Pangloss

I'm not sure I agree with your assessment, IMM. McCain played that game before he ran for president, so it's consistent with his past behavior. And I don't see a lot of far-right pandering going on in his current behavior. He was one of the few Repoobs opposing the Terry Shiavo law, he opposes the Republican "nuclear option" anti-filibuster changes, voted against the constitutional amendment to restrict gay marriage, and so forth. Yes, he votes with his party much (if not most) of the time, and he votes conservative much (if not most) of the time. But pandering to special interests or the religious nuts? I respect your opinion on it, but I don't see it. I'm keeping an open mind about it, though.

It's starting to look like Florida's system is about to change, by the way. Legislation is flying through the state congress, which is not too surprising given the vast amount of negative publicity Florida (which already has a tougher system than a lot of states) has been getting lately. The Jessica Lunsford Act creates a mandatory sentence for molestors whose victim is under the age of 12 of 25 years to life. If and when they do get out, they have mandatory monitoring (ankle bracelet) for the rest of their life (although why they wouldn't just leave the state at that point is beyond me -- if they're not on parole, why stay?). If the victim is 12 to 15 years of age, the sentencing remains the same but it adds the braclet deal (but just during probation). The law also tries to close a couple other loopholes. It requires biannual check-ins for all registered sex offenders, and makes it a felony to harbor a sex offender. Anyone who violates the terms of their parole for any sexual offense goes into the ankle bracelet program for the rest of their probation. And it provides money to pay for all of this. (No big deal -- the state's swimming in dough right now; the hurricanes didn't even make us blink.)

Drill away. Where are you going to find a single place on the planet that's ecologically safer than the Alaskan tundra?

If you get a chance to catch this, be sure and do so. It's an interesting new documentary movie that takes a look at the Enron disaster and what brought it about. My one complaint about it would have to be the way they bookended it by tirading against the Bush administration, which obviously had nothing to do with the Enron collapse. It also vastly oversimplifies the California energy crisis, and makes Gray Davis (of all people!) out to be some kind of saint. Enron's and Andersen's shenanigans took place on Clinton's watch, and yet there's no mention of billy-boy in the whole program, or credit given to the Bush/Ashcroft justice department for the 15 pleas and 6 convictions of Enron execs. There's also a bit too much demonization of American business for my taste. What's really interesting about Enron is that, in the end, they DIDN'T get away with it. But I don't mean to make a mountain out of a minor complaint -- the show is, by and large, excellent. It's pretty good as a general run-down of what happened, but what really makes it interesting are the specific examples cited along the way. It does a good job of putting faces to names and painting a picture of the strange (or maybe not so strange...) environment of the company that paved the way for destruction. Anyway, check it out if you get a chance. It's in selected movie theaters, and playing on HD Net (mainly for DirecTV HDTV subscribers). Presumably it'll hit wider release and DVD at some point.

That's all well and good, but the issue is whether (and how much) to force people to take care of the issue. Not ask. Force.

This is why I love reading the WSJ's opinion page. As ideological (partisan-right) as they are, they have an impeccable history of inviting intelligent and insightful counterpoint. This is a perfect example. Ted Olsen was solicitor general under the Bush administration until last summer (argued the 2000 election before the Supreme Court, IIRC), and has every reason in the world to hate "activist judges". But look at what he has to say. http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006597 It's a registration deal, so I've taken the liberty of quoting a couple of the more potent passages.

It's always somebody's fault, right? Lack of knowledge, insanity, the landlord, the government, George Bush.... Always a ready excuse. And if you disagree, well, there must be something wrong with you -- you're just not compassionate enough. It's wierd how we just sort of know intuitively that this is wrong, yet we do it anyway. Like parents pampering their children. You know it'll make them complacent, but the idea of them having to succeed from adversity is just too horrible to allow.

Actually that's beside the point. Delete "Microsoft" and insert "ExxonMobile" or "WallMart" if you like. Just my two bits worth, of course.

Sure, I just want to know in what way he's become a "whore to the extremists". I'm not necessarily even disagreeing, I'm just curious what prompted that assessment.

Not to mention the fact that the money was created more or less out of thin air. It wouldn't exist if those entrepreneurs and investors hadn't created it. Had Bill Gates become an aid worker instead of creating Microsoft, you'd have a few people a little better off, and a lot more people much worse off. And that's not even counting his philanthropy. The phrase "to make money" doesn't mean earning. It means creating.

The first shots in the global entertainment war? http://www.variety.com/VR1117921406.html At the very least it seems to push back the current boundaries in the ongoing dilemma of news entities trying to report stories about the corporate giants that own them.

I see this issue as an interesting example of one of the areas in which scientific reasoning going out the window in favor of political correctness and far-left ideology. In a very real sense, we've been "genetically engineering" food for 10,000-30,000 years (in the form of selective breeding), and we're doing just fine. We *certainly* wouldn't be able to feed everyone alive today without it. According to Penn & Teller's show on this last year, we'd come up a couple billion people short. But I've heard some pretty good arguments that say we need to be more careful about certain areas, and a few objective arguments in favor of slowing down a bit. These arguments do carry some weight with me.

Really? How so? He's always seemed like an anti-extremist kind of guy to me.

Funny thread. This is really the first UK-oriented spam I've gotten (or at least the first that's gotten through my two-tier spam filtering, which captures at least 500 emails per day). I think it's because I bought something from Amazon.co.uk. Normally I just get stuff from Amazon.com, but they had a DVD I wanted that the US store didn't have. Since then I've been getting these UK lottery spams.

Hey, how come nobody's talking about Hillary vs. Laura?

Put it this way: After I'm through buying the London Bridge, I'm gonna swing by your side of the border and pick up the CN Tower and Niagara Falls.

Free bits for everyone! A round of data on me!

Oh I think he's a very interesting fellow, and I'll be following him closely. I just wonder how many of his supporters are aware that he voted for the Schiavo law. Not that that was any great surprise, mind you -- I believe the entire CBC voted as a block on that issue (although I could be mistaken). But it's not the hard-line liberal position, for sure.

Hey Bud, did you notice your buddy Obama voting in favor of the Schiavo law a few weeks ago? (hides)

Seems like a nice person, but a follower, not a leader. But this is really the first time she's been in a forefront leadership role. Let's see how the next couple years go.

That's it? Wow, that was disappointingly easy.

I love the idea of watching them suffer. I live for it. I'd buy season tickets if I could, just to see them suffer pain and agony all the time. Oh wait, I thought we were talking about the Yankees. My bad.

Hehe, okay, but that's not really what it's for. Here, try this: Go bring up your area again (by searching it like you did), and once it's displayed on the screen, click the "local search" button at the top. You'll see it change to a two-field form in which the right field says "the map area below". In the left field, type something like, say, "pizza", and click the search button. You should see a lot of little balloons pop up, indicating all the pizza joints near your house. At that point you can click on an individual balloon, and it'll give you web site links and links that will bring up driving directions to or from that location.

Great, I don't have a problem with that. We could probably use more education about economics and personal finance at the high school level. Um... you do realize that you didn't refute my point, right? You made a big deal out of the fact that you were able to buy a cheap computer, without apparently being aware that the reason you were able to buy that cheap computer is because of millions of other people buying them when they were more expensive, driving the technology forward and the price downward. Whether you *like* the situation or not is really up to you. It's a free country, you can like or dislike as you please. Yes. It also happens to be an incorrect opinion -- they say quite a lot about it, it just happens to fall on deaf ears much of the time. We agree about the need for greater education of the public about economic/finance issues. But in the end, (a) it's only a small part of a much larger economic picture in which depreciation and decay are generally not predominant, and (b) people choose to either buy a new automobile, and lose money from depreciation, or not. It's a choice. Nobody's holding a gun to their head. No, I need a scientific study (or some kind of evidence) to tell me why depreciation of automobiles is an indication of a larger problem. I have no idea what you mean, but if you're going to attack/insult me then this is going to be a very short conversation. Did you come here to drop bombs and be rude, or did you come here to talk and discuss? Last time I looked at Red Hat and Mandrake they were getting pretty bloated as well. (grin) But at least with Linux you can make a stripped-down distro if you like. But you've completely missed the point. You're using, what, a 20 or 30 gigabyte hard drive today? And you were lamenting that your neighbor had two 300-gig drives, right? The point is that you wouldn't have that dirt-cheap 20-30 gig hard drive that you have today, which you apparently need because you've held up your purchase as intelligent as compared with your neighbor's, if it wasn't for the growth of the industry (based on vast amounts of purchasing) that allowed those hard drives to become that cheap. You're taking advantage of the market, not circumventing it.