Arianna will announce candidacy Wednesday

From Arianna Huffington’s newsletter

“I’ve received many wonderful e-mails from so many of you urging me to run.  Well, tomorrow morning at 10:30 am at A Place Called Home in South Central Los Angeles (a center for at-risk children I’m on the board of), I’ll be announcing my decision.

You’ve been reading every week my outrage at the state of our politics, and I would love it if you could be there to join me as I make the leap from analysis to action — from columnist to candidate.”

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Howard Dean and the Net

From Dan Gillmor 

“I’m spending several days at the Vermont headquarters of the Howard Dean presidential campaign, studying a breakthrough in American politics. These folks are the first to truly grasp how to use the Net in a national political race.

How is the Dean campaign grasping the change? It’s no accident that the homepage headline says “The Great American Conversation” — because what’s happening here is fundamentally different from the politics of the last century, when “self-government” turned into little more than a television show where voters were nothing more than consumers.

The degree to which Dean’s staff is trusting people out at the edges of the system to be the campaign is remarkable. And people are responding, with money and hard work and passion and, for the most part, savvy.

There are serious risks in such a campaign — and everyone at the headquarters knows it. But the rewards, for the legions of supporters as well as the candidate, are huge if this works. It just may.

More later…”

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Sign on I-5 near San Diego

The more I look at this sign, the more it bothers me. Immigrants are not cattle. There must have been any number of better ways to signal to motorists that people might be running across the freeway than this sign, which to me, puts immigrants in the same category as deer crossing the road.

The next time you see some humble looking immigrants, realize they may speak three languages (indigenous, Spanish, English) and have been through absolutely hair raising experiences crossing over to the States.

Check Ruben Martinez’s masterful “Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail“, the true story of three brothers who were killed when the van they were in flipped while being pursued by the La Migra. He journeyed to their home town in Mexico, got to know the families and cousins, then traced them as some crossed over again.

This book has heart, and show how immigrants from Latin America are changing our culture as well taking our culture back - true multi-culturalists bringing, for example, banda music to the midwest and taking hip hop to rural Mexico. Which actually makes them post-modern, if you think about it…

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Arianna Huffington / Peter Camejo to form bloc in recall

Arianna’s newsletter, which today all but announced she is running, confirms the unique co-operative run with Green Peter Camejo. After one month, “”one of them will withdraw from the race and fully support whoever has the better chance of winning.”
  
The newsletter also said Huffington will not run only if Dianne Feinstein enters the race - this to avoid being a spoiler and giving any aid to the Republicans.

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Progressives with claws

“I think we are on the cusp on a Progressive rededication. No more Pink Tutu Democrats. Let’s call ourselves “Knife Fighting Progressives”.

More

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More on Diebold voting machines

A friend, Tony, responds to the post directly below concerning security holes in Diebold Voting machines

“There’s nothing new about this.  People have been warning about closed source code for many years. Bruce Schneier makes a habit of it. A lot of people do.  Bev Harris has been making up conspiracies, and completely missing the point.
 
Plain manual paper ballots are susceptible to all of the same threats that Bev Harris is trying to make an issue of.  Paper ballots aren’t encrypted. They have no password.  They can be duplicated by anyone with an offset duplicator. There is no checksum. There is no audit trail. All of the controls are pure physical security — physically guarding the data, because anyone, with no technical knowledge, could tamper with it otherwise.
 
Those aren’t the real problem. The real problem is that with closed source, there is no way of knowing what the threats are, and therefore no way to even know whether they are being dealt with. That’s totally unacceptable for a voting system.
 
Like I said, Bruce Schneier is one of the people who has made a real issue of closed source, though he’s hardly the only one. He wrote about it here, in reference to voting:

He also has an example of a voting system that is actually promoted as secure specifically because the internal details are kept secret:
 
It’s really just a special case of the more general problem of: how do you know that a program is correct? That is, how do you know you’ve identified every possible problem and dealt with it? For example, how do you know there are no bugs?  How do you know that nobody has done anything dishonest?  With paper ballots, you have a pretty good chance of at least seeing what the potential problems are.  With a computer, even with open source, that’s not possible.  With closed source, it’s not even thinkable.
 
And it’s not unique to computers.  Paper ballots are simple and easily understood.  The more complex the technology, the harder it is to understand, and impossible when the details are kept secret.
 
The problems with computer voting go way beyond the details of a particular company’s machines. That serves as nothing more than an illustration of something that has already been proved.”

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