Hillary Lipko: Frustrated Bunny

I have been trying to put this into words for so long, I think I might want to kiss this guy for formulating a statement I couldn’t. In his post about Congress’ healthcare “time-out,” Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com said:

“I don’t think the media has a liberal bias or a conservative bias so much as it has a bias toward overreacting to short-term trends and a tendency toward groupthink.”

That’s pretty much the long and short of it. Except for maybe Fox News. They’re just shameless.

So I’m sitting here watching the returns from the Puerto Rico Democratic primary, just like I was watching the DNC rules committee yesterday decide what to do about Michigan and Florida. Now, I realize that if you go by the rules and the numbers, that it is more or less impossible for Hillary Clinton to get the nomination. However, her supporters it seems will stop at nothing, including a floor fight at the convention, to get it for her, and she all but outright encourages their despicable and divisive behavior. Just watch the DNC rules committee proceedings from yesterday; it’s disgusting. But that’s not what this entry is about, I just find it necessary to indict them for their behavior before I get to the point.

The point? Let’s just play with the unlikely hypothetical that Hillary Clinton gets the Democratic nomination and it doesn’t destroy the party such that McCain wins. Right now, either Democratic candidate leads McCain in the polls, so maybe it’s not a total long shot there. So let’s just say for the moment that Hillary Clinton becomes president. That would make the presidents in my lifetime go as follows:

Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush, Clinton
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In the past couple of weeks, ZDNet has picked up two related stories (Google CEO: Techies must educate governments, 10/17/06; Chris Patten: Politicians have no grasp of technology, 10/27/06) regarding government leaders’ lack of education regarding modern science and technology. Upon reading both of them, I joked that someone needs to call Ric Romero and let him know about this “breaking news.” I was shocked — shocked, I say — to discover that the people making important decisions regarding our technological future often have no idea as to what they’re even voting on.

As a courtesy to those who haven’t quite developed a text sarcasm detector, I’ll state outright that none none of this comes as any surprise to me. For the past year, I’ve been working in one capacity or another as a technology policy analyst, and I’ve worked rather closely with several lawmakers charged with the responsibility of making primary policy decisions regarding science and technology. To the credit of some, especially regarding their ages, there are legislators who will not only admit to not knowing much about the issues upon which they are making decisions but are willing to learn about them. (more…)