Today's political schedule 

You can do a pretty good job of following the politics leading up to Tuesday's New Hampshire primary from television in rain-soaked California.

CNN has an excellent program running all afternoon called The Ballot Bowl. The format is really simple. They have cameras following the candidates and they're broadcasting their town hall stump speeches. They're authentic, based on my experience in the campaign for the 2004 New Hampshire primary.

The NY Times has an excellent resource (no RSS feed apparently) that lists the candidates' schedules. It's also possible to import the schedule into Google Calendar as an overlay.

ABCNews is hosting two 90-minute debates, one for each party, tonight starting at 4PM Pacific. Tomorrow Fox News is hosting a controversial Republican debate, which the Republican Party has withdrawn from because they won't let Ron Paul participate. He's polling third among the Republican candidates in New Hampshire. For once the Republicans got it right.

Update: Apparently ABCNews isn't broadcasting the debate live to the west coast, delaying it three hours to 7PM. Grrrr.

In the very limited time betw Iowa and New Hampshire there's a lot of action and drama. Romney all of a sudden is shamlessly the candidate for change. There was an Ahmadinejad moment when I thought for sure he was doing parody, but he was serious. He's changed his attire, but his pitch is still the sleazy VP-Sales who got promoted to CEO. Change change change, I can change too, just watch. Please die now. I don't think anyone stands for Romney.

Giuliani and Thompson are still nowhere to be seen.

Edwards is doing a good job of keeping the game on.

McCain is earnest and honest, but he's old and small and tired.

Obama has the aura of a front-runner and Hillary seems to believe that if only Iraq were still the big issue she would be where Obama is. Even so, according to recent polls she's likely to win New Hampshire.

A lot of my friends on Twitter dismiss Huckabee, and to be clear, I could not vote for a Republican this year, no matter who their candidate is, but he is a fantastic American personality. Elections are all about feelings, not policies or positions or even records as the pundits insist. Who you vote for is a function of how you feel about the country and the world in relation to yourself. The candidate who comes closest to validating your feelings is the person you vote for. I think we'll tire of Obama quickly, and we're already tired of HIllary. I think the rational choice for each party, although many disagree, is Edwards and Huckabee because each of them tap into the well of frustration Americans feel about everything.

But my guess, which will probably certainly turn out wrong, is that the Dems will nominate Obama and the Reps will nominate Huckabee, and Huck will win.

PS: After writing this, I wonder if George Lakoff would agree. I think I've just used a very Lakoffish process, unwittingly.

PPS: I went to UW-Madison. Bucky Badger is the school mascot. Our favorite cheer and T-shirt said Fuck em Bucky! It occurred to me the same slogan would work for Huckabee.

How to open a web page in the user's default browser 

On the Mac, in a Frontier or OPML Editor script.

sys.unixShellCommand("open http://scripting.com/")

I want to be able to find this tidbit later in Google. Please ignore.