A slow week


For me, anyway. I have a cold. So, my usual wit and rapier-sharp insightfulness is blunted. Bunch of bad stuff going on, like utility deregulation, but I can't chase them all right now. See this article: Energy Monoliths Could Return. This power company thing sounds a lot like the phone companies. "Deregulate us, and we'll compete!" Then, after we deregulate them: "Oh, the market doesn't work. Deregulate us more!" Sounds a lot like the cable companies too.

"We'll have the worst of all worlds: deregulated monopolies," said Lynn Hargis, a former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission lawyer now with the advocacy group Public Citizen.

Popular posts from this blog

New post-convention poll Results look good to me. Now, we have to keep them coming. Further down in the article, there is discussion of how Kerry is gaining ground as a person who understands the needs of people, and a person of character. Key problem is going to be keeping these issues in front of voters, when the Kerry campaign will have a finite amount of cash to campaign on. Bush won't have a finite amount until the Republican convention at the end of August. Other people are going to have to step up and start hammering the Bush administration. Kerry Leads Bush in Post-Convention Poll (washingtonpost.com) : The new poll shows Kerry now claims the support of 50 percent of all registered voters, compared with 44 percent for Bush, with independent candidate Ralph Nader at 2 percent. On the eve of the convention, Bush led Kerry 48 percent to 46 percent. Among those most likely to vote, the race is tighter: Kerry holds a 2-point advantage over Bush in the current po...
Read more
Sometimes headlines just write themselves Like this one from the Washington Post today: Ex-FEMA Head Starts Disaster Planning Firm Michael Brown certainly has shown he can plan a disaster. Look at how awful Hurricane Katrina was. For preventing or fixing things afterwards, he's not so good.
Read more
Reading List It is a good thing to be married to a librarian. Our local system has a web-accessable catalog where I can put a book on hold. Depending on how many people are waiting for the book, in a few days to a few months, my wife comes home with the book I've requested. I was reading "A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market" by John Allen Paulos. It is the kind of book that makes mathematics of investing accessable to non-mathematical types (and some of us mathematical folks as well), even as he tells the story of his failed love affair with Worldcom stock. Of course, I set this aside as soon as I got in "Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth" by Joe Conason. This book takes all of the distortions of the right-wing media, the Bush-Cheney administration, and the Republican "conventional wisdom", and proceeds to refute them, citing facts chapter and verse. I think this book is great. But I've g...
Read more