Voting keeps getting easier and easier for me. My default position on ballot initiatives is no. Most of these initiatives are brought up by fringe special interests, or they’re hot-button issues that elected officials don’t want to take responsibility for so they push them off on voters. As long as I’m paying my state senator’s paycheck, they can do their job and make laws. I’ll vote yes on an initiative if it’s something really compelling.

Like I just totally voted yes to add another $1 a pack in taxes on cigarettes. The funds would go toward cancer research. Smoking is grody. It’s bad for smokers and the people who have to breathe in their filthy fumes and deal with the mess it makes. We all have our vices and ways to relax, but unlike having a beer at a restaurant, smoking is a vice that invades the space of non-smokers and creates a drain on our healthcare system in the form of elevated risk. If you’re going to be a smoker, fine. I won’t tell you to stop. But in return you should accept responsibility to chip in for treating the diseases you’re giving yourself.

Candidates are even easier to choose from. I just start by weeding out and vote for whoever is left. Here’s how I do it. I scratch a big X through the name if:

• The candidate doesn’t have a website
• The candidate’s website has malware or pop-up ads
• The candidate did not bother to submit a profile for the state’s voter guide, which is totally free and easy to do.
• The candidate’s profile doesn’t use complete sentences, presents no cohesive platform, talks about other candidates but says nothing about themselves, or consists solely of whining about the status quo

That narrows it down quite a bit, especially in cases like the current race for California’s U.S. Senate seat. There are 24 candidates on the ballot. Yeesh. However, only eleven submitted profiles for the voter guide. If you can’t take ten minutes to type up a paragraph about why I should vote for you, my confidence in your competence is not high. From there, it’s easy to cross out candidates based on red flags that pop out from the text. Here’s examples of candidate fail:

• Orly Tatiz: “[Obama] is an Indonesian citizen.”
• Elizabeth Emken: “I became Vice President of Autism Speaks“
• Robert Lauten: I’d quote him but his broken English offends my grammatical sensibilities.
• Dan Hughes: “proud Reagan conservative.”
• Dirk Allen Konopik: “Will boldly stand for Christ.”
• Marsha Feinland: “The 1%” blah blah blah. Berkeley address.
• Colleen Shea Fernald: “Dear congressionally betrayed voter”
• Rogelio T. Gloria: “I am an experienced U.S. Naval Officer and federal employee.” (That was all he put.)
• Al Ramirez: Second Amendment illegal immigration blah blah blah

Easy peasy! By crossing out people whose statements are irrelevant as to their fitness for office, I was left with only two to choose between. I used to try to vote by comparing all candidates as equals. That was draining and frustrating. It’s so much easier to do it this way now, sifting out the nutters and lazy folks from people who actually seem to understand the importance of representing me and so many other voters.

I’m a Viking. I’m proud of my heritage. Scandinavians kick ass. We invented Nobel Prizes and Death Metal. We have contributed to numerous cultures the world over, usually in peaceful collaborative ways. Viking “invasions” were usually more like multicultural blending. We gave the Celts their art and the Normans enough backbone to conquer the Saxons. Overall, a close look at Vikings will tell you they were people of exploration, adventure, and multiculturalism. Not stupid skinheads with uncontrolled rage stemming from dissatisfaction with penis size.

I never thought I’d have to make political decisions while selling silly crochet hats on the Internet. There’s a lot of viewpoints I don’t agree with, but I’ll still probably sell you a hat.

Except if you’re a stupid Neo Nazi.

So I’ll just clarify my personal policy here. *AHEM*

IF YOU ARE A RACIST FTARD I WILL NOT MAKE YOU A HAT. EVER.

And now back to making happy rainbow scarves and unicorn hats for people who have a clue.

So if I’m gonna pick somebody to turn things around, shouldn’t they show a reasonable grasp of 21st century technology? Our kids are lagging in math, science and technology. If a candidate really gets where we need to be, here’s what I want to see, beginning with what’s the most important:

1. A website with a non-stupid domain name (i.e. votenorm.com and not nomranpfleegmanforoffice2010.com)
2. Clear, easily discoverable information about the candidate, their stance on major issues, and who endorses them
3. Strong advocacy for the Internet and technology as part of classroom instruction
4. A site that isn’t static like a printed flyer; dynamic content like a blog and twitter feeds to provide constant updates.
5. HTML 5, competent use of css, adherence to open web standards and use of open source software
6. Community presence and a place for voters to interact and communicate with the candidate and one another
7. Sans-serif fonts that improve the reading experience
8. A site that doesn’t look like a canned site purchased from a third-rate webmaster
9. Even better, a site built and maintained by the candidate themself

Basically, if I can’t tell that the candidate knows what the Internet is for, they’re not getting my vote. And so my impressions of the prospective future Superintendents of Public Instruction:

Larry Aceves has a decent website. The color scheme isn’t the greatest and the css isn’t the most sophisticated, but it’s functional and not buggy and I was able to find what I was looking for quickly. There’s the obligatory links to Twitter and Facebook, which no marketing person or candidate for office The dude’s from the Bay Area, so maybe being surrounded by techies and not rednecks from Barstow pays off when it comes to communicating effectively online. Its main weak spot is lack of any dynamic content. A blog would have taken this site from static but useful to a truly twenty-first century campaign hub.

Karen Blake’s site looks like a bad parody of 1996. From the horrible rotating cube in the right corner to the broken flash links to the graph from PowerPoint hell, everything about this site screams “I do not understand the power of the web nor its importance in our society.” This chick instills no trust in me whatsoever, but then she does have the disadvantage of coming from Bakersfield, which ranks pretty low on quality of life. With this kind of a presence, I just don’t trust her to understand how to guide kids toward the future.

Alexia L. Deligianni only has a Facebook page. I want somebody to guide kids, not to want to be back in junior high with them. Pass.

The website of Lydia Gutierrez kept timing out due to being tapped out on bandwidth. Somebody who understands tech infrastructure so little as to not purchase enough bandwidth to handle election traffic has no business governing the infrastructure of our schools. Insufficient bandwidth = visitors can’t get information. Something tells me she’d also give teachers insufficient resources and then wonder why kids aren’t reading.

Diane Lenning’s site is a nightmare of digital clutter colliding with a blasé color scheme and useless sound bites of information. It reminds me of a bulletin board in a dorm hallway; too much information to absorb in reasonable amounts and too shabby in presentation to care about. Also, using comic sans for your resumé is justification for murder in geek circles. This site shows no connection with anybody under 40. No thanks.

Leonard Martin used WordPress (plus) but didn’t leverage it by employing anything as simple as widgets (minus). Too many pages clutter the header, and the long list is repeated in the sidebar. Still, the fact that this guy knows what open source software is is a mark in his favor, although he really needs to surround himself with people who can help him understand how powerful it is.

If Karen Blake is a bad parody of 1996, then Grant McMicken is a bad parody of 1997. All it needs is a Geocities banner and sparkles on that California flag graphic.

Gloria Romero has the funding and marketing power to put together a decent website, but website bugs and stupid use of generic images makes this look like a canned corporate site, not something I should take seriously. I can’t even find a page that breaks down the issues.

Henry Williams, Jr. has put up a poster where a website should be. If you don’t know what the Internet is (and no, it is not a digital telephone pole on which to staple enormous bandwidth-sucking graphics), stay the hell away from our classrooms, thankyouverymuch.

Tom Torlakson’s site is the first one that really gets it. With a blog and easily discoverable information on the issues, this site shows that the candidate grasps what the web is actually for. Candidates take note: being an out-of-touch middle aged schlub = bad. Leveraging modern, dynamic technology = good.

Daniel M. Nusbaum lives in Beverly Hills but doesn’t have a website. Neither does Faarax Dahir Sheikh-Noor. Someone who thinks so little of the Web shouldn’t be elected to any office at all, let alone one that shapes educational policy.

California’s need for a Superintendent who really understands how badly we need to move forward in science, math, and technology is probably our most critical issue. Based on that, I’d have to go with Torlakson. All the other candidates look like old fogies who haven’t bothered to keep up with the times, and won’t demonstrate the sort of forward thinking that we so desperately need.

First off — it’s great that Laura Ling and Euna Lee got home safe. Lucky them. It’s not an exaggeration to say that they escaped a fate just as horrible as those faced by the victims of Hitler’s concentration camps.

It pretty much looks like a win-win situation. Two big dummies got themselves in more trouble they deserved, but Our Hero flies in and saves the day. I’m sure Kim Jong Il is patting himself on the back for the all-important ego stroke he got from getting Bill Clinton to come over and suck up to him. And luckily for us the North Korean leader is so self-obsessed that he’ll never realize that the West doesn’t give a crap about the all-important concept of saving face and subtly leveraging symbolic importance over others. Kiss for the cameras, hooray, nobody dies. (At least, the Americans don’t die. Nobody’s talking about all the North Koreans still in those awful camps.)

It’s hard for me to see this as some kind of amazing victory, because I can’t figure why Ling and Lee were in North Korea in the first place. The kind of reporting they were doing — creeping over the Chinese border with a camera — is unlikely to produce anything spectacular. The expedition is extra high on the Not Worth It Meter when you factor in the consequences of getting caught. And I’ll hazard a guess that neither Ling nor Lee had brushed up on their black ops training, so that risk was pretty high.

Both of these women have husbands. Lee has a daughter. But they intruded on a country that (a) is run by a psychopath and (b) doesn’t treat intruders well. (Read: tortures and executes them.) What were these chicks thinking? If they want to go for the Darwin Award by playing Intrepid Girl Reporter in a country that Navy Seals would be nervous to visit, great. But you don’t exactly win Wife and Mother of the Year (let alone a Pulitzer) by doing something so stupid and dangerous. It’s no surprise they got caught and handed a stiff sentence by a kangaroo court. It’s North Korea. Duh. The real wonder is that they were lucky enough to get bailed out. Boy are they lucky Kim Jong Il’s stroke didn’t affect the part of his brain that contains his massive ego, and the only price for parole was a charming song and dance from President Clinton. This wasn’t really a win; just looks like Ling and Lee’s epic fail (luckily) failed.

Next time, geniuses, stick to somewhere safer, like Detroit or Baghdad. Or just realize that you’re gonna die and it will be your own fault. Because I’m guessing private plane rescues from heads of state are kind of a one-time deal.

< / cynicism >

And I take issue with the notion that Robama was constructed out of Hope and basketballs. I also gave him laser vision! Come on! What’s a political infiltrator without a little PEW PEW power??