Month: February 2007

Lately, I’ve been trying to hard to write here every couple of days, even if it’s not very good. I’ve been writing here nearly two years, amd a lot of content is here (175 posts and 257 comments as of this writing). I’m continually annoyed by one aspect of writing here.

At least one of the parental units never reads this. Two of my three brothers and at least some of the parental units also never stop by either. All the more irritating since there are some posts that I know they would like. And my brothers are the tiebreakers in any pizza-related issues (some of my most popular posts are pizza-related).

But the kicker is Mrs. Muttrox never reads Muttroxia. My own wife won’t read my blog! Maybe it’s stupid, maybe it’s not, but I spend a good chunk of time on it, how about showing a little interest? So on Thursday I told her she might want to read it, there was something about her on it. Really? Look for Mrs. Muttrox, I sez.

In the middle of the Superbowl (three days later) she yelled over, “There’s nothing about me in here at all!”

“Yeah, I know, I just wanted you to read it for once!”

So now she’s read the last week of Muttroxia, but she’s kind of annoyed with me. As she says, “I already know all this stuff, you tell me everything already”. Which is true, every dumb idea and fleeting observation I have she has to hear about. But still.

So I’m writing this to see if she will ever see it. It’s a little test. Sshh.. don’t tell her!

I’ll try and summarize, but you really have to read the article.

Two pieces:
1) Every voter gets $50 to distribute to candidates. $10 for The House, $15 for The Senate, $25 for The President. This includes the primaries. Invidual limits are also raised dramatically. This produces a pool of a few billion dollars to be used in the election.

2) Contributions are made through the FEC. They collect and distribute the money. The kicker is that the candidate does not know who gave them the money, they have no way of knowing who any individual donor gave their money to.

It is an oddly compelling idea. And the more you read (read the article!) the better it seems. But I had one thought, which a commenter posted before I could.

Won’t work
Donors would require some sort of receipt from the FEC to demonstrate where their money has gone, or else the FEC itself would be open to charges of fraud in their allocation of money. Then all you’d have to do is show your candidate the receipt and voila, influence obtained (and without the inconvenience of public disclosure).

— Noman

I agree. Anyone know more about this, or see a way out?

Doesn’t all paper have multiple uses? Kind of a step back if you feel that’s a selling point of your paper.

Today, on the front page of the New York Times, the headline was Biden Unwraps His Bid for ’08 With an Oops!

“In an era of meticulous political choreography, the staging of the kickoff for this presidential candidacy could hardly have gone worse.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, who announced his candidacy on Wednesday with the hope that he could ride his foreign policy expertise into contention for the Democratic nomination, instead spent the day struggling to explain his description of Senator Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat running for president, as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” “

It was also prominently mentioned on several liberal blogs.

Oh come on. Is this really what presidential politics has come to? Biden is a serious politician, and a serious candidate. Like him or not, his candidacy should not be a joke, he’s a responsible senator with lots of experience to bring to the race, and to the office.

He deserves better than this. He deserves better than to announce his candidacy, and instantly be grilled about another candidate. He deserves better than to have a pretty innocuous remark thrown all out of proportion. He deserves better than to spend the rest of the day having to talk about Obama and his remark about Obama instead of making a case for himself as president. He deserves better than for this to be front-page news. He deserves better than to have the entire article focused solely on the horserace, with not one single word about Biden’s own qualifications or his own reasons for seeking the Presidency.

And we deserve better. We deserve better than to have truly racist politicians ignored, while those who don’t speak the right codeword are excoriated. We deserve better then to have Democrats with policy experience mocked, and those without to be cheered on as “outsiders”. We deserve better than to have candidates eliminated from the race for trivial reasons. And mostly, we don’t deserve to have yet another electoral campaign reported as a horserace. This is why the media is broken, they simply are unable to report substance.

Update: To cap it off, Biden may not have even said exactly that. The punctuation makes a huge difference. It looks like he said, “the first mainstream African-American, who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” or “the first mainstream African-American. Who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” More details are at TPM, these two posts sum it up.