RayBenjamin.Com

It’s one thing to play to the crowd and get them fired up. One of Sarah Palin’s strengths is her ability to get McCain supporters fired up and enthusiastic. But what is she getting them enthusiastic about? It’s not about how McCain is going to be a great leader. It’s not about his secret plan to capture Bin Ladin. It’s not even about his vision of buying up all the failed mortgages with money that doesn’t exist while cutting taxes for his rich buddies. She’s on the attack. She takes tiny kernels of truth, wraps an inflammable comment around it and tosses it into the bonfire.

Now, a certain amount of rabble rousing happens in every campaign. But a line is crossed when people in the crowd start shouting out “Kill Obama” and shout racial epithets at a black cameraman, and the politician standing there on stage says nothing.

What does it say about Sarah Palin?

I don’t know if Sarah Palin is a bigot, and I won’t accuse her of being one on the basis of not shutting down that kind of stuff at her rally. What I think her behavior demonstrates is a lot more important than her racial attitudes. It shows that her instincts for political leadership are poor. If she can’t think on her feet, recognizing that the ugly remarks being made are going to hurt her rather than help her, than she isn’t ready to lead this country.

We’ve had enough clumsy leadership for a dozen administrations. We can’t survive any more. Even if I believed that John McCain were the better man for the job of President, I couldn’t vote for him, because he was foolish enough to accept Sarah Palin as a running mate. To me, that indicates that he doesn’t have enough control over his own party to show he can lead this nation, or that his judgment is badly flawed when it comes to political associations. I would have thought after the mess with Keating twenty years ago, that McCain would be a lot more careful about picking his political associates.

On the other hand, I continue to be impressed with Obama’s even-handedness and his coolness, even under the pressure of this campaign. In the town-hall meeting style debate, Obama appeared to be at ease, while McCain wandered around aimlessly, his face set in a kind of rigid smile that I suspect was intended to hide a man who is seething with anger.

We need a leader who can think on his feet, one who can reassure a frightened nation that there is someone who understands what it’s like to be in the middle-class, working for a living. We need someone who people respond to, that they trust. I think Barak Obama is that man. 

McCain’s favorite attack on Obama these days is to claim we don’t know the guy, even though Obama and his wife Michelle have been scrutinized more carefully over the last 20 months than any presidential candidate in history, except possibly Hillary Clinton. The punch line is one already used in the primary, that Obama is chummy with a former domestic terrorist, William Ayers. A man who has since been given the Model Citizen of the Year award by Chicago, and is recognized as a leader in his community.

Ayers sat on the same board with Obama and hosted one of the early meet and greets that helped Obama get started. The stuff Ayers did happened almost 40 years ago. People tend to mellow over time, and it doesn’t sound like the guy has a lot of influence over Obama.

Here’s my question, do you know the real John McCain? Remember Milken, Keating and the S&L disaster? Didn’t that all start in Arizona?

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If John McCain really wanted to talk straight to the American People, it would be easy. Here are some suggested talking points:

• Apologize for blindly following the leadership of the most foolish man who’s held the Presidency in my lifetime, and then claiming to be a maverick.

• Apologize for repeating the lie that Alaska provides 20% of America’s energy needs or even 20% of the oil and gas we use.
• Retract the statements made by your ad, “A Gross Distortion,” which claims that Obama killed the immigration bill, when it was really your abandonment of your own legislation in order to further your political ambitions, that killed the bill.
• Admit that Sarah Palin has accepted earmarks. While she’s used fewer than her predecessor, Alaska still leads the nation in earmark spending per capita.
• Apologize for making up bogus crowd size numbers and then trying to claim they came from the fire marshal or Secret Service. Isn’t this the kind of thing we usually see done in China and in the old USSR?
• How about coming clean about just how ugly the “Disrespectful” ad was. Using out-of-context quotes, it tried to make it your opponent Obama and his running mate, Biden, look as if they were saying nasty things about Palin. In truth, they have made reasonable statements that have stayed respectful when the same can hardly be said of you or your running mate.
• Or maybe you could pledge to stop making up facts and then attributing them to respected new sources.
• Perhaps you could explain that by “taking on the oil companies,” you really meant that Palin married a man who worked in the oil industry. And that when you claim she said “thanks, but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere, what you forgot to say was that she supported it while running for office, and then opposed it when it became an embarassement, but kept the money anyway, so she could use it on other transportation projects.

I’m sure you can think of more.

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Sarah Palin wants us to leave her family out of the presidential campaign. At the same time, she advocates a strict abstinence-only pregnancy prevention program for all our public schools. It begs the question, how well did that work with your own daughter? Because clearly, it didn’t. There can’t be a more appropriate indication of what a foolish idea such a policy is. Obviously, Sarah Palin’s daughter chose to have sex. Perhaps, if she’d been taught about birth control methods other than abstinence, she would not be getting married and becoming a mother at such a young age. She’s fortunate, though. Sarah Palin’s daughter has a powerfully connected mother, and is unlikely to face the crushing poverty that affects most single mothers.

Abstinence only programs DON’T WORK. That’s not the only problem with them. The reason Sarah Palin wants to teach abstinence only, despite the fact that many studies have shown it is one of the worst things you can do, is that she wants to enforce her own religious ideals on the entire country. She is presuming to tell everyone how they should raise their children, even when it is clear that her own ideals don’t work within her own family.

I’m sure that I’ll be accused of being mean and partisan because I’m “picking on her family,” but I’m not, actually. I’m not making any judgments about Ms. Palin’s daughter or husband. I’m talking about a political issue, her stand on that issue, and the fact that she can’t admit that she’s wrong, even in the face of the evidence in her own family.

John McCain is an old man. He’s been fighting cancer off and on for years. He is far more likely to die in office than anyone we’ve had in that office during my lifetime. That means, that if McCain is elected, it’s quite likely we’ll get to have Sarah Palin as our president for at least some part of his term. While John McCain clearly has the experience needed to be our president, you can’t convince me that governing Alaska gives Palin what’s needed to do the job. It is possible that she’d be a fine president, but so far, I don’t see any reason to come to that conclusion. It appears the RNC have used the same criteria to select her that they’ve been using to pick judges: who cares if they can do the job, just make sure they pass the political litmus tests and aren’t well known enough that anyone can dig up stuff to make them look bad.

We can’t afford another four years of this foolishness. Who would have thunk that “Compassionate Conservatism” actually meant: invade Iraq, ignore Bin Ladin, torture prisoners, and illegally spy on your own citizens. If only we’d had that definition before we allowed the Supreme Court to appoint him King — ummm, I mean President. We need to know what we’re actually going to get, this time around, and McCain has guaranteed that by electing him, we’re trusting the Republican Party to have made a wise choice in selecting a Vice President. Do I really need to go over their track record on that one?

I’m very sad that McCain made this selection. I’m sure there are well-qualified women in the Republican party, women who wouldn’t have represented a painfully transparent attempt to appeal to unhappy Clinton supporters. McCain should have picked the best man or woman for the job, and told the pollsters what they could do with their polls. It was his independence that made him attractive in the first place, but ever since he ran out of money, he’s been pandering to the worst of the conservative special interests. Here’s a man, who when presented with the problem of Global Warming, thinks it’s a good idea to drill for more oil.

If John McCain were elected without any special interest money backing him, I think he might make a good, but not great, president. Unfortunately, he’s made lots of deals with special interests in order to get the money he needed in order to continue his campaign. We wouldn’t get a John McCain who was free to do as his conscience dictated, we’d get a John McCain who is owned by the oil companies and the defense contractors.  If he dies in office, we’d wind up with Palin, and we don’t know much at all about her, except she passed the vetting process of the RNC, the kind of process that gave us the kind of people who’ve put us in the mess we’re in.

John McCain could have done better. We, as a country can do better than McCain and Palin.

I write science fiction, and I use Open Office to do my writing, since I don’t have the money to shell out for Microsoft Office and can’t find any compelling reason to do so if I did have the money. Overall, I believe that Open Office is just as good as MS Word. However, as with any piece of software, sometimes it isn’t immediately obvious how to do something.

A lot of terms that are used in science and in science fiction are from Latin, and I got tired of having to check each one and add an exception to my spell checker for it. So, I went looking for a way to teach Latin to Open Office.

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Over the last couple of years, my wife and I haven’t seen many films. There haven’t been that many we wanted to see. I’d about decided that Hollywood couldn’t actually make a decent movie anymore. This summer, we’ve been pleasantly surprised by the movies we’ve gone to. The latest remake of  The Incredible Hulk actually made up - almost- for the true stinker they made a few years ago. Ironman wasn’t incredibly original, but it was fun, a true summer movie experience.

But the movie that really blew us away was the one we saw yesterday afternoon, The Dark Knight. It’s got a real story. It’s got special effects that ya gotta love. But, most of all, it has a great cast: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Arron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhall, Morgan Freeman, and most importantly Heath Ledger.

Ledger  did a fantastic job as the Joker, redefining the role and bringing to that character a spookiness and humanity that no one else ever has. I have tremendous respect for Jack Nicholson, but his Joker was standard Crazy Jack, and while entertaining, was eclipsed by Ledger’s portrayal of the psychotic villain. It is a great tragedy that Ledger died earlier this year of an accidental overdose of prescription medication.

Fortunately, there will be one more chance to see Ledger perform. His last movie, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnasssus was being filmed when Ledger died, but the director, Terry Gilliam, decided to complete the film, using Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell, to shoot Ledger’s final scenes.
Katie Holmes was replaced by Maggie Gyllenhall, an actress that I’ve always admired. She does a great job in her role as the love interest of both Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent.

The rest of the cast was largely the same as in Batman Begins, and all did their jobs wonderfully. I’m looking forward to more Batman movies, though I suspect it will be very hard for any of them to come close to this one.

These days, it seems like we try to patent everything, even stuff that really should not be patentable, like software and genetic sequences. (Let’s face it, genetic sequences are not invented, they are discovered. Don’t even get me started on all the reasons we should not have software patents.) But no one seems to object to the patents that do more harm than perhaps any others, patents on interfaces.

Read on for more …

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I like Barak Obama, and so far, I believe he is the man who might be able to lead us out of the mess that George Bush and a paralyzed Democratic party have put us in. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have some questions I’d like answered. Our mainstream media seem to be concerned only with catching Obama in some terrible gaff or in talking about his star power. Again, I think they are failing the American people who, as voters, depend on the media to deliver accurate reporting on political candidates so all Americans can make informed decisions.

Read on if you’re interested in the questions I’d ask Obama…

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I don’t much like Windows. I don’t hate it with a pathological hatred, like some people, but I do think that monopolies are bad things, in general, and Microsoft’s effective monopoly grip on desktop operating systems has been incredibly hurtful to the computer industry and humanity in general. By suppressing competition, we’ve been robbed of the real benefit of a free market economy, innovation.

Fortunately for Microsoft, but not so fortunately for me, the people who write the games I love to play don’t write them to run on Linux. They write them to run on Windows. So, while I’d love to use Linux as my normal desktop operating system, I’ve been reluctant to make the leap.

An announcement on June 18, 2008, brought the day of my emancipation from Windows a little bit closer.

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I like having fresh baked corn muffins for breakfast. After experimenting for quite a while, I’ve come up with a recipe that makes great tasting muffins that aren’t quite as bad for your waist-line as they taste.

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