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 - 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.

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.

Well I finally read the Informationalized Conversation post that I'd kept unread in my Google Reader and I'm glad I did. It cites Herbert H. Cook's book, Using Language to raise the idea of how we’ve internalized what Weinberger calls the information-based paradigm. According to Weinberger, this paradigm holds that "communication consists of the transfer of messages from one head to another." He summarized Cook's claim to contast with the informationalized paradigm:

Over the last few days, I've been thinking obsessing about how American neoconservatism has reveled in magical realist thought as a way of disempowering the American electorate.

The project of magical realism as a narrative trope has been employed by writers in post-Colonial societies to describe and highlight the contradictions in a transitional society. Quoting Bainard Cowan's Introduction to an issue of Margin:

So all this talk about bailouts is frustrating me. Yes, the pissing an moaning about bailing out the US automakers is ridiculous in light of the apparently oversight-free give-away to Wall Street. But that's just the beginning of the debate we should be having.

Today reminds me of the day after the fall of the Berlin wall. One day there was one reality, the next day that previous reality was totally ... irrelevant.