Wampum

Senators Obama and Biden will be in Dublin tomorrow, a town we've spent the past six weeks, MB doing work for a DCCC targeted Congessional in a district that, due to creative gerrymandering, includes neither the predominantly minority districts of urban Columbus, nor the predominantly better-off suburb of Dublin. One of our favorite songs is Alanis Morrissette's "Isn't it ironic?", and when we learned that there is a powow, here of all places, this weekend, starting the day after we leave Dublin and Columbus, that's what we said to each other. Yesterday's routing announcement for the nominees was just ... more ironic.

We could still lose this thing. Dave Axelrod's sororcidal choice to exploit misogyny and fratricidal choice to exploit race, and Dave Plouffe's choice to exploit the caucuses in Iowa, Nevada, and Texas, not the candidates qualifications and their policy records and promises, have won the nomination and could still keep the Executive Branch in the hands of the Republican Party leadership.

Ohio can be won, it can also be lost. It's competitive, like Pennsylvania, between urban and rural poles, but not by message and candidates alone. It would be prudent, with 66 days left, to set up alternative field campaign plans for the Congressional districts that are competitive, and there are several, that the DNC must win to get, as we say in Maine, "balance of state".

While MB worked on getting the trailer packed I took the kids to Wendy's for a celebratory lunch, as Dublin is where Wendy's started, and where the company's HQ remains to this day.

We also returned our books to the Dublin Public Library, which interestingly enough (well, positively infuriatingly) has a service model for data network access that (a) authentication with a library card is required, presumably because a user might take out some network access and not return it, and the homeless and travelers don't need network access, and (b) network access means web -- not telnet/rlogin/ssh, not pop/imap, not ftp, not ... Recall, this is paid for in part, this discriminatory set of policies, economically discriminatory, and service discriminatory, by E-Rate money, by Federal money. If you want to know what "tiered network service" will look like if the residential loop broadband operators control Congress, just visit a public library. The film is already playing.

As a technical exercise, a "bakeoff for teh tech political bloggers", try taking two laptops, setting them next to each other, pick up a dhcp provisioned addresses for each via the public library wifi, and transfer data from one to the other. Do not use a third node, in Maine or anywhere "outside" the local cloud, http, a dongle, or a wire the length and breadth of a shoestring.

Did I mention that bandwidth is capped at about 60kB/s, inside a cloud that should support 100Mb/s?

As a policy exercise, justify the results.

In "Clues for Call-Time" for the campaign MB helped, so far as three not very skilled guys suffering from advanced misogyny and booze can be helped, I wrote (for the candidate)

...
We do know that Dublin dumped money into fiber and that data-driven tech is more present in Dublin than anywhere else in the OH-15/OH-12 /OH-07. In a nutshell, Dublin will be richer than its surroundings forever because of some exotic glass and a backhoe. Public intervention does work, we just need to pick what we want. Dublin wanted Dublin, the United States may want to fiber-up Appalachia, and the Navajo Nation.
...

Now I'd add, "Having made the strategic investment in bandwidth, municipally provisioned dark fiber, the wealthy in Dublin have chosen the service model of the monopoly wireline and monopoly spectrum access models. Communication is limited to business and entertainment, to transactions involving cash extraction. We face that danger in every municipal, in every regional and state, and in every national network build-out -- theft of the public resource. The first Internet, which we paid for, was captured by the telephone and cable companies, and they haven't done much more than fill it with Viagra spam and milk it to death. We have a second chance, and Dublin shows us a dead end."