At long last

Barack Obama will be the 44th President of the United States! Well I guess we don’t have to move to Canada now.

The GOP ticket’s appalling contempt for knowledge and learning.

Great article by Christopher Hichens on Sarah Palin’s War on Science

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus.

Ron Howard’s Call to Action

See more Ron Howard videos at Funny or Die

With special appearance of Andy Griffith and Henry Winkler

Colin Powell – Endorses Barack Obama

I have always been an independent voter and it makes me wonder who exactly is the Republican party trying to represent. Clearly Colin Powell wants none of this bullocks and has endorsed Barack Obama.

Sean

Matt Damon: Palin rise is like a "really bad Disney movie"

“I need to know if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago. That’s important.. I want to know that, I really do. Because she’s going to have the nuclear codes. I want to know if she thinks dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago. Or if she banned books or tried to ban books. I mean, we can’t have that.”

Sean

Jon Stewart Welcomes RNC to Minneapolis

Jon Stewart and the Daily show have a billboard welcoming Republicans to their convention. Hilarious:

Customer satisfaction – Oh what lack of surprises we see here…

Top 5 Car Brands In Customer Satisfaction (starting with the best):

Lexus
BMW
Honda
Toyota
Cadillac

Bottom 5 Car Brands In Customer Satisfaction (starting with the worst):

Jeep
Dodge
Chevy
Kia
Ford

[Source]

NB: We are a Toyota family. I have never bought a new GM/Ford/Chrysler car. The last big three car I have ever owned was a Ford Mustang in High School.

Kansas Democratic Grass Roots – Education/Net-savvy

Sean Tevis, an information architect in Kansas, who is running for state representative with the help of an xkcd lookalike cartoon and grassroots Net-based fundraising. Tevis had garnered more than 6,000 contributions, most of them small, from around the country, far out-fundraising his opponent. Major news outlets have picked up the story as a harbinger of 21st-century Net-based political campaigning.

He has a pro-science attitude to reforming education and the mess the Kansas School Board has left standards in. A reader to the blog comments:

Andrea on Thu, Jul 17, 08 at 08:13 AM says:
I’m a science teacher, and I would love to see more reality-based, pro-science people in the government offices! (I also have a soft spot in my heart for geeks.)

As others have noted, Kansas has a terrible reputation for being a backward state with creationist/I.D. nuts yanking the school board around. (Not to mention former state senator/antisuffragist Kay O’Connor.)

The goals of the NCLB are generally good—improved education levels, accountability, but the means are horrendous. The real purposes of education get reduced or dropped when districts struggle to improve the almighty test scores by drilling students in test-taking rather than educating them. We need a citizenry that is educated and knows how to engage in critical thinking!

andrea

Sean is also a Shawnee Mission West High School alum, like myself. I didn’t know him in school as I graduated in 86 and I believe he graduated in 87 – same year as my good friend Mike Ramsey. Watch the video of him and Paul Rudd (another West alum) in the link below:

Video of Sean and Paul at SM West in 87

Encouraging!

Sean

Why oh why?

I read a lot of blogs thanks to Google Reader’s great user interface. But the one thing that gets me are bloggers who only write happy happy joy joy stuff. They never write about the downs of life or things that get a rise out of them. To me it seems like they are not being perfectly honest. Or maybe they are just putting on a show as if blog readers need to be impressed by how wonderful their life must be. Ah, there, I feel much better now.

Sean

Something I will track closely

A Kansas man has launched what he hopes will be a class action lawsuit against Time Warner cable for its tying of rental of a cable box even though you may not have a need for one. Tivo users like myself can appreciate this issue.

[Source]