Moral and intellectual confusion

Rummy sounds pretty fed up...

In unusually explicit terms, Rumsfeld portrayed the administration's critics as suffering from "moral and intellectual confusion" about what threatens the nation's security.

...

He said, for example, that more media attention was given to U.S. soldiers' abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib than to the fact that Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith received the Medal of Honor.

We have thousands of "foreign combatants" incarcerated on island prison camps in Guantanamo Bay, held without trial and often without just cause (some were picked up on random tips while traveling internationally, others innocent but simply at the wrong place at the wrong time). They are stripped, searched, interrogated, and to an unknown extent, beaten and tortured. Often their families have no idea they have even been arrested, only hearing about it through a secret note from a sympathetic soldier. Lawyers are made to jump through numerous hoops to speak with their clients, and sometimes are blocked entirely. There are known cases of DHS officials posing as lawyers and pretending that the detainees have no legal recourse. When an actual lawyer does get through, s/he must present anecdotal evidence of meeting with the prisoner's family so as to gain the trust of the detainee.
If you're thought to hold information, you may end up (a) in a freezing cold isolation cell, (b) forced to stand up with arms stretched out in front of you, (c) placed on the ground naked and kicked in the sides, or (d) who knows what, as not even Red Cross has been allowed access to the whole camp. The few prisoners with the courage to demand better conditions and an end to beatings have threatened to hunger strike, their final and only means of non-violent protest. They had plastic tubes jammed up their noses and down their throat, and force-fed food in an excrutiatingly painful and humiliating manner. Sometimes they are fed too much and vomit or defecate themselves. This is just on the threat of not eating, even before they show any signs of thinning.
If you are released (which may take three to four years, without contact with your family), it is only after you sign a statement, announcing your shame at having performed acts against the US, and a promise not to do so again, thus confessing to a crime you may or may not have committed. Those who sign this document laminate it and carry it with them at all times, in case they are picked up by roving vigilantes in their home country again. Fifteen Uyghur detainees were determined to not have been enemy combatants after all. Five of them pursued habeas corpus, but at the last minute were transferred to an Albanian refugee camp, so as to avoid answering to a courtroom challenge.
Almost all of our allies, the UN, and the Geneva convention want us to shut down this gulag. Mistreatment is not the stain of an ugly few, it is standard procedure. Our government is frantically trying to open satellite prison camps in places around the world where international law will not apply.

Moral and intellectual confusion?
No, Rummy, I'm pretty sure you're a fuckwad.

Gerrymander? But I hardly know her!

Check out the shape of congressional districts in many key states, warped and distorted from decades of unscrupulous gerrymandering from both major parties. Funny, bleak, and entirely true.

http://www.rangevoting.org/GerryExamples.html

District 2 in Arizona is a beautiful sight.

Restaurantics

I have this recurring idea for a buffet restaurant that charges proportionally to how much you eat. Except, to measure this, you get weighed as you enter the restaurant and as you exit. The novelty factor alone could sustain this!

Of course, you'd have to be weighed in the buff, and there would be no bathrooms.

In the month of July 2006...

Cribbed from Harpers.org:

Estimated change since 2001 in the total number of U.S. private-sector jobs: +1,900,000 [Economic Policy Institute (Washington)]

Estimated number of new private-sector jobs created by government spending during that time: 2,800,000 [Economic Policy Institute (Washington)]

Percentage of U.S. workers who say they are confident that they will be able to live comfortably after retirement: 68 [Employee Benefit Research Institute (Washington)]

Percentage who have saved less than $25,000 toward retirement: 53 [Employee Benefit Research Institute (Washington)]

Percentage of Americans who believe that most Americans are too fat: 90 [Pew Research Center (Washington)]

Percentage who believe that they themselves are too fat: 39 [Pew Research Center (Washington)]

Average number of extra calories children consume for every hour of television they watch: 167 [Jean Wiecha, Harvard Prevention Research Center (Boston)]

Size, in inches, of Panasonic’s new top-of-the-line plasma TV: 103 [Panasonic Corporation of North America (Secaucus, N.J.)]

Factor by which Hummer sales in April exceeded those a year earlier: 3 [General Motors Corporation (Detroit)]

Percentage change in average U.S. gas prices over that year: +80 [U.S. Energy Information Administration]

Volume of new reserves added by major oil companies in 2005, expressed as a percentage of oil pumped that year: 51 [Sanford C. Bernstein Limited (London)]

Ratio of the amount of energy used in producing corn ethanol to the amount yielded when it is burned in gasoline: 1:1 [Alexander Farrell, University of California, Berkeley]

Ratio of the amount of energy used in producing gasoline itself to the amount yielded when it is burned: 6:5 [Alexander Farrell, University of California, Berkeley]

Amount it costs the U.S. Treasury to manufacture and distribute a penny: 1.4¢ [U.S. Mint]

Amount that insects add to the U.S. economy each year, according to one invertebrate advocacy group: $57,000,000,000 [The Xerces Society (Portland, Oreg.)]

Percentage of this total attributed to insects’ value as a food source for larger animals: 88 [ The Xerces Society (Portland, Oreg.)]

Ratio of the average U.S. import of Mexican lettuce each year to the average Mexican import of U.S. lettuce: 1:1 [Foreign Trade Division, U.S. Census Bureau]

Number of players that Brazilian soccer teams have sold to teams overseas since 1993: 6,700 [Confederação Brasileira de Futebol (Rio de Janeiro)]

Amount the Brazilian teams have earned from these sales: $918,819,900 [Revista Superinteressante (Sâo Paulo)/Harper’s research]

Percentage of Peruvians who say their nation needs leaders who “impose order” and “authority”: 74 [U.N. Development Programme (Lima)]

Number of U.S. residents the FBI investigated last year using Patriot Act powers that waive the need for a warrant: 3,501 [U.S. Department of Justice]

Number of times that President Bush’s “signing statements” have exempted his administration from provisions of new laws: 750 [Phillip Cooper, Portland State University (Portland, Oreg.)/Charlie Savage, Boston Globe]

Total number of times for all other presidents since Washington: 568 [Christopher Kelley, Miami University of Ohio (Oxford)/Christopher May, Loyola Law School (Los Angeles) ]

Minimum number of close-up photographs of President Bush’s hands owned by his new chief of staff, Josh Bolten: 4 [Office of Management and Budget (Washington)]

Percentage of Republicans who viewed “Hillary Clinton” favorably in an April poll: 16 [CNN (Washington)]

Percentage who viewed “Hillary Rodham Clinton” favorably: 23 [CNN (Washington)]

Rank of atheists among minorities whom Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry: 1 [Penny Edgell, University of Minnesota (Minneapolis)]

Rank of Muslims and African Americans, respectively: 2, 3 [Penny Edgell, University of Minnesota (Minneapolis)]

Number of “peace walls” that divided Protestant and Catholic communities in Belfast at the time of the 1994 ceasefire: 30 [Institute for Conflict Research (Belfast)]

Number today: 41 [Institute for Conflict Research (Belfast)]

Percentage of Irish Catholics who think that priests should not have to be celibate: 76 [Sunday Independent (Dublin)]

Percentage by which Britain’s The Independent outsold its daily average on May 16, the day U2’s Bono was guest editor: 30 [The Independent (London)]

Last date on which the newspaper sold as many copies: 9/12/01 [The Independent (London)]

Number of books that Art Garfunkel has read since June 1968, according to a comprehensive list on his website: 948 [Donald McCarthy, www.artgarfunkel.com (N.Y.C.)]

Length, in hours, of a book appearance that author Lawrence Lessig made in January inside an online fantasy world: 2 [Wagner James Au (San Francisco)]

Minimum number of different characters who showed up: 100 [Wagner James Au (San Francisco)]

Number of MySpace.com users featured by Playboy in its June “Girls of MySpace” photo spread: 9 [Playboy Enterprises, Inc. (Chicago)]

Minimum number who sent pictures to try out: 2,000 [Playboy Enterprises, Inc. (Chicago)]

Estimated number of hot dogs that will be eaten in the United States over the Fourth of July weekend: 150,000,000 [National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (Washington)]

Tons of mud a Mongolian girl has eaten since 1994, because she finds it “delicious”: 1.7 [Bao Bao (Xinxiang, China)]

Just throw strikes

Boston lost three straight games to the Yankees in a five-game series, and New York has just tied it up 5-5 in the 9th. It's 1am, Papelbon has already thrown 42 pitches, there's one game tomorrow and then a West Coast series trip the next day, and no bullpen to speak of at this point. This is too depressing to watch.

Swept through the Hirschhorn, Sackler, and Freer galleries yesterday; they're a lot more fun than the National Gallery of Art. In particular, the Hirschhorn has an exhibition on Anselm Kiefer, powerful stuff, and Freer has some beautiful Asian art and calligraphy. Definitely worth checking out.

Recent time-wasters:

• F.E.A.R. Combat
• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
• How Few Remain by Harry Turtledove
• Survival Mode in Advance Wars DS
• Tooling around with Photoshop CS2
  

I wish our Chief Justice wrote opinions in verse

"Fear of cancer from asbestos, fuzzy science manifestos."

"Guilty
or not guilty,
past convictions frustrate
the judge who wonders should your fate
abate."

"I say this denial is not fit for trial."

Volcanoes

Blogger is in beta now, so the look of this site might be changing soon.

Top 5 restaurants/bars in Boston:

1. Brown Sugar Cafe, Commonwealth Ave
   
2. Sunset Bar and Grille, Allston (not the cantina)
   
3. La Summa, North End
4. Boca Grande Taqueria, Coolidge Corner
5. India Quality, Kenmore Square

Can't wait to be back!

Sparks

I have vivid memories of my first winter at MIT. Skipping class on the day of the first snow to walk around Harvard Yard. Vainly trying to piece together a decent snowman. Riding a commuter rail train out to Needham for a jazz concert report. Nearly freezing to death because the heat didn't work in my Next House dorm room, and practically living in a sleeping bag. Spending evenings gaming in the ZBT basement throughout IAP. Listening to Coldplay's Parachutes album on the Saferide late at night (it came up randomly on my playlist tonight, triggering all these memories). Getting trapped at ZBT during the blizzard, then celebrating when MIT announced that classes were cancelled. Having to gear up with a hat, scarf, oversized headphones (as earmuffs), gloves, fleece, long underwear, snow pants, and hiking boots to get to class.

Truth be told, there are few albums better suited to reveling in loneliness with than Parachutes.

Hold On To Your Genre

From TIME.com:

"Ironically, al-Qaeda finds itself substantially weaker organizationally at the very moment where the political conditions for its existence may never have been better. Muslims around the world are far more enraged by the U.S. today than they had been five years ago, fueled by shooting wars in Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Afghanistan. Even if Bin Laden arguably helped provoke the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, he has not managed to capitalize on the resultant outrage. In fact, it is among the active jihadists on some of those battlefronts that his isolation is most palpable." - Tony Karon

I'll buy that.

Looking ahead towards 2008, I'm reminded of a great West Wing quote:
"Because I'm tired of it year after year after year after year having to chose between the lesser of who cares? Of trying to get myself excited about a candidate who can speak in complete sentences. Of setting the bar so low, I can hardly look at it. They say a good man can't get elected President. I don't believe that, do you?" - Leo McGarry

Dukakis and Gore ran as fixers, as sensible, efficiency-minded technocrats who failed to capture the public imagination, much less the presidency. Kerry and Bush ran as visionaries, though Kerry ultimately could not be taken very seriously, and Bush's visions were marred by general incompetence and a failure to engage opponents intellectually. When will we find our happy balance? A candidate with nuance and inspiration?
I once looked with hope towards the centrists, McCain and Lieberman. But after a year of averting my eyes at the sight of them lustily photo-op-ing while publicly defending the worst mistakes of the Administration, and sanding down their edges to appeal to the center that apparently above all else hates to be challenged or satirized, that hope is dwindling quickly. Even Hillary is actively vanilla-izing her political views for the masses. When did we decide that the American public could not be convinced of anything, that candidates could not change peoples' minds?

The ones I'll be watching in the next couple years: Russ Feingold, Joe Biden, Rudolph Giuliani.

Pilot

Watched the Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip pilot episode last night, which NBC released on Netflix earlier this month. Unfortunately, only the one pilot episode was on the disc; the other content was a pilot from another new show called "Kidnapped", about which I could hardly care less. Not sure why NBC decided to put the Studio 60 pilot out on DVD, maybe just to generate buzz? I've watched it and I'm pretty excited for the regular season.

It's a bit more Sports Night than West Wing, though it seems to borrow from both. Like Sports Night, it revolves around producing a television show, with executive decisions, control room banter, and personal/ethical issues at the forefront. The ensemble cast is huge and full of well-established and rising actors, and the dialogue and drama are similar in style to Sports Night, if not slightly better paced. Other similarities:

To Sports Night:

• The two-tiered control room looks very similar to the one in Sports Night
• Felicity Huffman makes a cameo appearance at the beginning of the show
• Matt and Danny (played by Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford, respectively) interact a lot like Casey and Dan, the hosts of Sports Night
• The "woman in power" character; this time it's Amanda Peet playing the president of the network
• A rigid network hierarchy, with a media group executive at the top, network chairman above the president, and the unfortunate Standards and Practice guy acting as middleman without much respect from anyone around him.

To The West Wing:

• Timothy Busfield and Bradley Whitford return in prominent roles
• The opening sketch from the show-within-the-show is an Oval Office address, both homage to The West Wing and parody of a common SNL skit
• Lots of walking and talking in corridors, and at least one collision
• Danny's drug-relapse backstory, playing a similar role to Leo's alcoholism
• Matt's not-a-druggie-but-happened-to-be-on-medication stint is reminiscent of two hilarious scenes from the West Wing, one with President Bartlett and one with Miss Federer.

Unlike Sports Night and The West Wing, however, Studio 60 doesn't have an overarching father figure who grounds the various moral dilemmas and protects the younger staff (Sports Night had Isaac Jaffe, The West Wing had Leo). There also isn't as much humor or rapid-fire dialogue, though they might be underplaying that aspect for the purposes of the pilot (pilot episodes tend to appear pretty lame and overreaching in hindsight, even in past Sorkin shows). Finally, I'm wondering if there will be an equivalent of the Sports Night control-room-nerds or, of course, Ed and Larry.

Frank the Tank would disapprove

Cribbed from Harper's: “The Middle East is literally the Fraternity Row for terrorist groups,” said AIPAC’s own Middle East analyst Josh Block in the press release.

Among the terrorist groups that AIPAC claims are operating in the Bekaa Valley (a part of Lebanon recently raided by Israeli troops) are:

• Al Jihad (Egyptian Islamic Jihad)
• Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden
• Abu Nidal
• Arab Liberation Front
• Chechen rebels
• DFLP
• Dev Sol (Turkey)
• ETA
• Fatah
• Force-17
• Hamas
• Hezbollah
• Hezbollah–Bahrain
• IRA <-------------??!!
  
• Japanese Red Army
• Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)
• New People's Army (Philippines)
• Nicaraguan Sandinistas
• PFLP
• PFLP–GC
• Palestine Liberation Front
• Palestine Popular Struggle Front (PPSF)
• Palestinian Islamic Jihad
• Red Army Faction (a.k.a Baader-Meinhof Gang, Germany)
• Red Brigades (Italy)
• Turkish Workers and Peasants Liberation Army (TIKKO)

Yes, I'm sure the Sandinistas are busy training their terrorist corps in Lebanon, for a battle they already won in 1979.

Animals and Insects

by Sage Stossel

Seriously, no sarcasm here, I'm glad the UK-US intelligence sharing was up to the task of foiling the planned airplane attacks today. James Fallows of The Atlantic makes the point that despite our lackadaisical diplomatic efforts and gross mishandling of Iraq, we have still improved our own ability to detect and prevent terrorist action. I hope that's true.

The Dark of the Matinée

The weekend's come and gone, and it comes as something of a shock that the DC area has not melted into goo. Congress has already run for the hills, after accomplishing little more than a tax cut extension, a presidential $1 coin, and mangling student financial aid. This last week broke temperature records of 100 degrees, with the heat index at 110+. And the Sox are two games behind in the division, after Varitek, Lowell, Nixon, and Mirabelli all suffered freak injuries. Only half a game behind in the wildcard slot, though.
Catching the Nationals today from the upper bleachers; IEDC is treating us to a baseball game.

Intelligence and natural talent will always be in high demand; I don't think anyone with either should ever worry about making enough money to live comfortably. What, then, defines success for the gifted youth or the top-tier college student? What is a good life?
I've been grappling with this a lot lately, and with my own plans for the next few years. Across cultures, we're taught conflicting messages. Self-preservation, accomplishment, and (to an extent) greed are positive goals in themselves that propel human progress and teach us independence and self-identity. At the same time, a life devoted to service and the benefit of others is the ideal of civil society, as well as most religious doctrines. (Protestantism in the US mostly abandons this for the worship of individual success and righteousness, something for which I've never heard a satisfactory rationale.)
I think the gift and the curse of intelligence is that you know you are capable of doing a lot of good in the world, perhaps at your own expense. The problem is that most of us, myself notwithstanding, do not inherently derive the kind of satisfaction from joining the Peace Corps that would preclude a high-paying engineering or finance job. We're just not wired for it. And when you're trying to live a good life, one that upholds both leisure and productivity, and you're aware of your own capability for either, a certain sense of self-satisfaction needs to set in. Otherwise we'd always be second-guessing ourselves.
It's probably a balance, right? Hope that what I do for a living benefits society. Above all else, though, is this underlying fear that I'm not going to really enjoy what I do, and that ultimately someone else who does live only for himself will still end up doing more for the world, even as an afterthought.

---

As a side thought, doesn't killing the estate tax run against conservative ideals? Pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, being a self-made man, these are the qualities that conservatives admire and want to instill in American society. How does ensuring that the children of rich families will never have to work for themselves even remotely agree with that ideal? If anything, the Paris Hiltons and Anna Nicole Smiths of the world have assured children that you can be a vulgar, spoiled, dim-witted bimbo and still be entitled to a more comfortable life than 99% of the populace. Because, well, her father/husband worked for that money, doggone it.

From the Atlantic Unbound:

Why tax the well-off? Because, two recent studies suggest, it's practically the only way to persuade them to spend money on anyone but themselves. Philanthropy isn't the answer: a survey from The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that Americans making $70,000 or more dispensed a paltry 3.3 percent of their earnings to charitable cuases; in contrast, those making $50,000 to $69,999 gave 5.6 percent, and those making $30,000 to $49,999 gave 8.9 percent.

Simple and Clean

Diplomats Enjoy 'Free Parking' in Nation's Capital

Aug 4th - 5:02am

Mark Segraves, WTOP Radio

WASHINGTON - For most motorists in the nation's capital, two or more unpaid parking tickets will result in that big, ugly yellow boot on your car. But if you're a diplomat, it's a different story.

Local authorities are prohibited by the U.S. State Department from enforcing parking tickets issued to embassy vehicles that display diplomatic tags. That means embassies don't have to pay parking tickets and don't have to worry about getting the boot.

Since 2001, embassies have racked up more than $250,000 in unpaid parking tickets, according to documents WTOP obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. In 2005 the total was $79,890 for 971 unpaid tickets.

The biggest offender for 2005 was Cameroon with 78 outstanding tickets totaling $5,855. Albania comes in second with 50 tickets worth $4,370.

France averages about $1,000 per year in unpaid tickets. Other countries that owe the District more than $1,000 for last year include: Australia, Egypt, El Salvador, Iceland and South Africa.

(Copyright 2006 by WTOP Radio. All Rights Reserved.)

***
And now, the obligatory West Wing quote:
Bartlett: There are big signs! You can't park there! They should get towed! I hope they get towed to Queens and the Triboro is closed and there's a big craft show at Shea, a flea market or a tractor show!

***
Top 5 video game music sequences (stand-alone cutscenes apart from normal gameplay):
1. The opera scene from Final Fantasy VI
2. Link and Sheik playing any song together in Ocarina of Time
3. Opening sequence from Kingdom Hearts II (Sanctuary by Utada Hikaru)
4. Opening sequence from Metal Gear Solid 2, especially the last thirty seconds
5. The (good) ending in Chrono Cross

If liberals are cut-and-run and tax-and-spend, conservatives should be cut-and-spend

from Harpers.org

Six Questions for Gordon Adams on the Real Cost of the “War on Terror”

Posted on Thursday, August 3, 2006. Gordon Adams was the senior White House budget official for national security and international affairs from 1993 to 1997. He is a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and is writing a book on national security budget planning. He responded to a series of questions about the enormous sums of money being spent on the war on terror, and the Enron-style budgetary trickery being used by the Bush Administration to obscure the war's true cost. By Ken Silverstein.

Sources

1. How much money has the United States spent fighting the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the broader war on terrorism, and how much more can we expect will be allocated over the foreseeable future?
Including all the funds Congress has voted this year, we will have spent $437 billion on Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the war on terror since 2001—about $1,500 for every American. All this despite Paul Wolfowitz's promise that the war would be over quickly, the troops home soon, and that the reconstruction would be self-funding, thanks to the sale of Iraqi oil supplies. Back in 2003 the President's economic advisor, Larry Lindsay, predicted that the Iraq adventure would cost more than $100 billion. He was fired, in part, for saying it, yet he greatly underestimated the cost. Spending on Iraq alone makes up over 70 percent of the $437 billion, with Afghanistan costing another 20 percent and the rest for counter-terror operations elsewhere in the world. Another way of looking at it is that funding for Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terror accounts for 20 percent of all the funds the Defense Department has spent over the past five years. The Congressional Research Service estimates conservatively that we might spend another $371 billion on these operations through 2016.

2. How closely do the Administration and the Congress scrutinize budget requests for all that money?
Virtually all of this money has been authorized by Congress as “emergency supplemental” funding. That is supposed to mean “we didn't expect it and we need it right away, so don't waste time with the normal budget process.” And that is how it has been done. The funding request is prepared at the top of the Defense Department, but does not go through the regular internal budget planning process; it is waved through the White House, and lands—with minimal justification—on congressional desks. Normally, the defense budget is reviewed three times—by the Budget Committee, the Armed Services Committee, and the Appropriations Committee. Emergency supplementals skip the first two committees and go straight to the money guys—the appropriators. Over the past five years, the appropriators have held virtually no public hearings on the Iraq money; they just mark it up and push it through for a vote. So nobody is minding the store the way they should.

3. Is there any way of knowing exactly how that money has been spent?
Not really. The Defense Department, which has received over 90 percent of the $437 billion, has stiffed Congress for two years on a requirement that Congress voted into law to demand regular reporting on how they are spending the money. So, aside from anecdotal evidence, we don't really know what happened with the money. The State Department reports every quarter on how it plans to spend the relatively small share of funds it has received for reconstruction in Iraq (about $27 billion). But it doesn't tell Congress or the public how it was actually spent, and we rely on the small office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction to tell us how all that money is being spent.

4. Is the Pentagon and/or the Bush administration taking advantage of this process to fund pet projects that it might have a hard time winning support for through the normal appropriations process?
The Administration has shoved into the emergency supplemental request things they should be able to plan for on a regular basis and request through the normal budget process: repair and replacement of equipment being used in Iraq, buying new helicopters and Marine aircraft, restructuring the Army into brigades, rather than divisions, and buying new equipment for future Army needs. Some of these items have been in the works for years; all can be planned; all of them should be in the regular budget. As for the Congress, they play “three card Monte” with the emergency supplementals—they cut the regular defense budget so they can fit it into their own overall budget limits and control the deficit; then they add the money they cut back into the supplemental, which doesn't count against the limits, but adds to the deficit.

5. Have previous administrations relied on such sleight of hand to fund wars?
The Congressional Research Service looked at that question and found that in every previous war, since World War II, after one or at the most two years, the [President] planned and requested war funding from the Congress through the regular budget process. This time we are doing something new and dangerous.

6. What are the implications of all this for budget planning and public awareness of how tax dollars are being spent?
Putting 20 percent of our defense dollars beyond standard scrutiny has broken the budget planning process. The defense budget that is published is incomplete and meaningless and the emergency supplementals are based on a “trust me” system. As a result, our defense spending is dishonest and out of control. It is hard to know if we can ever fix this, but some in Congress are trying. Senators McCain, Warner, and Gregg got an amendment into the defense bill this summer that would require the Defense Department to ask that Iraq, Afghanistan, and counter-terror funds be put through the normal budget process next year. We will see if that requirement survives negotiations with the House of Representatives. It is doubtful that the Administration will comply with the requirement if it becomes law; they have not wanted to project future costs for Iraq or the war on terror at all.

Dig Me Out

Sleater-Kinney's DC show was hotttttt. Didn't realize they were going on "indefinite hiatus" so soon; this was their 4th to last show =(

Another horrible, skin-melting day outside in DC, but we're gonna rally around the thunderstorms tomorrow.

Jumpers

Our legislature shall be terrorized by freedom no more. French fries and french toast have returned to the US Capitol!

Sleater-Kinney's concert was postponed last night due to some freak electrical issues.

In a flash of inspiration, the Onion reported that Critics Accuse Joe Biden Of Running For President For Political Reasons.

Attempting to package a minimum wage hike with the estate tax cut is cynical politics at its worst, designed primarily to embarass Democrats rather than actually pass either provision. Anyone wonder why Congress' approval rates are hovering just above 20%?

Stephen Colbert interviewed Peter Beinart (author of The Good Fight) last night, and was really playing hardball. The way he heckled Beinart at the beginning was almost a mirror image of the O'Reilly/Scarborough tactic. (Scarborough once claimed that he wasn't doing his job if he lets his guest speak for more than seven seconds at a time without interruption.) As it turned out, however, his heckling actually allowed Colbert to build up to the logical conclusion that the Bush Administration was deliberately misleading the American public to further its own agenda and hide its own incompetence. Of course, he immediately rejected his own conclusion.
Jon Stewart's been a lot more aggressive lately as well, but unfortunately, he's actually trying to be taken seriously and comes off as more annoying than enlightening. While The Colbert Report runs head-first into packing as much satire as possible into a half-hour segment, The Daily Show has become content to just slip in a couple jokes between "oh-those-wacky-correspondents" features and straight-faced interviews. At least the punny headlines are still good.

Your Heart Is An Empty Room

NPR is broadcasting the Sleater-Kinney concert live tonight around 10pm. Tickets to go see them were nearly impossible to get, so I guess I'll enjoy it from my car radio.

The pilot episode for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is apparently available on DVD through Netflix.

The Colbert Report is much funnier than The Daily Show these days. Perhaps the writing staff was spread too thin when the former was spun-off?

Both my laptop hard drive and my external Firewire hard drive crashed last week. I lost all my music and pictures =(