Watch as conservative Casey, currently leading in the polls, tries to hone his oratory skills for his hoped-for debates next fall against incubent Neo-Con Sen. Rick Santorum. Pennacchio and Sandals, both liberals, have the debating skills but need to develop more name recognition.

Their positions on the issues are more in tune with those of most Pennsylvania voters. According to a Zogby poll late January, voters preferred Pennacchio and Sandals over either Casey or Santorum when presented with the candidates’ issue stances.

Pennacchio and Sandals face an ironic possibility: If they remain unknown to most voters, then Casey can win the primary based on name recognition alone, but if they manage to get their positions and names in front of the voters, they’ll likely split the liberal/centrist majority of Democrats, with Casey winning a plurality.

Pennacchio and Sandals have already met several times for debates. Each time, Casey declined his invitation to join them. His campaign manager cited the others’ purported lack of support in the polls and limited fundraising as proof that Casey doesn’t need to bother with debates.

It’s not law yet, however. The State Senate still has to pass the bill before Gov. Rendell, an announced supporter of the wage increase, gets to sign it. Be sure to remind your State Senator to help pass HB 257 when it comes up for a vote soon.

When enacted, the new rates would make Pennsylvania the 20th state to set its minimum wage above the federal level.

Young burger-flipper exception: The bill as passed allows employers to pay newly hired teenagers a “training wage” of $5.15/hr for two months. And to protect the integrity of this exception, it forbids employers from firing regular employees just to substitute them with low-paid trainees.

Several Republican members of the Appropriations Committe who had voted against the bill in committee, switched and voted in favor of it when it reached the Assembly floor. Shades of the Kerry campaign: They voted against the minimum wage, before they voted for it!

Companion legislation, a bill to set future automatic COLAs (cost-of-living adjustments), didn’t make it out of committee. Without COLAs, expect the struggle to re-emerge in several years as inflation nibbles away at the new wage rates.

Other legislative news: As he had publicly pledged, Gov. Rendell last month vetoed the anti-voter bill. Under that law, passed with strong Republican backing, Pennsylvania voters could be turned away at the polls if they failed to bring proper identification. It would have replaced the current system in which voters sign a registry and have their signature compared to an older version already on file.

The winner of the May 16 primary will face NeoCon Rick Santorum in the general election next November.

According to the AP report,

He believes such a mandate is unconstitutional and would disenfranchise some of the state’s most vulnerable residents. People including nursing home residents and poorer citizens might not have proper ID and thus could lose their right to vote under the legislation, Rendell said.

“At a time in our nation’s history when voter participation is dropping to alarming levels, the government should not be taking action that will turn away bona fide voters from our polls.”

This from the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Seated in front of a dozen of the city’s African American leaders, Democrats all, Rendell said at a news conference that House Bill 1318 would have the effect of denying some people their right to vote.

The legislation, he said, would discourage voting at a time when “we should be doing everything we can to increase voter participation.”

Meanwhile, Lynn Swann, Rendell’s likely Republican opponent next election, seems worried that without the new law not enough Democrats will be turned away from the polls. “The idea that presenting a form of identification would somehow disenfranchise people is as ridiculous as it is untrue,” his campaign dissembled.

The governor’s website lists 22 organizations urging a veto of House Bill 1318. Still to come: Even though passed by the legislature last Wednesday, the bill has yet to cross the governor’s desk allowing his formal veto.

So quickly, some things that are exciting.

• The new Macs are here, the new Macs are here!! Though quite poorly named, every computer nerd out there is salivating over the new Intel-powered MacBook Pro. Apple claims that these machines are 4 times faster than the previous generation, and combined with the news that these machines should run Windows, it looks like Apple has really created a killer machine. If only I actually needed one to justify the expense…
• Google is funny and worth a fortune.
• And surprise, Microsoft Windows is still dangerous!

I’ll make sure to hit up all the political news, including Bush’s illegal wiretapping, the Alito confirmation hearings, and Jack “Me” Abramoff’s plea bargain later. Check out FireDogLake’s live blogging of the Alito hearing for lots of detail.

Great shots on Flickr of the incredible effect that the transit strike is having on New York City. Beautiful and I imagine, so frustrating to get around the city today. But there’s something remarkable about all the masses of humanity just walking down 5th Ave.

These issues prompted Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to change the rules that govern editing on the open source encyclopedia. While anyone can still alter an article, now only registered users are allowed to create new entries. All these problems, combined with criticism from many writers and established encyclopedia institutions have not dampened enthusiasm for the service, and a new study, along with one done by IBM that showed the median time for page vandalism to be fixed was only 5 minutes, further strengthen the legitimacy of the open source encyclopedia model.

Researchers at the British journal Nature examined scientific entries on Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica and compared them for accuracy:

The reviewers were asked to check for errors, but were not told about the source of the information.

“Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopedia,” reported Nature.

“But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.”

Wikipedia is not perfect, as this study shows, but neither is any other source of information. The simple fact is that the open source model works, and seems to work remarkably well. Content will be created, shared, commented on, and remixed and altered by anyone and everyone. The sooner the elites from the science, journalism, entertainment and music industries wake up and realize that they must relinquish their oppresive grip on content, the better.

Want to see what thousands of random people can do? Check out SwarmSketch, a “Collective sketching of the collective consciousness.”

This month, as in every December since he took office, President Bush sent out cards with a generic end-of-the-year message, wishing 1.4 million of his close friends and supporters a happy “holiday season.”

Many people are thrilled to get a White House Christmas card, no matter what the greeting inside. But some conservative Christians are reacting as if Bush stuck coal in their stockings.

…Wildmon does not give retailers the same benefit of the doubt. This year, he has called for a consumer boycott of Target stores because the chain issued a holiday advertising circular that did not mention Christmas. Last year, he aimed a similar boycott at Macy’s Inc., which averted a repeat this December by proclaiming “Merry Christmas” in its advertising and in-store displays.

“It bothers me that the White House card leaves off any reference to Jesus, while we’ve got Ramadan celebrations in the White House,” Wildmon said. “What’s going on there?”

All I want for Christmas is a conservative Christian boycott of Georgie boy.

South Africa’s highest court ruled today that same-sex marriages enjoy the same legal status as those between men and women, effectively making the nation one of just five worldwide that have removed legal barriers to gay and lesbian unions.

But the Constitutional Court, as the high court is known, effectively stayed its ruling for one year to give the Parliament time to amend a 1961 marriage law to reflect its decision. Should the legislature balk, the court said, the law will be automatically changed to make its provisions gender-neutral.

Few expect the Parliament to resist, even though African nations are generally intolerant of gay relationships and many South Africans are conservative on social issues.

Yes, caveats abound, but I for one am heartened that a country that is basically socially conservative and that has only recently emerged from incredible hardship can make this positive move in recognizing the inherent human dignity of full civil rights.

How sad is it that there are many in our nation who still question the wisdom of civil rights legislation at all?

With that off my chest, there are ways to still get to the Select content and today’s editorial by Tom Friedman is particularly enlightening. He offers a unique take on the quagmire in Iraq by claiming that it is not the intelligence failure on WMDs that will ultimately be seen as the Bush cabal’s downfall in Iraq, but rather their complete misunderstanding of the socioeconomic status of the country prior to invaasion:

But I think Saddam knew how busted and bankrupt his country and army were. Therefore, he never wanted to completely erase the impression that he had W.M.D. Saddam lived in a den of wolves. The hint of W.M.D. was his only deterrent shield left against his neighbors, his enemies at home and the West. (This was alluded to in the Duelfer W.M.D. report.) So he tried to allow just enough U.N. inspections to clear him on W.M.D., while playing just enough cat and mouse with the U.N. to leave the impression that he still had something dangerous in the closet.

The Bush team, and the C.I.A., not only failed to learn that Saddam had no W.M.D., they failed to appreciate how devastated Iraqi society really was. The Bush team, listening largely to exiles who had not lived in Iraq for years, thought that there were much more of an Iraqi middle class and more institutions than actually existed. So Mr. Bush thought taking over Iraq would be easy. That is the only way I can explain his behavior.

This intelligence failure about Iraqi society is what is killing us today. Because what really happened after the U.S. invasion is that what little Iraqi state existed just fell apart in our hands, like a broken vase. And then Rummy let the shards get looted.

Friedman has a tendency to create his own grand hypotheses and then treat them as fact, but this one rings true with me.

[UPDATE: Here's a link to the full version.]