Today, on his website electoral-vote.com, Andrew Tanenbaum presented three options for the Senate dealing with Roland Burris’ appointment to Barack Obama’s currently vacant Senate seat. The third option was to reject Burris and make DC a state; Tanenbaum thinks that this would be a good time to press for that, and that the statehood process would be a matter of law.
Mr. Tanenbaum, what are you smoking? How on earth would this be effective? If anything, Republicans could spin this as “Democrats trying anything they can think of to avoid filibusters” “just wanting more African-Americans in Congress”, and “Taxation without Representation” has never been a particularly effective slogan anyway, to my knowledge. The process you’ve outlined seems incredibly unlikely to succeed, even if it is implemented.
A. I didn’t say he was pushing for it.
B. For something to be an interesting strategic option, doesn’t it need to make sense? I really don’t think that D.C. statehood is viable in conjunction with Burris’ rejection, maybe even at all.
I admit that I have only vaguely heard of this guy so I read the article. Here’s his idea; reject the black guy while pushing for DC to have senate seats assuming they would be filled by black people thus prevent the pubs from gaining any “we love black people” cred from voting to seat him.
I say this without any intended snark, this is what it appears to be, an old computer science guy with an interest in politics standing at the water cooler rambling to no one in particular.
Change ‘computer science guy’ to ‘electrical engineer’ and you have the guys I work with/around/against. So he’s not insane, just missing the real world application part.
He’s not just any computer science guy. He’s the guy who wrote the book on computer operating systems. Also on computer networking. (From the first book, we get MINIX, which begets Linux.) And on distributed operating systems, and so on.
That said, this Electoral-Vote.com site of his has been analyzing elections for the last three presidential elections, it’s not a new thing. Fivethirtyeight has replaced it in the last year, but he’s been tight, and he’s been good.
That said, I really think that he’s blue-skying it on this, trying to think of some third option that isn’t just more of the same. Sometimes he does.
I know I write extremely poorly (fixing that is why I finally joined)…so lemme 'splain
I am well aware of the genius part, and his analysis of polling data(among many other data sets) to create accurate election projections. Both of which are still within the field of computer science. I meant aware of him in the sense of political commentator, so my impression is based on the four entries on the page.
My interpretation of the paragraph in the column was my simplistic interpretation despite what I typed.
What I meant was this column is written like an expert in his field (pick one) trying to enter another somewhat connected field (pick another). It usually does not go well. IOW, he’s not insane, just missing the real world application part.
I may still be wrong but a little clearer than the original mud?
But don’t get too hung up on this aspect of his work: He backed the wrong horse, technologically, and Linux succeeded despite the fact he thought it was fundamentally misdesigned and the wrong way to design a new OS in the 1990s (Linux only dates to 1991). He’s a genius but that doesn’t mean he’ll always pick a winner.
Oh, sure, he won’t always pick a winner, he’s not always right, but he’s not a moron. (I thought he did the 2000 election… nope. 04, 06, 07, 08.)
Alienhand, in that case, I can’t disagree with you in the least.
Derleth, while true, I was trying to explain how Tannenbaum fundamentally defines computer science for most people in a simple way.
