Monthly Archives: July 2011

Come on Down, it’s Cool Here

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Apparently, large chunks of the US are hotter than Miami this week.


Seems unnatural, somehow.

Posted in Miami | 1 Comment

FL-25 Looks Attractive for Democrats

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Federal investigators have opened a second criminal probe of U.S. Rep. David Rivera

See More FBI trouble for Rep. David Rivera | Florida politics blog: The Buzz | tampabay.com & St. Petersburg Times.

State Rep. Luis Garcia has already announced he’s running (feel the excitement), and Annette Taddeo is said to be thinking about it.

Posted in Politics: FL-25/FL-27 | Comments Off on FL-25 Looks Attractive for Democrats

Done Tweaking?

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

I got the load time down from 9+ seconds (according to Pingdom) to something in the 2-4 second range. Where it falls in that range seems to depend on the atmospheric pressure.

To achieve this result, I took the following steps:

  • Tweaked some W3 Total Cache settings
  • Stopped banging my head against the W3 Total Cache minification settings, and fired up the WP Minify plugin instead.
  • Swapped out the two slowest design elements for faster lower-tech versions
    1. Put in the HTML version of Sitemeter instead of the Javascript version
    2. Used the sfw of the clock instead of the Javascript version
  • Removed the archive drop-down, which amazingly was responsible about half of the HTML for this page, although it showed up as only one line in the margin if you didn’t click it. Now, instead I have a new freestanding archive page via WP-Archives. This is one part of the revision that still needs work — right now it takes waaay too long to build the archive page when someone visits it, and I fear it could bring the server to its knees if some malicious robot decided to hit it a lot (I have set it to noindex, nofollow and blacklisted it in robots.txt, but that only works for good robots).
  • Installed the Wp Smush.it plugin to automate the reduction of image file sizes that I was doing manually with the GIMP
  • Moved some static files to Amazon S3 & CloudFront, for a cost of a penny or two per day — unless of course traffic should go up all of a sudden.

I picked Amazon because it is integrated with my server and also W3 Total cache. But the user interface is awful and the help files are hard going. I’m still not sure I’ve set things up right.

Stopwatch copyright © 2009 casey.marshall. Some rights reserved.

Posted in Discourse.net, Wordpress | 1 Comment

PolitiFact Florida Calls Again

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

This time the question was: Sen. Alan Hays says ‘Legislature’ didn’t file lawsuit to fight redistricting amendment.

And PolitiFact (based in part on an email interview in which I explained some basic Civ Pro II) rates it, rightly, as “barely true” since it is true only in the most technical sense — the House is a plaintiff-intervenor, not the originator of the lawsuit.

Amendments 5 & 6 are two of the few decent things to come out of recent Florida politics, and the attempts by entrenched politicians — Republican gerrymanders and their ethnic-enclave Democrats co-dependents — is the sort of behavior whose failure to shock is the surest proof of the overwhelming outrage fatigue gripping so much of the state population.

Not surprisingly, according to a related PolitiFact inquiry, Sen. Hayes flat-out lied about who was paying for the House’s part of the lawsuit.

Posted in Florida | Comments Off on PolitiFact Florida Calls Again

I Shouldn’t Have, But It Felt Good

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

A very nice lady called up raising money for the Obama re-election campaign.

I told her that I was not planning on giving to any Republicans this year.

Posted in 2012 Election | 6 Comments

Peter Shane Explains What Happens If the Money Runs Out

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

An obvious question, should Congress not manage to fend off default within the next two weeks, is: What does the President do then? If the President cannot pay off America’s creditors and keep all government programs running, what legal authority does he have to deal with the crisis?

Answers at What May a President Do if He Cannot Pay Our Bills Without Borrowing and Borrowing More Money is Unlawful?.

The bottom line is that the President has a pretty free hand to “defer” any spending he wants — an ironic given decades of Congressional attempts to stamp out claimed executive “impoundment” authority and force Presidents to spend as directed by Congress.

The only thing I’d add to Peter’s story, which is worth a look, is an historical note: the 19th Century budget process also relied on something called the Anti-Deficiency Act (which still exists in somewhat amended form. The basic idea behind the early versions, was that if anyone in Treasury paid any expenditure not authorized by law (which then meant an appropriation), the official risked being personally liable for any overpayment.

Posted in Econ & Money, Law: Constitutional Law | Comments Off on Peter Shane Explains What Happens If the Money Runs Out