Let's run the numbers

Busy Busy Busy Working like a fiend this week, and getting ready for a trip home for the holiday weekend. So, I don't have time to read all of the pundits online. What to do? Check out the brilliance of Busy, Busy, Busy which provides distillations of the longwinded bloviations. Brad Delong mentions it on his site today, and I think it deserves repeating to all three of my readers. Such fine things, including this blurb from my buddy Charles Krauthammer: Shorter Charles Krauthammer: No 'Roe' Replay On Affirmative Action: The Supreme Court's affirmative action decision is socially ruinous, a legal travesty, and a good thing as it circumvents a potential Roe-style political backlash against my side. Oh, and I've added some new blogs to my blogroll. Check them out at your leisure.

Took the Political Compass test Thanks to Tiger , who has a link to this on his page. Granted, some of the questions are poorly worded, and it definately doesn't cover all aspects of political philosophy, but it was fun. And I ended up slightly to the left of Ghandi and the Dalai Lama. The Political Compass Jim's Political Compass Results

Strom Thurmond Dies at 100 Story here . Impressive for his longevity, intolerable because of his early views on race. Certainly a mixed bag. "We cannot — and I shall not — give up on our mission to right the 40-year wrongs of liberalism," he said during his last campaign. "The people of South Carolina know that Strom Thurmond doesn't like unfinished business." His voting record was pro-defense, anti-communist and staunchly conservative; his tireless devotion to constituent services was widely revered. Wonder what Trent Lott will say? Keep the recorders handy, guys.

OK, now which one of you is the real God? Yesterday, on Brad DeLong's blog, I picked up a bit from Ha'aretz , where W. is quoted saying: "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them." Didn't they make fun of Woodrow Wilson believing he had a hotline to the almighty? But, you see, it gets better from here. He may not be talking to the right God. Or at least not the one Pat Robertson's 700 Club talks to: On April 30, 2003, America was positioned as the catalyst to jump-start the so-called "solution" to the Middle East crisis. As U.S.-backed Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas was sworn in, the "Road Map" peace plan was set in motion. The very next day began the worst month of tornadoes in Ame...

Blogger was down, and Medicare Otherwise I'd have gotten these posted last night. Enjoy. Also, check this article on Yahoo! news about Medicare and a memo that details the cost of this new prescription drug plan. Basically, it will increase premiums for people who stay in traditional medicare by 25%. The Democrats on the Hill have asked for the memo, and it is not forthcoming from Medicare's Chief Actuary, because he has been threatened with dismissal if he releases it. Go read.

Recording Industry to Sue Internet Song Swappers I'm trying not to use bad language to describe the disgust I feel right now about the record industry. They've apparently decided to start suing individuals for trading music on P2P networks like Kazaa , for which they can claim $150,000 in damages per occurance. So, if you have 100 songs on your hard drive, they sue you for $15 million dollars. It's time for a boycott. Boycott major label CDs, and boycott the movie industry for supporting this. I'm trying to think of when I last bought a new CD in a record store. Or listened to commercial radio. Been a long time, and was when I was outside of the Washington, DC area. Radio sucks here, and I haven't had the time to go in search of a decent record store, preferably with a good used CD selection, like I used to have in Knoxville and Chattanooga( McKay's and The Disc Exchange ). I've picked up some CDs at shows and concerts, but not in record stores...

Mrs. Datanerd is angry As all of my longtime readers know, Mrs. Datanerd is a librarian. And she's using bad words about the Governor of Florida, who just fired the head of the State Library in Tallahassee. Governor Bush lost his fight with the state legislature to shut down the State Library in Tallahassee, and move the collection, at first to Florida State University, except they didn't want it. Anyway, here's an excerpt from an article in the Tallahassee Democrat : Sears' firing comes two months after the Legislature rejected Gov. Jeb Bush's plans to move the Library's circulating collection to Nova Southeastern University in Broward County. Bush's plans to reconfigure the Library drew vocal protests from librarians, the public and key legislators - culminating in March when nearly 250 protesters ringed the R.A. Gray building that houses the Library. Imagine 250 protesters, made up of librarians. Seems like that would raise some eyebrows when ...

We are not the enemy Some history notes: I live in Alexandria, Virginia, just south of DC. After 9/11, the army base south of here, Fort Belvoir, closed two roads that had been open to the public, without public consultation or warning to the community. Because of this closure, traffic on Richmond Highway has gotten a lot worse, and Mount Vernon hospital is citing the closure of these roads as a reason for possibly moving or shutting down. Last night at a town hall meeting, one woman stood up and shouted "We are not the enemy!" You can read more about the meeting in the Washington Post today. When 9/11 happened, the people put up with additional security measures, because we were scared, and because we wanted the government to get us secure quickly. Since then, though, there has been very little discussion of the cost in terms of our lives of those security measures. Security is one thing, but the various governments (local, state, and federal) are not t...

The Topic Today: Bubbles in the Economy Steven Roach and Paul Krugman are on the same page, at least in terms of today's topic, another bubble cycle. And where will this take us? Steven Roach: It's hard to know where and how this all ends. The Fed's strategy seems to be aimed mainly at buying time -- hoping for a gradual and benign endgame to the post-bubble workout. That's certainly possible. But there's also the distinct possibility that the Fed is hoping against hope. I would personally assign equal odds to the chance that there will be a more treacherous moment of reckoning. My concerns in this latter regard stem from the increasingly ominous current-account implications of a saving-short US economy. Courtesy of outsize Federal budget deficits and massive multi-year tax cuts just enacted by Washington, it is not that farfetched to envision a net national saving rate that falls from a record low of 1.3% in the second half of 2002 to "zero" o...

Workouts continuing For those of you who have been with me since May, you may be wondering about how my workouts are going. Well, it's about a month and a half, and I'm still hitting the gym 3 times a week. Just got back a few minutes ago. Feeling the burn. Takes a bit longer now to get my heart rate up into that cardio training range, and a bit longer than that to get to the cardio straining, oh my god I'm gonna die range. Mrs. Datanerd says she can see the difference. I've lost 8 pounds so far, would like to lose another 15 before the end of the summer. Maybe I'll post pictures if I make it. Now all I want is a very large glass of scotch.

Last votes So I vote for 4 new blogs. From The Truth Laid Bear 's New Webblog Showcase : Transparent Eye : Dreaming of a Chirac Assassination The SchoolHouse Review : How NOT to diversify I probably wouldn't have voted for "Dreaming of a Chirac Assassination" had I not had a strange dream during my nap this afternoon concerning Charles Krauthammer and other talking heads raising the total amount of heat in the universe by blathering on endlessly. I had to keep him from overheated political speech or the world would end. Quite the challenge. UPDATE: Tiger says some kind things about me, and these other bloggers, in his The New Weblog Showcase Review II . Thanks Tiger!

Another Vote for a New Weblog Showcase entry From The Truth Laid Bear 's New Webblog Showcase : I know this is probably bad for me : Grown Up Passion Maybe the problem is not that the Dems aren't saying the right things ... maybe the problem is that the left wing equivalent of the right's talk radio is NPR. I like her work. I've thought for a while that the left has a problem getting its message out because we tend to overthink and want to be intellectually rigorous. While the right doesn't care, lets fly with the most outrageous whoppers, never comes back to clean up their mess. Then they use our intellectual purity on us, accusing us of fabricating. So we go and cite a bunch of articles, while they've moved on to other accusations. Oh, I like the gratuitious Ibyx shots too. Only thing I'd change is the black text on funky blue-purple background can be hard to read in Mozilla.

Back to North and South (Korea, that is) I was initially troubled by a post on Eschaton(Atrios) by Lambert tonight. I'm not so sure about this, though. Here's the quote from military.com: The U.S. is now moving rapidly to relocate its forces in South Korea well to the south of the DMZ. I suspect the real reason is to move them out of range of North Korean artillery. At present, if we launch airstrikes on North Korea, Pyongyang can respond with a massive, World War I-style artillery bombardment of U.S. ground troops that could kill thousands. The sudden withdrawal of Americans to positions south of the Han river reveals our intention to go after North Korea's nuclear and missile facilities. A possible North Korean riposte: demand Japan expel all American forces or kiss Osaka goodbye. I just don't buy it. As our troops are withdrawn from the DMZ, our troops are replaced by ROK (Republic of Korea, aka South Korea) army troops. We wouldn't pull back, to le...

Speaking of Bill Bryson I'll hum the "Waiting for the elevator" song [1] while you go read this piece on CNN.com about him and his book, *A short history of nearly everything . ------- [1] Bryson, Bill. Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe.

Shameless Pandering Why, because I've entered my little piece of cyberspace into the New Weblog Showcase. And I'll be linking to the best ones in this weeks list here. And Brian's Study Breaks look interesting. But I'll be goddamned if I'm going to link to the meshugener who's link is saying "Smokers save lives". I'm an ex-smoker, a ex-two pack a day man, and it's an addiction. It's a disease. It's closely related to depression. If a person wants to do that, it's fine. But I'm not going to justify their behavior as a social good. If you are a smoker a pack a day or more, you're a junkie. Get help. Take the patch, take the pill. They work. I know. I had to do both, but it broke the back of the addiction.

From The Truth Laid Bear 's New Webblog Showcase : Brian's Study Breaks : Afghan Nation-Building "This issue highlights a core problem in the Afghan reconstruction efforts: What is Karzai's means of unifying the country? As became clear from Bob Woodward's Bush at War, the most important early factor was money - we hired the warlords as mercenaries, and set up a state on the theory they would learn to profit from stability. However, they see their real power in their armed forces, and Dostum knows that if he loses that connection he becomes less worth the attention of the different power blocs. One thing to remember about Afghanistan is that even before the civil war there was never much central control by the government...the concept of the nation-state taken for granted by Western policy-makers really doesn't exist there. Hence, Karzai's main tool, a plea for Afghan unity to become a modern nation-state, may not be the best tool for the job, even wo...

3,000 antiquities looted Howard Kurtz, in his WashingtonPost.com column, today calls the media to account for its deception about the 170,000 antiquities stolen from the Iraq National Museum, saying that "The actual number: 33. Yes, some of the booty was later returned, but 169,967 items? Maybe Don Rumsfeld was right that TV kept showing the same vase being carried away over and over." Actually, Kurtz is wrong. 170,000 pieces weren't stolen. 3,000 were. The 33 that Kurtz cites is the number stolen from the "... 8,000 or so exhibit-quality, world-class pieces of jewelry, statues and cuneiform clay tablets." He cites the same article, All Along, Most Iraqi Relics Were 'Safe and Sound' that mentions the 3,000, yet doesn't mention this number at all, preferring to say "Only 33" were stolen. He then uses this as an opportunity to link to Andrew Sullivan and his blood feud with the New York Times. This is the sort of sloppiness...

Also reading Other things on the current reading list are Bill Bryson, *A short history of nearly everything , and Timothy Garton Ash's The File , the story of the author reading his own Stasi file. If I can just make time to get more into it. I have one book (Chalmers Johnson) I read on the Metro to work and back, one book (Bryson) I read at night before bed, and one book (Ash) that I read in my easy chair downstairs. And that's the one that get's neglected.

Bush Asserts Iraq 'Had a Weapons Program' Note, he is changing the terms of the debate. It used to be 25,000 liters of anthrax. Now it's that he had a "weapons program". "The credibility of this country is based upon our strong desire to make the world more peaceful, and the world is now more peaceful after our decision," Bush said. Remember this. I'm in the process of reading Chalmers Johnson's book Blowback . It's one of those books you wish you had read when it came out in 2000, because it talks about the effects of U.S. imperialism in the third world, and mentions Osama bin Laden by name as a figure we hadn't heard the last of. His basic premise is that our imperial posture across the world, as the "sole remaining superpower" will cause unintended consequences in the form of increased violence. I'll talk more about this later.

Administration Seeks Overhaul of Federal Workforce So far, the Bush administration had done a lot of things that I never thought they'd be able to get away with. Let's make a list: Tax cuts that are supposed to help the economy, but instead will bankrupt this country. Sunset provisions that are shams, and will never come into play. These cuts apply most to the very very wealthy, and only after they are passed does Congress realize that the cuts don't include the working poor who would spend the money and stimulate the economy. A war in a country because we claimed they had nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. None has been found. Trailers used to produce hydrogen for weather balloons were found, and misidentified as biological production vehicles. Disregard for the environment, drilling for oil in ecologically sensitive wildlife preserves, eliminating requirements on utilities to come into compliance with the Clean Air Act when refitting old plants, so t...

Empire Maker wins Belmont I was really sort of wanting Funny Cide to win, so we'd have a Triple Crown winner. He came in third. Oh well, next year. I went over to Rosecroft Racetrack in Ft. Washington, MD to watch the race, and put a small wager down. A fun little track.

Kinsley on class warfare Check out Michael Kinsley's new column, The Return of Class War: Bush and the new tyranny of the rich. Sort of ties into my post below , with his description of the tensions between democracy and capitalism.

On government user fees Yesterday, in a couple of news stories, I read about a growing trend in managing traffic in urban areas. In areas where there is heavy traffic, allow people to pay a toll to use the carpool lanes. The articles portrayed this in a favorable light. I think it's a bad idea, though, and a symptom of a greater problem we're facing in America. Right now, in Washington, DC, all of the main arteries into the beltway (I-66, I-95, and I-270) have dedicated carpool lanes, where you have to have 2 or 3 or more people in your car to use them. These lanes frequently zip right along, while the one-occupant cars get bogged down in the regular lanes. What this proposal would do is allow people to pay to use these carpool lanes when they only have one person in the car. In some studies, this toll would vary based on time of day and congestion in both the toll lanes and in the regular lanes, so the carpool lanes would always be faster, barring a wreck or some...

FCC eases media ownership rules Thanks, FCC. Here's a story from the Washington Post about what happens when media are allowed to own multiple outlets in a city. I don't want to live in that world, and apparently between 500,000 and 750,000 people who commented to the FCC don't either. Mega-Media: Better or More Of the Same? Washington Post, June 3, 2003 It wasn't hard to find the big story in Tampa yesterday. News of the arrest of Tampa Bay Buccaneers football player Michael Pittman on domestic violence charges appeared in the Tampa Tribune, again on the Tribune's Web site, again on TV station WFLA's Web site and yet again on TBO.com, a local news portal. In every case, however, it was the same story, written by a single Tampa Tribune reporter, Katherine Smith. As it happens, all the media that carried Smith's story are owned by the same company, Media General Inc. of Richmond. It is, perhaps, a vision of what's to come for the new...