It seems America is still fixated on minutia when it comes to politics:
Obama was prodded a bit further and asked whether or not he had ever inhaled.
“I did,” the senator from Illinois said to light applause. “It’s not something I’m proud of. It was a mistake as a young man.”
The question was a reference to a line made famous by former President Bill Clinton who, while admitting to trying marijuana, said he did not inhale.
“I never understood that line,” Obama continued. “The point was to inhale. That was the point.”
Herein lies the ultimate truth of American politics: we don’t really care about the big issues in the grander context of things. Sure, we want our candidates to say the right buzzwords and make the right promises when they’re on the campaign trail, but we don’t really hold them to their promises after they’re elected. What we really care about is crap like this; stuff that makes us think we understand the character of a person. This was huge in 2000, and all I have to say about it is: look where we are now voting on character.
Technorati Tags: barack obama, character, marijuana
I like Jon Corzine. Seriously, I do. I met him once, way back when he was running for Senate in 2000. He was shaking some hands at a Rock the Vote event at Rutgers (there’s a wonderfully funny picture of me walking around that day with a Gore/Corzine sign taped to my back that I should find and scan in, it makes for a good laugh). He seems like a guy who knows what the hell he’s doing, and I’ll even buy that he’s sincere about fixing some of the more glaring money problems that this state has. But, seriously, leasing our toll roads to pay down debt? That’s just another shell game designed to look like someone is doing something to fix the problems that we have in New Jersey. It’s just like when Whitman brought in that Parsons company to do the state’s emissions testing modernization in the late 90s or the state’s original plan to fund the construction of EZ-Pass with revenues from toll violators. It just doesn’t make sense at all. We need some real fixes here, not giving up our toll roads to a private company that will only want to raise tolls without any increased service or maintenance on them.
What we need are some leaders who are unafraid to do the things that will get the money issues in NJ fixed for good: consolidate government services into 21 county governments (and no more), and then allow for the counties to charge a municipal sales tax (say, cut the state sales tax back down to 6% and then let the counties charge at most 1.5% extra on top of it) to offset the need to lump so much property tax on people to pay for things. Oh, and also set one statewide number for how much it costs to educate one kid in school and adjust state funding to allow for that to be met (meaning that rich towns should get less funding, or shares some of theirs if their funding exceeds the cap). Can you imagine if we did these simple things? Even in corrupt, off its nut NJ, things are bound to be better and cheaper in the long run. Mark my words on that.
Technorati Tags: jon corzine, monetization, new jersey, taxes, toll roads
So I bit the bullet and jumped head-first into the realm of 21st century mobile communications and obtained one of these, so I could have my email on the go. As a result of this decision, I consolidated all of my email into my GMail account so that I could sync it with the Blackberry. Around the same time, Google announced that GMail was gaining IMAP access. This is a good thing, because it means that my email can be synced across all of my devices and everything can now be seen in perfect sync. Great, right?
Except, not so much. IMAP access over the Blackberry is so slow that it’s ridiculous. Apparently, this is due to several factors, including that RIM’s BIS service (that’s the service that pushes email to your Blackberry) does not support IMAP-IDLE, which you need to make this stuff work correctly. All it translates to is a less than satisfactory experience for me and feeling like I’ve wasted this time and my excitement, because the whole point was to have a device that allowed me to see my email and keep it in perfect sync with the web and desktop versions thereof. Apparently, as a consumer and not someone in the corporate world (using the Blackberry Enterprise Server solution allows this, which is what you use in a corporate environment with Outlook or Lotus Notes), this remains a mythical thing for me. Oh well. At least my device is cool.
Technorati Tags: blackberry, gmail, google, imap
Technorati Tags: blackberry, gmail, google, imap
