First off, I'm one of those people that doesn't like George W. Bush, in fact , I really don't like George W. Bush. But, I don't feel particularly compelled to vote for Kerry. Why is that? I have no idea what his positions are on issues that I find important. I have little idea what his positions are on any issues at all.

So in the interest of finding out I turned to Daily Kos, surely a site such as this would give me some useful information on Kerry's position. Well, let's look at the last few posts. (I omit open threads, and I'm not going to link to each of the posts as I am too lazy)

In chronological order backwards from the time I started looking.

Get ready for heavy duty nagging
Australian General Election - October 9
Rally Stories
Pre-Convention Program
While the Republicans Fiddled
For the Doom-and-Gloomers This AM

So far, not so good. Not one post on a Kerry position. Well, it's still early, this is only the first page or so.

Sunday Talk Show Lineup
Bush: An intelligence disaster
The Numbers Don't Tell the Story
More on the Vietnam Legacy
Bush, flip-flopper: A weekend homework assignment
Implications of Spy Story
Najaf: Who Won?
The Big Apple Burnishes Its Image
New Evidence SBVT Has Peaked
ABC News Reports on theoria's troubles
Texas pol admits getting Bush into National Guard
IL-sen: Illinois Dems are insane
Trip Mines
More ammo against Swift Boat liars
Bush has blown NYC's 2012 Olympic chances
GOP moderates strike out with platform committee
RNC bloggers
Bush lies again

I'm starting to get a bit frustrated. For a blog that should be pro-Kerry they spend very little time writing about Kerry. And even less time writing about what Kerry actually thinks or will do. Maybe this is just an aberration, I should keep going further.


OK-sen: Latest Carson internals
Hypocrites in action
Bend Over And Smile
Smart vs Dumb
Revisionist History
Dick Cheney, Lord of the Manor
This Week's Polls
2004 Iraq deaths now exceed 2003 deaths
Ranks of Poverty and Uninsured Rose in 2003
GOP hates New York
July party fundraising
Haunted By Abu Ghraib
Iraq Violence Continues
Sigh...
Majority rules, but not on the podium
Cleland confronts Bush
GOP 527s enter fray

Well, it doesn't seem to be an aberration, but wait, what's this!

Under The Radar

Which contains the following quote.

“However, Edwards spent much of the nearly hourlong event at a Cleveland community center talking about jobs, housing assistance, small-business funding, predatory lending and post-incarceration programs, salient issues among blacks”

Ahhhh, finally a position on an issue. It's not Kerry, but it's close. And it's not really stating a position as much as a vague area of concern, but it will have to do.

I don't make a living blogging (it's a good thing), I don't even spend that much time blogging. But looking at blogs like this it's no wonder people like me don't know anything about Kerry's positions.

I was going to do the same thing with Eschaton, but I have real work to do. I looked down through and I didn't see much there.

U.S. Cutting Back on Details in Data About Charter Schools from the New York Times (registration required.) Just when data was starting to show that charter schools were lagging behind public schools the Education Department is cutting back on the amount of information it collects about their performance.

"Susan Aspey, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said the decision to switch to a random sample had been made in the first year of the Bush administration "for technical reasons." "There is nothing sinister or untoward about this.""

The Memory Hole >This I find hilarious. Apparently, the Justice department redacted part of a Supreme Court decision that had to do with them classifying things that don't need to be classified.

Pleasure Boat Captains for Truth. Lol.

I wonder why this idea wouldn't work for disposing of nuclear waste. It's similar to something that I had thought of. The basic idea presented here is that radioactive waste would be buried on a tectonic plate in a subduction zone. This would over the course of time pull the waste into the core of the earth. This would seem to avoid all of the problems with conventional nuclear waste disposal sites, such as groundwater and aquifer contamination. One concern that I can see would be corrosion of the containment vessel.

My original idea was to dig a mine that would go beneath all the underground water. This could be prohibitively expensive, but it has been done. An added bonus to this type of mine is that it ends up being deep enough that the heat can be used to generate geothermal energy.

Some of my favorite Googlisms for my most regular reader, "dan baker is the new 1999", "dan baker is the undisputable center forward for the boozehounds", and "dan baker is at is best when he is being >wrong."

Via BoingboingWired News: All That Secrecy Is Expensive is an article that summarizes the findings of Open The Government.org as they tally the costs of government secrecy in the United States.

What is Metadata? And what does it do. Although I was almost as mystified when I got done reading it as I was when I started, I'm told this may be a good introduction to the concept of metadata.

What I'm hearing is thatThe Kingdom of Loathing is a very funny RPG.

advanced theory blog: The Ayatollah Is a Rock-N-Rolla The last part had me laughing so hard I almost peed my pants. Blogger tells me my issue is fixed, but we'll see if this link works.

Fafblog the whole worlds only source for Fafblog. Funny. Wicked funny.

Ok, all the links I've done lately are broken. I've sent a help request, because I couldn't find a fix in the blogger help files. The links were made using the Blogger icon on the Google toolbar, and I'm not sure why they aren't working. Since that's pretty much the only way I add stuff I won't be adding too much until I hear back from them. I could enter the links by hand but my knowledge of HTML begins and ends with italics.

My Beef With Big Media by Ted Turner I'm not sure what to think about Ted Turner. Maybe he's advanced.

One of the reasons I check in on Asymmetrical Information is that every once in awhile you get a nice informative rational discussion. This one's about oil and alternative energy.

As far as I'm concerned the goal is still "too cheap to meter." That's what the promise was back in the 60's when nuclear power was coming online. I still think that it can be done, but it's not going to be done with oil. That's the best reason for alternative energy research I can think of. Free energy would be one of those things that fundamentally transforms the world we live in. Like the industrial revolution. It's a big step towards living in a Star Trek type universe where money becomes irrelevant, or so leveraged that even the poor can live at a ridiculous (by current ideas) standard. The sooner we can move out of these mud huts we live in the better, as far as I'm concerned.

Politics again! Yikes! And it even has the BCCI in it. The BCCI is one of my all time favorite scandals. It's got so many interesting characters and unsavory connections. It can be a bit hard to understand at times, and it's about banking so that might throw some people off. All in all, it's at least a 9 out of 10.

I agree with the first part of this. Although, I think it tends to understate the case. Most of the time it only takes one party to make a behind the scenes deal. As for the rest of it the topic was dealt with in href="http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tvtome.com%2Ftvtome%2Fservlet%2FGuidePageServlet%2Fshowid-344%2Fepid-212343%2F">South Park - The Death Camp of Tolerance in a much more amusing way.

Indeed.

Cliff Pickover's RealityCarnival has been around the net for a long time. And it's still around. Temporal Much weirdness.

More awesome Jesus related stuff. From Metafilter.

Get your brackets in early. The office pool on cinematic supervillians has already kicked off! Trying the link again Thanks to anonymous for the heads up. Ok, I'm not sure why the link doesn't work. If you want to see it someone was kind enough to put up a working link in the comments.

Is the CIA tampering with Venezuelan elections? | Metafilter I wouldn't be too surprised if the answer is yes. We have a history of interference in the process of democracy in other countries. I love the idea of America as I understood it as a child. It gave me chills to hear about the ideals that America was founded on. I think we have screwed it up in practice, though.

Call me a dork but I think D&D jokes are pretty funny.From FARK

One of the hallmarks of a good article is that it makes you reconsider your own views. Which makes"Hating Dick Cheney: The new national pastime is as puzzling and unsatisfying as watching baseball" a very good article indeed. While I am kind of puzzled by the hatred a lot of liberals seem to feel for George W. Bush, I harbored the sneaking suspicion that Dick Cheney was some kind of evil genius. I mean, he commissioned a secret energy task force that's only made up of major oil and gas industry lobbyists. It's like he stole the idea from a John Grisham novel. GWB seemed to me to be a bit befuddled by the fact that he's president, but Cheney was always lurking in the inky shadows. Maybe, just maybe, because he was worried he might have some gravy on his tie.

Also via Drudge,Some bad economic news. Whatever party you like, you may want to hope that they lose in November. In my estimation, we may be in for an economic "rough patch" that is Great Depression-esque. I don't like the high level of debt (government, business, and consumer.) I don't like the housing bubble. I don't like the high energy costs. I think the Fed is pumping out too much money. Whatever the political dimensions of this whole mess are, I wish someone would start talking some sense.

Via Drudge, if you live in Florida I suggest you get somewhere else post haste. There's a hurricane a comin'.

An old study that said that longer sentences would lead to more crime. I'm not really qualified to comment on the validity of the study. These kind of studies almost always have some kind of hole or another. I'm just going to use it as a springboard to make the observation that the idea of prison as being some kind of reformative experience seems to have almost vanished. In our society today the emphasis seems to have shifted to prison as punishment.

Prisoners are getting out of prison less and less equipped to deal with the realities they face in the communities they are released to. The main advantage of keeping people in prison longer is that if they get out when they are old they may be too tired to commit any violent crimes. This seems to be kind of a waste to me.

People with tinfoil hats talk about the prison industrial complex, but it seems to me that there may be a grain of truth in the idea that our current system of justice has an unseemly element of profit motive to it.

Not that I really have any idea what to do about it.

I actually read about this in an article in Esquire. Which is weird because I don't read Esquire.The advanced theory blog is the home of advancement theory. Which is, as far as I can tell, limited at the current time to music. But if it ever breaks out of the musical genre into politics I would probably have to say that Donald Rumsfeld is advanced.

Roadside America - Guide to Offbeat Tourist Attractions is the most useful road trip planning tool I've ever come across. Truly a Mecca generating tool.

This is a pretty neat site that fact checks political ads. From what I can tell it looks pretty independent. I found this by hearing an interviewwith the director of the project on Fresh Air.