P.E.T.E., JOIN ME

     My new group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Embryos, needs new members.

     We are going to go to fertility clinics, get in, grab the petri dishes, then throw them out the front door as we scream "Free! You're Free Now! Run Little Humans!"

"How can we hope for higher standards next time?"

     Tom DeLay is making fallacious arguments.  He tossed in the title line and I couldn't help think how that applies to him?  Out of lack of respect for him, what can we expect?

Cresting Wave

     Depressing as it is, the deteriorating situation in Iraq, a Civil War being one choice on the horizon (while the House debates on whether or not federal funding can be used to do research on hospital waste), means that the "happy-face trust-god-squad", the new religious right, the Frist-DeLay-Bush machine, grows weaker. 

     An interesting note about the seven "moderate" Republicans who were part of the deal.  J Warner of Virginia, S Collins and O Snowe of Maine, M DeWine of Ohio are moderates.  L Graham of South Carolina, however, is not.  Neither has McCain been one, lately, although he did jump to the center for his 2000 run.

Must.. Keep.. Pro-Lifers.. Agitated

     Base Vibrations: the right wing is keeping the religio-right perspiring hate.  Empryonic stem-cell research is currently being debated on the House Floor.  There is no war in Iraq.  There is no torture.  There is nothing going on in Afghanistan.

     Don't believe me?  Why did DeLay grant extra debate time for this?

Santorum Denies Agreement

     The agreement said there was no agreement to cloture on Saad or Myers, but Santorum said it is "we'll see" on one of them.

E-ssembly Progress Report

     Let's see.  I got the "move a (point, grouping or position) (up or down)" controls working yesterday.  Today I spent a bit of the morning working on stashing the votes in a javascript form element, getting the submit button to change once any vote was made, and writing the code on the back-end that parses the vote.  I still have to think a minute about how they are going to be restored when you view the page later, which is causing me to delay doing the actual stashing.  This evening I spent some little time normalizing a little bit of code (I used "value" in one place for something, but I had used "id" for it everywhere else, so I switched that) and then got into the meat of listing committee (and eventually subcommittees) in the main dropdown of e-ssemblies.  I've got the fetch and manipulate parts 98% done, I don't think I'll need the change the HTML at all.

     Some people believe there is a rule about separating things, perhaps the Model-View-Controller model.  Bah.  Separate everything so none of the chunks are bigger than one can easily handle.  I use the rule that (eventually) all my SQL will be in the form of stored procedures.  Not only do they run faster (some pre-compilation) and make code re-use easier, not only does it force a person to think about their database layout more, but it also makes for cleaner code.  Is that MVC?  I divide my tasks so that almost no module has more than a few hundred lines of code.  A couple do now, one I will break up, and the other is a library. 

     You can see why I never talk shop here.  This is a forum for politics, darnit!  Who cares if my templating system, alone among the available options, has XML valid templates?  Or that every request you make to my site goes through 28 handlers (or more) divided into eight of the phases of the Apache request cycle?

Filibuster Issue Resolved

     I'd like you to picture this for a moment.  Having counted the votes, the Republican Majority decides it has the 50 it needs (plus Vice President Cheney) and then decides to strike a deal anyway.

     If you can imagine that, then you can probably imagine the aliens regularly kidnap people in order to give them rectal probes.

     The Republicans didn't have the votes. 

     Thanks to the centrist Republicans. Text of the agreement, according to someone.

MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING ON JUDICIAL NOMINATIONS
We respect the diligent, conscientious efforts, to date, rendered to the Senate by Majority Leader Frist and Democratic Leader Reid. This memorandum confirms an understanding among the signatories, based upon mutual trust and confidence, related to pending and future judicial nominations in the 109th Congress.
This memorandum is in two parts. Part I relates to the currently pending judicial nominees; Part II relates to subsequent individual nominations to be made by the President and to be acted upon by the Senate’s Judiciary Committee.
We have agreed to the following:
Part I: Commitments on Pending Judicial Nominations
A. Votes for Certain Nominees. We will vote to invoke cloture on the following judicial nominees: Janice Rogers Brown (D.C. Circuit), William Pryor (11th Circuit), and Priscilla Owen (5th Circuit).
B. Status of Other Nominees. Signatories make no commitment to vote for or against cloture on the following judicial nominees: William Myers (9th Circuit) and Henry Saad (6th Circuit).
Part II: Commitments for Future Nominations
A. Future Nominations. Signatories will exercise their responsibilities under the Advice and Consent Clause of the United States Constitution in good faith. Nominees should only be filibustered under extraordinary circumstances, and each signatory must use his or her own discretion and judgment in determining whether such circumstances exist.
B. Rules Changes. In light of the spirit and continuing commitments made in this agreement, we commit to oppose the rules changes in the 109th Congress, which we understand to be any amendment to or interpretation of the Rules of the Senate that would force a vote on a judicial nomination by means other than unanimous consent or Rule XXII.
We believe that, under Article II, Section 2, of the United States Constitution, the word “Advice” speaks to consultation between the Senate and the President with regard to the use of the President’s power to make nominations. We encourage the Executive branch of government to consult with members of the Senate, both Democratic and Republican, prior to submitting a judicial nomination to the Senate for consideration.
Such a return to the early practices of our government may well serve to reduce the rancor that unfortunately accompanies the advice and consent process in the Senate.
We firmly believe this agreement is consistent with the traditions of the United States Senate that we as Senators seek to uphold.

Deepak Lal, BookTV

     It is hard to imagine a more confused person.  This dipshit thinks the Chinese "Empire" has lasted for 5,000 years.  This dufus divides liberty into the political, civil and economic, and considers political to be unimportant.  As you can well imagine, the audience at the American Enterprise Institute will eventually applaud.  Even as this idiot declares that America had become the premiere economy by about 1920, and that America has never fully embraced free trade, he continues that free trade is unquestionably an economic good, he compares it to a law of physics.

     To be fair, AEI also had Robert Kagan refute _some_ of Lal's assertions, even as Kagan isn't really my cup of tea.

     To be even fairer, they then had Allan Meltzer refute him.  Lal, in his response, proved yet again his totalitarian leanings when he declares that China may be our best hope.

This Blog is Pro-Norway

     But please, use the site feed

     By way of explanation, someone from Norway seems to have been coming to this site more than a dozen times a day for a while now.

Still pluggin away

     Now if you register, you'll automatically become a "staff" member of the "Wild" e-ssembly.  I think everyone who registered already is, also.  If you create a debate, what'll you need to do is add a pro and con position.  It doesn't happen automatically because sometimes debate doesn't work that way.  For instance, three separate budget bills.  There are alternative voting regimes which allow them all to be considered simultaenously, ending the limit of a single amendment passing or failing on one version of a bill.

A Request To My Readers

     I'd like all of you to go to my web site and tell me what you think.  There are four required fields to register, a username, an e-mail, repeat your password, and check the you agree not to rip me off.  I'd like your first impressions.

     It's part of my revolution, and I appreciate your support.  1 of 5, you could say.

Progress is being made

     But I deleted some data, so it is hard to tell.  IM me at my AIM address, JoshSimeon, if you'd like to ask any questions.  There's really a lot more to it than a regular user can see.  Ah, what'll I'll do is create an e-ssembly called Wild and upgrade everyone I know to a senior staff position there :).  Again, the URL is http://Narins.Net:4321, and sorry it isn't perfect yet.

What the hey

     Want to look?  It's at http://narins.net:4321/enter.  The ":4321" is a port number, since my ISP blocks 80 (the default).  Register, then join an e-ssembly, then view the Section 203 debate.  Not so many links work yet, but it just a matter of time.

It is my pleasure

     It is my pleasure to announce that my programming efforts have succeeded in producing something worthy of celebration.  Ergo, I celebrate.  There are a couple thing I need to add to get it into the shape necessary for outside user testing, namely, "leave" "modify" and "delete."  Please understand that these are eventualities, not possibilities, and the timeframe embodied in their inevitableness is short, indeed.  Which reminds me, while attempting to talk some sense into some True Believers©® I used this term, heirloom misapprehension, to describe religion.  Anyone else as fond of the phrase as I?  Certainly the mainstream religions are passed from parent to child, like any heirloom.  And may the divinity of Jesus instantly join the rubbish heap upon which the theory of the 1/3 divinity of Giglamesh lays.

Yay and Boo

     Yay for me.  Ok, I won't give you the link _just_ this second, but my code is getting very ready.

     Boo for the otherwise decent Representative M De Lauro of Connecticutt, who accused Senator Frist of "destroying the Senate."  A bit over the top, even while the rest of her statements seem reasonable.