The skimmers work by pumping in water mixed with oil, separating the oil out from the water in large tanks, then pumping the clean water back into the ocean. However, because the water pumped back into the ocean would still contain trace amounts of oil, this fell afoul of an EPA regulation that forbids oil-contaminated water from being pumped into the ocean. Under normal circumstances, this is a good thing — but in this circumstance, following this rule to the letter would be asinine. But that’s exactly what an EPA bureaucrat did. And neither President Obama nor anyone else in his administration saw fit to overturn this idiotic decision.

There’s more. In Louisiana, someone had the bright idea of loading a bunch of vacuums onto barges and floating them out onto the oil-laden water to start sucking the oil off the surface. Essentially, they built the world’s largest wet vac. But the Coast Guard stopped them because “[t]he Coast Guard needed to confirm that there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board, and then it had trouble contacting the people who built the barges.” Again, an idiotic decision made by a low-level bureaucrat not looking at the big picture, that wasn’t overturned by his superiors.

Now, it’s not the federal government’s job to hold your hand and wipe your nose for you, and the most effective response to a disaster is usually the local response. But the least the feds can do is avoid getting in the way!

If Obama wants to persuade the American people to hand over our healthcare to the tender mercies of government bureaucrats, he’s got to get them to do a better job than this.

UPDATE: Same song, third verse.

It’s also mistaken, it seems, for anyone to posit that race might be animating anti-Obama hotheads like those who packed assault weapons at presidential town hall meetings on health care last summer.

Why do I make a point of the fact that the link was in the original? Because Frank Rich obviously never read the link. If he had, he would have seen this photo:

From CNN: Black man carrying assault rifle outside Obama town hall meeting

Now, I’m not saying that black people can’t be racist; that would be a ridiculous claim. There are black people who are anti-Semitic racists, or anti-white racists, or anti-Asian racists, just as there are white people who are anti-black or anti-Semitic or anti-Asian. But how many white people are anti-white racists? How many black people are anti-black racists?

I hate to have to explain this to you, Mr. Rich, but the entire point of your “anti-Obama protestors are racist” column is that President Obama is black, and that the racism allegedly directed against him is supposedly reminiscent of racism during the Civil Rights era. And the very article your column links to disproves this point with a single photo.

Perhaps Frank Rich didn’t insert that link himself, but it was inserted after his column was written by the Web editor(s) at the New York Times. In which case Mr. Rich’s failure is not one of reading comprehension, but one of failure to do the research. Even so, it doesn’t give me much faith in Harvard’s American History program: research into sources is a fundamental part of doing history right. As C.S. Lewis so memorably put it in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, “What do they teach them at these schools?”

At my alma mater, Wheaton College, there was a standard joke that we were the “Harvard of the Midwest,” or sometimes, that Harvard was trying to be the “Wheaton of the East Coast”. I’m now thinking that we should have been joking about a better university, because Harvard’s education clearly isn’t up to snuff.

The award for “best sign of the day” has to go to this one:

I’ll have more photos up later once I’ve finished sorting through them all to pick out the best ones.

UPDATE: A few minutes later, as I was discussing this sign with a member of the press, a woman behind me said in a tone of sarcastic surprise, “You mean there are black people at a Tea Party?” I turned around to see who had spoken, and saw this woman:

These weren’t the only black people I saw there, but I didn’t take a picture of most of them because really, when you think about it, it shouldn’t matter what skin color someone has — it’s the content of their ideas that matters. (Dr. King would have been thrilled with the attitudes of the Tea Party attendees that I met yesterday). But since these two women had both made a point of their skin color, I snapped their photo.

How many people does that look like to you?

Now head over to http://www.eyeblast.tv/public/checker.aspx?v=XdkUnzkU2G and listen to the CNN reporter, standing in the middle of that crowd, describe the size of the crowd:

“Hundreds of people, at least dozens of people - we haven’t gotten a count of how many people turned out there…”

Don’t take my word for it; check out the video yourself. Read more at http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2010/03/cnn-on-size-of-todays-searchlight-tea-party-rally-hundreds-of-people-at-least-dozens/.

The Obama administration has been claiming that the stimulus “created or saved” jobs. But there have been some significant factual problems in the numbers reported.

From the Columbus Dispatch article:

Of the 212.5 full-time equivalent jobs the district said were funded with part of the $64 million in stimulus it expects to receive, about 65 percent were “saved,” including 36 principals and assistant principals.

So was the district on the verge of laying off 36 school administrators?

“No,” Dannemiller said, explaining that the reporting choices were “created” and “saved.”

“They weren’t ‘created,’ obviously, so our only other choice was ’saved.’ “

… So if these jobs weren’t in danger, what was the money used for? Apparently, raises and bonuses. From the AP article:

About two-thirds of the 14,506 jobs claimed to be saved under one federal office, the Administration for Children and Families at Health and Human Services, actually weren’t saved at all, according to a review of the latest data by The Associated Press. Instead, that figure includes more than 9,300 existing employees in hundreds of local agencies who received pay raises and benefits and whose jobs weren’t saved.

And further down in the AP article, there’s this spectacular demonstration of innumeracy:

At Southwest Georgia Community Action Council in Moultrie, Ga., director Myrtis Mulkey-Ndawula said she followed the guidelines the Obama administration provided. She said she multiplied the 508 employees by 1.84 — the percentage pay raise they received — and came up with 935 jobs saved.

The innumeracy on display by Ms. Mulkey-Ndawula is staggering. She multiplied by 1.84 when she should have multipled by 0.0184 — throwing her results off by a factor of a hundred. Leaving aside how ridiculous it is to claim that a raise is a “fraction of a job saved” (if the job was truly in danger, why would there be any raises?), that means that instead of reporting 9.35 jobs “saved” as a result of those raises, she reported 935 jobs “saved”.

Innumeracy. It’s a real problem, folks.

And while Ms. Mulkey-Ndawula’s innumeracy may not be widespread, the false reporting of raises and other uses of stimulus money as “saved jobs” is indeed widespread. Near the close of the AP article closes, we find:

More than 250 other community agencies in the U.S. similarly reported saving jobs when using the money to give pay raises, to pay for training and continuing education, to extend employee work hours or to buy equipment, according to their spending reports.

The next sentence tells us that “[o]ther agencies didn’t count the raises as jobs saved, reporting zero jobs,” but this fails to reassure, since we aren’t told how many. Since counting raises as partial “saved jobs” was done on direct instructions from the administration, I’m guessing most of the other agencies counted things this way as well. Which means there are some massive problems underlying the claim of X number of jobs saved by the stimulus.

$1,200.00 check from Wachovia bank - what's the catch?

Now, I wasn’t born yesterday. If banks handed out $1,200 to random people all the time, they’d soon go out of business. There must be a catch. So I looked at the accompanying letter, and saw this:

Header of the Wachovia letter

Sure enough, this wasn’t a gift, but a loan. And what were the finance terms? I turned the letter over and looked at the other side:

$600 interest on a $1,200 loan? Do they think I'm stupid?

An APR of more than 50%? Almost $600 in interest… on a $1,200 loan? Do they think I’m stupid? Those are finance terms more commonly associated with loan sharks than with respectable financial institutions. I can only conclude that Wachovia Bank has decided they no longer want to be a respectable financial institution.

Furthermore, who do they think is going to fall for this? The answer, clearly, “people with more greed than sense.” And do they really believe such people are going to repay their loans? I mean, come on, this is the subprime mortgage fiasco all over again! It would seem that the Wachovia Bank lending people have not learned from history.

Finally, it’s my opinion that a bank that has so little respect for people as to offer loan-shark interest rates wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage of them in other ways as well. Therefore, I will avoid doing any business with Wachovia Bank, and would urge you to follow my example.

def walk_descendants(root):
    """
    Walk through a tree of this object's children, their own children,
    and so on, yielding each object in depth-first order.
    """
    yield root
    if not hasattr(root, 'get_children'):
        return # No children, so we're done
    children = root.get_children()
    if not children:
        return # No children, so we're done
    for child in children:
        for widget in walk_descendants(child):
            yield widget

I use this function to build a dict listing all the widgets in my dialog box, keyed by their names. Then when I need to do something with the OK button, I can use something like self.widgets['button_OK'] and no matter where it is in the hierarchy, even nested inside several VBoxes and HBoxes, it’s easy to use.

In case others might find this useful, I hereby release this function into the public domain. Use it however you like.

• Packaging session from Ubuntu Open Week (and part 2)
• PackagingBasics from Ubuntu wiki
• PbuilderHowto from Ubuntu wiki

• First, download the certificate you’re interested in, e.g. “wget http://www.cacert.org/certs/class1.crt”. I suggest storing it in /etc/ssl/certs with an appropriate name, such as “cacert-root-ca.crt”. You’ll need to have root privileges (use “sudo”) to get write access to the /etc/ssl/certs directory.
• Run “openssl md5 /etc/ssl/certs/cacert-root-ca.crt” and/or “openssl sha1 /etc/ssl/certs/cacert-root-ca.crt” and compare the results against the certificate fingerprint given on the website. The website you’re downloading this certificate from does give you its MD5 and/or SHA1 fingerprints, right? (If not, what the heck are you doing trusting a certificate you haven’t verified?!?)
• Run “openssl x509 -text -in /etc/ssl/certs/cacert-root-ca.crt” to verify that the certificate’s data (company name and so on) looks correct.
• If the above fails, add “-inform der” to the command above: maybe you accidentally downloaded the DER-encoded certificate instead of the PEM-encoded certificate.
• If you have the DER version, you’ll need to convert it to PEM. Run “sudo openssl x509 -inform der -outform pem -in /etc/ssl/certs/cacert-root-ca.crt -out /etc/ssl/certs/cacert-root-ca.pem”. Note the “sudo” in front of that command: you’re writing to the /etc/ssl/certs directory, so you need to be root.
• Now that you’ve got a certificate in PEM format and verified it, it’s time to edit your “~/.subversion/servers” file. In the “[globals]” section, add the line “ssl-authority-files = /etc/ssl/certs/cacert-root-ca.crt”. The “ssl-authority-files” option is a colon-delimited list, so if you already have something there and are adding the second certificate to it, use a colon to separate the two paths. If you’re adding a third certificate to the list, then you should already see the colon and be able to figure it out. :-)

I mostly figured this out from the “SSL Certificate Management” section of the Subversion book. Which I highly recommend reading, BTW.

I hope this helps someone else spend a little less time on Google figuring out how to trust a new root CA.