Duck Season

The rest of the story... Margarine vs. Butter in German history.

(Link via Dave Barry)

A high school valedictorian fails to graduate because she can't pass the math portion of the exit exam. She took the test five times.

Sports Guy's top 12 fantasy players:

12. Daunte Culpepper
11. Fred Taylor
10. Shaun Alexander
9. Marvin Harrison
8. Michael Vick
7. Travis Henry
6. Priest Holmes
5. Marshall Faulk
4. Deuce McAllister
3. Clinton Portis
2. Ricky Williams
1. LaDainian Tomlinson

How on Earth did Fred Taylor make the list?

Now we know who to blame for the blackout.

Slate on "sports' new arbiter of cool", John Madden:

In hindsight, sports and video games seem destined for a peanut-butter- and-chocolate-style fusion. Both are thought of mostly as the domains of adolescent males, but over time they've become more and more a part of mainstream culture. Both are associated with male camaraderie and competition. (You can even throw in a third element of youthful manhood: One year in the 1990s, 5,000 soldiers in Bosnia signed up for a Madden tourney.) And both often play the role that one EA vice president conceded to Brandweek: "We're sort of a direct competitor to girlfriends."

CNN presents the Top 10 Iraqi suggestions for keeping cool in New York. My two favorite:

#5 Check for bitter-enders

"They should go to the power stations and see what the problem is," suggested Ahmed Abdul Hussein, 21. "Maybe there are followers of Saddam Hussein who are sabotaging their power stations. That's what happens here."

#2. Use foul language

"When the power goes out, I curse everybody," said Emad Helawi, a 63-year-old accountant. "I curse God. I curse Saddam Hussein. And I curse the Americans."

The Corner links to this story in the Washington Post about the Democratic presidential candidates campaigning in Iowa. The only one missing was Joe Lieberman, who was in California. Which led to this thought: why doesn't one of the candidates smarten up and abandon Iowa?

Consider the last election: Al Gore and George Bush were the favorites early. Gore had only one competitor, Bill Bradley, while there were more than a dozen candidates vying for the Republican nomination. Bradley chose to spend major resources in Iowa and changed his position on ethanol subsidies, hoping that an upset of Gore there will propel him to a win in New Hampshire. Unfortunately for Bradley, he couldn't match the Gore team's organization in Iowa, and he had no momentum going into New Hampshire after a lost. After Iowa, that race was essentially over.

Meanwhile, John McCain ignored Iowa completely. At the time, he was still polling in the low single digits. In a candidate forum in Iowa, McCain told the crowd that he was against ethanol subsidies and that he wasn't going to change his vote just to win Iowa. While he didn't win any votes for Iowa, that certainly made him stood out to the rest of the country. McCain concentrated on New Hampshire, and pulled off the upset. While he went on to lose South Carolina two weeks later, that wasn't because of his lost in Iowa.

Because of how liberal Iowa Democrats are, abandoning Iowa probably works best for a moderate candidate who has no chance of finishing top 3 anyway. Dick Gephardt is an exception because of his history in Iowa, so that leaves John Edwards and Lieberman. Hopefully one of them will come out against ethanol subsidies and employ this strategy.

UPDATE Grrrrrrr ... I see that Kevin Drum and his commenters already made all the points I made ...

Pentagon seeks to reduce the pay of U.S. soldiers currently serving in Iraq. Of course, they're losing pay in the sense that rescinding an not yet implemented Bush tax cut is considered a tax increase:

Unless Congress and President Bush take quick action when Congress returns after Labor Day, the uniformed Americans in Iraq and the 9,000 in Afghanistan will lose a pay increase approved last April of $75 a month in "imminent danger pay" and $150 a month in "family separation allowances."

The Defense Department supports the cuts, saying its budget can't sustain the higher payments amid a host of other priorities. But the proposed cuts have stirred anger among military families and veterans' groups and even prompted an editorial attack in the Army Times, a weekly newspaper for military personnel and their families that is seldom so outspoken.

Congress made the April pay increases retroactive to Oct. 1, 2002, but they are set to expire when the federal fiscal year ends Sept. 30 unless Congress votes to keep them as part of its annual defense appropriations legislation.

(Link via OpinionJournal 'Best of the Web' e-mail)

There was no blogging on my part last night due to the Blackout, I just couldn't get myself away from the television. Who else loves watching CNN and FNC for the enjoyment of examinig how news reporters cover the news? "Will there be a national news broadcast from the Big 3?" was as gripping as "how many people are stuck in the subway?".

Somehow there were newspapers in the effected areas this morning:

The Toronto Globe and Mail was conducting its front-page story meeting when the power went out.

"We decided what the front page story would be," said Edward Greenspon, editor in chief.

The newspaper prints at six plants across Canada, and only the one in Toronto went out. The paper's normal five sections were to be reduced to two, totaling 28 pages, Greenspon said.

You can call me Mannix: CNN outdid FNC last night in blackout coverage. FNC was hampered with presenting as much information about how this could/couldn't relate to terrorism as possible, and it lost points for having Greta Van Susteren as their anchor. How does she talk with her mouth wired shut?

CNN tossed the story around a lot more, it had Aaron Brown, Paula Zaun and Wolf Blitzer all working different angles. Wolf Blitzer, who I normally don't care for, had a wonderful performance being the 'man on the street.' His various interviews brought a wonderful human angle to the viewers, and Wolf earned some laughs when, after discovering that his subject was a photographer in the middle of a fashion shoot he questioned, "well what happened to the models, are they alright?"

From the OpinionJournal.com's "Best of the Web Today - August 14, 2003" e-mail:

Some People Call Him Maurice
http://www.freep.com/news/latestnews/pm15862_20030813.htm

The antismoking fanatics have really gotten out of hand up there in Michigan, we thought when we read this headline in the Detroit Free Press: "Suspension Over, Smoker Reinstated at MSU." Is Michigan State really suspending students just for smoking? Maybe not. It turns out the headline refers to MSU quarterback Jeff Smoker, who is returning to the team just in time for the start of football season.

Then again, the article says Smoker was suspended for "substance abuse," and it doesn't say what substance, so it's possible Smoker is a smoker, or even a midnight toker.

I've figured it all out. The power thing is payback for this.

(Link via Dave Barry)

Preseason football is good for reminding fans that, regardless of how bad the starters are in two months when their team is 2-6, the backups on the teams are probably even worse. In the Raiders-Niners game going on now, backup o-linemen are moving before the snap, receivers are dropping balls left and right, Marquis Tuiasosopo, Rich Gannon's backup, doesn't seem to know how to protect the football, and Ken Dorsey doesn't know when to run out of bounds. Justin Fargas does look fast, though he seems a bit shrimpy.

Josh Chafetz is unhappy with this Washington Post poll showing that support for gay marriage has dropped 10% since May. But he finds hope (or seems to, anyway) in a CBS poll showing that the younger one is, the more likely one is to support gay marriage. I'm not sure that's good news for gay marriage proponents, for two reasons.

One, it's not certain that the numbers will carry over with time. While 18-29 year olds do favor gay marriage 61% to 35%, according to the CBS poll, that doesn't mean that twenty years from now, 38-49 year olds will favor gay marriage by the same margin. People do tend to become more conservative as they get older, and it wouldn't be a surprise if many of those 18-29 year olds switch sides on this issue in twenty years.

Two, while a gay marriage proponent can look at the numbers and feel optimism in the future, it almost certainly mean that they will be on the losing side right now. The Post poll shows that 58% of the public oppose civil unions for gays, so the percentage opposing gay marriage is probably even higher. The demographics also come into play too, and it's bad news short term. Since voter participation correlates with age, and older people are more likely to oppose gay marriage, that means that voters oppose gay marriage more than the polls reflect. If a poll shows 60% opposition, opposition by voters is probably 65 or even 70%.

With the level of opposition this high, few politicians who favor gay marriage will find it a winning issue. Those on the other side, on the other hand, can oppose gay marriage safely without losing votes.

POSTSCRIPT I just noticed that all the polls on gay marriage shown at pollingreport.com asks adults, not voters or likely voters. This is more bad news for gay marriage, since voters tend to be more conservative than the adult population.

The pie throwing people in San Francisco didn't find Ralph Nader getting hit with a pie funny, according to the LA Times:

"I do want to stress that anyone with a pie and a vision of a better world can deliver just desserts," said Agent a la Mode. "But in the espirit de pie of the Biotic Baking Brigade, [Nader] is not a worthy target. He's not deserving of a pie...This is one of the first times in recent history that I've actually cringed and said, 'Oh my God.'"

Eric Lindholm contrasts Terry McAuliffe's statement in July that there will be no Democrats on the recall ballot with the news that there are in fact 50 Democrats on the ballot. The implication is that McAuliffe failed miserably. But as stated here on this blog, McAuliffe's statement was part of a grand strategy to get exactly one major Democrat on the ballot. And lo and behold, Cruz Busatamente is the only major Democrat on the ballot! So again, Terry McAuliffe is a genius.

A debate is scheduled for September 17. Any candidate who polls 10% in at least one of the three major polls before 9/5 will be invited (with a minimum of six candidates), and Grey Davis will have a taped message played during the debate. Daniel Weintraub also reports that the debate questions will be published in advance, which he thinks is a good idea:

First, in a traditional debate, the candidates have a pretty good idea anyway of what questions they will be asked. They prep for them endlessly with their staff and often provide canned responses that are safe and unenlightening. One reason they get away with that, ironically, is the pretense by all involved that the questions are actually a surprise and the answers spontaneous. Thus, the expectations for their responses are fairly low. If the candidates knew what questions were coming, and we knew they knew, voters might actually expect them to answer with a little more substance. That’s what competitive debaters do in real debates, by the way.

But there’s more. The idea of a political debate isn’t just to have the candidates sparring among themselves. It’s to have voters watch, be interested and talk about it. If the questions were widely circulated say, a week ahead of time, on television, in the newspapers, and on the Internet, it’s even possible that some of the queries could work their way into conversations people are having about the race, in person and on the web. People might talk about how they expect this or that candidate to answer, and what kind of answer they would be looking for. With any luck, an enterprising newspaper might publish background stories related to the questions to help novices better understand the topic. Or maybe the web might generate such material.

While trying to discuss the merits of this Jonah quote "But spare me this haughty and feigned naïveté. If you can't tell the difference between a gay marriage and an interracial one you are either a fool or a liar or quite possibly both." I had the following IM conversation with my friend Diana:

Nick: do you think someone's sexual orientation says more about them than their hair color?
Diana: yeah
Nick: bigot
Nick: how?
Diana: well it depends on what you mean by hair color
Diana: do you mean chosen hair color or natural?
Diana: Because obviously someone who has the audacity to dye her hair like electric blue probably prides herself on being original and bold and stuff
Diana: hair color changes so often it's not a good indicator of personality

(thanks to the Gphiles quote box for the inspiration)

Politician sues New York City for opening a high school exclusively for gays:

The lawsuit charges that the school violates the Education Department's own rules against educating students based on their sexual orientation. It also alleges a gay school robs money from other schools and earmarks it for a special class of students, amounting to an illegal form of segregation.

Kramer: Next thing you know, you'll want them to have their own schools!
Jerry: They do have their own schools!

They were talking about dentists, not gays, though.

(Via How Appealing).

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick understands that "Big Food" suits are junk, and here's why:

For one thing, people must eat to live, whereas no one needs to smoke. For another, there was compelling evidence that the tobacco companies knowingly torqued up the addictive content in their product and systematically lied about the dangers, whereas there is little evidence that Big Food did the same.

But aren't foods addicting?

Oh, but there are the wackier legal theories: Some anti-Big-Foodists contend not only that fast food is indeed addictive, like cigarettes, but that their purveyors similarly manipulate the ingredients to make them more so. Dr. Neal Barnard, a respected nutritionist, has recently argued that cheese contains a protein that breaks down into morphinelike compounds ("Gimme 30 cc's of gouda, stat") and other opiates that can create addictions.

That's the biggest nonsense science of them all. Let me tell you about the house I grew up in. In my house we were never taken to McDonalds, we were never allowed to eat that trash, yet I ate cheese all the time as a kid. Anyone remember those pre-packaged processed cheese rolls in the shape of a hot dog where you'd pull the strings of cheese off it and eat it? Ate those by the dozen when I was a kid, but i've haven't had an urge to eat one in ten years, and I definitely don't recall going through withdrawal.

Not being a scientist I can't refute Dr. Barnard's findings on their merits, nor do I believe my experiences actually form a reasonable argument proving his science false (although common sense is the basis for reasonable objection), but I do understand that "morphinelike" isn't exactly "just like morphine."

Is food addictive? I'm sure that on some levels it is. We all have favorite meals, and I wouldn't doubt that these are chosen on some subconscious level based upon the chemical gratification received from these foods. We all also have "comfort foods", where we consume to replace/relieve outside stresses. These certainly sound like the actions of an addict, but to call them addicting behavoirs would be to pervert our whole understanding of individual choice.

What has been said above for food which can't be said about my favorite television shows? After a particularly hard day, if my muscles are tense and my nerves are all frazzled, I undoubtedly look forward to catching a good Simpsons episode for all the reasons attributed to food above. Should Matt Groening be responsible for my doctor's bills?

And now we hit the most despicable part of these suits, the arrogant elitism:

There is something creepily paternalistic in the arguments put forth by the food nannies. They tend to say that while they are smart enough to read labels or look up fat contents on the Wendy's Web site, the poor, disadvantaged single mommies are not that sophisticated. One would hope that even the poorest single mom knows that eating McNuggets every day is unhealthy. And—since obesity doesn't happen in a day— one would hope that even the most unsophisticated parent would cut back on the KFC if her child started to split her Wranglers.

So here's a stupid question, how come I've never actually met anyone who was frothing at the mouth for a McFish sandwich? The "they're out there, but i'm not one of them" argument is particularly facetious. If you or I do not know anyone who's addicted to McDonalds, and we're not ourselves addicted, where are all these people? While this isn't sufficient disproof of their existence, I does raise considerable doubt in my mind because of my special relationship with the "target" group of "Big Food" advertising.

I'm in my early twenties and overweight, some of my friends are overweight, but we all grew up watching lots of television. We're the last gasp of the MTV generation, people who can remember what the "M" stood for, and who remember Nickelodeon didn't have more cable channels than Jesus. When we were kids we saw shows with just the same disgusting amounts of commercials as todays kids watch, yet we're not afflicted? My experiences are not sufficient to disprove science, but they do reinforce experience with scientific facts. I know smokers, you can see how antsy they get when they haven't had a ciggarette even though every last one of them knows they're just inhaling cancer. That's addiction. I've drank alcohol. It's very easy to understand how that can be addicting. But i've also known people who love to eat who are very healthy, and people who don't like to eat who're nevertheless overweight. None of them have ever displayed a chemical need for a BigMac.

Please, let the insanity stop here:

But we may want to keep an eye on the John Banzhafs of the world, who have observed that their next target may well be "Big Milk"—full of saturated fats and cholesterol and not nearly as healthy as those moustache commercials would suggest.

TalkLeft links to this news story:

Films and television shows featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger and other celebrity candidates in California's gubernatorial recall election will likely not be broadcast in the state for the next few months so that stations can avoid having to give rival candidates equal time.

The airing of "Total Recall" or another Schwarzenegger film, or a repeat of a "Diff'rent Strokes" episode with Gary Coleman on broadcast television in California would trigger the Federal Communications Commission's equal time provision, allowing other candidates to demand the same amount of time.

Cable channels are not covered by the FCC rule, which in the past kept reruns of "Death Valley Days" off the air while Ronald Reagan ran for president. A repeat of a "Saturday Night Live" episode featuring Don Novello, aka Father Guido Sarducci, on cable, for instance, would not trigger the provision.

The New Republic really likes Joe Lieberman, who has scored 4 straight 'A's in their primary blog:

Liebererman[sic] is just as critical of the Bush administration's post-war planning, but his criticism carries a lot more weight, considering that he's already made clear that he supported the war. As Lieberman said to Kerry last night, "It was time for decisiveness, which is what people expect in their president, not uncertainty and ambivalence." That line may not win Lieberman many votes, but it's straightforward and honest, which is more than you can say about some Democratic posturing on Iraq.

One of my friends like to joke that there are two Joe Liebermans, one who went with his beliefs in the Senate and another who pandered to the Left during the 2000 campaign. Looks as if the old Joe Lieberman is back, at least for now.

This post at Winds of Change is well worth a read, though it's way above my head for me to comment.

Well, not offensive to blondes, anyway ...

Matthew Yglesias writes:

I understand that a candidate can't very well write off rural America and expect to win, especially considering the importance of the Iowa primary, but if I'm not mistaken Dean's critique of Bush's agricultural policy is that we don't subsidize rural America enough. This is...well...not something that I'm going to be supporting. John Kerry seems a bit better but he, like everyone else in American politics, is drinking the ethanol-flavored Kool-Aid, thus making the air less clean at enormous cost to the taxpayer.

As much as I disagree with John McCain for campaign finance reform, I voted for him in the 2000 primaries because he was the only candidate to oppose ethanol subsidies. Contrast this with Bill Bradley, who was against ethanol subsidies for his whole Senate career, then swiftly changed his position while running for president because ethanol subsidies are "bad for New Jersey, but good for America". Looks as if we have too many Bill Bradleys and not enough John McCains this election.

Eugene Volokh asks:

Criticizing people for raising taxes on the middle class is an attack "from the left"? Not a ridiculous position, I suppose, but far from an obvious one. "Left" and "right" do have some utility as labels, but they don't seem to make much sense here.

This was in response to this passage from the LA Times:

Yet Dean is as much target as model. Kerry recently attacked him from the left, complaining that Dean's call for repealing all of Bush's 2001 tax cut (which Dean wants to apply to a new drive to cover those without health insurance) would raise taxes on the middle class as well as the rich.

Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, desperately seeking a foothold in the race, last week attacked Dean from the other direction, portraying his rival as too liberal to win a general election. Lieberman echoed the arguments raised against Dean this spring by the Democratic Leadership Council, the centrist Democratic group that Lieberman used to chair.

Saying that criticism for raising taxes on the middle class is an attack "from the left" makes sense if one thinks that conservatives only want to lower taxes for the rich, and raise taxes on the poor. After all, those evil Republicans wouldn't want poor people like me to get a tax cut!

Michael Totten links to the Country Quiz. He got Canada. I got Texas.

You're Texas!

You aren't really much of your own person, but everyone around you wishes you'd go away, so you might as well be independent. You're sort of loud-mouthed and abrasive, but you do have a fair amount of power. You like big trucks, big cattle, and big oil rigs.  And sometimes you really smell. But it's not all bad, you're big enough to have some soft spots somewhere in all that redneck madness.

It's apparently also National Underwear Day.

And oh, Happy Birthday, Lisa!

Jose Chafetz at Oxblog supports Georgy but thinks Victorino Matus makes a good case for Gary Coleman. I'm not convinced. I'd still take Georgy every day of the week and twice on Sundays (so to speak).

Some noteable anagrams of Nicholas:

HAC LOINS
CLASH ION
CHAOS NIL
CASH LION
CASH LOIN
AH COL SIN
SHOAL INC
HALOS INC
LASH ICON
LASH COIN
SLAIN OCH
LOANS CHI
LAO CHINS

With anagram names like Chaos Nil, Cash Lion/Loin and Halos Inc, why haven't I cut my first record yet? Those names alone should get me work with Ja.

From the comments of a Calpundit item about Wesley Clark:

I've not read a thing about this guy's positions, but wouldn't the fact that he's never held public office be an enormous liability? Are dems here really so desperate to undo our reputation as pansies that we would throw support behind any moderately progressive military man?

Yes, yes they are.

Dennis Kusinich may be saying stupid things while guest-blogging, but at least he's saying something. Maureen Dowd today ravages the other candidates who have tried blogging:

In a lame attempt to be hip, pols are posting soggy, foggy, bloggy musings on the Internet. Inspired by Howard Dean's success in fund-raising and mobilizing on the Web, candidates are crowding into the blogosphere — spewing out canned meanderings in a genre invented by unstructured exhibitionists.

It could be amusing if the pols posted unblushing, unedited diaries of what they were really thinking, as real bloggers do. John Kerry would mutter about that hot-dog Dean stealing his New England base, and Dr. Dean would growl about that wimp Kerry aping all his Internet gimmicks. But no such luck.

The best bit is about John Kerry:

John Kerry has given more grist to critics who label him aloof and insincere by assigning staff members to write his cheesy blog. (It's like trying to prove you're a sportsman by making an aide go fishing for you.)

His spokesman, David Wade, offered this edgy report from Concord, N.H., on Aug. 8: "I'm sitting in the studio at New Hampshire NPR listening to The Exchange — they're asking John Kerry about his life, his service in Vietnam and his fight for veterans when he came home — it's something I forget about, working for him every day, taking for granted the quality of the person leading this campaign." In bold type, the blog breathlessly described a music store stop in Littleton, N.H., "where John Kerry treated press and customers to a couple of songs on the guitar!"

When the Kerry camp started the blog last week, rambunctious Dean supporters flooded the Kerry message boards with taunts. One Dean fan tallied all of Mr. Kerry's missed Senate votes this year.

Hey, I didn't know John Kerry fought in Vietnam!

Rich liberals like wind power, just not where they live and vacation. Jane Galt has comments.

Each Wednesday, we monitor tradesports.com to see what degenerate gamblers think about upcoming elections. Last week's numbers in parentheses. If you don't understand these numbers you can think of them percents (i.e. bettors think that Cruz Bustamente has a 19.1-22.0 percent chance of winning).

stock:high bid-low ask

Gray Davis to survive September: 78-96
survive December: 20-23 (50-53)
survive March: 15-19 (32-35)

Most votes in recall election *NEW*
Cruz Bustamente 19.1-22.0
Arianna Huffington 0.1-0.5
Tom McClintock 1.0-3.0
Arnold Schwarzenegger 56.0-58.0
Bill Simon 3.7-5.0
Peter Ueberroth 1.0-3.0
FIELD 0.3-3.0
RECALL FAILS 17.5-20.0

Democratic primary
Hillary Clinton 8-9
Dean 27-31 (27-32)
Edwards 4-6 (8-10)
Gephardt 6-7 (7-8)
Kerry 29-31 (28-32)
Lieberman 12-13 (12-15)
FIELD 9-11

Bush reelection 65-68 (64-67)
Bush wins Massachusetts 22-27 (22-27)

Electoral votes if every state result was rightly predicted:
Bush 397, Democrat 14, Dem. states CA 55, CT 7, HI 4, MD 10, MA 12, NJ 15, NY 31, RI 4, VT 3 (Last week same)

Do professors who cite widely discredited forgeries as proof of a global Jewish conspiracy really have anyplace in a University? Read a summary of the whole disgusting mess here.

Democratic hopeful Dennis Kucinich is guest blogging this week on Lawrence Lessig's blog. You may remember that Howard Dean previously guest blogged for Lessig. Unlike Dean who appeared to spout the same campaign drivel, Kucinich has chosen to take quesetions from the peanut galley. His second entry begins with the question "how do you propose to get your broad reforms through a divided congress?" Candidate Kucinich replies:

My nomination will set the stage for a Democratic Congress. In 1932, when president Franklin Roosevelt was nominated, he ran on a platform of broad economic reform, which excited people to come out in vote in their own enlightened self-interest. As a result, FDR led a Democratic sweep, which resulted in a pickup of 90 House seats and 13 Senate seats. This was accomplished because he represented profound change. He represented jobs, he represented rebuilding America, he represented a hope for popular control over predatory corporations. My nomination will reverse the results of the 1994 election when the Democrats were unable to regain the House and lost the Senate principally because the parties’ ties to corporate interests muted the differences between the parties and discouraged the Democratic base. My nomination will excite the Democratic base, will broaden the reach of the party, and will engage third party activists to join us in a mighty effort to reclaim our government.

Well if it's that easy, sign me up! What about his mirror reflection causes Kucinich to believe that he alone is a man destined to reshape society? As Greg from Begging to Differ rightly points out the United States is sharply divided between the left and the right, and without a unifier like the Great Depression in site (knock on wood). If there has been a unifier in last two years, Dennis Kucinich has shown that he's on the complete wrong side of the issue from the publics perspective.

There's a pretty sad fault in Kucinich's reasoning, which may be attributable to his "progressive" agenda. From what I understand, the theory of historical materialism is focused on the belief that our economic systems shape our own impressions of our economic system. In other words, why am I a serf? Well I always have been, it's the way things are. Marx knew that economic systems were the very basis of society and tended to last for hundreds of years. Yet after only a few decades after the Industrial Revolution, Marx was constantly defying his better judgement and declaring the socialist revolution to be on the horizon.

Why does Dennis Kucinich believe that his "progressive" agenda alone will be able to derail a growing conservative trend in this country? Because he *really* wants it to? For the country to retend towards the left it will require candidates who embrace Americans where they stand, not candidates who force them to concede that they're on the wrong side of history. History has shown an odd ability to outlast the desires and ego of any one man.

I was mining our Site Meter data again when I noticed that someone had found the blog with a google search for the terms nude "georgy russell". While we are not currently in possession of any cheesecake pictures of Georgy, nude or otherwise, this blog wishes the searcher luck. Georgy is a serious cutie.

UPDATE by Hei Lun Looks as if we aren't the only ones getting unexpected traffic. Begging to Differ is experiencing the same thing. Of course, if the pervs had look through Georgy's site, they would have found Mickey Kaus telling them that her website is "not a porn site". She's a real candidate! Um, yeah...

Remember the list of worst Americans as determined by right-wing bloggers? Well, Right Wing News has compiled another list from a survey of left-wing bloggers, and the results weren't much better. Bill Clinton appeared on 38.5% of the right-wingers' ballots. These are some of the people who appeared in more than 38.5% of the left-wingers' ballots: Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, and Henry Kissinger. In fact McCarthy got 72.2% from left-wingers, 20.9% more than anyone got from right wingers. Also, George Bush would have had a higer percentage than Clinton with just one more vote. The rest of the lefties' list, like the righties', are filled with assorted idiocies.

It's time to redo the running backs board again, after San Francisco Squared Sevens running backs coach Tim Lappano declared "to tell you truth, when I first saw Garrison on tape, I didn't think he had much left" in the San Francisco Chronicle. According to the story the team plans to "go with starters Garrison Hearst and Fred Beasley and then substitute the emerging Kevan Barlow liberally for Hearst, particularly early."

Why is running back by committe suddenly all the rage in the NFL?

While looking through our Site Meter data I noticed a very pleasant trend, our weblog rules on the subject of Georgy! Just check out these results:

A Google Georgy search has us ranked #4, as does a Yahoo! Search, and an AOL search.

POSTSCRIPT: I tried to delete this post, but once Blogger has something it won't let go. I wanted to delete this post because I noticed my search results prove that this blog only rules on searches for Georgy Russel. If you want to vote Georgy for Governor you need to vote for Georgy Russell. I've gone through our archives and fixed all of my typos.

Christopher Hitchens pipes in on the Pipes nomination over at Slate: "The objection to Pipes is not, in any case, strictly a political one. It is an objection to a person who confuses scholarship with propaganda and who pursues petty vendettas with scant regard for objectivity."

Luckily "progressives" doubt all media sources. From yesterday's 'OpinionJournal.com Best of the Web' e-mail:

Best of the Web Today - August 11, 2003
By JAMES TARANTO
Inventing a Quagmire
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/07/pageoneplus/corrections.html

We missed this last week, but it's so stunning that it's worth highlighting even a few days late. The corrections column of Thursday's New York Times carried the following "editor's note":

*** QUOTE ***

An article on Sunday about attacks on the American military in Iraq over the previous two days, attributed to military officials, included an erroneous account that quoted Pfc. Jose Belen of the First Armored Division. Private Belen, who is not a spokesman for the division, said that a homemade bomb exploded under a convoy on Saturday morning on the outskirts of Baghdad and killed two American soldiers and their interpreter. The American military's central command, which releases information on all American casualties in Iraq, said before the article was published that it could not confirm Private Belen's account. Later it said that no such attack had taken place and that no American soldiers were killed on Saturday.

Repeated efforts by The Times to reach Private Belen this week have been unsuccessful. The Times should not have attributed the account to "military officials," and should have reported that the command had not verified the attack.

*** END QUOTE ***

Consider that: The New York Times is acknowledging that it published a fabricated account of American casualties in Iraq. There's no reason to doubt the Times' contention that its source, as opposed to its reporter, was behind the original fabrication, but it seems fair, based on the paper's account, to say that the Times "sexed up" its reporting by promoting a single private to "military officials" (plural) and by failing to note Centcom's doubts, much less wait for confirmation before running with the story. (The original article is no longer available free on the Times Web site, but here's a later version that appeared in the Tri-Valley Herald http://www.trivalleyherald.com/Stories/0,1413,86%7E10669%7E1549667,00.html of Pleasanton, Calif.)

The Times, of course, used its news pages as well as its editorials to crusade against the liberation of Iraq, and it's hard not to interpret this latest foul-up as reflecting an unhealthy eagerness to believe Iraq is a quagmire producing large numbers of casualties. Anyway, remember this the next time some Times editorial or op-ed columnist raises troubling questions about the Bush administration's credibility.

Also worth noting from OpinionJournal: Peter Beinart says the Dean candidacy is the fruit of seeds planted by the first two years of the Clinton Administration (link) while the Daily Telegraph reports that the heads of seven major tribes in Fallujah have "agreed to work with American troops to stamp out the looting as well as the rocket and grenade attacks, that have made Fallujah a byword for instability and danger." (link)

Imagine that, peace in Iraq.

The Big Three networks are already talking about the focus of their programming for the 2^nd anniversary of the 9-11 attacks:

ABC News' Peter Jennings seemed to sum up all of the networks' attitudes when he said at one point during the Sept. 11 coverage last year: "This is not, it seems to me, the moment to have a policy debate."

Not this year.

ABC is brandishing its plans to spend five days that week on a series of reports across most of its news vehicles -- on television, radio and the Internet -- that will examine, in effect, if the war on terrorism is working. All of ABC News' shows will ask aggressive questions about al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden and whether the $20 billion spent on security was worth it.

****

But CBS News senior vp news operations Marcy McGinnis conceded that the media might have hesitated at a time when patriotic fervor was sweeping the country. [emphasis added]

"It's been swinging like a pendulum back and forth," she said. "The press, they questioned authority a little bit less than they normally would after 9/ 11. The mood of the country was such, it was a very different time. The mood of the country was very much 100% rally around the president, and I think the media probably wasn't as tough as they normally are."

But in the past few months, she said, "It went the other way after the war was over. There were no weapons of mass destruction and no connection between al-Qaida and (Saddam) Hussein."

The stupidity of these statements defy the need for comment. For now.

The U.S. Treasury department is threatening to fine Human Shields upwards of $10,000.00 a piece:

"I will not contribute any money to the continual buildup of America's weapons of mass destruction, which, as far as I know, far exceed the weapons of all other nations combined, and, in fact, have escalated the buildup of weapons everywhere." [said Faith Fippinger, a 62 year-old retired school teacher/H.S. said on CNN]

Faced with a new round of media inquiries, Tom Andrews, national director of the antiwar group Win Without War, quipped, "Let things roll."

Such sanctions are fairly routine, especially for those doing business with Cuba, Griffin said. The New York Yankees settled a $75,000 fine with Treasury this spring for allegedly violating sanctions on Cuba. Playboy Enterprises Inc. paid $27,500 for Cuba sanctions charges. Caterpillar Inc. paid $18,000 for similar charges, according to documents posted on the Treasury Department's Web site. No individuals are listed on the Web site to protect their privacy, Griffin said.

UPDATE: Yes, I forgot to include my sourece. The above is a direct quote of a story in the Washington Post which can be found here.

What an asshole.

Ralph Nader says that if he were president 9/11 would never have happened:

He claims that amid all the big decisions new presidents have to make after inauguration, he would have ordered cockpit doors to be hardened against attack. He says an old report warning about how easy it is to get in the cockpit still sticks with him. What's more, he would have wiped out Osama bin Laden and his gang without a shot being fired. How? Bribe Osama's friends to hand him over.

I'm glad that at least one of us at this blog didn't vote for him last time.

(Via A Small Victory)

Good news for the Georgy Russell for Governor campaign: Those with last names beginning with the letter 'R' will appear at the top of the ballot.

Now we know why the Cincinnati football team has been so bad for so long.

Finally took the time to find all the relevant links. Previous post here.

Almost all scientists acknowledge that the earth has been getting warmer recently. But for global warming to be a problem about which something should be done, all of the following must be true:

1. The earth has been consistently getting warmer, not just recently.
2. The source of this warmth is human activity.
3. The warmth comes from a greenhouse effect.
4. Global warming is harmful overall.
5. Humans can prevent global warming by changing their behavior.

Now some of these points are in dispute. First, a recent study shows that the earth was warmer than it is now in the Middle Ages:

Claims that man-made pollution is causing "unprecedented" global warming have been seriously undermined by new research which shows that the Earth was warmer during the Middle Ages.

***

This announcement followed research published in 1998, when scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia declared that the 1990s had been hotter than any other period for 1,000 years.

Such claims have now been sharply contradicted by the most comprehensive study yet of global temperature over the past 1,000 years. A review of more than 240 scientific studies has shown that today's temperatures are neither the warmest over the past millennium, nor are they producing the most extreme weather - in stark contrast to the claims of the environmentalists.

***

The findings prove that the world experienced a Medieval Warm Period between the ninth and 14th centuries with global temperatures significantly higher even than today.

They also confirm claims that a Little Ice Age set in around 1300, during which the world cooled dramatically. Since 1900, the world has begun to warm up again - but has still to reach the balmy temperatures of the Middle Ages.

The timing of the end of the Little Ice Age is especially significant, as it implies that the records used by climate scientists date from a time when the Earth was relatively cold, thereby exaggerating the significance of today's temperature rise.

According to the researchers, the evidence confirms suspicions that today's "unprecedented" temperatures are simply the result of examining temperature change over too short a period of time. (Via Robert Musil)

And it turns out that some of the warming of the earth is caused by the sun:

Humans may be shouldering too much of the blame for global warming, according to a new look at data from six sun-gazing satellites. They suggest that Planet Earth has been drenched in a bath of solar radiation that has been intensifying over the past 24 years--an increase of about 0.05 percent each decade. If that trend began early last century, it could account for a significant component of the climatic warm-up that is typically attributed to human-made greenhouse gases, says Richard C. Willson of Columbia University's Center for Climate Systems Research in Coronado, Calif. Willson concedes that the climate's sensitivity to such subtle solar changes is still poorly understood, but the evidence merits keeping a close eye on both the sun and humans to better gauge their relative influences on global climate. "In 100 years I think we'll find the sun is in control," he says. His team's report appears in the March 4 Geophysical Research Letters. (Via Zonitics)

This is supported by the fact that Mars is getting warmer too, and I'm quite sure humans don't have anything to do with that:

The March 2003 Astronomy has an article by Peter Thomas titled, "Mysteries of the Martian Poles." Among the other interesting aspects of the article is the repeated mention that the polar ice caps "are receding at rates up to 15 feet (4 meters) a year."

Lately, high temperatures in Europe is taken as a sign of global warming. Bjorn Lomborg, author of the Skeptical Environmentalist, in an op-ed today in the Telegraph, says not so fast:

... it is simply not correct to claim that global warming is the primary explanation of the kind of heatwave we are now experiencing. The statistics show that global warming has not, in fact, increased the number of exceptionally hot periods. It has only decreased the number of exceptionally cold ones. The US, northern and central Europe, China, Australia and New Zealand have all experienced fewer frost days, whereas only Australia and New Zealand have seen their maximum temperatures increase. For the US, there is no trend in the maximum temperatures - and in China they have actually been declining.

Having misidentified the primary cause of the heatwave as global warming, we then tend to make another mistake: we assume that as the weather gets warmer, we will get hotter and more people eventually will die in heatwaves. But, in fact, a global temperature increase does not mean that everything just becomes warmer; it will generally raise minimum temperatures much more than maximum temperatures.

***

If the goal is to reduce our vulnerability to extreme weather, limiting carbon emissions is certainly not the most cost-effective way.

In the Kyoto Protocol, industrialised countries have agreed to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 30 per cent by 2010. This will be very expensive and will only have a negligible effect. Estimates from all macro-economic models show a global cost of $150 billion-$350 billion every year. At the same time, the effect on extreme weather will be marginal: the climate models show that Kyoto will merely postpone the temperature rise by six years from 2100 to 2106. (Via The Corner)

We know that predictions for the temperature of the earth based on the greenhouse effect have always been wrong. An adjustment to the greenhouse effect theory also takes into account the role of aerosols of smoke. According to this revision, the reason why predictions about temperature based on the greenhouse effect are wrong is that aerosols masks the effects of the greenhouse effect:

Smoke is clouding our view of global warming, protecting the planet from perhaps three-quarters of the greenhouse effect. That might sound like good news, but experts say that as the cover diminishes in coming decades, we are in for a dramatic escalation of warming that could be two or even three times as great as official best guesses.

***

IPCC scientists have suspected for a decade that aerosols of smoke and other particles from burning rainforest, crop waste and fossil fuels are blocking sunlight and counteracting the warming effect of carbon dioxide emissions. Until now, they reckoned that aerosols reduced greenhouse warming by perhaps a quarter, cutting increases by 0.2 °C. So the 0.6 °C of warming over the past century would have been 0.8 °C without aerosols.

But the Berlin workshop concluded that the real figure is even higher - aerosols may have reduced global warming by as much as three-quarters, cutting increases by 1.8 °C. If so, the good news is that aerosols have prevented the world getting almost two degrees warmer than it is now. But the bad news is that the climate system is much more sensitive to greenhouse gases than previously guessed.

Sounds like bad new, but Iain Murray (from the Volokh link above) has another perspective:

The original short Perspectives piece in Science magazine the workshop was based on had said that this might mean either that the earth’s temperature is more naturally variable than thought or that the climate is more sensitive to forcing than thought. The Berlin workshop settled on the latter, and produced the prediction that, when sulfate aerosol production wanes, the earth might warm between 7-10° C. based on the IPCC’s worst-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is based on the improbable idea that the entire world will raise itself to the economic output levels of the United States.

New Scientist admits that the calculations on which these dire predictions were “back-of-the-envelope” figures. Despite this extreme uncertainty, Will Steffen of the Swedish Academy of Sciences was quoted as saying that “the message for policy makers is clear: ‘We need to get on top of the greenhouse gas emissions problem sooner rather than later.’”

This is a perfect illustration of the way the greenhouse theory is manipulated. The base theory suggests warming that isn't happening to the extent it should. Science then suggests something else. A new theory is produced, or an old one updated, to make the new data fit with the base theory. Worst-case scenarios are dreamed up and promulgated, normally worse than before. Action is then demanded now from policy-makers to avert the worst-case scenario.

All this seems to fit Thomas Kuhn's idea of paradigms in science. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn argues that science advances not by a slow addition of facts and discoveries, but by a rise and decline of overarching paradigms. Scientists abide by a paradigm in a field of science, and work to solve the minor problems, the facts that do not fit in with the paradigm. Usually scientists solve these problems by making slight adjustments and additions to the paradigm, but other problems go unsolved, and they accumulate. Eventually, scientists acknowledge that the existing paradigm has major problems, and the field of science is in crisis, until someone proposes a new paradigm, a new way to organize known facts within a new theory. If other scientists find that the new paradigm is able to solve the problems left unsolved by the old paradigm, they will become adherents of the new paradigm.

Global warming by greenhouse effect seem to be in the stage where unsolved problems keep cropping up. Perhaps scientists who adhere to this theory will find the solution to these problems and show the theory conclusively to be correct, but right now, we just do not know.

POSTSCRIPT The following is purely anecdotal, so I decided not to put it in the main post, but it is too funny not to be included. The European Union missed it target for greenhouse emissions last winter. The reason--it was too cold:

European Union greenhouse gas emissions rose for the second year running in 2001, the European Environment Agency said Tuesday in its annual report on the bloc's strategy to curb global warming.

Ten of the EU's 15 states overshot national targets, increasing total emissions by 1 percent in the last year for which data is available.

***

The EEA says the latest increase is due to a cold winter in many EU countries, higher emissions from the transport sector and greater use of fossil fuels in electricity production. (Via Clayton Cramer)

Steven Denbeste has a quite lengthy account of the effect anti-americanism has had on french tourism.

Having spent a few days in Paris back in June I have to say that Steve's article sort of rang true with me. While I never felt in any particular peril, only one time was I ever singled out as an American, and that was by a street vendor trying to sell me trash, Paris never felt like a particular warm or inviting place. No one in a restaurant ever smiled, and I had a really unpleasant experience with a lady at a city zoo who really didn't want to accept my 20 Euro bill for admission (smaller bills seem to be quite rare in Euro countries, she gave me what amounted to a wealth of change in 0.20 Euro coins). Let's not even talk about the cafe I ate dinner one night that wanted 9 Euro for a milkshake.

For my money London was a far better place to visit. I hope my fellow countrymen take their vacation money to the UK to thank Tony Blair for his support.

(Link via Viking Pundit)

From Seinfeld, Keith Hernandez has to be the greatest celebrity appearance on a TV show of all time:

Hernandez: Elaine, you don't know the first thing about first base.
Elaine: I know about getting to first base, and I know you'll never be there.
H: The way I see it, I've already been there, and I plan on rounding second base by 11:30 tonight.
E: I'd watch the third base coach if I were you, because he's not waving you in.

Since many people think that cell phones cause too many traffic accidents and that the government should do something about it, such as making cell phone companies give away headsets for free, I think we should also do something about some of the other causes that lead to more accidents than cell phones.

Car radios are causing way too many traffic accidents. If we don't ban car radios, we should at least make a law requiring radio makers to give radio headsets that allow drivers to change the dial through voice recognition away for free, so they won't get distracted.

Eating by drivers also causes many traffic accidents. Eating in cars should be banned too, or at least food companies should hire people to feed drivers while they are driving, so they won't get distracted.

Passengers also cause many traffic accidents by talking to the driver. Passengers should be banned too, or at least car companies should be hire people to muzzle passengers from talking to the driver, so drivers won't get distracted.

S.W.A.T. S.T.I.N.K.S. according to Slate's David Edelstein. It does seem to have a redeeming character though:

This is not your father's SWAT team—it's not even your gay uncle's SWAT team. But its values are comparable. S.W.A.T. is a peculiar, hugely commercial mixture of red-meat action and rainbow coalition. This movie quite nakedly wants to appeal to male, female, urban, rural, right, and left. It makes jokes about the loss of civil liberties, but it's only the criminals who get holes blown in them, and the film has a villain that everyone can hate: the French. Yes, the bad guy is an irritating French drug dealer played by Olivier Martinez, whom you might remember as the irritating French book dealer that all the men in the audience wanted to kill in Unfaithful (2002). He's too French, he's too pretty, and he's screwing our women. That he's a terrible actor seems, in context, a misdemeanor.

Three of the main arguments of downloaders are 1) they wouldn't have bought the CD if they hadn't download it, 2) it's not really stealing since there's no physical object taken, and 3) all the money goes to the big, bad, evil record companies. All three of these arguments are fatuous.

I can conclude from personal experience alone that the first argument doesn't fly. There are a lot of CDs I wouldn't have bought if I had been able to listen to it entirely before buying, and I'm sure that every person I know have heaps of unlistened-to CDs in their collection too. Now one might be thinking, "so I'm supposed to pay for something I don't like, and that's a good thing?" But this is true of everything else one buys. I paid $8.19 for a chicken sandwich on soggy bread and a small ice tea yesterday, and I know it wasn't worth the money. The difference is, people don't start stealing sandwiches and justifying it because they don't know whether the sandwich is good before eating it.

Now one might say in response, "when I steal a chicken sandwich, the sandwich shop is missing a chicken sandwich, but when I download a CD, the record store doesn't have a CD missing." This is wrong by imagining this simple scenario: everyone is a downloader, and no one buys any CDs. In this scenario, the record store, the artist, record company, etc., make 0% of the profit they would have made if no one downloaded. Also, if no one downloaded, all the parties obviously would make 100% of the profit. But it cannot be the case that the parties would still make 100% of the profit if some people download and others don't. The relationship between number of downloaders and profits is very complex, but it probably is linear with a downward slope. In other words, the more downloaders there are, the less the profits made by the parties. Even though they may not have lost money from shrink, they still made less money than they otherwise would have.

In response to that, one might say "the money all go to the record companies, boo hoo for them if they lose money." But of course, this isn't true either. A recent study shows that for every CD sold, the record company makes a profit of 19 cents:

Professor Fisher estimates that for a typical $18 compact disc, about $7 goes to the retail store that sold you the disc; $3.75 goes back to the artists, performers, and composers; $1.50 goes into manufacturing the disc; $1.50 goes into the distribution of the disk from the manufacturer to the retailer; $1.50 pays for marketing the disc; $2.50 pays for the record company's overhead, and a whopping 19 cents is record company profit.

(draft os study in .pdf here)

The real reason for downloading is that it's free and one probably won't get caught. But of course that doesn't sound high-minded enough to be a legitimate argument.

Reading this post from Michele Catalano reminds me of one of the reasons why I'm in favor of prosecuting downloaders: many of them have no respect for private property. It's not that they don't think they're stealing, or that they really wouldn't have bought the album if they had not downloaded it. My problem with them is that they know they're stealing, and they don't care.

Many of these people want the record companies to go out of business through their activities. This piece from several weeks ago is representative. The writer thinks that he has come up with a new and legal way to fileshare that will survive the courts. Also, if his "Snapster" plan is indeed legal and implemented, all the record companies would go bankrupt. Which, of course, is exactly what he wants:

But what about the poor record companies and their owners?

To paraphrase Marie Antoinette, if they have no sales, let them buy stock. There is nothing that would keep owners of record company shares from selling those shares and replacing them with Snapster shares. The earlier they do so the more they would benefit both because they'd be selling before the record company shares went completely in the tank, and they'd be buying before Snapster shares had fully appreciated. It is one thing to maintain the status quo and another to recognize the inevitability of change and benefit from it.

Investors in companies that manufactured horse drawn carriages could have tried to make automobiles illegal or they could have sold their carriage shares and bought car shares. Which makes more sense? There is more money to be made by embracing this future than by fighting it.

Completely missing from his analogy was the part where the auto companies investors stole the horses from the carriages.

Whether it's a good strategy for the RIAA to target individual downloaders, I don't know, but I sure won't have any sympathy for those who got caught.

... but not from insanity:

A government-access television station wasn't allowed to tape a City Council discussion of the city's budget crisis Wednesday because a councilwoman said she didn't want the group to be shown eating the cinnamon rolls she brought to the meeting.

Council President Elbra Wedgeworth confirmed that Councilwoman Jeanne Faatz requested on Saturday that Channel 8 not broadcast the meeting.

"It's not a big deal because the meetings still go on; they're still public," Wedgeworth said. "We rarely do something like this. It was a one-time request."

(From Is That Legal?).

I'm thinking of quitting the Avengers.

Summer season is convention season in the comic book world, and today Comic Book Resources has an interview with the recently announced new scribe of Avengers, Chuck Austen. Here are a few utterly depressing quotes from their interview:

For a team called the Avengers, some fans have lamented the fact that the team doesn't do much, well, avenging.

"Oh, yeah [there'll be some avenging]," reveals Austen. "There will be some changes and tension in how jobs are handled in the post 9-11, post Gulf War II world. Are we proactive or reactive? Do we avenge, or do we strike before the need to avenge?"

****

The Avengers are loved by the world, mostly. In my first arc, we find that Captain American is not so loved outside the US.

Chuck spent part of the interview praising 'The Ultimates', a quasi-Avengers revamp set in a different universe where writer Mark Millar gets to explore such fun stories as Captain America being a tool of the american military, Hank Pym having a nervous breakdown and attempting to kill his wife ('The Wasp') with bug spray, and Thor having a snooty anti-war/European alter ego. Chuck also praised the current scribe Geoff Johns, who, with July's really late issue, is in the middle of a story arc where a biological weapon was deployed from a secret American research facility under Mt. Rushmore. The ensuing red vapor cloud has devastated huge parts of South Dakota.

I'm not so much disgusted at the politics, i'm on the fence as to whether or not I think Geoff and now Chuck are telling their stories from a particular anti-american viewpoint, or if they're just bad stories about touchy subjects, but i'm definitely not happy that this material is being explored at all. Doesn't anyone understand the word "fantasy" any more? I have the 9-11 Spider-Man issue, it's touching and poignant, but Chuck has earned my ire because I don't understand why everying in the world up to and now including comic books have to be reunderstood through a new lense.

It's kind of a stupid point, but worse things have happened in the Marvel Universe than 9-11. Summer of 2001 saw Kang the Conqueror declare war on the Earth, starting with an invasion of Europe. In October of 2001 Kang destroyed Washington D.C. (after which The Wasp surrendered to Kang on behalf of the United States), while he later built huge camps filled with large portions of the Earth's population. I'm not trying to be a continuity cop, but why aren't issues ever discussed through the lens of a post-Kang world? (Or, for that matter, a post-Onslaught world. 'Onslaught' being a story which culminated with robot Sentinels destroying huge parts of Manhattan.)

I'll tell you why, because its a freakin comic book. The status quo is continuously reset. Is it really so much to ask that issues like terrorism and american foreign policy are also reset, so that I can have twenty minutes away from these things, even if it's only in the sanctity of my imagination?

And that, boys and girls, is why i'm considering dropping the one comic that's kept me a collector all these years.

Archives for new posts aren't working. I checked other blogspot pages and those aren't working either.

Only one Libertarian qualified for the recall election, and he has a pro-smoking platform.

Almost all the pundits seem to think that with so many candidates, someone with only 20-25% of the vote could turn out to be the winner. What they're missing is that as campaigning progresses and polls show who are the favorites, many of the "serious" candidates are going to drop out and endorse the front-runner of his party. When it's obvious to Simon or Huffington or McClintock that they have no chance, thwy'll probably call it quits, and even if they don't, those who supported them initially will switch their allegiances. In the end, it's probably going to come down to Schwarzenegger and Bustamente, and one of them is going to need 50%, or come close to it.

Also, given the rules, Bustamente have a much smaller chance of becoming governor than Schwarzenegger, even though he might have an equal if not greater chance of getting more votes than Schwarzenegger. That's because the voters most likely to support Bustamente are also most likely to vote against the recall. Bustamente needs enough Democrats to give him the plurality, but not too many to save Davis. Right now, he's stuck in nowhere land.