The Cowtown Chronicles

1959 TCU grad Bob Schieffer will be hosting his annual Symposium, titled: “Obama and the Press: Is the media doing its job?”

Panelists scheduled to attend:

David Brooks, of the New York Times

Gwen Ifill, author of “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama” (also moderator and managing editor of PBS’ Washington Week

Andrea Mitchell, chief foreign affairs correspondent for NBC News

Mark Shields, nationally syndicated columnist and commentator on PBS’ Newshour with Jim Lehrer

That’s a pretty bad-ass lineup of journalistic luminaries! I wonder if I can get them all into Scat Jazz Lounge after the Symposium? I’ll bet Andrea Mitchell could drink my buddy Steve under the table.

Fort Worth State Representative Mark Veasey filed a bill this session that would require Texas State Agencies to create all of their documents in an open, freely-available file format standard.

Fortunately for Microsoft, they’ve already succeeded at creating FUD about the bill, even though it’s only been in committee for a little while.

Here’s the skinny on what the bill does, and more importantly does NOT, require:

The bill requires that all documents created by a State agency (court, legislature, department, office, etc.) to be made available in an XML-based OPEN file format based on a recognized industry standard, and available without any intellectual property restrictions on the underlying file format.

What does that mean? Does it mean we’ll all have to switch to OpenOffice if we want to read government documents on our computers? Does it mean that the lady down at the DPS will have to learn Linux and OpenOffice? No.

To really understand the thrust of the bill, you have to understand a bit about how “standards” in the computing world work. Bear with me for a minute, I’m about to get technical…

Essentially there are two kinds of standards: widely recognized and adopted standards created by standards bodies like the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) or Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), referred to in our world as “industry standards,” and de-facto standards which are created because “everyone” uses a particular application or file format, like Microsoft Word. The two are related, but they are most definitely NOT the same.

Industry standards are the foundation upon which Information Technologies are built. Ultimately all de-facto standards are based at some point on an industry standard. A good example of this is Wi-Fi. The correct name for Wi-Fi is IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n, depending on what kind of device is in your computer. Obviously the general public doesn’t want to have to know anything about the IEEE standards that Wi-Fi is based on, so the group charged with promoting its use came up with the nonsensical name “Wi-Fi,” which doesn’t have anything to do with the technology except that it is wireless. The ethernet cable you have plugged in to your desktop computer works because of IEEE 802.3 (which is older than me, by the way), and your bluetooth headset works thanks to IEEE 802.15. The CSS that generates the page you’re reading right now is thanks to IETF RFC 2318. (Yes, I COULD go on all day.) While there are competing technologies for wireless data transfer among computers, Wi-Fi is both the Industry Standard AND the de-facto standard by which we all interconnect.

The point: It doesn’t matter what company manufactures what you have, so long as they adhere to the defined and open industry standard. Usually these standards are free for anyone to use, or at the very least available for a minimal fee with no restrictions on how they can be used, and no royalty or licensing fees.

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The Star-Telegram writes a slobbering love note to coal. (BTW, There’s no such thing as “clean” coal. There’s just not. It’s like being “a little” pregnant — you get environmental catastrophe with all of it, the only difference is on which end you get it.)

“Smokey” Joe Barton is #4 on the list of house members in terms of coal contributions to his campaign — $122,050 worth. (I wonder who gave the $50?)

Well, really I think it’s more than a bit full of itself, but I do appreciate and respect its position as a(the?) premier world city.

I also LOVE the NY Times. I read it as often as I can. Lately that’s been pretty often due to the student readership program at TCU — which puts stacks of The Gray Lady in bins all over campus, free for the taking.

Imagine my surprise today when “all the news that’s fit to print” included an op-ed on Judge Sharon Keller, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals judge who refused to keep her clerk’s office open an extra 20 minutes to allow a death row inmate’s legal team to file new motions based on a pending Supreme Court review of lethal injection.

Okay, so what? The good, Christian, peaceful, other-cheek-turning people of Texas ritualistically kill retards and foreigners on the taxpayer’s dime all the time — why is this worthy of an opinion piece by the Editorial Board of the NY Times?

It’s news because Fort Worth State Representative Lon Burnam has filed a resolution to impeach Judge Keller for “…gross neglect of duty and conducting her official duties with willful disregard for human life.”

Good on ya, Lon, for calling for an investigation into this Judge’s actions. As the opinion piece in the Times says, if the facts of the matter are as the condemned man’s lawyers have said, then Judge Keller should be removed from office, relieved of her state retirement benefits and disbarred. (Maybe even tried for negligent homicide? I’m sure there are legal indemnifications for judges acting in their official capacity, even if they’re acting improperly.)

If the allegations are false and the attorneys just didn’t get their paperwork done in time without talking to anyone at the court, then no harm, no foul, and Judge Keller keeps her job, etc., and we can let the voters decide in 2012 if she gets to come back.

Oddly enough, I also read the S-T today. I usually stay off the opinion page, because the letters to the editor are usually so stereotypically “White Bible-Belt ‘Conservative’ Texan” as to be embarrassing for the rest of y’all. One of the letters, predictably, calls for Rep. Burnam to “…go do the job he was elected to do and let the judges run the courts.” Well, Mr. Walter Degner of Arlington, perhaps you should go back and read that trivial slip of paper called The Constitution. Each branch of government exercises some degree of oversight and control of the other — Mr. Burnam is doing EXACTLY the job he was elected to do, and should be applauded for that.

I’ve been informed that I’m a jackass, and that my complaints about the child tax credits I don’t receive doesn’t take into account just how damn expensive it is to raise a kid these days.

I seem to have also missed the point that a healthy and well-educated citizenry (even a young one) benefits all of society, and that I should be glad to be paying for these kids who will eventually be paying for my Social Security.

So, I take it back. Now my least favorite tax is the tax on the interest earned by my savings and investments. It’s a sad day when there are more tax advantages to debt (mortgages and student loan interest) than savings and self-sufficiency.

If there was ever any doubt about Obama being the “change” president, this should erase all of it.

Rick Warren To Give Invocation At The Inauguration; John Williams, Aretha, Yo-Yo MA, I. Perlman, Too – Marc Ambinder.

Check out Allen over at The Whited Sepulchre. I haven’t had the time to spend debating him (actually, he and I agree on more than we disagree on, methinks, but he draws some CRAZY-ass commenters) in the comments, but I do still read it when I have time.

Gotta read all angles, even if Allen is bitter and distrustful of our political leadership. (I kid!)

Congrats on your appearance in the paper, Allen!

Anachronistic throwback to agrarian times?

OR

Great equalizer for the under-represented rural area to this day?

Go!

Republicans.

How can one honestly call themselves a Democrat (and by implication that they support the same policies and positions as the Democratic Party) and then vote for McCain?

Don’t give me that “experience” bullshit. We don’t align ourselves with political parties or causes because one or the other is more experienced. We do it because they share our worldview and promote positions that we agree with. To call yourself a Democrat and to be willing to vote for a Republican (particularly one that so violently disagrees with Democratic positions) is the worst kind of dishonesty with yourself.

I think it goes back to fear. Some people are so convinced that we’re under immediate threat of attack from anyone and everyone that they’re going to go with the guy (or woman in the form of Hillary Clinton) who says that they’ll take the fight to the enemy and all that macho BS. It’s sad, really.

I should know better than to read the letters to the editor in the Star-Telegram. It’s like the editors pick the MOST loony letters sent in each week in order to illustrate just how crazy both sides can be.

Take this one for example:

Scares liberals

Gov. Sarah Palin is a Christian. She is a strong supporter of her family. She is a moral person. She thinks killing babies is a poor form of birth control.

She thinks government should be of the people. She thinks Washington politics should be free from graft. She thinks we should be free from being held hostage by foreign oil-producing countries. She thinks terrorists should be dealt with harshly. She thinks the people of this country should elect the president, not Hollywood or the media.

Palin is everything liberals hate.

— Joe Cole, Weatherford

What an insanely ridiculous and simplistic string of assertions and implications that because Palin is supposedly “for” these things that so-called “liberals” are against them.

Barack Obama is a Christian, so is Joe Biden. Both men are strong supporters of their families (Biden was a single dad for a while, does that make him better than Palin?). Barack Obama and Joe Biden are presumably moral persons. I have no evidence (and I’m certain Mr. Cole doesn’t either) that they’re not. Both have made mistakes in the past, but that doesn’t make you immoral, just flawed. Barack Obama and Joe Biden think killing babies is a horrible form of birth control. In fact, it can’t even be classified as a form of birth control, because killing babies after they’re born isn’t exactly “birth control.”

Obama/Biden think government should be of the people, but I’m guessing those people are different people than Mr. Cole wants. Obama/Biden think Washington politics should be free from graft — who’s ever come out in favor of graft? Obama/Biden think we should be free from not only being held hostage by foreign oil producing countries, but also by domestic oil producers. Why can’t otherwise smart people grasp the concept of MOVING THE FUCK OFF OF OIL?!? (sorry mom) Obama/Biden think that terrorists should be dealt with harshly — Obama supports pursuing them across the border into Pakistan when there’s actionable intelligence, a position that McCain rejects and calls “naive.” (Side topic: When you’re a warmonger, every problem looks like the only solution is war. Terrorism is a CRIMINAL ACT, carried out by non-state actors. Our military is not equipped or trained to fight terrorism, nor are they the appropriate people to be doing it legally or from a policy standpoint. The FBI/CIA should be doing their JOBS and working with our allies in the region to flush out the terrorists, and THEN maybe we could look at military strikes.) Obama/Biden think that the people of this country should elect the president, not Hollywood or the media — the last time I checked, “Hollywood and the media” have WAY fewer votes than “the people of this country.”

I do agree on one point though — Palin is everything liberals hate. She’s a poseur, a small-town mayor (or a small-state governor) who stumbled into the governorship and now presumes that she can hold the second highest office in the land because she “didn’t blink” when she was asked. I’m sorry, but I expect more of the people who run for the highest offices in our democracy. Obama may be lacking experience, but he certainly isn’t lacking intellect or education, two areas that so far Gov. Palin has demonstrated are not her strong suit. She also apparently can’t see past religious dogma when framing her policies, and that’s simply unacceptable.

Everyone who tells you that this is the most important election in history is exactly right. Never before has our country faced such a defining and definite choice: Do we want to continue on our path of glorifying willful ignorance and irrational stubbornness, or do we want to expect more from our leaders and demand that they apply intellect and reason to problems instead of dogmatic homilies and simplistic answers?

The choice is ours — I hope we get it right.