So there are a bunch of really fun things going on in the good ol’ US of A in spite of all of the bad. Things like new political parties, possibilities and hope. After reading this article by Clarence Page I’m starting to think, Why not? Wouldn’t it be great to have a real alternative to the broken two-party mess we’ve gotten ourselves into? The timing seems right. Here’s my scenario:

1. Ron Paul almost makes it past the GOP primaries, but fails.
2. Dennis Kucinich (my batman hero) falls short in the Democratic primaries too.
3. The Constitution Party endorses Unity ‘08
4. Ron Paul becomes the presidential candidate for Unity ‘08, with Kucinich as VP
5. We get 4 choices for president in ‘08: Ronald Romney (R), Chic Obama (D), Perfect Paul (U) and Billionaire Bloomberg (I).

It’s a long shot, but wouldn’t it be so wonderful to get crooks out of power? I can’t see that happening in a two-party system—it’s too easy for the Rich and Powerful to play games with people when The People have only one dimension of freedom.

It’s not impossible to corrupt three parties at once, but it’s an order of magnitude more difficult. It also happens to be a little easier to start a fourth party when there’s a third—look at Canada. We see movements crop up every decade or so that changes the political scoreboard a bit and keeps everyone honest. Perhaps America could do with a good diversification too.

I’ve been thinking about this question for a while: If I really believe Ron Paul is the best man for the job, how do I help him become the next president of the United States?

Blogging about him is a little helpful, I think, but it’s mostly preaching to the choir (at least, most of his grassroot support has been brought together by the internet, so I assume you supporters are out here, reading my blog, just as I’ve read yours). So, blogging is great, but what else can I do? Here’s what I’ve thought of so far:

1. Donate. Dr. Paul made an appeal for funds during his interview with Bill Maher (he noted that “money talks”). I’ll be making an announcement regarding this aspect soon.

2. Become a Republican Delegate. “Before Ron Paul can get elected, he has to be nominated by delegates at the Republican National Convention which will take place in St. Paul, Minnesota. September 1-4, 2008.”

3. Meet up. Small or medium-sized groups can do a great deal when working together. Provo has a half-dozen or so “would-be” members of such a group. I’m considering sponsoring the group (meetup requires money to form a group).

4. Represent Ron Paul Well. There are a number of reasons why we might feel justified in participating in angry outbursts of extreme activism. There is a lot of anger in America right now, on all sides. But as a representative of the good things in Dr. Paul, we must meet violence with peace, and anger with understanding. If Dr. Paul is represented well, for the good man that he is, the good people of this land will be attracted to him.

Good luck, and God bless!

Rather than blog about each individually, I thought I’d write a summary of things in the news and on my mind lately.

• No jobs for US citizens without Homeland Security Approval
  If I understand the implication of this recently passed immigration bill, it seems that immigration reform, too, has been turned into a vehicle for reducing civil liberties. If neither the White House Republicans nor the Congressional Democrats are for the rights of people, where should we turn?
• A 2nd Interview with Ron Paul on Real Time (Bill Maher)
  It seems that Bill has had a change of heart since the first interview, explaining that after the Republican presidential debate, he realized “this is a person I really want to talk to a lot more.”
• Homeland Security Contracts for Vast New Detention Camps
  A Canadian news service reported a year ago (as have several others) that a Halliburton subsidiary was awarded a $385 million contract to build detention facilities for “an emergency influx of immigrants”. Civil libertarians like me, of course, worry that this is part of a larger and more nefarious plan.
• Why Bush Hasn’t Been Impeached (Salon Magazine)
  This is an excellent article that opened my eyes to the social and personal aspects of the impeachment process that we each have to go through—for example, it wasn’t easy for me at first to accept that Bush was not the hero my faith-based eyes had seen in him after September 2001.
• New Presidential Directive Gives Bush Near-Dictatorial Powers in Case of Emergency
  Another piece is in place, if you’ve been following the trend. This one gives the president power over all three branches of government in the case of an emergency (note that the definition of emergency is quite liberally described).
• And in a more personal line of thought, I’ve been watching prices go up on just about everything lately. Gas is the obvious one, but I bought a sealed-gel battery (about 40 lbs) the other day and the small business owner I talked with there told me the price would be going up by about 15% next week. He cited rising costs in commodities such as lead and copper. I wonder though… is the cost increase across the board, or are we just seeing inflation? Is there a difference?

I recently discovered that xml data is automatically parsed by the latest Rails (probably for quite some time) and added to the params hash. What’s more, it turns on that adding Json data to params isn’t too bad, either. Here’s the code I added to my environment.rb file:

ActionController::Base.param_parsers[Mime::JSON] = Proc.new do |post|
  RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER.debug “JSON parser: #{post.inspect}”
  # Just to be gracious, we’ll ignore javascript ‘undefined’ and ‘null’ strings
  if post and !["", "undefined", "null"].include?(post)
    decoded = ActiveSupport::JSON::decode(post)
    if !decoded.respond_to?(:update)
      RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER.warn “WARNING: ”
        “JSON parameters not in hash form (was an array sent?)”
    end
    decoded
  else
    {}.with_indifferent_access
  end
end

(Wow, two rails posts in a row!)

While the dev.rubyonrails.org site is down for the time being, I thought I’d post this patch in case the bug bites anyone else. There’s a bug in the Rails ActiveSupport::JSON.decode method (edge rails) that causes parsing to fail if you have alternating quote types in a string. For example:

  {"title": "That's great!"}

will fail because the single quote inside the double quotes is taken to mean “the start of a new single-quoted string” rather than “a character inside the double-quoted string.”

Here is a diff and a ruby patch (require it in your environment.rb file).

Update: Now available as ticket 8425

Looks like 37signals is doing some viral marketing… as usual Looks like it’s working too, ‘cuz here I am blogging about it…

Watch Part 3 if you’ve ever had to inherit a PHP app.

I’ve just made public the source code to the javascript library I’ve been working on: yootools.

For those in the know, it’s obviously a take-off from mootools, an already great javascript library. As explained on the yootools website, however, we wanted to encourage a more friendly environment for questions and discussion as well as loosen up the requirements for including new code in the library. The result is yootools, or “your object oriented tools”.

We’ll have a forum and mailing list shortly.

I saw this pic and just had to photoshop the rest of the room in.

HR-333

I’m sure there are several entrepreneurs among us, so here’s hoping this is helpful to each of you.

A friend of mine is putting together an opportunity to hear former VP of permission marketing at Yahoo, Seth Godin in Salt Lake City. Seth will be speaking at the Salt Palace in a couple of weeks on Thursday, May 24th.

If you’d like to learn about permission marketing and his recent book The Dip (”when to quit and when to stick”), this will be a great opportunity to hear from the man himself.

Admission is $50, which includes for free all 5 of Seth’s books.

For the last week and a half, the blogosphere has been buzzing about impeachment—on average, about 500 posts per day, according to technorati, up from a baseline of about 200 per day. A lot of the buzz surrounds the presidential debate held last week, as well as spurts and starts from John Murtha’s announcement that impeachment is on the table, and now Reps. William Lacy Clay, D-St. Louis and Janice Schakowsky, D-Ill. who have joined Rep. Dennis Kucinich (video) in co-sponsoring the bill to impeach Cheney (HR-333).

The latest buzz today, however, has been from various reddit.com readers and bloggers who’ve invited supporters of the movement to call Nancy Pelosi’s office (202-225-0100), and “register support for impeachment.”

I called to do so, both to show support and to find out what this is all about. I was curious to know if this was a rumor—is Pelosi really running an informal poll, in spite of her famous “impeachment is off the table” statement last November? I asked the young woman I connected with what Pelosi’s involvement was in this momentum. She said that the speaker’s office is always open to take comments on any issue, but that the speaker did not solicit input on any particular issue. So maybe it’s a little white lie that got this all started, or maybe it’s a reconnaissance mission on Pelosi’s part. In either case, I’m glad to be able to express my support. I agree with the sentiment that we should get Cheney and Bush out of office, because “the world can’t wait” for 2008.

Update: The California Democrats also passed a resolution demanding “appropriate remedies and punishment, including impeachment”. Also, there’s an op-ed by Richard Cohen at washingtonpost.com explaining some of Kucinich’s bill, although Cohen is not optimistic about making Bush and Cheney accountable through impeachment.