Sunday, 12 March 2006

Edged out

Colts HB Edgerrin James has signed a free-agent deal to play for the Arizona Cardinals, which will probably either (a) put the Cardinals back on the NFL map or (b) relegate James to football oblivion. Given that decent backs are dime-a-dozen in the contemporary NFL, my money is more on option b.

Logic, Democratic style

Only the Democratic Party could conclude that their main problem in the 2004 election was that the people who nominated John F. Kerry were too white:

An influential Democratic committee on Saturday endorsed the idea of adding as many as four state primaries and caucuses to the early presidential nominating season, now dominated by Iowa and New Hampshire.

The goal, they said, was to add more racial, ethnic, regional and economic diversity to the process of choosing a Democratic nominee.

Iowa, whose caucus marks the opening of the nominating season, and New Hampshire, which holds the first primary, have long been criticized as far too homogeneous and atypical to exercise such a powerful influence over the process.

Back-to-back victories in those states can set a candidate on a glide path to the nomination — as they did for Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts in 2004 — before the bigger and more diverse states weigh in.

And, just to prove that the DNC is in complete disarray, they can’t even figure out what the problem is in the first place:

The commission also debated using bonus delegates to reward states that move their contests back in the season. This is an effort to deal with another criticism of the nominating process — that it is too “front-loaded,” with too many states bunched together in the early weeks.

So, the problem is that the nomination process is too front-loaded, so the solution is to have six states decide nominees before February 5th, instead of two. My mind truly boggles at the concept.

I hesitate to give advice on this matter to either major party, but the party that figures out first that the primary and caucus process is a giant waste of time and money and goes back to using the conventions to select nominees will probably end up nominating much more credible candidates.

Git-no-mo?

Orin Kerr links an Independent on Sunday article that claims the administration is planning to shut down the prison camp at Gitmo. Color me skeptical, to say the least.

Your IPTV primer

Ars Technica explains IPTV to the masses. In theory, IPTV will be the telephone companies’ (i.e. AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon’s) response to the cable companies’ offering of “bundled” services, although it seems like with the exception of Verizon (and, even in Verizon’s case, only in limited areas) the phone companies don’t seem to be all that interested in rolling out these services. At least from my perspective, the phone companies are going to have to do a much better job in pricing and bandwidth to get me back from the cablecos.