There’s a schedule posted for the first day of BloggerCon.

The second day is open and free. From a msg from Dave Winer:

1. Day 2 is October 5, 2003.

2. It’s free for everyone. You can invite members of your community to attend, at no cost.

3. We have five excellent classrooms in Pound Hall on the law school campus, all day.

4. Four classrooms can hold at least 40 people. Three of them hold a hundred. Our capacity for Day 2 is huge.

5. Day 2 is for in-depth discussions, group meetings, announcements, trial balloons, political speeches, debates, whatever we want to use it for. We have twenty 1.5 hour slots, quite a few are still open.

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Dean’s success has to be at least partially responsible for the new fire in the bellies of all the Democratic candidates at last night’s debate. No more pussy-footing around W’s “miserable failure” (Gephardt’s phrase) as a president.

Who “won”? How the hell would I know? I thought Gore absolutely trampled W in their debates, and I couldn’t imagine anyone voting for Reagan after the Mondale debates. That said, I thought Dean did well but didn’t stand out as much as he should, in part because so many of the Democrats now sound like him. Gephardt’s passion helped counteract the nebbishness that comes from spending a lifetime in the House (and from looking like the adult version of the Pillsbury Doughboy). Kerry has a great voice, but I thought failed to make himself as interesting as his hair. I love Carol Moseley Braun and wish that she weren’t doomed by race, gender and political position; also, she was a weak senator. Jonathan Edwards seemed a very credible vice presidential candidate. Lieberman was the token Republican at the debate. As for Dennis Kucinich: Embarrassing, hello?

Neither Al Sharpton nor Bob Graham showed up, although Graham sent his body.

Halley writes about On Point, a talk show syndicated on NPR stations that last night had a round table discussion with experts about the Democratic candidates. She applauds Eli who called in and contradicted the pundits’ assessment of Dean as a left-wing candidate.

I was listening also and felt the same way. If I hadn’t been in a car, I was tempted to call in and say:

You media pundits have already fallen for the trap: Karl Rove said that the Republicans want to run against Dean because he is the most liberal candidate, and you believed him. Most liberal?? Here are some of Dean’s positions:

– Backed the first Gulf War and the invasion of Afghanistan

– Is supported by the NRA (!) because he thinks gun legislation generally is a state issue (although he backs the Brady Bill and the ban on assault rifles)

– Believes in a balanced budget

– Says we have to finish the job in Iraq, albeit by internationalizing it

How the hell does this make him more liberal than he rest of the Democrats in the race?

I’m a classic, kneejerk, bleeding-heart liberal. Dean is much harder to categorize. It’s the media’s job to get past the competitive labeling. But you know what? Maybe we can no longer afford to assume it’s the media’s job. Maybe now it’s our job as bloggers and citizens.

Halley also points out this surprising snippet from Andrew Sullivan:

BIG GOVERNMENT BUSH: More evidence of the runaway federal government under Bush. The sheer profligacy of this administration continues to astound. If you’re a fiscal conservative, Howard Dean is beginning to look attractive.

[Damn, I just saw that Halley linked to my Springsteen entry. And I’m linking to her. So now it’ll look like tit-for-tat linking! Honest, it wasn’t.]

John Edwards has started a blog. It’s a little boring so far, but a posting by Nick Baldick shows promise. And there is a strong and welcome emphasis on reader comments.

The Dean blog continues to get lots and lots of unfiltered comments, running open threads quite regularly. The first open thread got 287 comments, so they posted a new one and then another. A quick scan (and the fact that there’s no good way for humans to scan 800 msgs — time to move to a more slashdotty comments capability) shows that although the vast majority of the comments come from “Deaniacs,” the conversation frequently gets pretty frank.

You can see Gephardt’s first TV ads here.

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According to an article by Steve Morse in today’s Boston Globe:

Surprisingly, the band members receive song lists from Springsteen only 20 minutes before each show. And Springsteen still often calls out audibles to shake things up. “Just recently we talked about doing `Roll of the Dice’ or `Lucky Town,’ and I had no idea which one he was going to call,” says [Nils] Lofgren. “Then he said, `Are you feeling lucky?’ “And of course, instead of thinking lucky as in `Lucky Town,’ I thought lucky as in `Roll of the Dice.’ So I picked up the wrong guitar and counted it off and I just plowed full tilt into the wrong song with the wrong instrument. When that happens, you have to have a sense of humor about it.”

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Mr. Poon, whose blog I found via Ernie the Attornery (nee Ernselor the Counselor), writes about Friday’s airing of 20/20:

Anyone watching 20/20 right now? They have a heartwarming story about a “bubble boy” who gets a stem cell transplant to be able to have a better-functioning immune system. While showing scenes of the baby finally going home from the hospital, the reporter gives us a voice-over question: “So were prayers answered, or was it science?” Lady, let me explain something: A lot of the people out there who thinks this was prayers being answered want to make sure that stem cell transplants don’t happen.

Well, maybe it was a coincidence that God happened to listen to the prayers for the kid who got the stem cell transplant.

Yeah, sure. If this is as Mr. Poon reports it, 20/20 ought to be ashamed for itself for such lousy journalism.

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I hate it when online documentation tells you everything except how to do what you’re trying to do. For example, type “multiple chapters” into Word XP’s help box and you’ll get taken to listings about “master documents.” So far so good. But the explanation of what master documents are and what you can use them for includes everything except how you create one.

Fortunately, we have the Web where a quick googling turns up a very helpful site. And it’s advice on master documents is:

How can I best use the Master Document feature?

Answer: Don’t use it. It has serious bugs and will corrupt your entire document at the most inconvenient time possible. (This advice to not use Master Documents reported as correct through Word 2000, SR-2.) John McGhie puts it succinctly when he says that there are two kinds of Master Documents: Those that are corrupt and those that will be corrupt soon.

BTW, this is exactly the type of thing Interleaf — where I used to work — was great at handling. Too bad we lost to Word.

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As a member in good standing of GOP Team Leader, the site that helps you spam newspapers in return for valuable free merchandise (registration required), I get a weekly mailing from the Republican leadership. The latest touts this video. (The transcript is here.)

It picks out clips of Democratic candidates criticizing W and the Republicans and urges us to adopt the “Republican’s positive agenda.” It includes a clip of Dean hoarsely thanking a crowd, which strikes me as not so very negative; clearly it’s there to make him look wild-eyed.

The ad is obviously of no appeal to people who agree with the Dems that Bush is a “Pinocchio president,” as Bob Graham is quoted as saying. Will it motivate people to join GOP Team Leader? I wonder. I think the take-away is that the Dems are a bunch of pessimistic clowns who don’t stand a chance. But I am definitely not in the target audience for this ad.

Now can I get my 12-pack insulated bag (350 points)?

The launch of the GOP ad supports an article in Salon by David Talbot that asks why Gov. Dean and Al Franken are hot now:

On Monday, the New York Times’ Adam Nagourney reported that the White House and the Democratic Party have both concluded that because of the increasingly polarized and evenly divided political landscape, the 2004 race will focus mainly on turning out the parties’ core voters, rather than appealing to swing voters and independents. This means a campaign unlike 2000, with its muted, centrist tones, but one that delivers red meat to the parties’ respective bases. And what is the temper of the Democratic Party base? They loathe Bush and everything he stands for…

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Shelley Murphy and Hiawatha Bray report in the Boston Globe (temp link) that face recognition software failed 38% of the time in a test at Logan Airport.

On the other hand, I’ve always thought there ought to be many more doubles than there are since there aren’t that many variables to play with. But, apparently I’m wrong since we can almost always tell celebrity lookalikes apart, and they’re professionals. Nature seems to have made us sensitive to faces the way other animals are sensitive to smells.

Here are some snaps from some sites offering lookalikes, including the #1 at google when you search on “celebrity lookalikes”. (The other page is lookalike.com.) Can you guess who they’re supposed to be? The answers are the ALT values of each image, so hold your mouse over the image for a second to see the answer. (And do dogs have celebrity smell-alikes?)

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AKMA reminds us (with special reference to the discussion going on among Joi, Jonathan, Shelley and various commenters) that as we generalize about Christianity, we’re talking about him, a real human being with complex beliefs.

This overall discussion is about the hardest problem in the world, harder than what ignited the Big Bang or how Madonna got people to invest in “Swept Away”: What do we do about incompatible beliefs, especially when those beliefs are about the biggest thing there is?

Shelley writes:

If you believe in God in a certain way, no matter how much you respect that others may not agree, you still have to believe your own truth is the Truth.

She appreciates AKMA’s ability to respect “each of our right to develop our own Truth, even if it doesn’t agree with his.” And you don’t have to know AKMA long to see the truth in Shelley’s comment.

But I think there is a problem with Shelley’s formulation that “you still have to believe your own truth is the Truth.” While you can certainly find strains of universalism in orthodox Judaism — “Our view of God is the only true view of God — there is also a strong sense that because God reveals Himself in history, He reveals Himself in the different ways that make sense to different peoples. That’s why Jews only rarely in history have tried to convert others, and far more commonly discourage conversionsThat’s why Jews don’t expect anyone else to keep kosher; God didn’t reveal Himself to others through that particular law. Furthermore, God reveals Himself to Jews by giving us a book of laws that literally makes no sense unless and until it is interpreted by humans who converse and argue for millennia; thus the “my truth is The Truth” doesn’t hold quite so cleanly for Jews.

My understanding is that Jews work out this morass of contradictions basically by saying “We’ve got our revelation. You go worry about yours. Oh, and you can stop trying to convert us already.”

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TIP: In Windows, typing “command” into the Run box brings up a DOS window. Typing “cmd” also brings up a DOS window, but with “cmd” you can use the arrow keys to cycle through previous command lines, etc.

Why “command” even exists beats me. If it’s for backwards compatibility, then why not add the basic set of user interface facilities in “cmd”?

Oh well. Some things we just aren’t meant to understand.

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The self-styled progressive site CounterPunch has a scathing article about Howard Dean’s record as governor of Vermont. It claims he is a “Clintonesque Republicrat whose stances are not far from that of the current administration.” Oh no! not Clintonesque!

I hadn’t followed Dean when he was governor, so much of this was news to me. But most of the positions that the authors find outrageous are either mainstream or compromises (e.g., after getting 99% of the state covered with health insurance, the state then increased co-pays and cut back some benefits). You know what: Good! I am personally to the left of Dean on almost all issues. I would de-militarize the “war on drugs” and would legalize marijuana. I’d look at socializing the pharmaceutical industry. I hated the Tough Love Welfare Reform Act. In general, Carol Moseley Braun better represents my political views. (Probably not this Braun, however.)

But I also think that it is laughably short-sighted to say that there’s no real difference between W and Dean. Sure, the Himalayas are no higher than the bump on the skin of an orange, but only if you’re living on Mars. On earth, the differences are enormous and if you’re too morally pure to see that, then the damage that W’s second term would do to the environment, to the poor, to the powerless, to the different…all that now is on your head.

For me, the most telling moment — and the funniest — in the article comes when the authors each state whether they’d vote for Dean against Bush, and Ron Jacobs writes:

I have never voted for a presidential candidate. Indeed, the last one I even wanted to see in the White House was George McGovern, but my 18th birthday came after the 1972 election. The only candidate I have consistently supported for the presidency is the candidate managed in his first several campaigns by Wavy Gravy: NOBODY. Why? Because I honestly believe NOBODY really cares about the poor and the young, especially when they don’t vote…

Poor Ron Jacobs! He’s too right to ever vote.

Politics is about compromising enough to be able to share the planet with people you disagree with. The inability to compromise is as dangerous as having no moral ambiguity. Scary.

Similarly, if you tell me that Howard Dean has compromised and taken mainstream positions, my response is: Thank God!

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