Lueders Haus Blog

We did our civic duty on Saturday night and watched the presidential debate on TiVo. Our mistake was to going to Brouwer’s Cafe for hopfest beforehand. By the end of the debate it was going on midnight and we were both nearly asleep. Lets just say we both found the debates pretty boring.

Sunday was a beautiful day so we headed out on the bike trail towards Woodinville. I finally got to try Armadillo BBQ who’s smell has been tempting me for so long on my bike rides home. I was very impressed. Definitely a better pit stop then Red Hook.

Thomas Friedman is back from vacation. In his first column he takes on what he calls the “McCain-Clinton gas holiday”.

The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.”

It is embarrassing that Clinton is digging this low to get votes.

All the mountain passes were closed, so Seattle had no excuses not to caucus on Saturday afternoon. We headed up the street to our local church basement to practice some democracy. The scene was total chaos. Overflowing with people, few knew what to expect or even knew what caucusing involved. Having both gone through the process before in ‘04 we knew what to expect. It was about as chaotic as I remember last time being, just with tons more people. Our precinct was being run by two women who got the job just by the fact that they showed up early. It was unclear to me if they had ever been to a caucus before let alone run one. (Next time I will definitely volunteer to run our precinct.) About eighty people showed up for our precinct, the vast majority for Obama, a few Clinton supporters, and a handful of undecided voters. After the initial vote a few speeches were given, a mother with baby in arms gave a speech for Hillary (accord the baby’s bib he appeared to be supporting Obama, no reason was given). A few first time caucus goers gave speeches for Obama (I don’t understand these non-voters, everyone in my family votes, its just assumed). I don’t know if we swung any undecided voters our way but in the end we sent six delegates on for Obama and two for Hillary. 

I’m glad to see my home state senator do so well in Iowa tonight. I’ve been reading lots of the pre-caucus news coverage over the last few days and most of it is pretty slim on actual content. I think the best piece I’ve read was David Leonhardt’s last column. He writes in depth about the differences been the candidates health care plans. Which I think is more telling of their general philosophical differences. He ends with a slim endorsement of Obama’s plan:

Yet for all of the good ideas Mrs. Clinton has proposed, there still seems to be something missing from her agenda. It feels like less than the sum of its parts. It lacks some of the elegance of the Obama approach.

We sat down with the ballot and voter’s pamphlet tonight and did our best. As usual for a Seattle ballot, it was fairly entertaining. (Prison labor, drunk drivers, city charter preamble?) But School District Board candidate David Blomstrom has to win my award for favorite statement in the pamphlet.

I also advocate socialism – not Soviet-style, but more in line with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’ vision. The oil industry should be nationalized, and money spent on weapons used to murder civilians in Iraqistan would be better used to fund free medical care.

Jon Stewart rips McCain a new one over his position on Iraq. Part One and Two. Does he have what it takes to be the next president? Stewart was featured on Bill Moyer’s new show tonight as well.

This article came in via my news reader this afternoon. Its nice to see that xenophobia is alive and well in the software industry. The article is a reaction to a interview Bill gave to a columnist for the Washington Post where he supported raising the cap on H-1B. Bill wrote an Op-Ed to this effect last weekend as well. 

The writer had some problems with the starting salary Gates mentioned but that was fairly debunked in the comments. (Bill was including the cost of benefits.) His main theory was that Gates was making up the labor shortage as a way to import more cheap foreign workers. Keeping down the wages for all software developers. He of course ignores the fact that many of these foreign workers have just received graduate degrees from fine American intuitions.

Immigration is a complex subject and it’s hard to find a source of information that does not have an agenda behind it. It seems too easy to me to blame this all on the foreign guys down the hall. Interest in math and science is dropping, there is a shortage of talent, and I think the reasons go deeper then just the pay.

We have two more years of this? It all started with these comments David Geffen made to Maureen Dowd after a fund raiser for Obama:

Mr. Geffen said the Clintons lie “with such ease, it’s troubling” and that the Clinton political operation “is going to be very unpleasant and unattractive and effective.” Mr. Geffen called Mr. Clinton a “reckless guy” who had not changed in the last six years, and suggested that Mrs. Clinton was too scripted.

Clinton’s camp responded by calling on Obama to return all $1.3 million raised.

“While Senator Obama was denouncing slash-and-burn politics yesterday, his campaign’s finance chair was viciously and personally attacking Senator Clinton and her husband,” Howard Wolfson, the Clinton campaign communications director, said in a statement.

Obama?

Bill Burton, a spokesman for Mr. Obama, responded with a statement less than an hour and a half later, saying it was “ironic that the Clintons had no problem with David Geffen” when he was “raising them $18 million and sleeping at their invitation in the Lincoln Bedroom.”

I remember the Lincoln Bedroom! I wonder if Laura remodeled?
How about McCain, what has he been up to?

Although McCain had once lavished praise on the vice president, he said in an interview in his Senate office: “The president listened too much to the Vice President . . . Of course, the president bears the ultimate responsibility, but he was very badly served by both the Vice President and, most of all, the Secretary of Defense.”
McCain added: “Rumsfeld will go down in history, along with McNamara, as one of the worst secretaries of defense in history.”

It’s not nice to hit people while they are down. I’m not sure how McCain gets away with criticizing the President while still being such a vocal supporter of the war.

The mainstream media’s take on political bloggers is always entertaining. Take for instance this piece from the NYTimes on the live blogging of the Libby Trial.

Even as they exploit the newest technologies, the Libby trial bloggers are a throwback to a journalistic style of decades ago, when many reporters made no pretense of political neutrality. Compared with the sober, neutral drudges of the establishment press, the bloggers are class clowns and crusaders, satirists and scolds.

Class clowns? That is harsh. Now I can’t imagine anything more boring then live blogging a trial, so I headed over to firedoglake and checked out “Libby Live“. Here is just a piece of the nail biting journalism you are missing:

3:26

Something happened funny. The whole court room was laughing.

Walton: Good afternoon, Happy Valentine’s Day.

One of the jurors is saying something, but it’s not celar what. Everyone seems to have a smily face on. One of the jurors was reading a poem, apparently.

Walton: Thank you very much, you’ve been a very attentive jury and everyone appreciates it.

Cline: We’d like to read a stipulation.

…

Obama has been catching some slack from the bloggers recently for dissing DailyKos with this quote:

“One good test as to whether folks are doing interesting work is, Can they surprise me?” he tells me. “And increasingly, when I read Daily Kos, it doesn’t surprise me. It’s all just exactly what I would expect.”

I couldn’t agree more.