A Clear Choice

In 1864, as America trod the bloody fields of fratricide and Abraham Lincoln staidly bore the rhetorical slings and arrows of Democratic opponents who accused him of mismanaging the Union's four-year war against the outmanned and outgunned armies of the Confederacy, a wholly different type of war raged in British Naval circles.

For several years, the Jacks of the Royal Navy had struggled through a painful transition from muzzle-loading to breech-loading cannons. The disadvantages of muzzle-loading cannons were obvious. Each cannon on a man-of-war required a highly coordinated crew of six to eight sailors to run in, load, run out, and fire the several-thousand pound weapon. Simply running the guns in and out was fairly dangerous business when done at full speed; indeed it is possible that more sailors' limbs have been lost to wayward gun carriages than to cutlasses.

Breech-loading cannons, on the other hand, remained fixed in one position, which allowed increased rates of fire with smaller, more easily trained gun crews. But despite these advantages, after a brief flirtation, the British abandoned breech-loading cannons and returned to their old muzzle-loaders for another 15 years. I'll explain why in a moment.

In recent days and weeks, I've run across an extraordinary phenomenon: formerly Republican voters who claim they will vote for Senator Barrack Obama next Tuesday. We've seen this among public figures such as Christopher Buckley, and I've seen it among several acquaintances and family members. Last spring when the slate of Presidential candidates was finally set and we knew Senator McCain and Obama would face off in November, I remarked to my wife that McCain would lose because his disadvantages in campaign funds and volunteers combined with media complicity on behalf of Obama would prevent him from exposing Obama as the radical leftist politician he is. The hour is getting late for McCain, and I fear I'll yet be proven right in my prediction.

But what is the sine qua non of Republican support for Obama? I still don't know. I haven't yet heard it explained in a coherent, logical fashion that can reconcile what is known about Obama with these voters' moderate to conservative values. He is "authentic". They "like his economic policies". He has a "first class temperament", says Christopher Buckley. He is "intelligent", a "graduate of Harvard". He "transcends race". He'll "change the failed policies of Bush".

But the questions remain: Which economic policies? The economic policies he's espoused for a mainstream Presidential campaign audience or those of the Democratic Socialists of America? Which temperament? The one we see now or the one that led him to rest comfortably in the pews of Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ for twenty years? Or the one that led him to associate with radicals and terrorists through his career to date? Or the one that led him to work for and fund the ACORN voter fraud factory? Or the one that led him to challenge every signature on the ballot petitions filed by opponents in his first Illinois state senate race?

Minimize these relationships all you want, but the fact remains that if the media applied the same standards to Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers as they would a Republican associated with an abortion clinic bomber, Obama would never have reached the national political stage, let alone be poised to become President.

You want concrete policy criticisms? Obama stands firmly in support of several that should be deal-breakers for any moderate or conservative even considering supporting him. Obama is a co-sponsor of card-check legislation that removes the requirement for union organization through a secret ballot election process--which is an open invitation for a rebirth of union thuggery and coercion. Obama was instrumental in blocking passage of an Illinois bill identical to the Federal Born Alive Infant Protection Act, which passed 98-0 in the United States Senate. Obama opposed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act passed 64-43 by the United States Senate in 2003.

Have you given up on capitalism lately? Feeling a bit of European style social-welfare is just the thing to perk up the American economy? Are you liking the idea that Obama will sock it to the rich and greedy fat cats at the top of corporate America? Well, you've probably heard the case that redistributionist government policies aren't exactly good for prosperity. You may know that after 50 years of communism North Korea's GDP is roughly 1/40th that of South Korea, and that per capita GDP for the countries of Western Europe is 25 percent lower than in the United States (an average standard of living equivalent to Mississippi, America's poorest state). You may believe a little slower growth is worth the inherently greater justice and virtue of wealth redistribution, but there is no personal virtue in voting to give away other people's money. And there's certainly no virtue in redistributionist policies when you realize they negatively impact everyone on the income ladder proportionately. In other words, when government destruction of wealth reduces the after-tax income of all households, the ones at the bottom are hurt much worse than the ones at the top. Or to put it another way, you won't find many doctors, lawyers, engineers, or corporate managers sneaking across our southern border from Mexico!

Are you voting for Obama because you don't like Bush's aggressive prosecution of war against Islamofascists in Iraq and around the world? Or because you think Bush mismanaged the war or made a bad decision to fight in Iraq in the first place? I certainly hope not, because wishing and hoping for change won't make America's enemies go away, and voting for Obama because you think his election will suddenly make the world a nicer, friendlier place where diplomacy's, mellifluous tones will soothe the savage Shiites of Iran is just about the most foolishly irresponsible reason to vote for him of all.

I'm not particularly fond of McCain as a Presidential candidate myself. He's mostly pointed in the right direction, but he'll sometimes latch onto and stubbornly drive forward bad policies like campaign finance reform; or he'll accept a foolish compromise in the spirit of bi-partisanship (which always seems to mean giving Democrats what they want). On the other hand, I can see him digging in his heels against a Democratic Congress and vetoing just about every bill containing an earmark, even to the extent of shutting down the government, which I wouldn't consider a bad thing.

The danger with McCain is that he could be a loose cannon as President. A loose cannon can be dangerous. It may fire in the wrong direction. It may roll around and break things you don't want broken, but at least you can see it coming and get out of the way.

Obama is something else. Remember those breech-loading cannons the British Navy discarded in favor of their tried and tested muzzle-loaders? Just when you thought you had them loaded, buttoned-up, and pointed in the right direction they had a bad habit of blowing up in your face. Take another hard look at Obama before you light that fuse America. He's not aimed where you think he is.

The photos of President Reagan and Air Force One over Mount Vernon are from prints given to my parents in  the 80s by their friend, Don Dean, a former White House photographer.

Spies I Have Known

I've sometimes thought it might be entertaining to join an organization espousing political views completely different from mine. The idea would be to attend enough meetings to start fitting in and then begin "innocently" provoking other members; the challenge would be to provoke as much conflict as possible without getting kicked out.

So I really had to laugh when I read Mother Jone's recent expose of Mary McFate, the anti-gun activist who was actually a paid spy for the NRA: 

This is the story of two Marys. Both are in their early 60s, heavyset, with curly reddish hair. But for years they have worked on opposite ends of the same issues. Mary McFate is an advocate of environmental causes and a prominent activist within the gun control movement. For more than a decade, she volunteered for various gun violence prevention organizations, serving on the boards of anti-gun outfits, helping state groups coordinate their activities, lobbying in Washington for gun control legislation, and regularly attending strategy and organizing meetings.

Mary Lou Sapone, by contrast, is a self-described "research consultant," who for decades has covertly infiltrated citizens groups for private security firms hired by corporations that are targeted by activist campaigns. For some time, Sapone also worked for the National Rifle Association.

But these two Marys share a lot in common—a Mother Jones investigation has found that McFate and Sapone are, in fact, the same person. And this discovery has caused the leaders of gun violence prevention organizations to conclude that for years they have been penetrated—at the highest levels—by the NRA or other pro-gun parties. "It raises the question," says Paul Helmke, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, "of what did she find out and what did they want her to find out."

But here's what interested me most: In 1993 or 1994 Mary showed up in several of my political science and history classes at Grove City College. She also joined our chapter of Pi Gamma Mu (the social science honor society), of which I was local treasurer. It's tough to miss a nearly 50 year old woman in a class full of undergrads--especially one who answers all the questions and regularly contradicts the professors. Nevertheless, I'm not sure I would have remembered her name after so many years except for this description of her other underground activities:

She infiltrated an animal-rights group in the late 1980s at the request of U.S. Surgical, and befriended an activist who was later convicted in a pipe bomb attack against the medical-supply business, U.S. Surgical acknowledged in news reports at the time. U.S. Surgical had come under fire for using dogs for research and training.

As I remember it, she claimed to have infiltrated eco-terrorist and animal-rights groups for the Federal government as well. Her stories of last minute excuses and ankle "sprains" to avoid actually breaking the law with the eco-terrorists were especially interesting.

Hotwire.com: Bad Technology, Worse Customer Service

We just returned from a fantastic 5,000 mile family vacation across the southern and southwestern US. The trip included visits with extended family members we rarely see plus planned and unplanned detours to explore whatever we found interesting (map thumbnails courtesy of my wife--who now has enough pictures to supply her photo-a-day blog for about a decade!).

Most nights we stayed with family. On days when we found no welcoming hearth to rest our travel-weary bones, I used Hotwire to book last-minute accomodations. I've used both Priceline and Hotwire in the past with mostly good results. However, after my last experience with Hotwire, I think I'll stick with Priceline. A bug in Hotwire's site caused me to accidentally book a hotel in the wrong city, and Hotwire refused to take any responsibility for the issue. I usually refrain from complaining about incompetent companies on this blog because such writing is often tedious and boring to read. But I'm making an exception in this case because software quality and usability are topics near and dear to my heart. Plus I've recommended Hotwire to dozens of friends and relatives in the past, and I want to very visibly retract my recommendation.

Here's what happened: At one point we were unsure whether to stay in Austin or San Antonio. So I opened up two Firefox browser windows to search Hotwire for hotel availability in both cities. In the first browser window I searched for hotels in Austin. Below is the hotel search screen. Clicking "Find a hotel" displays the search results for your selected city:

 

Below are the search results for Austin. As you can see the city is clearly labeled. Clicking "Continue" on a hotel listing displays the details for that hotel:

In the screen below, I've selected a 3-star hotel in Austin priced at $79 per night:

 

Clicking "Continue" again on the hotel details page (above) displays a screen to select the primary hotel guest (below). Note that the below screen still indicates I'm booking an Austin hotel. At this point I switched to the second Firefox window (not pictured), searched for hotels in San Antonio, and viewed the details for a specific San Antonio hotel. I then returned to the first Firefox window (below) to finish booking an Austin hotel:

Clicking "Continue" on the above screen displays the final confirmation screen (below). Notice anything strange about this confirmation screen? I've circled the important bits in red as they are otherwise easy to miss:

Give up? The price of the "Austin" hotel has changed from $79 to $73 per night. It's hard to tell for sure that this is an Austin hotel because Hotwire doesn't bother to list the city of the hotel on the final confirmation screen after showing it on most other screens. The final confirmation screen shows only the city-area name--using a normal, unbolded font no less. These design issues are bad enough, but there's a worse problem: the hotel is described as a "3-star hotel in Riverwalk South and Market Square Area". Eh? Do both Austin and San Antonio have riverwalks, you ask? Well, sort of, but Austin's is more plan than reality at this point. The real problem is that my Austin hotel was quietly replaced with the San Antonio hotel I had viewed in a different browser window! I didn't catch this error before booking the trip and so purchased a hotel in the wrong city!

I immediately contacted Hotwire customer support via their web site to explain the issue and request a cancellation (at that point it was nearly midnight). At 2 AM Hotwire responded with an email asking me to call customer support and be prepared to answer specific questions about my operating system, browser, ISP, etc.--in other words, typical bug report stuff. The next day I dashed off another response answering their technical questions, describing the bug in greater detail, and reiterating that the hotel booking should be canceled. Being in the midst of a busy vacation, I dropped the issue at that point and did not contact Hotwire again until I returned from vacation two weeks later.

When I finally spoke with a Hotwire support rep (name unknown) and her supervisor, Chad, their response could be summed up as:

1. The erroneous booking was completely my fault--no acknowledgement of the Hotwire application bug that changed my selected hotel.
2. They might have refunded my credit card charges if I had called them right away to cancel the booking--the two requests for cancellation submitted via their Web site didn't count.
3. They definitely would not refund any portion of my charges because Hotwire had already paid the hotel vender--even though they could and did verify that I never actually stayed at the San Antonio hotel.

I'm a software developer myself, so I can appreciate that bugs will unavoidably slip through testing and into production applications. But there are some warning signs here that Hotwire is not a first-class organization. First, without getting into the technical details, this bug appears to be the result of a deep design flaw in the application. I doubt Hotwire is unaware of the issue (unless they are completely incompetent on the technical side) and the fact that they haven't yet fixed it indicates unwillingness to put application quality on a par with new-feature development (the site has, after all been around for eight years). This does not bode well for their future success. Second, they were unwilling to acknowledge the correctness of a detailed bug report from a customer who understands the technology involved. I'm not sure that the front-line support folks even understood that I was reporting a bug--and I was never connected with a technical support person who could make such a determination, despite contacting Hotwire three separate times about the issue.

UPDATE: I emailed Hotwire customer support a link to this post and Judith B responded with the following:

I understand that your booking was for the wrong city due to your having
two browser windows up at the time of booking and choosing the wrong
one.
You having two browser windows up would not be a bug on Hotwire's
website.

Just in case there is any doubt after reading this post, I did not accidentally choose the wrong browser window when making my reservation. I replicated the described session-corruption bug at least half-a-dozen times while capturing screenshots for this post.

UPDATE II: Mastercard apparently found my arguments here more convincing than Hotwire. They've refunded all charges related to this disputed booking, and the waiting period has now passed without Hotwire reposting the charges. Nice job, Hotwire: Your arrogant and obtuse customer no-service is documented here for posterity, and you still had to give the money back anyway!