Obama Triumphant in Money Primary, Starts Picking Cabinet?
Obama out with huge numbers: $25 million. Almost all for the primary! Not for the general, which, as you know, is the crucial, all-important, political-geek distinction.
Hillary reported $26 million the other day, not to mention a cool $10 million more that she can roll over from her Senate campaign, but she didn't detail how much was for the primary and how much for the general. Plus there's the cash-on-hand issue: Supposedly she's been spending it hand over fist, McCain-style. We need more data from the Clinton camp. The public has a right to know.
Message: Obama wins. A clear, smashing victory over the Establishment candidate.
He should begin picking his Cabinet now. (Mental note: Offer Veep spot to HRC?) [Squeaky inner voice: Is it possible that we're jumping the gun?? Banish that thought!]
Now then: I've been crunching the numbers from the exit polls in the Republican portion of the money primary. Remember: Exit polls are not always correct. Sometimes people are not straightforward when interviewed by exit pollers. They say they gave one amount, but actually gave less, or to a different candidate, or were actually not invited but merely crashed the party for free booze. So take all this as what President John Kerry would call "preliminary exit poll data."
As expected, Romney did very very well with the Mormons, the Far Right, the Even Farther Right, the Wafflers, the Flip-Floppers and persons with weirdly prominent foreheads. Giuliani cleaned up among urban Northeasterners, Alpha Divorcees, and autocrats. McCain did well among World War II veterans and members of McCain's Senate staff.
The great thing about political coverage these days is that you can get all the way through a long story about the candidates without ever reading a word about the actual issues, positions, anything that might be termed ideologically substantive. I won't search for a link to use as an example, as Google might turn up one of my own articles.
The Post has a good story today about Romney's political base among Mormons. FYI, I just flew in from Utah, where the other day the Mormons got together for their biannual conference. A major theme, according to a story in the Deseret News, was that Mormons are Christians and shouldn't be viewed askance just because they believe that the Book of Mormon is a true account of Jesus among ancient Americans, etc.:
'He then offered followers his testimony of faith, defending the church's central text, the Book of Mormon, as a valid account of Christ's dealings with ancient Americans. Mormons believe church founder Joseph Smith translated the text from a set of gold plates delivered to him by an angel.
' "This is all recorded in detail in the Book of Mormon," Pres. Hinckley said. "I would think that every Christian would welcome this second witness of the reality of Jesus Christ. Strangely, they do not."
' Some mainline religious faiths discount Mormonism as not being a Christian faith, in part because of its reliance on Smith's text. Doctrinally Mormons also differ from other faiths, believing in a preordained existence and that man can progress to a God-like state in heaven.
'The debate is a sore spot for the church which in 1995 even altered its logo to place more emphasis on the inclusion of the words "Jesus Christ" in its name.'
Click here to find the church's official account of its history.
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At Firedoglake, Christy Hardin Smith has an item on Fred Thompson that includes a link to a very disturbing story I wrote for Style a decade ago. Very disturbing because I can't remember writing it, and can't remember the "John Huang" scandal.
Oh, wait. Lincoln Bedroom. Whorish White House fundraising. Got it.
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Von Drehle on Giuliani: "...an operatic personality and a tragicomic domestic life worthy of Boston Legal's Denny Crane."
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Sports dept.: Excellent column by Tim Cowlishaw on the Gators who stayed in college.
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TECH cocktail Takes On Washington
A few hours ago, TECH Cocktail completed its first event in DC at the popular MCCXXIII bar (1223 Club DC, for the non Roman-numeral types). The event was packed with hundreds of guests mingling as the place rocked to music, wine, product demos and mingling. Over 225+ technology enthusiasts, VCs, bloggers and entrepreneurs came and celebrated the ... (Read on Source)
Proud American: James Will Suit Up for US Team - Washington Post
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White Sox get best of Blue Jays - MLB.com
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Government-industry security group expands
(InfoWorld) - The Transglobal Secure Collaboration Program (TSCP), an IT security standards consortium that includes heavyweights such as the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and many of the largest government contractors in the world, is looking to broaden its ranks.
The TSCP -- founded in 2002 with the goal of bringing together government entities and members of the aerospace and defense industries to establish guidelines for secure collaboration -- said on Aug. 14 that is now looking to bring in systems integrators and software developers.
Along with the DoD, the TSCP counts the U.S. General Services Administration, the U.K. Ministry of Defense, and the Netherlands Ministry of Defense among its existing government participants. Vendors involved in the effort include BAE Systems, Boeing, EADS/Airbus, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Rolls-Royce.
The TSCP's charter calls for its members to establish specifications for secure online collaboration, identity federation, and digital rights management technologies to build common ground across those areas as they work together on sensitive projects.
TSCP leaders maintain that by getting all the parties involved to the same table to establish security standards for issues such as e-mail encryption, the governments and contractors will save vast amounts of time and money that may have otherwise been spent working on proprietary systems.
"Involvement in the group is sort of like binding arbitration, in the sense that the members have promised to contribute to these specifications and establish central guidelines to adhere to," said Jeff Nigriny, outreach director for TSCP and chief operating officer of CertiPath, which provides PKI management technology to the group.
"The only way to foster interoperability among these large players is to get them to agree on standards," he said. "We have some real technological fights, and some companies involved have been forced to throw things out that they've used in the past, but there's value in bringing this group together to address secure communications and collaboration."
In 2007, TSCP has focused primarily on building guidelines for secure e-mail and federated document sharing. Creating the standards will help the participants address both security and compliance issues, said Nigriny, in particular as the involved parties continue to embrace greater levels of outsourcing and shared infrastructure.
Once the policies have been approved, they will also be shared with the public.
At present, the group is in the process of implementing its secure e-mail guidelines, which are aimed at helping the various parties involved agree on common policies for handling messaging encryption.
Digital certificates and PKI systems have long suffered from a lack of central repositories, making it hard for workers to communicate across multiple organizations, Nigriny said.
By eliminating the need to move information over individual classified networks operated by the participants through use of a Web-based specification that handles behind-the-scenes processing of different PKI and LDAP systems, he said, the groups have been able to streamline communications considerably.
The TSCP secure e-mail guideline is expected to be adopted by all consortium members by the fourth quarter of 2007, after more than 18 months of joint work on the standard.
"We've definitely seen that it takes a while to get all the involved companies to put something like this into production; we've essentially been forced to sit on it for almost a year as companies try to implement it, but this is real progress," Nigriny said.
"The name of the game is interoperability, and all the members view this as a sound way to deal with supply chain security," he said. "Today the only way to address this is to have a prime contractor centralize data or share it via traditional e-mail and buy insurance policies against leaks, which doesn't do anything to protect the data itself."
The TSCP will continue to work on its federated document and ID management projects, with releases for both efforts planned for 2008, he said.
Labeling the consortium as an effective manner for validating security strategies and technology investments, officials with Chicago-based Boeing said they are already working to adopt the group's guidelines and plan to continue doing so.
"Being able to work with the subject matter experts from within each company directly is of tremendous value, and the pilots and interoperability testing also helps validate security approaches in a cooperative lab environment, which helps reduce risk," said Jim Cisneros, deputy chief information officer in the Future Combat Systems unit at Boeing.
"It's the right thing to do, and doing it in this type of forum allows us to understand where information exchange problems occur in common and work together to introduce adjustments that will work across our multiple programs and minimize the need for program-unique solutions," he said.
Developing secure collaboration and communications systems in-house has proven costly in the past, the executive admitted.
In addressing the issue of whether or not adoption of centralized standards among the involved parties might make it easier for attackers to infiltrate the entire group of participants when successful, Cisneros said there is always a risk of such events, but he doesn't feel that the collaboration will have that effect.
"There will always be challenges no matter what we do because the technology constantly changes, but once again, working in this cooperative manner should provide an ongoing forum for us to work with to constantly upgrade our defenses to minimize that from occurring," he said.
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New Technique Improves Purity Of Medicines
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Call of Duty (CoD) 4 Glitches: Pipeline Tricks & Tutorials
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just did the iPhone SDK hello world app # (Read on Source)
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Competitive Webmaster Tools Presentation Tomorrow
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PAULA Abdul wore out her welcome for good with the "Today" show. Abdul was supposed to perform her single "Dance Like There's No Tomorrow" on the morning show's concert series in April. She canceled that gig because of "production commitments," but...
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Liberation Day for Lions Fans - New York Times
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© 2003-2008 oDesk Corporation. Use of this Web site constitutes acceptance of the oDesk Marketplace User Agreement and incorporated Policies. (Read on Source)
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name: MAGPIE