Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

It’s been an interesting few days. While I was tied up at work, home, and a class, a lot of debate raged about my open letter to Peter Vadala, both here and where it was replicated on Facebook. (Side note: the major difference between this blog and Facebook was that here a bunch of total [...]

Please also see the follow-up to this post.
I was watching the evening news tonight, something I do rarely, when my attention was caught by a local item about a man named Peter Vadala being fired from his job because he “expressed his opinions” about gay marriage.
The story went on to clarify: a coworker mentioned that [...]

Tragedy:
…Forget about everything else. Here’s the story on washingtonpost.com.
Dave Winer has a good weblog of news stories as they come in. Use your common sense to sort through news and rumors. Don’t trust anything that isn’t linked.
The context: I had already awakened and written a short blog post, and was at work in [...]

I just used the Contact form on whitehouse.gov to send the following to President Obama and am reposting it here. Please reach out to the White House with your own concerns on this matter.
Dear Mr. Obama:
As a supporter, I was surprised to see that Carmen Suro-Bredie, chief FOIA officer in the White House’s Office of [...]

The funniest meme to come out of Tuesday’s very serious speech by President Obama was the chorus of voices who noticed how much Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who delivered the GOP response, sounded like Kenneth the Page from 30 Rock. A Facebook group helped amplify the chorus of voices asking for a furtherance of [...]

There’s a combination of feelings I’ve had over the past months as we work our way through the meltdown and resulting bailout of the banking system and the overall economy. Nausea and dread are pretty high up there; anticipation, wondering when the next shoe is going to drop; puzzlement.
For me the big one is the [...]

I drove a historic route this morning on the way to work. Between Arlington Heights and Lexington runs part of Paul Revere’s route, where he famously rode through the countryside warning the people that the British were coming. I followed the route to Lexington Green, where stands a statue commemorating what happened next.

It’s not a [...]

I don’t have the energy or time to write the summary of how I feel about the election, except to note that others have already done a pretty good job of summarizing for me.
From a campaign strategy perspective, 2008 will be discussed for many years, but a few things I found interesting in looking at [...]

Holy cow. 284 electoral votes at 11:01 PM. Barack Obama will be the next president of the US.

I voted this morning at around 8:25 am. I was number 325 at my precinct; a line about 100 people long had been there at 7 am, so I was catching things at a brief resting point. There was a PTA bake sale on the way out. It was a traditional end to a most [...]

I don’t often repost entire blog posts, but this needs to be disseminated widely. Thanks to Estaminet for saying what I wanted to say. Take a look at this and spread it to your friends and family:
estaminet: an open letter to american social conservatives.
Please stop.
Please stop saying that Barack Obama is Muslim. He’s not. He, [...]

A piece in the Las Vegas Sun about Howard Dean caught my attention. After the “Dean Scream” got played into the ground by the media, Dean has largely been ignored by the popular press, but I think his actions at the DNC have been substantial in positioning the Democrats in 2008. And it’s instructive to [...]

The endgame of the 2008 election season is interesting in a few ways. First, I find it interesting that Obama’s numbers go way up after people get to see him in action (e.g. during debates), and start to edge back down when robocalls and other personal attacks start to hit. In particular, it’s interesting to [...]

I don’t know if Erik’s seen this, but I found this report on Talking Points Memo interesting. Apparently Intrade’s internal investigation confirms that someone is artificially inflating the value of McCain (that is, the probability that he’ll win in November) by dumping huge amounts of money into the market in an irrational fashion. The CQ [...]

Thanks to John Gruber for pointing to Austrian coverage of last night’s debate, complete with this bizarre picture of McCain. I think the caption says that he was reacting after he mistakenly turned the wrong direction to shake hands with the moderator. But there couldn’t be a worse image to sum up his debate performance [...]