Glowing with pride

 
Howard Dean leader in MoveOn.org online Democratic primary with 43.87 percent; no candidate wins majority

More voters participated in MoveOn.org online primary than in 2000 New Hampshire, Iowa, and S. Carolina Democratic primaries COMBINED!

The results are in: 317,639 people voted in this week's online mock primary at MoveOn.org. Quite a turnout, even though those people represent a relatively small percentage of eligible U.S. voters who use the Internet.

Howard Dean outdistanced the rest of the pack with 139,360 votes, or 43.87 percent, nearly double runner-up Dennis Kucinich's 23.93% (76,000 votes). John Kerry came in third with 15.73 percent (49,973 votes). John Edwards was fourth, with 3.19 percent (10,146 votes); Richard Gephardt fifth with 2.44 percent (7,755 votes); Bob Graham sixth with 2.24 percent (7,113 votes). Carol Moseley Braun came in seventh, with 2.21 percent (7,021 votes); Joe Lieberman was eighth with 1.92 percent (6,095 votes), and Al Sharpton placed ninth with 0.53 percent (1,677 votes).

Meanwhile, a day after the U.S. Supreme Court's none-of-your-beeswax ruling on consensual sex between adults in private, a New Jersey Superior Court judge heard oral arguments today in a suit brought by seven same-sex couples who claim the Constitution's guarantees of equality and privacy also give them equal marriage rights. The couples have been together from 10 years to 30 years, and were all denied licenses when they attempted to wed. Judge Linda Feinberg said she would rule on the case in two months, at the earliest.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who vehemently dissented in yesterday's 6-3 ruling, said the high court's decision "leaves on shaky grounds state laws limiting marriage to opposite sex couples." He didn't think that was good news, but a lot of other people do.

 
Overtime threatened AGAIN!!

You can't turn your back on those folks in Washington for a minute without them trying to sneak something past. It's only been a few weeks since the Republicans in Congress withdrew their bill to allow employers to substitute compensatory time off for overtime pay, because they realized they didn't have enough votes.

But hey, who needs votes when you can accomplish the same thing, and much more quietly, with changes to federal regulations? The Department of Labor is about to implement regulatory changes that would cause 8 million workers to lose the right to overtime pay. This is not just some blogger telling you this (though this particular blogger maintains the same exacting journalistic standards she always has no matter whom she's writing for); here it is on CNN. So now we have to write our elected representatives again. It's been almost a week since I wrote to mine; I'm sure they're eager to hear from me again. If the CNN piece isn't enough, here are the current Google News search results on the word "overtime" (Note: the results will be different for those who are reading this more than a day or so after the original publication date.) I'm off to harangue some politicians. If you want to do the same, the Working Families E-activist Network makes it easy to do so right here.

THIS JUST IN: U.S. Supreme Court celebrates Pride Month by legalizing sex between consenting adults in private, nationwide.

 
Shipping out

Bon voyage to the Seven Seas Navigator as she departs for a 7-day cruise to Bermuda and back. And bon voyage also to the Queen Elizabeth II (the one with the red-and-black smokestack), which was scheduled to depart on a transatlantic voyage today at 4:45 p.m., but hadn't left yet as of 6 p.m. And a safe and prosperous journey as well to this tanker, bound who-knows-where.

 
Campaign 2004: First Democratic primary held online as Republicans raise another $4 million overnight

I voted again today, not at the polls this time but online at MoveOn.org's Online Democratic Presidential Primary. MoveOn is a political action committee with hundreds of thousands of members, many of whom joined during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq. If you're already registered at MoveOn, you have until midnight Wednesday (U.S. Eastern Daylight Time) to vote via the ballot you should have received by e-mail. If you're not registered at MoveOn, don't worry: there's lots more football left to be played before this game ends sometime in the hours, days, weeks, or months after the polls close in November, 2004.

Those who want George W. Bush to remain in the White House until 2008 have been busy as well; yesterday they raised $4 million at a Manhattan fundraiser; no word on the cost to the city, state, and federal governments, or private enterprise, of the traffic disruption and extra security for the occasion. Here's an excerpt from the Associated Press coverage of the event, used here under the principle of fair use:

Sept. 11 looms large in NYC fund-raiser, where Bush banks $4 million

Bush was careful not to directly mention the Sept. 11 attacks or the demolished World Trade Center in his campaign speech here. Aides have said they won't use the attacks as campaign fodder. But the fight against terrorism that was prompted by Sept. 11 loomed large in his speech about 80 blocks from Ground Zero.

Mr. Lindlaw, his editors, their editors and their editors and their editors' editors all seem to believe what they hear from these unnamed "aides" over what they hear for themselves. The "aides" say Mr. Bush "won't use the attacks as campaign fodder." But the AP (and the rest of the press corps) quotes him saying, "terrorists declared war on the United States of America...." Do Mr. Lindlaw or his editors imagine Mr. Bush was talking about a different occasion when "terrorists declared war on the U.S."? Do they expect US to imagine it?

Here's how the story went by the time it got to India, this from The Hindu Online Edition:

Bush camp sets aims high

WASHINGTON JUNE 24. The U.S. President, George W. Bush, took his anti-terrorism message to New York but was careful not to mention the attacks of September 11, 2001 in his fundraising that brought his campaign an additional $4 millions.>>

The story did not mention Bush's mentions, or as the "aides" and press corps say, non-mentions, of the 9/11 attacks.

Even the Washington Post is following the "aides" spin on the story:

Some of the president's stock applause lines had more resonance than usual in a city where residents are surrounded by reminders of Sept. 11, 2001. "Terrorists declared war on the United States of America -- and war is what they got," he said.

"Policemen and firemen and people who wear our nation's uniform,are reminding us what it means to sacrifice for something greater than yourself," Bush said. "Once again the children of America believe in heroes because they see them every day."

At least the Post allowed for the possibility that the "aides," if not their boss, will face criticism for his use of that event and its victims for his own political purposes.

Meanwhile, the group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting is calling attention to underplayed reports of the White House's attempt to link its policy to the Sept. 11 attacks, a story those "aides" aren't talking about.

 
happy.birthday.dns@20

Happy Birthday today to the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS), introduced on this day back in 1983, right around the time I took out a loan to buy a brand-new Kaypro II luggable and a state-of-the-art 300-baud modem and a dot-matrix printer. The Kaypro was my second computer, the first being a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A that I wish I still had. The TI had a speech synthesizer, and if you click on those words, you can hear one talk. Or, for a real nostalgia indulgence, you can download a TI-99/4A simulator for Windows. Haven't tried it myself, though. You can also find a Kaypro emulator, but it doesn't talk. My old Kaypro gave me the best error message I ever got from a computer: "one of us has made a mistake."

Anyway, way back then, Internet addresses were all numbers, and there was no automatic way of finding an address. You had to look it up, manually. Then on June 23, 1983, Internet pioneers Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris tested a new system that not only allowed addresses to be found without human intervention, it allowed those addresses to be represented by names, organized by domain such as .com, .net, .org, etc. If you think dot-com advertising was annoying during the late '90s boom years, just imagine how much worse it would have been if it were all just a bunch of numbers competing for your attention.

Many years later, there was an organization known as the Domain Name Support Organization, and it once had a general assembly of Internet developers and users that once got to vote on such questions as whether there should be new domains like .biz and .info. I was once one of those people.

Meanwhile, the Internet continues its evolution. A few days ago, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced the deployment of internationalized domain names.

Brought to you by...

Today I'd like to direct your attention to the growing list of links along the left-hand side of this page, as The Dagley Dagley Daily welcomes more than two dozen new sponsors. Exploring those links will take you on a trip around the world, as we have sponsors from Germany, Korea, Russia, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom as well as the United States. I admit I haven't tried all these products yet myself, but I did personally select each advertiser listed, and I'll be checking each one out further in weeks to come. The "random blog" is randomly chosen from the roster at Blogsnobs.com. The BlogAdNet boxed text ads are also randomly chosen, although they haven't changed much as the BlogAdNet program is still in beta-testing.