February 8th, 2008
The results from last week’s election are in, and it’s looking as if Republican party will be fronting John McCain as their presidential candidate this year. Given his less-than-favorable reputation with the more rabid members of the conservative junk media, don’t be surprised in a few weeks when his running mate turns out to be the only remaining Republican contender with any large-scale popular support, Mike “Evolution is only a theory” Huckabee.
While the election’s outcome couldn’t be more cut and dried on the Republican side, the Democratic party, true to reputation, managed to produce a result on Tuesday that can only be understood with an advanced degree in applied mathematics.
According to the most recent estimates, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will go to the Democratic National Convention in August nearly tied in delegates, and both short of the number necessary to claim the Presidential ticket. Of course regular listeners of this program know the eventual outcome, since we used advanced predictive voodoo polling to call the November election for Obama just over a year ago now.
But knowing the outcome isn’t the story. There are plenty of surprises in how things play out.
We knew one thing going into Tuesday’s election. There was an initiative on the ballot, Proposition 91, that shouldn’t have been there at all. It was an accident of scheduling, made redundant by Proposition 1A over a year and a half ago.
So it wasn’t needed. Proposition 91’s original backers even wrote a piece for the State-issued voter’s guide asking that Californians vote against their redundant initiative. It should have pretty easy to predict the outcome of Tuesday’s election then, right?
But knowing the outcome isn’t the story. The award for the most clueless voters in the State goes to Butte county, the only county in the State to actually vote in favor of Prop 91, and by a landslide. Despite being asked by the initiative’s sponsors to vote against it, 87% the residents of Butte county.
Was the Voter’s Guide even mailed to them? Did any of them read it? Are they from the past?
The results are hard to understand. Prop 91 was the only initiative on the ballot that they passed at all.
The rest of us didn’t do much better. Statewide in total over 2.7 million Californians voted FOR Proposition 91. The damn thing nearly passed, despite the best efforts of its own sponsors to kill it.
Some 23,000 Santa Cruz residents voted in favor of Prop 91, so don’t start feeling too superior. That was 36% of the people who bothered to vote.
A little under 70,000 residents of Santa Cruz county turned out to the polls on Tuesday. There are somewhere around 200,000 people in the county over the age of 18, which means that once again less than half of eligible voters bothered to show up.
But then again, given the results up in Butte county, maybe it’s better that they didn’t turn up.
We did our best last week with our Voter’s Guide, and maybe we influenced a few people one way or another. Which is all you can really ask for, and we do, every week, on the Timothy Jordan Show News, coming to our listeners on this 8th of February, ‘08.
• California Proposition 91 results
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Flying on a commercial airline in recent years has often been less pleasurable than a beating with a rubber hose, due largely to the efforts of the Transportation Security Administration. Since the agency was created to oversee airport security across the country we’ve been witness to random strip searches of elderly grandmothers and equally shifty national political figures.
If they really think that my Grandmother and Al Gore are plotting to hijack a flight to Ontario, then who can we trust, really? Both of those people that I just named have been detained by the TSA in recent years.
Okay, so my Grandma’s titanium hip does funny things to airport metal detectors. We all understand why they have to take a second look at her if the metal detector starts bleeping like an EKG, but Al Gore?
In the summer of 2002 the former Vice President was stopped and searched twice by eager TSA agents as he went through airport security. Did they honestly think that Al Gore is a security threat? Was his name on some kind of watch list? Was he randomly selected twice in the span of a few days? Or was there some secret terrorist plot to use Al Gore impersonators to breach airport security. After all, who would search Al Gore?
The TSA would. In recent years we’ve had to put up with a lot from them. Just over a week ago while traveling with my staff we were admonished for not removing all electronics, not just laptops, from our bags. This was a bit odd, given that only a few days before we had passed through security without so much as a hiccup.
We weren’t the only people confused by the new orders, and incredibly there’s now a way to get those questions answered.
The TSA has a blog! And not one of those elderly-senator-getting-his-staff-to-post blogs. This is actually written by people who have used a computer for more than searching for pictures of celebrities getting out of cars while wearing short skirts.
They’re diligent enough that one of their administrators, posting under the name Christopher, went to the trouble of posting on another website, tsacomplaints.com, to let people know that they can register their complaints to the TSA directly via the TSA blog.
Early Monday morning people were doing that, asking why in hell they were suddenly having to remove all of their electronics from their bags. Dozens of people wrote in, and they actually had an impact.
It may be the very first time that a blog post had an affect in the real world.
TSA headquarters didn’t know anything about new regulations, but their bloggers were able to contact some local offices. They discovered that it was a security exercise run amok. By Monday afternoon orders had been sent out to cancel the exercise.
Some of the other posts have been less encouraging. While admitting that it’s exceptionally difficult for a trained professional to produce a liquid explosive in a laboratory setting, TSA Administrator Kip Hawley said in a letter written for the TSA blog that there are classified reasons that the ban remains in place.
As anyone with an internet connection can quickly discover, liquid explosives are slightly more dangerous to airline passengers than the Loch Ness monster, and only slightly at that. The fact is that they’re explosive because they’re highly unstable, enough so that they’re just as likely to blow up long before they reach the airport as they are to wait until the bomber is on a plane.
And despite the descriptions of “binary chemicals” straight out of a Die Hard movie, there simply isn’t a way to take two inert chemicals and make an explosive. TATP, the best-known and most dangerous of the liquid explosives, requires acetone, concentrated hydrogen peroxide, and hydrochloric acid. Not exactly the least noticeable compounds to be carrying in your bags.
Then actually blending them to create the explosive generates toxic gasses and tremendous heat. The mixture has to be continuously cooled to prevent it from boiling away before the explosive can form… slowly… over the course of several hours.
Even back in the wild, pre-terrorism and security days of airline travel, when it was possible to carry a loaded .45 in your pocket, someone bringing a giant cooler full of ice and a bag of lab equipment into a airplane bathroom was going to attract some attention, particularly once the bathroom began emitting caustic fumes.
To sum up, there never has been a credible threat from any known liquid explosives. The TSA knows this, but that’s classified.
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There’s new information about the REAL ID Act this week. Remember how advocates of the national database of personal information have been saying that it isn’t a national ID? Remember how they swore that the database wouldn’t be used to data-mine for people potentially committing crimes? Well true to form, some members of our current administration don’t think that the 4th Amendment applies to them.
Speaking before the Heritage Foundation just a few days after the final rules for implementation of the REAL ID Act were released, the Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department for Homeland Security, Steward Baker, told members of the neo-conservative think tank that the ID would make it harder for meth labs to operate in the country.
How would a simple ID achieve this? He suggested that the government could begin mandating that IDs be checked when over-the-counter drugs are purchased. The national database created by the REAL ID Act would presumably then let government and law enforcement agencies track purchases of medications like Sudafed, used as precursors for meth.
With no evidence other than a large purchase of entirely legal cold medication, Mr. Baker suggested that law enforcement could act, based on information gathered through the REAL ID database.
We used to have this thing in this country… what was it called? Oh yeah, the Constitution. It sure seems like our government doesn’t think that the 4th Amendment is part of it anymore.
• REAL ID Act at Heritage Foundation
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At least we still have the 1st, for the most part. We’ll be making full use of it here, on our way to excellence every week.
Some people, at a certain point in their lives, will have a great idea and too much time on their hands. This week’s Award of Excellence was the result of one of these moments.
Marco Facciola is a 16-year old with a little too much time on his hands. Inspired by his grandfather’s stories about building wooden wheels for his bicycle in occupied Holland during WWII, as Marco describes, he decided to go one step further and build a bicycle entirely out of wood.
When I say entirely, I mean entirely. The frame is wood. The wheels are wood. The handlebars are wood. The chain is wood. The gears are wood. He even built a ratcheting flywheel out of wood so that the wheels can spin backwards without moving the pedals.
He even found a way to get high school credit for the project, which may be the most excellent thing about the project.
He doesn’t say how much the finished bicycle weighs, and we don’t expect to see him riding up any mountains any time soon.
It’s a thing of… it’s a bicycle made out of wood! Apparently even strong enough for his father to ride it. A link to photos will be available, as always, in the post of this evening’s News at timothyjordanshow.com.
And for that, Marco Facciola is this week’s winner of the Timothy Jordan Show Award of Excellence.
And that’s the News for February 8th, ‘08.