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The dust up over President Clinton’s overt playing of the race-card in the SC primary reminds me of the character in the Cohen Brother’s film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?. The challenger to the Governor is Homer Stokes, a southern politician who is sure to win the election but for the confluence of events that reveal him to be a particularly objectionable racist. Set in the 1930′s, Stokes isn’t just any old racist like your favorite uncle, but one who doesn’t like the Soggy Bottom Boys who sing the “Old Timey” music. They have, you see, a black guitarist.

The hapless Soggy Bottom Boys, escaped convicts except for the aforementioned guitarist, don’t realize their one-time recording has become a hit while they were on the lam. Forced on stage at a political debate to escape the ever persistent lawman who is after them … after all, where best to hide but in plain sight? … the crowd goes wild when they start their song. Stokes grabs the microphone and starts to disparage the Boys, raising the issue that they are misogynists due to the presence of the black guitarist they saved from a Klan rally. As Stokes puts it, “They desecrated a burning cross!”

Stokes is revealed to be the Grand Kleagle of the KKK, and he appeals to the crowd to disabuse themselves of the notion that the Soggy Bottom Boys should be honored by their applause. After all, they are his people, and the polls show they like him.

“Is you is, or is you ain’t my constituency?”, Stokes pleads repeatedly, right up until they ride him out of the meeting on a rail, paving the way for the Soggy Bottom Boys to finish their song.

Like Homer Stokes, Bill Clinton played a race card and asked the Democrats “Is you is, or is you ain’t”, and they answered that, at least in South Carolina, they ain’t.

Sen. Obama is the most electrifying politician to come along since … well, since before Bill Clinton. He has the chops to be the Democratic Ronald Reagan, in style at least. Barring some unforeseen calamity, he will be President some day, if not in 2009, then 4 or 8 years later.

But its too early to declare the race-card strategy a failure. By linking Sen. Barack Obama to Jesse Jackson on the morning of the primary, Clinton attempted to minimize his importance. He is just another black candidate, someone to have on stage and treat respectfully as long as he knows his place and doesn’t get too uppity.

Super Tuesday will reveal if the seeds of doubt planted among the nascent racists of the Democrats will take root. Its easy to forget that a generation ago the Democrats were the party of the KKK, and are the only party to have a former member of the KKK in Congress right now. Scratch very hard, and you find those racist roots among many Democrats in the South, and the Clintons know that.

Today we view this as a craven political strategy, but come Super Tuesday … if the Clintons win … the press will herald it as a “bold, daring strategy” that is “remarkable for its Ju-jitsu like leveraging of hidden racism to further the goals of the first real black President”.

Because, unlike the good people in the film, when Bill Clinton asks “Is you is, or is you ain’t my constituency?” too many Democrats will nod and say yes, indeed, they are.

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After replacing my hard drives late last year, my backups were not running. When I tried to do manual backups using Norton Ghost, I got the dreaded BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) with the message “BAD_POOL_HEADER”.

MicroSoft’s Knowledge Base can lead you astray on this one unless you read it carefully, saying its due to a device driver, new software or hardware. The only new software installed is TurboTax, and I highly doubted it was causing this problem.

I found the solution at TechSpot.com. Seems the drive partitioning software Seagate uses, a variation of Acronis True Image called “DiscWizard Disc Clone”, gives the new cloned drive a new disk signature in the master boot record (MBR) and writes to the registry:

The disk clone operation gives the cloned disk a new signature (probably in order to prevent conflict with the source disk), and also changes the signature in the following registry key on the cloned disk:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

The result being that Windows starts without recognizing the disk as a new drive. Since the disk is not considered a new no update is performed on keys that needs update when the disk signature is changes (like those of the Volume Shadow Copy Provider).

The solution is provided at TechSpot.com linked previously, and the fix can be done from a Start*Run*CMD DOS box (I didn’t have to boot to a clean copy of Windows.)

So it is “new hardware” … but the problem is infrequent enough that I never suspected my backups weren’t running due to the new drives. Norton Ghost 10 has been troublesome for me, with an awkward interface and too much happening under the hood that you can’t see.

It seems to be working. I have removed the troublesome Acronis and also Norton Ghost products for now, and I’m running a Windows XP Pro backup in the background. The XP Pro backup program seems fine.

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Recognizing the deafening silence on the war as an issue now that the Surge is working, Politico.com notes a change in strategy coming:

After a series of legislative defeats in 2007 that saw the year end with more U.S. troops in Iraq than when it began, a coalition of anti-war groups is backing away from its multimillion-dollar drive to cut funding for the war and force Congress to pass timelines for bringing U.S. troops home.

In recognition of hard political reality, the groups instead will lower their sights and push for legislation to prevent President Bush from entering into a long-term agreement with the Iraqi government that could keep significant numbers of troops in Iraq for years to come.

H/T to Captain’s Quarters.

The Left has lost this one, and they can’t stand to see any patina of success in the future. But, this will be seen as a craven political move, as tying the hands of the Administration will be seen as preventing them from “securing the peace” that Americans paid so dearly for.

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I wrote about the irritating trend toward assaulting customers with a “wall of music” as they approach and enter retail establishments and mentioned Circuit City as one of the offenders.

Now I see that Warranty Week is listing more than just annoying sound as part of their problems; sales are down about a third over last year, including sales of the highly profitable “extended warranty” contracts.

I suppose it isn’t because of the music that drove me out of the store, pledging to never return until I can shop in peace. But in business, one obvious and glaring problem is often the tip of the iceberg.

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Just a rant …

What’s the deal with the loud music OUTSIDE stores now? Trying to walk into a Circuit City store forces you to wade through a wall of noise … music loud enough that the bass is badly distorted … before you reach the “inner sanctum”, where the music is still too loud to pick out a clock radio or stereo. Perhaps that’s the goal; deafen the customer before they enter the store, and then leave the music on loud enough so they can’t differentiate between good and bad systems. No thanks, I’ll go someplace relatively quiet where I can actually hear the product I’m buying. Best Buy, Frys, Radio Shack … at least you can hear what you’re planning to buy there.

Its an unsettling trend. I noticed the BJ’s Restaurant in my home town had a similar arrangement. Music projected outside the doors. Well, they have to page dinner guests, I thought, and then I opened the door. Loud music washed over me, and I fought the temptation to stagger backwards. It took three tries for the hostess to get my name right (“Frank” sounds like “Brian” and “Rick” when accompanied by loud Goo Goo Dolls music). Luckily, we were seated far from the hostess station, where the ambient noise was in the normal range for a “sports bar” type of restaurant. Which is to say it was loud enough already.

So what’s the deal? Is this a new fad like the heroin-addict models they were showing in ads a few years back? Is it a commentary on the short attention span of our populace, with constant and intense stimulation is required to induce buying impulses?