Today marks the official launch of dKosopedia, a wiki project that I’ve been working on the last few months along with some great members of the DailyKos community. Here’s how Kos is describing it in the “official” announcement :

I can almost hear you all thinking, “what the heck is a wiki?” It’s a collaborative website that will allow this community to build a political encyclopedia (from a liberal standpoint, of course). In short, anyone will be able to contribute encyclopedia entries on a variety of political subjects.

The best example of a wiki is the Wikipedia, which is an open source, collaborative encyclopedia with over 274,000 entries, all of them community submitted.

We hope the dKosopedia will become the progressive-political version of the Wikipedia, a political FAQ so to speak — a repository of answers to questions such as “how do I calculate a Margin of Error”, and “How are superdelegates selected?” and “What is a 527?”. It’s currently just a skeletal shell, but we hope it’ll grow into a main resource for community members and the general public at large. That’s where you guys come into play.

So head on over to the dKosopedia and look around. If you see something that’s missing or inaccurate, click on “Edit this page” at the bottom and you can update it yourself. That’s the beauty of the wiki concept : Anyone can change any page at any time.

Here’s an op-ed that really warms the heart :

Less than six months from election day, polls suggest that Mr Kerry is leading the President in 12 of the 16 so-called swing states. In some states the lead is slight, but in places such as New Hampshire, which Mr Bush won in 2000, Mr Kerry has a lead of almost 10 per cent.

Though polls offer only a snapshot in time, pollster John Zogby, who made the latest survey, said if the present leads in these 16 states hold true - and Democrats and Republicans hold on to the states each party won easily in 2000 - Mr Kerry will win with a margin of 102 electoral college votes. In 2000, Mr Bush beat Al Gore by 271 to 267.

“I have made a career of taking bungee jumps in my election calls,” Mr Zogby wrote in an op-ed article. “Here is my jump for 2004: John Kerry will win the election … We are unlikely to see any big bumps for either candidate because opinion is so polarized and, I believe, frozen in place. There are still six months to go and anything can happen. But as of today, this race is John Kerry’s to lose.”

The battleground states, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin, are likely to prove crucial in deciding who carries the day on 2 November. Republican and Democrat strategists know that in at least 30 states, along with the District of Columbia, the outcome of the vote is a foregone conclusion. But in the battleground states - which were won in 2000 by six percentage points or less - everything is up for grabs.

Six months ago we thought Dean would be the nominee, so let’s not forget how quickly things can change. With that caveat out of the way, damn this is awesome.

The important think here it to not get too confident. If 2000 taught us anything, it’s not enough to just get more votes. If we want to guarantee that Kerry will win, we have to make sure it’s by an unquestionable landslide. With the way Bush continues to dig his own grave, it’s a possibility.

Here’s a weird-ass analogy from a speech George Bush gave last month :

Al Qaeda obviously is the name everybody knows that’s associated with war on terror. And we’re hunting them down. It takes a while to find them. But we’re using all our assets and resources and friends and allies to bring them to justice. It’s the only way you have to deal with them. And it’s important that we find them before they come here again, or somewhere else, for that matter.

And we’re making pretty good progress. If al Qaeda were a board of directors, the chairman and vice chairman might still be out there, but the middle management is gone. That’s not to say that they’re not encouraging others to step forward. They are. But we’re on the hunt, and we’ll stay on the hunt. And it’s essential that the country not yield, and lead. The world looks at us, and if we show any weakness whatsoever, there will be weakness in the world. And as I just told you, in order to win this war against these people, there has to be solid cooperation in the world.

If al Qaeda were a board of directors?! Let’s take that line further, shall we?

The problem is that al Qaeda’s stock price has been going up dramatically since their initial public offering due to the fact that their biggest competition, America, is mismanaged and has been unable to capitalize on the synergy they once had with their strategic partnerships, largely due to America’s Chief Executive being so closely intertwined with its Board of Directors that the shareholders have very little oversight. Add to that the fact that the CEO lacks a cohesive business strategy and has been unable to maintain long-standing business partnerships, it’s easy to see why al Qaeda has been able to maximize its assets and negate its high turnover rate by attracting fresh talent and expanding into new marketplaces. So while they have lost some high level executives, al Qaeda is well-poised for future growth.

You can thank our “CEO President” for that one.

Here’s a good example from PollingReport of why I’ll never completely understand the mainstream :

70% of Americans believe in the Devil?? How can anyone believe in something like this??

I don’t mean to be completely judgmental here, but the idea that people believe in some cartoony embodiment of pure evil is as nutty as someone trying to convince me that the Smurfs are based on a true story.

This kind of logic makes me ill.

If we execute murderers, why don’t we execute the people who write computer worms? It would probably be a better investment.

Let’s do the math. What do we get out of executing a murderer? Deterrence. A high-end estimate is that each execution deters about 10 murders. (The highest estimate I’ve ever seen is 24 murders deterred per execution, but the closest thing to a consensus estimate in the econometric literature is about eight.) That’s 10 lives saved, with a value?again a high-end estimate?of about $10 million apiece. (The closet thing to a consensus estimate in the economics literature is about $7 million per life. I am rounding up.) So let’s say the benefit of executing a murderer is roughly 10 times $10 million, or $100 million?and that’s probably at the high end.

Compare that to the benefit of executing the author of a computer worm, virus, or Trojan. There seems to be no good name for such people, so I’ll make one up?at least until some reader sends in a better suggestion, I’ll call them “vermiscripters.” It’s estimated that vermiscripting and related activities cost the world about $50 billion a year. So if a single execution could deter just one-fifth of 1 percent of all vermiscripting for just one year, we’d gain the same $100-million benefit we earn by executing a killer. Anything over one-fifth of 1 percent, and any effects that last beyond the first year, are gravy.

So much for benefits. What about costs? The cost of an execution is one life?usually (one hopes) the life of the guilty, but occasionally the life of a wrongly convicted innocent. The question is: Which is worth more: the life of the average convicted murderer or the life of the average convicted vermiscripter?

Plausibly, the latter. Compared to murderers, vermiscripters might be easier to rehabilitate (the author of the Sasser worm is, by all reports, still a teenager) and probably have more skills that can be put to good use. (Offsetting this, though, is the prospect that those same skills can be put to further bad use.) Let’s bias things very strongly against the conclusion I’m driving at by valuing the average murderer’s life at zero and the average vermiscripter’s life at $100 million?the same value we earlier attributed to 10 lives.

Then to rate the vermiscripter’s execution as a better investment than the murderer’s, you’d have to expect it to deter at least $200 million worth of computerized vandalism?enough to cover the $100 million value of executing the murderer plus the $100 million value of the vermiscripter’s life. That’s twice our earlier estimate, but still just two-fifths of 1 percent of one year’s worth of worm and virus damage?and still a plausibly easy hurdle to clear.

Conclusion: On a pure cost-benefit basis, we should be quicker to execute a vermiscripter than a murderer.

By this same line of reasoning, there should be no doubt that terrorists deserve the death penalty. After all, don’t you know how expensive it is to build two skyscrapers??

On the surface, conservatives are right, this is really goofy :

“The Day After Tomorrow” transforms the worst-case scenarios of climate change into the apocalypse.

First the polar ice sheets melt instantaneously, raising the sea level hundreds of feet and inundating coastal cities, including New York. Then an equally instantaneous ice age descends, flash freezing New York and other northern latitudes. All of this is blamed on a Dick Cheney look-alike who refused to stop exhaling carbon dioxide.

This is beyond ludicrous. While the melting of ice sheets and the disruption of ocean currents leading to colder temperatures in the northern latitudes are plausible theories of possible climate futures, neither could possibly happen instantly or to the extent depicted in the movie. It wouldn’t even happen fast enough for a miniseries. It probably won’t happen at all.

Does a cartoon version of a serious issue help or hurt public awareness?

Some environmentalists and activists, including former Vice President Al Gore and MoveOn.org, think it will, going as far as to suggest that this is “the movie the White House doesn’t want you to see.”

Serious environmentalists have reason to be worried. Public concern for global warming has been dropping for several years now in polls on the issue. A year ago a Gallup Poll on global warming found that the issue was “a bit of a yawn” to most Americans. A follow-up Gallup Poll on global warming taken last month found that “the public is practically dozing.”

To use this as a way to seriously debate the environment is like using Dawn of the Dead as a tool to discuss Bush underfunding the Centers for Disease Control. These worst-case scenarios are so ridiculous and hyperbolic that nobody should really take them seriously. Or should they??

Global warming may be bad news for future generations, but let’s face it, most of us spend as little time worrying about it as we did about al Qaeda before 9/11. Like the terrorists, though, the seemingly remote climate risk may hit home sooner and harder than we ever imagined. In fact, the prospect has become so real that the Pentagon’s strategic planners are grappling with it.

The threat that has riveted their attention is this: Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world’s climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decade?like a canoe that’s gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don’t know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies?thereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power.

Though triggered by warming, such change would probably cause cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to longer, harsher winters in much of the U.S. and Europe. Worse, it would cause massive droughts, turning farmland to dust bowls and forests to ashes. Picture last fall’s California wildfires as a regular thing. Or imagine similar disasters destabilizing nuclear powers such as Pakistan or Russia?it’s easy to see why the Pentagon has become interested in abrupt climate change.

Yeah, the Pentagon scenario doesn’t include woolly mammoths or Dennis Quaid, but it’s still worth keeping in mind that the potential for global disaster due to the destruction of the environment is very real. That said, I’d suggest being very careful about hyping the events in The Day After Tomorrow as a possible future if Bush gets reelected. Even if there’s a grain of truth in there, it just sounds stupid.

I can’t believe I’m doing this, but I’m actually siding with the millionaire CEO on this one :

New York Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer sued former New York Stock Exchange chief Richard Grasso on Monday, alleging that the man once celebrated as the public face of Wall Street used deception and intimidation to take home at least $100 million more in pay than he was entitled to.

The lawsuit portrays Grasso as stockpiling the NYSE’s board of directors with his allies, then misleading them about the extent of his compensation.

Grasso, who became chairman and chief executive of the world’s largest stock exchange in 1995, was forced out in September after it was revealed that a month earlier he had been paid $139.5 million in bonuses and retirement benefits accumulated almost entirely since 1999, and that he was owed $48 million more.

The disclosure capped a public outcry over executive pay levels and sparked added furor because the NYSE, as a regulator of most of the nation’s biggest companies, had been cracking down on similar perceived abuses in corporate America.
. . .
Spitzer criticized the NYSE’s previous board, which included the heads of Wall Street’s biggest brokerages, for inadequate oversight. But he said he didn’t take action against the full board because it wasn’t shown all of Grasso’s pay data.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t support Grasso per se, but I think this case is largely meritless.

The key question here is “Did Richard Grasso break the law?” Despite the list of charges brought against him (stacking the Board of Directors with his buddies, misleading people about his compensation, being an arrogant and overpaid dickhead), I’m not completely convinced that his actions weren’t of the “evil, but perfectly legal” variety which savvy executives are well-known for. Just because the business world (thanks to extraordinary public outcry) has buyers remorse over his pay package doesn’t mean that he didn’t steal that money fair and square.

Furthermore, I think this could likely weaken the fight against corporate corruption by turning into one of those “a few bad apples” situations and therefore obscure the extent of the problem. The horrible thing about this whole situation isn’t that the business world is full of criminals, but that the business world if full of people doing things that should be crimes.

(To give one quick example : The fact that it’s legal to be both CEO and Chairman of the Board of a corporation is absolutely insane. The whole point of the board of directors is to keep an eye on the executives and make sure they aren’t screwing the shareholders. Allowing the CEO to be in charge of the group that oversees him/her is like letting George W. Bush be President and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.)

So while it may be more satisfying to see rich dudes get hauled away in handcuffs, we should be fighting for changes to the laws that make this crap legal in the first place. We shouldn’t automatically assume there’s a criminal element to every instance of executive malfeasance. Our response to this sort of thing needs to stop being “Why are they allowed to get away with this?” to “Why is this legal?”

Have you guys seen the new Shrek movie yet? As you can probably guess from what I wrote in last year’s “Worst Movies…” post, I sure as hell haven’t :

Shrek - With Mike Myers doing his Scottish Voice? that he does in every movie and Eddie Murphy reprising his role from Mulan as a trash-talkin’ dragon donkey, how could this movie fail? Well, apparently the only way people can make movies that appeal to adults and children these days is by adding humor that’s totally inappropriate for children, so this movie gives us a bunch of shit, snot, and penis jokes as well as a character named Lord Fuckwad. Then, in keeping with the theme of bashing Disney formulas, they end this movie with a generic ending wherein the two main characters fall in love. The big twist here is that she turns out to be an ugly ogre too. I hope you kids are paying attention, because the moral of this story apparently is that ugly people and beautiful people cannnot love each other. Great….

Everything I’ve seen about Shrek 2 says it’s better than the first, but that’s like saying pee tastes better than poo. And can we all finally admit that the 3-D animated emperor isn’t wearing any clothes?? The big studios are so obsessed with the method of animation, they forget that it doesn’t mean shit without a decent story to tell. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer my animation to be old school.

From and article about his speech last night, here’s Bush’s 5-point plan for Iraqi reconstruction :

In his speech, Mr. Bush tried to signal that the troops would not be there indefinitely.

“America’s task in Iraq is not only to defeat an enemy, it is to give strength to a friend ? a free, representative government that serves its people and fights on their behalf, and the sooner this goal is achieved, the sooner our job will be done,” Mr. Bush said.

The president laid out a five-point plan to “achieve freedom and peace in Iraq”:

Hand over authority to a sovereign Iraqi government.

Help establish stability and security.

Rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure.

Draw other countries into military and other operations.

Move toward national elections by January.

But the insurgents in Iraq have been hampering such efforts, assassinating top Iraqi political leaders and harrying U.S. troops, destroying infrastructure by blowing up oil pipelines and stoking dissent among Iraqis about the legitimacy of the interim government.

“There are difficult days ahead, and the way forward may sometimes appear chaotic,” Mr. Bush allowed. “The terrorists and Saddam loyalists would rather see many Iraqis die than have any live in freedom.”

From April 2003 (!), here’s Howard Dean’s 7-point plan for Iraqi reconstruction :

“We knew from the outset we could win this war without much help from others. But we cannot win the peace by continuing to go it alone,” Governor Dean said. “Our goal should be what the Administration has promised-an Iraq that is stable, self-sufficient, whole and free. Our strategy to achieve that goal should be based on a partnership with three sides-U.S., international and Iraqi-and a program that begins with seven basic points.”

Those points are:

A NATO-led coalition should maintain order and guarantee disarmament.

Civilian authority in Iraq should be transferred to an international body approved by the U.N. Security Council.

The U.N.’s Oil for Food program should be transformed into an Oil for Recovery program, to pay part of the costs of reconstruction and transition.

The U.S. should convene an international donor’s conference to help finance the financial burden of paying for Iraq’s recovery.

Women should participate in every aspect of the decision-making process.

A means should be established to prosecute crimes committed against the Iraqi people by individuals associated with Saddam Hussein’s regime.

A senate transition will take between 18 to 24 months, although troops should expect to be in Iraq for a longer period.

“We must hold the Administration to its promises before the war, and create a world after the war that is safer, more senate, and more united in winning the larger struggle against terrorism and the forces that breed it,” Governor Dean said.

“That is, after all, now much more than a national security objective,” he added. “It is a declaration of national purpose, written in the blood of our troops, and of the innocent on all sides who have perished.”

Whew! It’s a good thing Dean didn’t get the nomination, huh? He’s a goddamn madman!

Charles Kuffner has some good news about the Texas Comptroller who denied tax exempt status to a Unitarian Church. Call me a “glass half-empty” type, but every time we have one of these cases in which a conservative backs down on some horrible policy due to public pressure (which is about once a month or so in Bush’s case) I can’t help but think of all the policies that aren’t generating the necessary amount of outrage. My inner centrist tells me I should pat these people on the back for ultimately doing the right thing, but the rest of me can’t shake the feeling that we’ll never have enough anger to keep these people doing the right thing all the time.