Latest Blog Posts
Batless Batter
Random fact: the Official Baseball Rules do not explicitly state that a batter must have a bat in his possession while he is in the batter’s box.
Johnny Be Good!
More bad news for poor Johnny Bolton (and Bush) - the senate foreign relations cmte is expanding the investigation into this sick bastard.
His “serial abuse,” ideology, and horrible haircut aside, I find one good reason NOT to promote this guy (I am assuming that being named UN Ambassador is a “promotion”): reforming our OWN intelligence service! After the whole WMD debacle, its pretty clear to everyone that there were some serious problems going on and a lot of group-think and political pressure. This guy has not only played a part in exagerrating the WMD threat, but he tried, on several occasions, to get people fired who didn’t agree with him. Talk about some serious “political pressure” - is that any way to run an intelligence agency? What kind of message does that send to actually promote him? And promote him to the UN of all places????
George Jr. and his buddies made a seriously bad mistake in nominating this joker.
Latest Media Bias
The AP is at it again:
The House passed a bill yesterday that would make it illegal to dodge parental-consent laws by taking minors across state lines for abortions, the latest effort to chip away at abortion rights after Republican gains in the November elections.
The mainstream media often wonder why they are perceived as biased. Phrases like the one I emphasized above are one reason.
[Edited to add: Oh by the way, I think the law in question is a pile of Republican dung. But that’s for another post.]
Lincoln Neighborhood Alliance Grades City Council Candidates
Today the Lincoln Neighborhood Alliance released its report card for City Council candidates. The grades were based on a survey (PDF) distributed to the six finalists. The grades are:
- Terry Werner: A
- Dan Marvin: A
- Shawn Traudt: B
- Ken Svoboda: C
- Robin Eschliman: C
- Mark Koller: D
Even a cursory glance at the grades makes one thing clear: the Lincoln Neighborhood Alliance is biased toward more liberal candidates. That isn’t at all surprising. The political scene in Lincoln has for several years been painted as a battle between “business” and “neighborhoods,” with “business” acting as a proxy for Republicans and “neighborhoods” for Democrats. It’s a false dichotomy, of course, but it remains a popular division.
If I get more time I’ll try to fill out the survey on my own. I glanced at it, but I haven’t had time yet to actually write in my responses.
Imagine What This Would Do to the Southpark Movie…
President Bush today signed legislation legalizing technologies that enable users to skip or mute sections of DVDs. Most often these technologies are targeted to parents who want to control what their children watch.
Hollywood and other media companies opposed the legislation because they argue that the government is enabling companies to distribute technologies that violate Hollywood’s copyrights. That would be a fair charge if anybody were actually altering the content (and especially if they were distributing the altered content, which is illegal). But that isn’t happening. The content isn’t being altered at all. The technology enables users to automatically skip certain sections of movies. It’s no different than if a reader were to skip a couple pages in a book or a track on a CD—except in this case it’s automated, and the skipped portions are very carefully selected.
Although this legislation is driven by an ideology of censorship, the outcome is more consumer freedom. That’s a good thing. And it’s typical that Hollywood would oppose it.
(As an aside, I got a kick out of the URL for this article. The URL includes the phrase “bush_sanitizing_hollywood”. That’s beautiful. It sounds just like what an [impartial and objective!] AP editor would title this piece.)
Rising Rates
LES wants to raise rates by an impressive 9%. That’s a pretty hefty rate increase, if you ask me. LES has rightfully accumulated a nice stash of customer satisfaction capital over the years due to its excellent customer service and low rates. I wonder how much of that capital will be wiped out by this announcement.
More Home Improvement?
Lowe’s might be coming to 66th & Highway 2. Home Depot is already at 70th & Highway 2, while Menards and Tractor Supply Co. are down the road at 87th.
Do we really need another monster home improvement store along that stretch? How much home improvement can one city do?
The Wheels On the Bus
I saw a hilarious sign this morning. It was one of those signs on the side of Lincoln’s buses promoting StarTran that area schoolchildren have drawn. It said:
Save gas. Save money. Save time.
Save gas? True. Save money? For most people, true. Save time? ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!
I’m a big mass transit fan and I use StarTran buses to get to work most days. I ride the bus for a lot of reasons, one of which is that I once calculated it is about 1,500% more expensive for me to drive to work than to take the bus. But time is one of the biggest reasons not to use StarTran. StarTran is one of the most pathetic excuses for a mass transit system in the country for a city of Lincoln’s size and demographics. It is an incredibly inefficient system, which is one of the reasons why so few people use it. It takes me 40 minutes to get home using the bus (including walking time), compared to 15-20 minutes in my car (including walking time to the parking garage).
And don’t get me started on all the time lost because you can’t run errands on the way to and from work.
No, little fourth grade student from a Lincoln elementary school, saving time is most certainly not a good reason to ride the bus. But two out of three ain’t bad.
A Robot Named Stinky
Four high school students from Phoenix, all illegal, beat a corporate-funded MIT team in an engineering competition? Yeah, right. Only in a cheesy Disney movie.
(I also came across a brief follow-up article.
Chaos on the Diamond
I spent seven hours yesterday on the ball diamond, and I have the sunburn to prove it. (Three year-old sunscreen just isn’t as effective as you might hope.) What a beautiful day to be outside.
And then…
Chucky’s Dilemma
C-Span, the only TV channel that matters anymore for news, again replayed the Senate Foreign Relations Cmte meeting of last week this morning. I caught parts of it last week but had an opportunity to watch the whole thing today, including Dodd, Biden and Kerry go ballistic over John Bolton. A synopsis of all the Bolton allegations from an anti-Bolton perspective can be found here and here. To recap, Bolton has alleged problems about exagerating WMD claims, overstepping bureaucratic lines to get people fired who disagreed with him, patterns of “serial abuse” (most recent allegation here), and overall credibility problems - debate over his ideology notwithstanding.
Republican Senator Voinovich made a lot of headlines for voicing his initial opposition to Bolton during the meeting, which would deadlock the nomination 9-9. Since then Voinovich has been been the focus of a lot of hate mail recently, for example see Malkin’s latest take on it.
Where will Nebraska’s favorite politician weigh in on the nomination? During the meeting, the Chuckster said that he wanted to move the nomination out of committee but that he wasn’t necessarily going to vote for Bolton on the senate floor and that the allegations “demanded” further review. In fact, the Chuckster is being targeted by liberal groups to vote against Bolton and has yet again opted to depart from the party line and voice concern over Bolton.
In anycase, you can send the Chuckster’s constituent office an email
>
if you support, or oppose, the appointment of this crazy man as UN Ambassador.
And the Culture Wars continue…
A lot of C-Span junkies and political blog readers have been following the ongoing controversies over Harvard President Larry Summers. A generally supportive article about him can be found here.
In anycase, looks like the latest round in the culture wars to come out of our favorite ivy league institution is the initiation of a new, completely online journal called the Harvard Journal of the Legal Left. Looking at some of the articles from its first issue…well, lets just say that its obvious they didn’t have many submissions to choose from… I mean that in a constructive way of course. It looks like a mish mash of commentary on critical theory (generally good), politics (good or bad depends on your view), and a few random musings on life and the law school experience by various writers (again could be good or bad depending on your view, but what the hell is it doing in a law journal?!).
Most striking about this is how absolutely blatantly political this journal is. I can’t think of any other law journal out there, of the hundreds that are out there, which is so blatant in its political stance. As any former law review editor knows, law reviews are radically moderate and eschew both right and left wing politics. Although there are a handful of critical theory journals out there, I can’t think of any which even come close to this new harvard rag.
It will be interesting to see how this one develops. I’m all about supporting new ideas and thinking outside of the box etc., but I sincerely hope that the journal finds some sort of identity, and I think it probably will in the next few issues. In anycase, I better get started on a new article for these guys before it gets discovered. If the qual
ity of some of the articles in the inaugural issue are any indication, ANYTHING will get published by these guys. And having a Harvard Law School publication on your resume is a good thing.
PS this is not a bash.
Google Does Evil
*sigh*
Even the good are eventually overcome by evil. The latest victim: Google. Their crime: Google is trying to shut down Froogles because the name is similar to Google’s service, Froogle. Too bad Froogles was first—by two years.
Google is starting to look more and more like Wal-Mart.
Shall I Beat My Cock or My Woman?
This is easily one of the most entertaining (and bizzaro) stories I’ve read in quite some time.
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