Can I pick 'em?

In this post in mid-December of last year, right after Gore announced that he would not run in 2004, I rated the Democratic candidates for President. It's about seven months later, and let's revisit the list.

Dean: Almost no one had heard of him back then. I picked him as the most interesting of the field, and I've turned out to be right. He's now the guy I'm supporting for the Democratic nomination; I've even gone to meetings and donated money, which I've hardly ever done before. His combination of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism resonates wih me and with lots of other people. He's not afraid to take on Bush, uinlike some of the other Dems. Added to that, his campaign has made far and away the best use of the Net for organization of any candidate. Last Wednesday, at the monthly Dean gathering coordinated through dean2004.meetup.com, rank-and-file Dean supporters wrote more than 20,000 personal, handwritten letters on Dean's behalf, and sent them to caucus voters in Iowa. Smart, tough, and right on the issues is a winning formula. And as we've seen, he knows how to raise enough money to be competitive. Dean for president!

Kerry: I could probably support him if Dean loses in the primaries. He's not an exciting candidate on the stump, and he's middle-of-the-road on the issues. He's got bigtime fundraising abilities, which is a big benefit. Still too cautious to win over Bush, I think. Would probably lose in the general.

Edwards: I wasn't impressed in December, and he's done nothing to change my mind. He can raise money from trial lawyers. There's a surprise. If he has the money, he'll stay in the race until South Carolina, I'd guess.

Lieberman: I actually dislike him more now than I did in December. Lieberman, as far as I can tell, is really an old-school country-club moderate Republican. Since the GOP won't have those people anymore, he's stuck with the Dems. He's had fundraising problems, which has surprised the chattering classes, because he has high name recognition. Doesn't surprise me; he's boring, sanctimonious, and too darn nice to face up to Bush and the Rove attack machine. He's running for president, not National Grampa. He cannot win the nomination; he sure as hell could not win the general; he should drop out now and allow real Democrats to fight it out.

Gephardt: Still a loser in the general, in my view. He's an Old Time Democrat who seems lost in the 21st Century. Sucking up to the established Democratic interest groups, like labor, is the past; the future of the Democratic Party will lie in reconnecting the people to the party, and that's more likely to be done at the grassroots levels, like Dean is doing with his Meetup.com network. If he doesn't come in first in Iowa, and only does second or third in NH, he's out.

Graham: This guy doesn't seem to have a strong message on any issue other than national security, which is undeniably important. His accurate accusations that the Bush team screwed up Iraq (Graham's in a position to know, since he's on the Senate Intelligence Committee) have not gained the traction they deserve. He hasn't been able to break through the rest of the pack. He's from Florida, and can raise money from Floridians. I'd be happy to see him as Dean's VP pick. But I can't imagine a scenario in which he wins over Bush.

Kucinich, Sharpton, Moseley Braun: These vanity candidates will stick it out until they're booed off the stage. Too bad. A friend of mine lived under Kucinich as mayor of Cleveland, and said that he was a loser even back then. Sharpton is a lying racist jerk. I've seen Moseley Braun speak; she's nice, and obviously smart, but has nothing special to recommend her. Just being a woman isn't enough qualification to be president.

Wesley Clark: Still flirting with the notion of running. He's encouraging Draft Clark websites. But he hasn't even said that he's a Democrat, for pity's sake. As a former Army and NATO general, he's bulletproof on national security. He's from Arkansas, which is nice because the Dems need a Southern connection, especially if Dean or Kerry is the nominee. If this guy is really running for Vice President, Dean or Kerry would be smart to pick him.

Whew. That's it for this half-year roundup. I'll be back in December to see what happens before the voting starts in January. I'm off to eat hot dogs and watch fireworks. Happy Fourth of July, everyone!

O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference

While I have a good working relationship with O'Reilly, I've covered this topic here before and I figure that, objectively, it'd be wrong for me not to mention it this time. So, I'm pointing out for the record that the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference 2003 has no women speakers.

Before someone responds saying that I'm wrong, what really brought this to my attention is the fact that the conference site does prominently display a woman as one of the featured speakers. But so far as I can tell, while Prof. Gaasterland did speak at a past O'Reilly Bioinformatics conference, based on the Mac OS X conference grid, she is not actually doing a keynote on Meeting the Demands of Genome Annotation with Savvy Distributed Computing. It appears to just be a typo in whatever they're using to generate the conference site.

So nope, no women speakers this year.

Later note: I'm told that Prof. Gaasterland is speaking, and that it's the keynote and grid pages that are incorrect, not the front page and her session page. Either way, it sounds like an odd topic to cover at a Mac conference, but I'm always happy to be wrong on this one.

MT/Safari bookmarklets

Safari bookmarklets don't work quite like those for other browsers (dammit), so I've had to make custom "Post to MT" bookmarklets. Figuring that they might come in handy for others, here they are for your posting pleasure:

• Blog This (with trackback)
• Blog This (with trackback and categories)

Just drag either one from here to your Bookmarks Bar, modify it to point to your MT installation, and it should work fine. If it doesn't, let me know. Thanks to Al for figuring out the missing piece of the puzzle.

I'm chatting about Keynote

As part of the promotional push for my new book on Apple's Keynote presentation program, Keynote for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide, I'll be doing an online chat this Wednesday, at 6 PM Pacific Time, at World Without Borders WWB Chat. Hope to see some of you there.

C and G close up shop

The bad news: Casady & Greene to cease operations Thursday.

The not-quite-so-bad-news: It will still be possible to buy SpellCatcher X, as Evan Gross will be selling and supporting it at Rainmaker Research.

Blog changes

There's been a couple of changes that you might not have noticed here, assuming that you haven't scrolled all the way down and looked at the very end of the nav bar:

• In the "We recommend" section, we've added a button with a link to Howard Dean's campaign site. Given his campaign's news today, it's pretty clear that he'll be in it for the long haul (barring unforseen disasters, of course).
• We're trying out Google AdSense links. Do us a favor and click on some of them if any sound interesting to you. They're mostly an experiment for us in seeing (1) what Google considers relevant to this blog, (2) who's buying ad space, and (way in last place) (3) if we can make a couple of bucks once in a while to cover some of our hosting costs. So far, it looks like most of the ad buys here are by the Kerry campaign, in response, so far as we can tell, to our Dean posts. Interesting.

Fish and Chips

I don't know which is more likely: that this would never show up on Good Eats, or that it would be just strange enough that it might. Either way, check out Tim Doherty's Recipe for Horse Manure-cooked Trout, aka fish & chips, aka Truite à la mer(de).