"I am the nominee, whether you like it or not."

This race is already shaping up as one of the more active state ones in the area, with three Democratic candidates and two on the other side. For what it's worth, I endorse Greg Brownfield over Kevin Allen and Thomas Cullerton.

Having worked as a legal aid attorney giving free advice to people who can't afford a lawyer, Greg Brownfield knows first-hand how the wrecked economy is affecting people. He talks about a compassion deficit, the obligation of government to the needy which is as important as its other debts; we must not balance the state's books on the backs of the most vulnerable. Brownfield is also highly skilled at bringing together large crowds of motivated volunteers, a skill that our nominee will surely need in order to take on someone with the resources of a Pankau or Ramey.

Each of the candidates in this primary has something valuable to offer. Kevin Allen is a friend, a smart guy who's been active for years in local politics against the Republican machine. Tom Cullerton is the best village president that Villa Park has seen for quite some time. Either of them would make a fine State Senator, and I'd be happy to support either of them after the primary. But until then, Brownfield is endorsed.

There's an email going around listing some ideas that will supposedly reform Congress. The email attributes its contents to gazillionaire investor Warren Buffet, but in actuality, Buffet only suggested the first idea in the email; the rest are by some anonymous author who evidently felt it necessary to appropriate Buffet's name.

The email, with my own arguments against what it proposes, is below. I should mention that I have no great regard for (the current) Congress, especially my current member who I regard as one of the biggest dirtbags on the planet.

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Ran a torture camp for dogs, using her own money. Sentenced to thirty months in jail.

Ran a torture camp for human beings, using public money. Left free and given fat pensions.

Moral: Never use your own money.

...it's a really, really good idea:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

(Emphasis added, of course.)

This applies to people regardless of whether we like them, whether they like us, whether they like our country, or whether people of similar skin color and religious background once carried out an attack against our country.

It applies to everyone, because if it doesn't then it applies to no one.

From Raw Story:

Greg Mitchell's new book, Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki and The Greatest Movie Never Made, is the first to be devoted to the historic full-color footage that was covered up by the U.S. government for decades.

Google's "ad word team" notified Mitchell Monday that an online ad for the book's video trailer was being suspended because it "promotes violence."

"At this time, Google policy does not permit the advertisement of websites that contain the promotion of violence," an email to Mitchell said. "As noted in our advertising terms and conditions, Google may refuse any ads or terminate any of your ad campaigns at any time, for any reason."

You can watch the video trailer at the Raw Story link above. At no point does it advocate violence against anyone. By exposing the harm that war can cause, it might in some small way help to deter violence.

A lot of people think of Google as a benign alternative to some of the more obviously scummy corporations like Microsoft. They aren't. When it comes to corporations of that size, there's no such thing as benign. Think about this before you decide to trust them with custody of your email or any other documents.

Via Forbes:

In the 1980s, attorney Gary Reback was working at Sun Microsystems, then a young technology startup. A pack of IBM employees in blue suits showed up at Sun headquarters seeking royalties for 7 patents that IBM claimed Sun had infringed. The Sun employees, having examined the patents, patiently explained that six of the seven patents were likely invalid, and Sun clearly hadn’t infringed the seventh.... An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. “OK,” he said, “maybe you don’t infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back... and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?” After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list.

Android has roughly 10 million lines of code. Auditing 10 million lines of code for compliance with 18,000 patents is an impossible task—especially because the meaning of a patent’s claims are often not clear until after they have been litigated. Most Silicon Valley companies don’t even try to avoid infringing patents. They just ignore them and hope they’ll be able to afford good lawyers when the inevitable lawsuits arrive.

So Android, like every large software product on the planet, infringes numerous Microsoft patents. And Microsoft is taking full advantage. They’re visiting Android licensees and giving the same sales pitch Reback remembers from a quarter century ago. “Do you really want us to go back to Redmond and find patents you infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us?” Once again, many of the targets are writing checks to make the problem go away.

In software development, in which I myself am gainfully employed, you often find that there's one clear best way of doing something. You may reinvent it without knowing or caring who did it before you. Should that entitle the first person to solve the problem — or the person who patented the solution, who probably wasn't actually the first — to free money from you? That's a bit like saying that I need to cut a check to Karl Fredric Gauss' decendants every time I solve for three unknowns in three linear equations.

Microsoft, of course, doesn't follow its own rules. The Win-D'Ohs operating system borrowed heavily from Mac OS and OS-2. The .NET platform is basically Java with some not-very-useful extra features thrown in. And so on. You'd be hard-pressed to find any product these guys put out that somebody else didn't do first, usually better, and almost always cheaper.

So to all the readers out there -- yes, both of you -- please don't buy any Microsoft products. If you need a PC, get Ubuntu instead. After all, Microsoft will get your money anyway.

The Chicago Tribune reports on activities of DuPage County Sheriff John Zaruba that would be considered endemic of rampant corruption if Cook County Democrats did them:

• The Zaruba campaign has regularly sent letters to employees seeking donations—helping him raise a much larger portion of his campaign cash from deputies than other current sheriffs. Scores of his employees also have done campaign work.
• Political supporters were more likely to receive promotions—at times over peers who scored higher on tests and job reviews. He promoted one supporter over more than 20 higher-ranking deputies.
• Political supporters also have been more likely to receive lighter discipline in recent years than nonsupporters. One federal suit alleging favoritism led to a $65,000 settlement, while other suits are pending.

Sadly, there will probably be no consequences for Mr. Zaruba, since the first law of DuPage government is that there are never any consequences for anything.

An actual screen shot from my email this morning (with a me-specific link blocked out):

My "nohtml" address filters out HTML formatting and only leaves the text part of the message. It's possible that Roskam's people only filled in the HTML part of the message and left the text one empty. Or they might have sent a blank message by accident. It happens. Can't really blame them for that.

But symbolically, this is too perfect to pass up. There's only one job that Mr. Roskam really cares about: his own. In order to keep his job, he serves the big-money interests that bankroll his campaign. These interests have no desire to see jobs created; they like a high level of unemployment, because it keeps working people too hungry and desperate to effectively fight for their rights.

No doubt if the text of this message had come through, it would have talked about big, scary debt; how we need to destroy Medicare in order to save it; how we need more tax cuts for the rich and austerity for everybody else. These policies won't do anything to create jobs or reduce the debt, as we should know by now from experience. But they're what will benefit Mr. Roskam's sugar daddies, so he tries to con us into thinking they're for our own good.

Thankfully, I'm being redistricted out of Mr. Roskam's neighborhood, and come November might be represented in Congress by somebody with some basic decency.

Really! I know it's odd that I hadn't said anything before now. But there were these 140,737,488,355,327 votes for me in a file that I was editing in TextPad, and I forgot to save it. Good thing I eventually noticed.

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