I love a good constitutional debate.

This article from the Atlantic is being linked to and blogged quite a bit. It is a mock speech by President Obama, in which he uses his constitutional executive powers to order the treasury to create debt instruments in order to satisfy the debt of the United States.

It is being touted as an instrument to force the raising of the debt ceiling, which in turn is being used as a WMD.

The article cites the Article 4 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. The full article reads as follows:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Seems pretty clear to me. All that is needed is a full accounting from the pentagon as to exactly how much of our national debt is owed due to "bounties" paid to the Military Industrial Complex. Specifically, for "insurrection" or "rebelion". The question is of course if you interpret these acts of violence as acts by the peoples of America, or of peoples from outside our borders. Does the 'threat' of terror count towards this as well?

Regardless of what side of that debate the decison falls, I believe the taxpayers and debtholders of the United States would be horrified to see just how staggering the number is and what percentage of our national debt it entails.

Perhaps this very passage from the constitution is why the Department of Homeland Security was created in the first place, and why we must "See Something and Say Somthing" to protect our 'homeland' from Lone Wolf attacks.

Hard to argue 'homeland security' isn't intended to supress insurrection and rebellion. But we certainly deserve to know how big our credit card bill is for these 'services', and if we feel we're getting a good deal.

Additionally, it would interesting to understand how the US's funding of Lybian rebels with links to al-Qaeda doesn't violate Article 3 of the 14th Amendment, for that certainly is an impeachable offense by this administration.

 5/16/2011; 5:24:42 PM.   .

I've been working with a lot of developers recently and am reminded by my 'inside view' of the work they do just how amazing that work really is.

If you've ever looked at the code that makes your 'stuff' 'just work', then you know what I'm talking about. If not, try a google search or two to look at some code.

I like getting paid for my work, and I like paying for software I use. It gets me support when needed, and helps further the development of the products I use. A lot of the software I use is built by one man shops, filling a void that bigger companies can't or won't.

The biggest hurdle for these developers is the cost of marketing. They can't buy mainstream advertising, hire PR firms to in turn hire convince bloggers or Mike Arrington to write about them, and google has gotten progressively worse at helping find these gems. So I am reminding myself that the best marketing assistance I can provide is a blog post sent out to 'my world' about their products.

Today's Happy User post is about MailSteward Pro.

Late last year I decided I would move my email 'off the cloud' onto my own server in-house. This was a lot easier than I expected it to be, with the help of OSX-Server running on a Mac Mini.

The real penalty would come from having to say goodbye to GMail's excellent search functionality in their product.

Not willing to give this up easily, I went hunting for a solution and found MailSteward. The "Pro" version allows you to automatically store all your email into an mysql database, which was easily set up on my Mac Mini.

The program has a nice and understandable interface (screen shot) that lets me search for any message, attachment, sender etc. in a very logical way. Results are returned as fast, if not faster than a search in GMail and here's the kicker; the results I get are better than GMail. This is because I am interacting directly with the application in a logical fashion, GMail would at times try to be 'too helpful' in my queries, undoubtedly anticipating people I've emailed in the past and other smoky parameters only the GMail team knows about.

Now, before you start commenting about how you *can* query GMail to get better results, the point of my happiness is that I'm able to do this at home, on my own machine, without a BigCo between me and my data. Quite simply, this product works for me and I Love It.

So, my thanks today go to John Seward and his MailSteward Pro product.

(disclosure: I was not paid to write this, I have no interest in the company, product or developer's business, and I paid for my copy of the software. I'm just a happy user :-)

 5/16/2011; 12:33:19 PM.   .

Poster from 1968, during a similar socio-economic period in time to today.

 5/16/2011; 11:26:47 AM.   .

John and I received a nice bit of PR for the No Agenda podcast today in the mainstream German media. Handelsblatt closes out their coverage of what they are calling "Facebook-Gate" with our take on the PR smear;

Doch Facebook-Gate stellt das alles in den Schatten. Oder wie es die New Media-Pioniere Adam Curry and John Dvorak in ihrer Radioshow feststellten: "Das ganze stellt eines klar: Google ist bose. Facebook ist bose. Die in Wahrheit schmeissen langst die PR-Agenturen die ganze Show."

Google translate really doesn't know what to do with this paragraph. I think the essence of it is:

Google is evil, Facebook is evil. As the show always makes clear, it's what PR agencies do.

I'd love a better contextual translation if possible.

 5/16/2011; 10:30:44 AM.   .