Monthly Archives: February 2004

Oh, Really?

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USA Today would have you believe:

Sen. John McCain’s presence on a panel charged with investigating U.S. intelligence gathering will give the group immediate credibility because of his willingness to criticize the Bush administration, key lawmakers say.

I also have several bridges for you.
More then a few countervailing views can be found. For instance this from Brad DeLong:

He has the most partisanship and the least ethics of anyone to sit on the federal bench in my lifetime (save possibly his masters Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas). And he is there to blow up the Commission if it reaches any conclusions that the Bushies do not like.

and there is more at Orcinus.
Not only is it stuffed with stooges this diversionary commission isn’t even chartered to look at the administration’s use of the intelligence it received.

Search Wars

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Buried deep in this NYT article is this:

And Google has embarked on an ambitious secret effort known as Project Ocean, according to a person involved with the operation. With the cooperation of Stanford University, the company now plans to digitize the entire collection of the vast Stanford Library published before 1923, which is no longer limited by copyright restrictions. The project could add millions of digitized books that would be available exclusively via Google.

This is really good stuff but, since copyright protection has lapsed on these books, I wonder why they would be available exclusievely via Google.
Will Wilkenson is ‘jacked’ about this and also notes that:

This is, by the way, what Microsoft is really good for. It puts the fear of Jesus in the Googles of the world, and makes ’em hustle to make us happy. So what I’m really hoping for is that Microsoft comes close in the search war, and succeeds in creating a superfast integrated search in Windows that allows me to search my own measly 30gb hard drive at something close to the speed that Google manages to search the whole goddam internet, but falls short in the end because of all the glorious innovations the Google geniuses lay at our feet in order to keep us from straying.

Things should be pretty exciting in this space over the next several years.
Via Tyler Cowan at Marginal Revolution.

Who is Lying?

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Mark Kleiman considers part of Tenet’s testimony:

But that’s separate from the question of whether the President deceived the American people about the nuclear threat from Iraq. The Director of Central Intelligence just told us, unemphatically but also unequivocally, that he did.
The least you can say about this is that it can’t be right for Bush and Tenet each to keep his job. If Tenet is lying, he should be fired. If Tenet is telling the truth, Bush should be replaced.

This isn’t quite the spin I heard on talk radio today while I spent a few hours on the local freeways. They seemed to be able to only find parts of the testimony that painted bush positive.

Strange Budget Choice

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Why would the folks putting together bush’s budget propose eliminating funds for building decontamination research?

an Environmental Protection Agency acknowledgment that his proposed cut “represents complete elimination of homeland security building decontamination research.”
The agency said in the documents that Bush’s proposal will “force it to disband the technical and engineering expertise that will be needed to address known and emerging biological and chemical threats in the future.”

This certainly seems inconsistent with the image the bushies seem to be trying to project. A mistake perhaps? Or simple blundering?