Becks at
Unfogged reports:
Via Yglesias: D.C. complains about ‘No Taxation Without Representation’? Heritage responds with a proposal to abolish the federal income tax for D.C.
What alternate universe do these DC folks live in thinking that having a congressional critter from their geographical area means that they have representation beyond a few bribes earmarks being tossed their way?
David Brin on the accomplishments of the bush administration::
Our topic is the number one accomplishment of the George W. Bush administration. Not the record deficits, or stagnant science, or rampant theft, or even a legacy of nation-dividing Culture War. Rather, it is something that until a few years ago seemed downright impossible — bringing low the finest and most professional national military the world has ever seen.
Read the rest. It is quite good and thought provoking.
For your leisure time I highly recommend Brin’s Uplift series! Read his more recent The Kiln People only if you become a Brin completist.
Via Robert Farley.
Mustang Bobby alerts us to the the fact that the New York Times is mostly free again via online access and that:
So starting tomorrow, Maureen Dowd, Thomas L. Friedman, Frank Rich, Gail Collins, Paul Krugman, David Brooks, Bob Herbert and Nicholas D. Kristof and all the rest will be liberated from their purgatory and will no longer rely on the kindness of strangers for getting their word out to the electronic masses.
Frankly, I haven’t missed reading these folks* and wouldn’t mind if they kept them behind the wall. When one of them said something really interesting as MB notes:
…there was probably one reader or blogger who went around the gate and posted the material for free on other websites or excerpted enough of the articles for blog commenting as to render the pay site pointless.
Isn’t the most important thing about this the news archives:
In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.
Over the past two years I’ve been stopped in mid-track many times by the archive wall when wanting to read something a couple weeks old.
Yea, there were workarounds but now just the news, please.
*Guilty: I read them before the wall went up and will probably read and blog them again not that the wall is down. But, as above, I have not missed them!
Just in case those of you living in the land of the american taliban were wondering what the fox censors bleeped last night here is what Sally Fields said:
“If mothers ruled the world, there wouldn’t be any god -” she said when the sound went dead and the camera suddenly turned away from the stage so viewers would be distracted. Chopped off were the words “god-damned wars in the first place.”
Some of us think the problem is that there are rulers and ruler wanna-bes presidents in the first place not what sex they are.
I will grant that if all the councils, legislatures, parliaments and other elected, appointed and usurped government positions around the planet were 80-90% mothers that we would live in a very different worldwide culture. Perhaps one without war.
Via skippy.
The 182nd Carnival of the Cats is up at House of the (Mostly) Black Cats.
You know the routine.
Drop in and give them each a skritch.