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I only became interested in Politics over the last few years and one of my great regrets as an American will be missing out on most of Tim Russert’s interviews. One of the few respectable political correspondents in a world filled with bad ones (Like the utter morons at Fox News). Fair, honest and without agenda. We’ll miss you Tim.

Several months ago:

DNC: Everyone must hold their elections between x and y or they don’t count

Mich/Florida: Fuck you, we’re the balls. The Wolverines and Gators hold elections whenever they want. You’re not the boss of us.

DNC: Fine, but the votes don’t count

Mich/Florida: The Wolverines and Gators don’t give a shit, that’s how we roll. Holla!

DNC:  All the candidates ok with this?

Candidates: Yup

If someone could tell me when this is over so I can turn NPR back on without losing my mind, that would be outstanding.

Much to the dismay of many standards proponents, the OOXML office standard passed the fast track International Standards Organization (ISO) vote last week. For anyone reading this that doesn’t know what this was all about here’s a quick rundown:

Despite the dominant market postion held by Microsoft, some companies had started moving away from using Microsoft Office due to the fact that MS office document formats are proprietary, tying users to MS office. Because of the outcry for open standards, MS decided it would be good to show consumers they are committed to playing nice with everyone else and use an open standard. Of course, there already exists an open document standard, ODF. The problem with using the ODF format for MS is that other products who already use it would suddenly become viable alternatives to the MS office suite. Instead, they proposed their own format, Office Open XML (OOXML).

In true Microsoft fashion and to no surprise of their critics, the OOXML specification was around 10-times larger and infinitely more complicated than the existing ODF format. Despite the problems with this document, Microsoft was able to work “around” ISO rules,  and buy/strongarm enough votes to get the specification to pass. A long list of irregularities in the ISO voting process can be found here.

Here’s what sucks:

1. Knowing a single company has enough power to pull this off. It makes me skeptical of all politcal processes.
2. Once again, a company with questionable (at best) business practices and a dominant market position wins. In an ideal world, objectivity would enter into these decisions somewhere.
3. A single company (with a history of exploiting their dominant market share to make it difficult for competition) will now control an entire ISO standard.
4. This vote showed some serious flaws in the ISO organization that will likely weaken it’s power and encourage countries to adopt their own standards instead of relying on a newly corrupt international entity.
5. As the world seemed like it was getting smaller and working better together than ever before, we revert to allowing a single corporation to decide what is good for us.

Perhaps this is a weakness of capitalism or a call for reexamination of business (and ISO) standards. Either way, it’s discouraging to see an entity with only it’s best interests in mind pull off something of this scale.

It’s getting to the point where I’m thinking of voting Nader should Clinton stage a comeback and get the Democratic nomination. I read this at Daily Kos. Again, she overstates her depth of foreign policy experience. Sinbad called her on it. Yes, Sinbad. Yes, the comedian. If Sinbad is a more trustworthy source than Hillary, I’m not sure I want her running the counrty.

A snippet of a speech by Obama detailing some reasons to vote for him over Hillary/Satan.