Yes, dear reader: you did read the headline correctly. The woman who was nearly vice president has quit her elected position without using the word “resigned” or even acknowledging that she is walking out on the people who elected her. In fact, the entire “letter” is couched in terms of “not seeking a second term,” which goes without saying since she couldn’t even finish the first one.

I chose to post the fulltext of the entire resignation letter because it is so rife with grammatical errors that there is virtually no way it won’t be redacted and edited. The closing line is just priceless: In the words of General MacArthur said, “We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”

During this stream-of-consciousness, Palin sways violently from characterizing the United States as the “Outside” (spelled with a capital “O”) on the one hand, to proclaiming that her unique style of politics is just what the United States needs. While this will be interpreted by some as a precursor to her “inevitable” 2012 presidential bid, there is no mistaking the subtext: Palin is an Alaskan separatist who seeks secession from the Outside.

While it is true that quitting so long before the end of her term will spare her further exposure to the media (which she absolutely cannot withstand), this has to be one of the most shameful displays of leadership that any self-respecting representative could conjure up.

We all know that the electorate (A.K.A. the “unwashed masses”) are a fickle group who will have forgotten Palin after a few weeks’ time, so the most damnable part of this spectacle is that it probably would serve to provide a favorable position for Palin, compared to her ongoing humiliation as a public servant. The inescapable paradox lying within this strategy is that it would presumably be in anticipation of further public service, which would apparently be harmed by continuing to serve as Governor of Alaska.

Got that? In order to not harm her chances as a future public servant, she must quit her current position as a public servant in order to avoid fatally damaging her hypothetical presidential aspirations. We’re not talking about quitting on the school board, and we’re not talking about waiting out a difficult term in office. We’re talking about the Governor of Alaska — essentially on a whim — up and leaving office with nothing more than a few weeks notice.

…and she is announcing this in time for July 4th! Srsly, peeps: this isn’t a presidential bid. This reads more like a 4th grader’s stuttering, guilty, and evasive partial apology for getting caught in the act of cheating, then dropping out of school instead of studying for the next test. It’s shameful, but hardly unbelievable.

RTFA: http://www.gov.state.ak.us/exec-column.php

Hi Alaska, I appreciate speaking directly to you, the people I serve, as your Governor.

People who know me know that besides faith and family, nothing’s more important to me than our beloved Alaska. Serving her people is the greatest honor I could imagine.

I want Alaskans to grasp what can be in store for our state. We were purchased as a territory because a member of President Abe Lincoln’s cabinet, William Seward, providentially saw in this great land, vast riches, beauty, strategic placement on the globe, and opportunity. He boldly looked “North to the Future”. But he endured such ridicule and mocking for his vision for Alaska, remember the adversaries scoffed, calling this “Seward’s Folly”. Seward withstood such disdain as he chose the uncomfortable, unconventional, but right path to secure Alaska, so Alaska could help secure the United States.

People who know me know that besides faith and family, nothing’s more important to me than our beloved Alaska.

Alaska’s mission – to contribute to America. We’re strategic in the world as the air crossroads of the world, as a gatekeeper of the continent. Bold visionaries knew this – Alaska would be part of America’s great destiny.

Our destiny to be reached by responsibly developing our natural resources. This land, blessed with clean air, water, wildlife, minerals, and oil and gas. It’s energy! God gave us energy.

So to serve the state is a humbling responsibility, because I know in my soul that Alaska is of such import, for America’s security, in our very volatile world. And you know me by now, I promised even four years ago to show my independence… no more conventional “politics as usual”.

(more…)

WAT? I told you! Didn’t I tell you? As recently as two months ago, we were discussing Guinea Coups on RTFA. Now, the (former) president has been assassinated, and the region is in unrest.

Sure, this isn’t a coup… sure, the military promises to respect democracy…

But all the same, the president is dead at the hands of a group of soldiers, and the meme lives on.

[UPDATE 2009-03-03]
Erm, whoops. Wrong Guinea. The post from two months ago was Equatorial Guinea, but the current article is Guinea-Bissau (neither of which should be confused with the Republic of Guinea).
[/UPDATE]

RTFA: http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/03/02/guinea-bi…

Renegade soldiers killed the president of Guinea-Bissau just hours after a bomb blast led to the death of his rival, according to senior government officials.

President Joao Bernardo Vieira died early Monday morning, Luis Sanca, security adviser to Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Jr., confirmed for the Associated Press. Sanca declined to provide further details on the death.

Gunfire had been heard around the presidential palace in the capital of Bissau for several hours overnight in the fragile West African nation, according to witnesses. But the capital was calm on Monday, officials said.

Vieira had ruled Guinea-Bissau for 23 of the past 29 years. He came to power in a 1980 coup, but was forced out 19 years later at the onset of the country’s civil war. He later returned from exile in Portugal to run in the country’s 2005 election and won the vote.

Under the constitution, parliament chief Raimundo Pereira succeeds the president in the event of his death.

The Portuguese news agency LUSA reported that troops attacked Vieira’s residence with rockets and rifles on Sunday night.

Troops closed roads around the armed forces building in Bissau on Sunday and a blast apparently destroyed part of the building, according to the BBC.

This is really cool – new Federal spending, according to the recent stimulus bill, will need to be exposed through an RSS feed. This means, in theory, that as new spending is approved, we can all receive notification in our blogs… or better yet, since these updates will contain structured data (see below) we can incorporate this data directly into an analysis engine. Most excellent!

RTFA: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rssstimulus

As chaunceyt pointed out, the new stimulus bill’s implementation instructions require that each government agency report the money it gives out in RSS:

For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) agencies are required to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription.

The document is very clear that the items in the feed can’t simply be unstructured text, but have to be reusable data

Heed well the following XKCD cartoon. Click here for the full-resolution version.

“You are not a lawyer” (YANAL) is a fascinating, brief, but effective introduction to the fallacy of using technological reasons for a jury to doubt certain evidence in court, thereby failing to meet the “reasonable doubt” qualification for guilt. I was a little disappointed by the picture that it paints of the modern legal system, which can disrupt your life even without you being guilty in the first place. This all comes down to the search and seizure process, which is the point of Ohm’s article. For whatever doubt you can invent, by resorting to some technological reasoning (e.g. a trojan, open wifi, etc) you will first be searched, and that might well be evidence of your crime (in the event that you actually committed a crime). If you didn’t do anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about, right? Not so fast: it’s hard to imagine anyone not being injured, one way or another, by the modern legal process. If you’ve done nothing wrong, at a minimum, you should still fear the search and seizure.

RTFA: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/paul/being-a…

When techies think about criminal law, and in particular crimes committed online, they tend to fixate on this legal standard, dreaming up ways people can use technology to inject doubt into the evidence to avoid being convicted. I can’t count how many conversations I have had with techies about things like the “open wireless access point defense,” the “trojaned computer defense,” the “NAT-ted firewall defense,” and the “dynamic IP address defense.” Many people have talked excitedly to me about tools like TrackMeNot or more exotic methods which promise, at least in part, to inject jail-springing reasonable doubt onto a hard drive or into a network.

People who place stock in these theories and tools are neglecting an important drawback. There are another set of legal standards–the legal standards governing search and seizure–you should worry about long before you ever get to “beyond a reasonable doubt”. Omitting a lot of detail, the police, even without going to a judge first, can obtain your name, address, and credit card number from your ISP if they can show the information is relevant to a criminal investigation. They can obtain transaction logs (think apache or sendmail logs) after convincing a judge the evidence is “relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.” If they have probable cause–another famous, but often misunderstood standard–they can read all of your stored email, rifle through your bedroom dresser drawers, and image your hard drive. If they jump through a few other hoops, they can wiretap your telephone. Some of these standards aren’t easy to meet, but all of them are well below the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard for guilt.

Oh man. I know fumf has been waiting for this day… I’m not exactly sure this is good for the NRA, however, since Nugent has a bit of a reputation for, well, being completely bat shit psychotic. Sure, he will connect with a big portion of the audience, but part of the problem will be reaching out to anti-gun advocates, and I don’t really see that working out.

RTFA: http://www.usnews.com/blogs/washington-whispers/20…

Barack Obama jumped over a bunch of longer-experienced presidential candidates to win the White House, so will that pattern take at the National Rifle Association? It might, considering rocker and hunter Ted Nugent’s popularity among NRA members. We hear that the Nuge is being urged to get into the race, and a key NRA insider tells us: “He does have a grass-roots following.” That’s for sure. The singer of “Cat Scratch Fever” fame and 23 albums is being promoted on Facebook. While Nugent is an NRA board member, he doesn’t have the type of top slot in the organization normally needed to springboard somebody into the presidency. Even Charlton Heston, who played Moses in Hollywood, worked his way up to the presidency.