Quick Roundup 74

How AMLO will he go?

My gladness yesterday that a leftist candidate might concede defeat gracefully were, as it turns out, way premature.

Mexico's leftist party demanded Tuesday that electoral officials recount every vote cast in the country's closest presidential race ever, claiming the balloting was manipulated and renewing fears that its fiery candidate will launch massive street protests if he doesn't get his way.

Reuters has more.

The leftist suspected fraud in the presidential race but would not claim Calderon's side rigged the vote until seeing the result of a recount that begins on Wednesday, Camacho Solis said. "We are sure there are irregularities but we would have to have more elements to be confident enough to call it fraud," he said.

A main concern is that 42 million people voted but only 38.5 million votes were tallied in the preliminary count that Calderon is basing his claims of victory on, he said.

But this story contradicts the following account from the New York Times.

Several political and financial analysts said they believed that Mr. Calderon's 384,000-vote lead, narrow as it was, was unlikely to be reversed, with only about 800,000 more votes to be tallied, but Mr. Lopez Obrador said that the preliminary tally was flawed and that he planned to challenge it in court.

Even granting the Reuters figure for uncounted votes, AMLO would need nearly 11% of those 3.5 million votes over and above what Calderon got and in a three-way race besides. Unless a large and systematic effort (which would be nearly impossible to cover up) to exclude votes from areas favorable to AMLO occurred, this is highly unlikely. AMLO further claims he'll abide by the final ruling of an electoral tribunal, but that is up to two months away, giving him ample time for rabble-rousing.

This has "ugly mess" written all over it, and not for the reasons AMLO is giving.

YouOS, Anyone?

Rumors about a possible Internet-based "operating system" (usually attributed to Google, who have also been rumored in the past to be working on a desktop OS) crop up from time to time. Now, there's a proof-of-concept example out there of a web-accessible "desktop" complete with its own applications.

However, I agree with Slate writer Paul Boutin that I wouldn't want this to be my primary or only way to compute.

[T]he real deal-breaker is trust: Are you going to let someone else handle all your data? If you use a Google-served computing environment, everything you upload, download, or type potentially passes through Google's computers. I'll be the first to sign up, but that's my blind faith in statistics. If there's a privacy breach at Google, I figure I'll be about 10 millionth in line to get hurt. How about it: Would you trust Google to protect your e-mail, your tax documents, and your family photos?

Not me. Not with anything important. After all, consider Google's track record so far! How much more effective would their censorship efforts be if they could look just rifle through your data any time they pleased!

What Cindy Sheehan's hunger strike means ...

... can be found right here.

-- CAV