I have been ranting about the editorial process to my colleagues at Groundwire lately. My claim can be summed up as crowdsourcing is a form of polling. In and of itself it does not create meaning or a system of valuing judgment. Assigning value to judgment and policing that value is what the editorial process is all about. It is more than aggregation or even curation. It is concerned with creating a narrative of distinction (to rip off Pierre Bourdieu).

Ok - So this afternoon fueled by a tasty lunch of shrimp and grits and Hoppin' John, mimosas and some good company, I proposed a talk for the next Ignite Seattle in which I promised to Re-factor American Equal Protection Law. Holy hubris, Batman!

As part of the proposal I had to list my blog or website - ouch! I mean I am so busy scoping and implementing Plone websites for work at Groundwire that this sad little website gets short shrift. All the more so since my attention-span is now reduced to 140 characters thanks to twitter. (Genius idea, twitter-lite or twee in which we are all constrained to 70 characters, oh, you think it's not coming, do you use a twin blade or triple blade razor, mes amis?)

So a lot of my progressive friends have been all het up about corporate personhood for quite some time. And I sort of got interested because I don't see how corporate personhood is an unqualified evil bad thing. So I started to read Thom Hartmann's book Unequal Protection and got about half a page in before I began to get really irritated.

So this post begins, as most of my admittedly infrequent posts do, with my having read two things in serendipetous succession (I give thanks for Google Reader).

1. A boing boing post on Thanksgiving Masking
2. A Guardian article on the Brits' beffuddlement on the whole gestalt of American Thanksgiving

So - I meant to post this two weeks ago, but work's been busy, and I've been pretty slammed. But here's how I'm voting in the Primary and why I'm voting that way.

King County Executive - Dow Constantine

I'm a former resident of the 36th Legislative District where Larry Phillips is the favorite sone. I've moved out to the 34th Legislative District where Dow is the favorite son. For a long time I couldn't see any real difference between the two. Both are progressive democrats, both are committed to doing the business of the County both responsibly and intelligently. Dow moved up in my estimation for his willingness to call out Hutchinson on her stealth non-partisan Republican campaign.

Margaret Carlson had an interesting aside on the fate of Mark Sanford on Countdown tonight. She said that Gov Sanford squeaked by with a censure from the SC GOP thanks to Michael Jackson and Sarah Palin.

Close but no cigar. My argument is that Palin's hasty press conference to announce her resignation was prompted by her pathological narcissistic jealously of the Sanford press coverage.

There you go Sarah, Margaret Carlson thinks that you have now eclipsed Sanford's coverage. Your politico-celebrity comeback is in full effect.

So I have a Sarah Palin theory that I haven't heard anywhere else. It's kind of a leap but I think that the reason behind the resignation and strange press conference was jealousy for Mark Sanford's press coverage. I'm not joking. I think Palin looked at Mark Sanford's press conferences over the last week and saw something the rest of us did not.

The view from under my glass topped desk

Sovereign immunity has been a critical and criticized concept in common law. It has been a cornerstone of institutional and corporate (in a rather pure if problematic sense) autonomy. This is an imporant concept in a nation state. The Stencil/Feres doctrine holds that the sovereign can only be sued with permission of the sovereign and prevents people from suing the government in case of war casualties and death.

OK - Pay attention, because we don't have all the time in the world. If the American economy and, by extension, the global economy, requires a serious economic stimulus to keep from running off the rails into a deflationary abyss, why is the GOP continuing to talk about pork, spending and tax cuts? It's because they are politically compelled to protect the legacy of Ronald Reagan. Because, and this is serious as a heart attack, that's all they got left.