Public Nuisance |
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Random commentary and senseless acts of blogging.
The first Republican president once said, "While the people retain their virtue and their vigilance, no administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can seriously injure the government in the short space of four years." If Mr. Lincoln could see what's happened in these last three-and-a-half years, he might hedge a little on that statement. Blog critics Gryffindor House Slytherin House Ravenclaw House House Elves Beth Jacob Prisoners of Azkaban Muggles
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Thursday, January 27, 2005
An odd moment from Bush's press conference: Last year at this time, the projected budget was $527 billion. You might remember that. It turned out that the budget was $412 billion for last year. Now the budget is projected to be at $427 billion. We look forward to working to hold the line with the United States Congress on spending. And as I say, I'll promote a package that will show the budget being cut in half over the next five years. Granted, saying 'budget' instead of deficit is a fairly easy mistake to make, although the far more common mistake is to confuse the deficit with the debt. But here Bush says 'budget' four consecutive times when he really means 'deficit'. Either this is a bit of remarkable blundering, or 'deficit' is the new 'private accounts', and the media will soon be informed that any use of the word constitutes bias. Saturday, January 15, 2005
The latest tempest to blow through the blogosphere is the claim by former Dean aide Zephyr Treachout that bloggers Markos Zuniga and Jerome Armstrong were hired by the Dean campaign to blog favorably about Dean. If it's true (the facts are disputed by other ex-Deanies)it's just further proof of something that we already knew: the Dean campaign made some really dumb decisions about spending money. Armstrong actually stopped blogging while he was a paid employee, and Kos clearly was more than willing to promote Dean for free. Both bloggers disclosed their financial relationship to the Dean campaign, and of course it was private funds being used, so the inevitable attempts to compare this to the conduct of Armstrong Williams is thoroughly bogus. While many people are talking nonsense about this, nobody is more nonsensical or dishonest than Bill O'Reilly, who in the space of a few paragraphs completely lied about Kos ("This is bunk. This is bull. Nobody knew about [Dean's payments to Kos].) and then bragged about his own supposed high standards. ("I operate under rules here, Hugh. If I say something defamatory, I get sued....If I say something irresponsible, NewsCorp pulls me off the air....Internet's not like that. No rules.") Friday, January 14, 2005
The Huygens probe landed successfully today on Titan, sending back some astonishing images from the surface of the only moon in the Solar System with a significant atmosphere. The top image isn't quite as Earth-like as it seems, however: Titan is believed to have a surface temperature of about -300F (-185 C). If there are lakes or oceans on the surface of Titan, which is what I thought this image was when I first saw it, they are probably liquid methane. No sirens have yet been spotted. Tuesday, January 04, 2005
Go Trojans? Rooting for USC is a rather new experience for me - like many dedicated Bay Area natives, I've always rooted against LA teams. And watching the Trojans play has long been especially irritating - how even USC fans can endure listening to the band play the same two tunes over and over without a break for 3 hours is a mystery to me. But I'm still a West Coast cosmopolitan elitist, and after watching the BCS shaft West Coast football two years in a row, it's deeply satisfying to see USC just beating the s**t out of Oklahoma. |
