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Can You Can This Can?
Or is it safe to eat its contents?
Several kinds of people need to know: Bush administration shadow government officials and their families
preparing for a coming nuclear war by stocking their fallout shelters, Tim LaHaye readers who expect
not to be raptured, to be left behind for their sins and to have to fend for themselves among us
unbelievers... and coastal and near-coastal residents preparing for hurricane season. Stocking up on
canned goods and bottled water does not mean you are automatically a nut-case (though you certainly have
the option to be one if you want to); there are emergency events for which it does make sense to prepare.
Most hurricanes (at least to date) fall in that category: they are survivable, and their aftermath can
also be survived if you have a few basic supplies on hand.
If you live in the U.S. and nearby countries near a coast or on an island that experiences hurricanes, I
don't need to tell you how to prepare. There's plenty of information available. But if you've been doing
it for a number of years, you may have run up against the question in the post subject. I rotate a stock
of canned goods and bottled water over a period of two years; i.e., I am currently using up the foods I
bought for emergency supplies in 2005. Considering that canned foods may be far from new when you buy
them, and that two years is the nominal shelf life of most canned vegetables (I can't speak for other
kinds of canned goods), determining the goodness of a can of (whatever) involves some guesswork.
Many cans now have a best-by date printed on them in human-readable form; those are easy to deal with.
This post is about those other exasperating cans... the ones with those cryptic codes on the lids.
Although I keep bins of cans stored by year of purchase, it isn't always easy once a can leaves the bin
and enters the pantry to tell how old it is. Even once you decrypt a date, you may not know what the date
means; I usually assume it is a sell-by date unless something indicates otherwise... i.e., I assume the
coded date is intended for use by grocers. As there are several stages at which canned food is cached on
its way to your pantry... the grocer's shelves, the grocer's stock, some indeterminate number of
vehicles, warehouses, etc. ... one can only guess how long ago the canning was done by the manufacturer.
It's sort of (ahem) cache as cache cans.
Onward to the purpose of this ridiculously rambling post: helping you date your can. No smart remarks
now! Well, OK, maybe one or two. Oh, never mind.
Amazingly, there is no one standard in the U.S. for those date codes: each manufacturer has its own.
Moreover, for many kinds of foods, there is no federal requirement that the cans be dated at all, though
everything I found lurking in my pantry had at least some sort of code on it. I had always assumed that
grocery stockers were trained to read a single standard code, so they could remove unsold outdated goods
from the shelves in a timely manner. Silly me. After a bit of research on the codes, I've concluded that
outdated cans are probably removed from the shelves at the point at which one can draw a line through the
dust on the lid. At that point, I certainly draw the line, whether the grocer does or not.
OK. Enough dancing about. Following are some links that are arguably the only useful information in this
post:
- Mealtime.org, apparently an
industry association site, has date code decoding instructions for some well-known and not-so-well-known
manufacturers, presumably the members of that industry association.
- Sally Strackbein's Emergency Kitchen,
apparently, from its domain name, an effort published in anticipation of far worse things happening in the
year 2000 than actually happened (if you ignore the political disaster at the end), has an excellent and
comprehensive list of many well-known brands of canned goods, packaged goods and staples, listed
alphabetically, with expected shelf life for each item. Sally clearly thought about how such a list would
be used in practice; I highly approve.
- A USDA newsletter
(warning: .pdf file), published by The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) and posted by a helpful
community association, that contains on Page 5 a list of general information about canned food date codes,
kinds of dates, good practice in organizing your pantry if you stock up for emergencies, etc. The rest of
the document was unhelpful, to me at least.
- Amarogue, a site
about which I know nothing but what I see, has a page of information on food expiration, and another
of examples of food date coding.
- This Google Answers thread
contains some useful links.
The first three items above appear useful enough to me that I printed them off and stashed them with my
cookbooks so I can refer to them as I organize my pantry.
And now I'd better get off my can and onto my cans. Thank you for visiting. This has been the YDD PSA for
the day.
Steve
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A Condom-Sense Approach
Let me acknowledge my borrowing up front: "Condom Sense" is the name of a store in the Dallas area (with
branches elsewhere) in which one can buy... right, those too, and quite a few other things as well. It
is not to be confused with "common sense," something completely and apparently deliberately lacking in
federally funded so-called
abstinence-only sex education programs:
Each of these assertions turns up in federally funded abstinence-only sex education programs: Condoms fail
to prevent HIV infection 31 percent of the time during heterosexual sex. The chances of getting pregnant
while using a condom are 1 in 6. And condoms break or slip off nearly 15 percent of the time.
And each of them is wrong, says John S. Santelli, a pediatrician and a professor at Columbia University's
Mailman School of Public Health.
In a 20-page document submitted to the Department of Health and Human Services this week, Santelli
detailed what he calls "misleading" and "scientifically inaccurate" information in three curricula used by
programs that receive federal abstinence-only funding. His analysis accompanied a letter from the American
Civil Liberties Union demanding that HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt ensure that such programs provide
medically accurate information about condoms and sexually transmitted diseases, as required by federal
law.
"They have been alerted numerous times, and they haven't done anything," said Ava Barbour, an ACLU staff
attorney. "Studies have shown that the vast majority of Americans do not remain abstinent until marriage,
and they need to have this vital information to protect themselves."
...
I found this article via Michael O'Hare of
The Reality-Based Community,
where the masthead slogan is "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." The slogan
has never been more appropriate than it is here. Whatever anyone may think about abstinence as a means of
protecting our young people... personally I think it's a terrible idea... federally funded organizations
promoting abstinence have no right to spread apparently deliberate misinformation about the alternatives.
Given a choice, who would a teen believe, an organization that has its own religious agenda promoted
through the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), or a noted professor at one of the most
respected schools of public health in the country? Well, we won't know immediately, because the HHS
is slow-walking any possible review of Santelli's corrections, which accompany an ACLU letter to HHS
advising the department of its error.
Before we proceed, let's look at the actual numbers as Dr. Santelli lays them out:
...
In the ACLU filing, Santelli said the 31 percent figure regarding condoms and HIV was from an outdated
1993 study. More recent studies show that the risk of an HIV-negative person being infected by an
HIV-positive partner is reduced by 80 to 87 percent if condoms are used every time they have sex, Santelli
wrote.
Authoritative studies also show that the chances of an unintended pregnancy while using a condom are not 1
in 6, Santelli wrote, but about 2 percent over the course of a year if condoms are used correctly every
time. And condoms break or slip off less than 4 percent of the time, not 15 percent, Santelli wrote.
...
In short, condoms rarely fail, either as contraception or as prophylaxis against HIV. Meanwhile, when
abstinence fails, which it almost invariably does at some point among teens, the method yields no
additional protection against pregnancy or disease... none at all. Add to this a study publicized
last week
showing that abstinence advocacy has almost no effect on sexual activity, and you have a disaster in the
making... a disaster paid for by your tax dollars.
As a teenage male, I coined the phrase (and I'm certain I'm not the only one who came up with it),
"Abstinence makes the front grow harder." I was a shy sort in those days; that alone kept me out of
trouble. But these are different times, and I am personally convinced that preaching abstinence at teens
today is both futile and risky. If we as adults can help kids stay out of life-altering trouble, we have
an obligation to do so. But whether you agree with my better-safe-than-sorry approach to teenage
sexuality, I hope you'll at least agree with me that teens should not be given falsified information paid
for by our federal government.
Besides... how well did George W. Bush follow his own advice when he was young? How well are Bush
administration officials following the advice in light of the
DC Madam scandal?
It looks to me like another instance of GOPers saying, "forgiveness for me, but not for thee." Sorry;
not on my taxpayer's dime... and not to the likely harm of our young people. Taxpayer-funded lies about
sex, contraception, and protection against disease must cease immediately.
Steve
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Saturday Signs
Good advice. And when spelling gets too hard, find work in a bookstore. I'm not kidding: I found this sign
on an advertising display in a Borders.
Steve
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Leaving This Earth
What a week!
Hawking,
Scotty
and
Rostropovich
all leave this Earth in various ways... and Stephen Hawking happily returns to tell the tale. As to
James Doohan and Mstislav Rostropovich, at least we have their recorded legacies to comfort us.
Yes, of course, I was a Trek fan, not to the point of attending con's or creating costumes, but
enthusiastic enough to have recorded all of Next Gen, and to own... and embarrassingly enough, to have
pored over... the "blueprints" for the Enterprise D. Hey, many of us were a bit crazy in those days.
More surprisingly, when I was 25, I took cello lessons for a while. I didn't intend ever to perform on
cello; my performing instruments were pretty well settled by that age. But I was writing music, and
several composers had told me that it was important to understand bowed string instruments thoroughly in
order to write well for them. Rostropovich was one of many inspirations in those days. Unlike Janos
Starker and Yo-Yo Ma, I hever actually heard Rostropovich in live performance, but oh, those recordings...
Farewell and R.I.P., Mstislav Rostropovich. Scotty, don't ever fall on our heads. And welcome back, Prof.
Hawking, from your brief, historic but undoubtedly bearable lightness of being.
Steve
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Moyers: Buying The War
Please read or view Bill Moyers's powerful special,
Buying the War.
It's rather long; reading is quicker, but viewing is more powerful. Regular readers of blogs... at least
of blogs in our part of the political spectrum... will find no blockbuster revelations, but the
interviews with press and media reporters are worth the price of admission. The short version: much of
our fourth estate is populated with Bush administration stenographers exhibiting little if any
independence of thought or effort toward serious scrutiny... even in, perhaps particularly in, matters
of war and peace, of life and death. Congress seems to have awakened to its duty to do actual oversight
of Bush's wayward Executive branch: when will the media experience a similar awakening?
I often experience a sense of futility in blogging. It's a pretty lonely occupation, and as often as not
it feels like a waste of time. But left-leaning bloggers in aggregate, and with the help of a few blog
superstars, can accomplish what none of us, even the superstars, can accomplish individually: we can
keep important but obscure stories alive for months, weeks, even years while print media, serving the
administration's needs, bury them two pages back from the end of Section A, and broadcast media touch
on them not at all. Of course, journalism drives blogging, but we have reached a point at which some
bloggers either are journalists or else drive journalism to do its job. If we can do nothing more than
help other, more successful bloggers hold the politicians' feet to the fire long enough to force the media
to hear them say "ouch" and repeat the "ouch" in their ledes, blogging will be worth the effort.
Moyers's special, as his works so often do, reminds us of the task ahead of us, as well as of the
disaster the press and media have wrought in the run-up to, and the execution of, the Iraq war.
We are where we are in no small part because the free press isn't, because the independent media
aren't. We are no worse off than we are because the left blogosphere has been resolutely unwilling to
give the press and media a free pass when they neglect their duties.
If you want to be rid of discretionary wars and dictatorial presidential administrations within your own
lifetime... keep blogging. (Here ends the pep talk for the morning. Thanks, Bill M., I needed that.)
Steve
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Friday Green Eyes Blogging
Having just changed her lenses for the new color, Her Majesty Queen Tabitha requests you accompany her
appearance with the song
Green Eyes (Aquellos Ojos Verdes)
(MIDI via
Grandpa Schober), a song to which my late
parents sometimes danced, usually to the Jimmy Dorsey cover...
Of course, Her Majesty will deign to accept more recent songs named Green Eyes if you prefer them.
(Sorry about the focus. The cats didn't do a very good job of standing still this week, and my hands are
never all that steady under the best of circumstances. And if I need another whiny excuse, I'm still
learning to use IrfanView to edit the photos. So there.)
Steve
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Walls And Homes
Ronald Reagan: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
(Wikiquote)
Dubya Bush: "Build more walls! Yeah, right, that'll fix Eye-Rack good! More walls!"
(Google search)
Oh, GOPers... how your mighty have fallen. Whatever became of the party of Saint Reagan? Where did you get
these idiots who think walls will improve the situation on the ground? Have you learned nothing from
history? Are you turning America into that old totalitarian regime we worked so hard to overcome? No? How
are we to tell the difference, as long as you continue employing their techniques?
"Mr. Bush, tear down those walls!"
Onward, from the grand gestures to the personal tragedies...
Why is the word "homes" in the post subject? Oh. That's easy:
Riverbend is leaving her home,
with some family members and some possessions, all yet to be determined. Will they make it to safety? I
wish I could confidently answer "yes," but there is just no way to know. Fates help her. If we are unable
to end this war, we may all be refugees someday.
Oh, I forgot... Riverbend has something to say about walls, too.
Steve
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Ohio 2004 Again
Via Avedon,
we have a
Slashdot story
about one more oddity... to say the least... in the running of the 2004 elections in Ohio:
goombah99 writes
"Netcraft
is showing that an event happened in the Ohio 2004 election that is difficult to explain.
The Secretary of State's website,
which handles election reporting, normally is directed to an Ohio-based IP address hosted by the Ohio
Supercomputer Center. On Nov. 3 2004, Netcraft shows the website pointing out of state to a server
owned by Smartech Corp. According to the American Registry on Internet Numbers, Smartech's
block of IP addresses
64.203.96.0 – 64.203.111.255 encompasses the entire
range of addresses
owned by the Republican National Committee. Smartech hosted the recently notorious
gbw43.com
domain used from the White House in apparent violation of the Presidential Records Act, from which
thousands of White House emails
vanished."
Update: 04/25 01:24 GMT by
KD :
ePluribus Media published a piece called
Ken Blackwell Outsources Ohio Election Results to GOP Internet Operatives, Again
on election eve 2006, when a similar DNS switch to Smartech occurred. They have been investigating the
larger story of IT on Capitol Hill and elsewhere for two years.
One of Avedon's commenters cautions that Smartech Corp. does lots of government contracting, and that
outsourcing of the Ohio SoS's web site on election eve may merely be prudent in light of increased
traffic that their regular provider may be unable to handle. That much is true, and if this were the
only evidence of trouble in Ohio in 2004, one could discount it as coincidence, or at worst, somebody's
brother-in-law getting the government contract.
But if there's anything we've learned about the Bushists, it is that where there's smoke, there's a
conflagration requiring response by the entire fire department. It will not surprise you to learn that I
do not believe this is an innocent coincidence. Think about it: in the most sensitive state in the nation,
what would the GOP give to have the published vote counts pass through its very own hot little hands? I
don't know if one could steal an election with this technique alone... I doubt it... but having the
capability of fudging the numbers published on the official web site if things got tight could reinforce
the public perception that the GOP candidate won.
And we learned all about public perception in 2000.
Steve
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Mad's Latest Parody
... evokes
anger and laughter
in about equal parts, as she skewers Laura for her recent outrage, to the tune of "Carolina in the
Morning." Mad also offers a link to the video of Laura's arrogant, whiny self-pity about how much she and
the C-in-C suffer over the war; be sure to view it if you haven't already seen it. Have your eyewash
handy, and maybe an anti-emetic as well.
You may have noticed a shortage of doggerel around here lately. The cause is no mystery, and I admire Mad
Kane for persevering in the face of almost insurmountable obstacles. As the great Tom Lehrer has said of
his own reluctance to write send-ups of the Bush administration, "I don't want to satirise George Bush and
his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them." Even for lesser satirists like the YDD, making readers laugh at
what is, at ground, painful and serious material is a challenge few are still willing to undertake. Kudos
to Mad for her steadfastness in this regard. In satire there is strength. Stick it to 'em, Mad!
Steve
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Watch What You Eat
Remember when Ari Fleischer
told us
that all Americans "... need to watch what they say, watch what they do"? To that, we and our pets and our
farm animals need to add,
"watch what you eat":
April 25, 2007
Were Our Pets Deliberately Poisoned?
FDA says a chemical linked to the deaths and illnesses of hundreds of dogs and cats may have been intentionally added to an ingredient in pet food to artificially enhance its protein levels
By Nikhil Swaminathan
A month after the the probe into the poisoning of pet food began, government officials announced this week
that a second contaminant had been found in protein additives that have sickened or killed hundreds of
dogs and cats. The announcement came on the heels of another devastating discovery: that batches of rice
protein concentrate used in pet food were also laced with the first known culprit, melamine, a nitrogen-
based compound used in commercial and industrial plastics. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says the
chemicals may have been deliberately added to the gluten in an attempt to artificially inflate the protein
levels in the products.
"We have found cyanuric acid, which is somewhat related to melamine," Stephen Sundlof, director of the
FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine. Both compounds have high levels of nitrogen, which are a measure of
protein in a food product. Wheat, rice and corn gluten are forms of vegetable protein that are used as
binders in soft (or wet) pet food. They can also be added to dry food to enhance the protein content, says
Dave Griffin, owner of the independent pet store Westwood Pet Center, in Bethesda, Md. Griffin, who has
worked in the pet industry for 35 years, adds that because of lax labeling requirements, pet food
manufacturers are not required to specify the source of protein—whether it's from meat or meal.
...
Note this is not an obscure tinfoil-hat web site: this is Scientific American.
Is your pet eating melamine? how about cyanuric acid? how would you know? are you eating either or both
of those substances yourself? again, how would you know? More:
...
Brent Hoff, a clinical toxicologist and pathologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada,
confirmed the presence of cyanuric acid in both the rice protein concentrate as well as in crystals found
in the urine and kidneys of sick animals. Late last month, those crystals, which are brown and round in
shape, were found to be made up of 30 percent melamine; the composition of the other 70 percent has yet to
be determined, though it is known to contain cyanuric acid as well as amilorine and amiloride, which are
by-products of melamine.
...
The FDA also announced that it is taking preemptive steps to try to prevent further damage by testing protein ingredients for melamine in a variety of pet and human food, which contains protein additives—like wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate—that are imported from outside the U.S. David Acheson, chief medical officer for the agency's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, says the new measures are to determine "where else may this be" in order to keep the contaminant from sickening any more pets, or perhaps, people as well.
...
In addition to the pet food scare, the FDA revealed that the urine of hogs in North Carolina, South
Carolina and California has tested positive for melamine. The implication is that salvaged melamine-
containing pet food was sold to hog producers in those states, as well as farms in New York, Utah and
possibly Ohio. The FDA has quarantined all of the farms that received the tainted feed. Stephen Sundlof,
director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine, said that a poultry farm in Missouri may have
received contaminated food, as well. But he stressed that officials are "working to assure that there is
no further distribution of the meat from these farms."
...
And on and on it goes, for two more web pages. Read as much as you can stand. One tiny bit of good news
among the bad:
...
The FDA will finally get a shot at getting to the root of the matter now that Chinese officials relented
to requests to allow inspectors into the country to probe gluten suppliers implicated in the potential
scandal. The FDA reported that it had finally received letters of invitation from the Chinese government,
which are necessary to obtain visas. Once in the country, the agency plans to investigate the
manufacturing practices of the two suppliers of the melamine-containing rice and wheat gluten, which have
been imported by the U.S., to determine if and how cross-contamination may have occurred.
According to Julia Ho of the FDA's Office of International Programs, the Chinese government has been
conducting its own investigations and has "also embargoed all the wheat gluten as well as the rice protein
concentrate from those two companies for export."
...
Now that's a relief. What? you're not relieved? Neither am I.
This speaks to a complete breakdown in the food safety protocols for foods obtained from international
sources, although I doubt they are being observed much more effectively toward food from domestic sources.
The Bush administration has systematically eviscerated the regulatory agencies that protect us from
corporations and individuals who have strong financial incentives to do us harm either willfully (as this
case appears to be) or through negligence. No other government in the civilized world sees such
regulation as burdensome or unnecessary: only Bush's clients, cronies, and contributors benefit from lax
regulation of the food supply.
If ever we needed an object lesson in the folly of hands-off government in the arena of public safety,
this is that lesson. We can learn it well... or we can die of our ignorance.
Steve
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Swiss Watch New Exoplanet - CORRECTED
This
is too cool for words: evidence has been found for the existence of a planet orbiting a star about 20
light years away, a planet that might... just might... have liquid water:
...
It is the smallest of the 200 or so planets that are now known to exist outside of our solar system,
called extrasolar or exoplanets. Moreover, it orbits its home star within the so-called habitable zone
where surface water, the staff of life, could exist if other conditions are right, said Stephane Udry of
the Geneva Observatory.
...
But he and other astronomers cautioned that it was far too soon to conclude that liquid water was there
without more observations. Sara Seager, a planet expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said,
“For example, if the planet had an atmosphere more massive than Venus’s, then the surface would likely be
too hot for liquid water.”
...
“On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X,” said Xavier
Delfosse, a team member from Grenoble University in France, according to a news release from the European
Southern Observatory, a multinational collaboration based in Garching, Germany.
...
Hmph. Someone named Xavier would be tempted to mark any planet with an X, I'd think. Onward...
...
“It’s 20 light years. We can go there,” said Dimitar Sasselov, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics, who studies the structure and formation of planets.
...
"We can go there" means, of course, "we can theoretically send a probe there." As astronomical distances
go, 20 light years is not an inconceivable trip... for a piece of equipment. If a probe were sent, the
first close-up information from it about the planet would be received back home 40 years after launch.
[CORRECTION: considerably longer than 40 years. Unless someone invents a
light-speed drive for the probe itself, it will take a good deal longer than 20 years to reach the planet.
Duh. I am guilty of blogging while sleepy. - The YDD]
Of course, our probes within our own solar system often fail, at distances that are microscopic compared
to 20 light years. Still...
...
The planet, officially known as Gliese 581c, circles the star every 13 days at a distance of about 7
million miles. According to models of planet formation developed by Dr. Sasselov and his colleagues, such
a planet should be about half again as large as the Earth and be composed of rock and water, what the
astronomers now call a “super Earth.”
...
Although the new planet is much closer to its star than the Earth is to the Sun, its star, a so-called red
dwarf, is only about a hundredth as luminous as the Sun. So 7 million miles is a comfortable cuddling
distance.
How hot the planet would get, Dr. Udry said, would depend on how much light the planet reflects, or its
albedo. Using the Earth and Venus as two extreme examples, he estimated that temperatures on the surface
of the planet should range from 0 to 40 degrees centigrade. “It’s just right in the good range,” he said.
“Of course, we don’t know anything about its albedo.”
...
Mine is diminishing as I age. Oh, wait; that's something else. "Albedo" is reflectivity: the planet's
surface temperature depends not only on the brightness of its sun, but also the amount of light its
atmosphere (if any) and surface reflect back out into space. Liquid water exists in a fairly narrow range
of temperatures, and liquid water is essential to the kind of life we know here.
There are projects either underway or in the planning stage which have the potential to find other
"Earth-like" planets, but according to this article, they "have been delayed by political, technical and
financial difficulties." My bad fortune; I won't live to see them. But they will happen, as that wonderful
Paul Simon song says, "not in my lifetime, but in yours, for sure."
Steve
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Texans: Take Your Voter Card To The Polls
Via
Charles Kuffner,
a GOP-sponsored bill requiring voter ID in Texas is more sinister than at first thought: if it passes
(which is likely, though it is possible that my State Senator Rodney Ellis may be able to block it),
those of you in the habit of voting using some sort of official photo ID (e.g., a valid Texas
driver's license) will find yourself being offered only a PROVISIONAL BALLOT. That's right... you
will not be allowed to vote in the usual way, and in Texas, provisional ballots, in practice, seldom get
counted.
This is of course part of the ongoing GOP "voter fraud" campaign, intended to prevent anyone from voting
fraudulently... and to prevent poor people and people of color from voting legitimately. Studies done on
alleged voter fraud have shown no evidence that there is a problem of any size regarding individual voter
fraud. (Of course, one could talk about massive fraud committed by tampering with the results of
direct-recording electronic voting systems, but Republans have no interest in such discussions.)
This bill may or may not be introduced for debate in the Senate, and if it is, any resulting law may or
may not contain this provision (which appears to have been slipped in in the dead of night by some
nameless Republan). But you can be sure that if it doesn't become law this time, it will be reintroduced
repeatedly until it passes someday. The message to take away from this post is as follows:
GET IN THE HABIT OF CARRYING YOUR VOTER CARD TO THE POLLS.
If your card is missing, obtain a replacement from the local voter registrar, who in most counties is
the tax assessor-collector. If you have difficulty or substantial delay in obtaining a replacement
despite repeated attempts to get your voter registrar to take action, please contact your local Democratic
Party for information on things you can do that may expedite matters. Remember this: it is strictly
illegal for any voter registrar or deputy volunteer voter registrar to discriminate by political party
against anyone legitimately entitled to a voter certificate. Keep pressing until you get your card. AND
TAKE IT TO THE POLLS WITH YOU!
Steve
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Bad Spell Of Whether
Ah, I mean weather. The forecast says we're about to have thunderstorms this evening, which is of course
no big deal and not uncommon. But about one time in 20, as storms approach, I get a "barometer headache."
Today is one of those times. I've spent much of the day lying down, hoping the ache will pass. For the
most part, it has. To those of you kind enough to believe that I display some cogency of thought when my
head is not aching, thank you, both for that sentiment and for your patience while I wait out Mother
Nature. With luck, I'll blog this evening.
Steve
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GOP: Withdrawal Equals Surrender
Based on what I'm reading on
SFGate
I am a lot less unhappy with the supplemental bill Democrats are pushing. Please correct me if I'm wrong,
but it appears as if there is at least one firm deadline in the bill:
A historic veto showdown assured, Democratic leaders agreed Monday on legislation that requires the first
U.S. combat troops to be withdrawn from Iraq by Oct. 1 with a goal of a complete pullout six months later.
A timetable it is not... but neither is it a complete cave-in with mealy-mouthed language about
recommendations, either. Matters could be worse.
Meanwhile, the war of words has escalated:
"No more will Congress turn a blind eye to the Bush administration's incompetence and dishonesty," Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid said in a speech in which he accused the president of living in a state of
denial about events in Iraq more than four years after the U.S.-led invasion.
...
He likened the president to Lyndon Johnson, saying the former president ordered troop escalations in
Vietnam in an attempt "to save his political legacy," only to watch U.S. casualties climb steadily.
Bush, he said, "is the only person who fails to face this war's reality — and that failure is devastating
not just for Iraq's future, but for ours."
... and on the other side...
... This time, Dana Perino, the president's spokeswoman fired back.
She said it was Reid who was ignoring reality, not the president.
She said Reid is in denial about the vicious nature of the enemy and about the U.S.-led plan to provide
more security in Iraq. "He's also in denial that a surrender date — he thinks it is a good idea. It is not
a good idea. It is defeat. It is a death sentence for the millions of Iraqis who voted for a constitution,
who voted for a government, who voted for a free and democratic society."
Oooohhh, yeah. Bring... it... on! If Bush maintains that line, by the 2008 elections, the American public
will be reluctant to be in the same room as any GOP leader.
I think we can now depend on a Bush veto. That was my primary concern when I heard earlier rumors of the
bill Democrats were preparing. Of course, the veto can be sustained; there aren't votes enough to
override it. What happens next? I cannot say with any confidence. But at that point, Bush will own the
surge... lock, stock and IED. His legacy will be secure. His own party may... may, I emphasize... begin
to distance themselves from this unwinnable lost war. And that will be the beginning of the end
of that war, whether Bush chooses to believe it or not.
Steve
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Krugman On Iraq
Paul Krugman
(that's a firewall-fracturing link, for those who care) has this insight on the "supplemental" conflict:
There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and the Bush administration over funding
for the Iraq surge. You can pretend that it’s a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it
really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush, barricaded in the White House, is
threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders — the troops — if his demands aren’t met.
"Drop your legislative guns, or the soldier gets it..." yes, that's the perfect line for Bush. Go read the
rest; Krugman is at his insightful best in this column. I'll give you one more teaser, Krugman's
conclusion:
Anyway, never mind the political calculations. Confronting Mr. Bush on Iraq has become a patriotic duty.
A patriotic duty, indeed. Are you listening, Nancy and Harry?
(H/T to
Mustang Bobby.)
Steve
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Oh, Crap - Dems Caving Again?
NYT:
...
One day after legislative leaders met with President Bush, failing to find common ground, House Democrats
signaled their intention to step away from a mandatory deadline to remove troops from Iraq, and to work
instead toward a compromise of setting a goal for troops to be withdrawn next year.
...
Oh, yeah. A compromise. A goal. A recommendation, not a mandatory deadline. Right. Sure. Whatever.
Is there something I'm missing here? Dems won the discussion with Bush. They have him over the
proverbial barrel. Why should they compromise the core of the legislation? Did everything Harry
Reid said a couple of days ago, about intending to give as good as we got from Bush in the inevitable
fight that would ensue, evaporate into thin air?
Kagro X
of Daily Kos points out one of the hazards of going this route: What if Bush decides NOT to veto
it? Yeah, sure, Bush says he'll veto the weaker version, too, but why should he? If he doesn't,
Dems will be co-owners of this awful war. What more could Bush ask for?
Pachacutec
of Firedoglake offers many insights, particularly this one:
And I'm also saying it's better to fail to pass the version of the bill with the supplemental language in
it and then put it back on the calendar than to compromise for marginal votes when the resulting bill will
say to the public that we're being reasonable, when it will really just mean we caved in.
Fuck the votes. Make a real confrontation and take it to the public. Public pressure could support a
conference committee bill with real limits on the president. The polls say they trust Democrats in
congress to run the "war" more than they trust the president.
Pach goes on to say how effective Bill Clinton was at this very tactic: taking a popular position
directly to the public, bypassing the nay-sayers in and out of his own party. Pach also says this about
the nature of negotiation:
I teach [executive level] level negotiation. Compromise is appropriate when the underlying issues are not
that important and when both sides are making collaborative concessions. Neither circumstance is met
here. ...
No. Fucking. Kidding. Why should there be any compromise at all? Dems hold all the cards... all of them,
including... especially including... public support for their position. It's not just liberal ranters
like me who voted Dem this time and sent them to Washington to end this war. Again and again, the polls
show that the vast majority of Dems (yellow dog, green dog and blue dog) and independents want this war
ended, and sent these people to Washington in numbers sufficient to do just that. Again... why, in the
name of the founders of our nation, would Democrats compromise now?
It's late. I'm tired. I know I'm ranting an angry rant. But would some of you who read this please
follow up on the rumors, and tell me why I should not be staring at my Democratic National Committee
renewal on my desk, at my local party sustaining membership renewal also on my desk, and not be both angry
and... more to the point... financially unsupportive?
This is very close to a go/no-go issue for me. If the Democratic Congress fails to pursue its advantage
despite a clear public mandate, I'll probably still vote Democratic... yes, they have that figured out;
there's no other practical alternative for my vote... but they can fucking forget about my financial
support. I don't understand. I simply do not understand, and unless they follow through, I will feel
betrayed. Is there no one in Washington on whom I can depend... on whom we can depend... to stop
this awful war?
Steve
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Saturday Signs
A couple of days ago, more or less, we had Earth Day. (Different people seem to name different dates.)
Today, we have the Grand Prix of Houston on a course at the Reliant complex. That is
about three miles from me, but I can hear the engines all the way over here.
This morning, from my bedroom, with the window closed, I thought I was hearing a howling wind. I don't
know for certain, but I'll bet those drivers burn more gasoline (actually methanol) in a day than I burn
in two or three years. So today's sign had to be something to do with automobiles. Perhaps it is no
accident (so to speak) that the sign is about not parking. Watch out that you don't incur that
"operators exepense"!
Steve
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Waiting For My Ship Truck To Come In
It's Friday afternoon, and the local Micro Center still has not restocked the PC I intended to buy last
weekend. I may end up having to make other plans. Fortunately, for the moment, the old desktop PC
continues to work, despite the alarming message on bootup. As I am not frenetically configuring a PC,
copying data and installing software at the moment, I'll take the opportunity to rant about
computer-related things:
- Symantec: give me my (expletive deleted) computers back! I use Symantec A/V, as I am sure
many of you do. It has successfully detected and prevented a number of bits of malware of various sorts.
But the cost has been considerable, and I don't mean just the price of the software. Symantec software
is NOISY... there's always something going on on the taskbar or in little popups, the frequency
of which seems to have increased in the 2006 version. Moreover, Symantec software is SLOW, not so
much on newer machines, but if your computer is three or four years old, you can see a noticeable
performance hit right after the A/V software is installed... and from then on. Finally, Symantec
software is PRE-EMPTIVE... when it decides to download, you can forget about doing any
processor-intensive work, and in some cases, it even slows down keystrokes. I installed the 2007 version
on Stella's machine, and every flaw mentioned above grew worse, not better. I'm open to suggestions.
- IrfanView photo software: powerful and free, but with a clumsy interface.
In my ongoing effort to wean myself as much as possible from Microsoft software for daily personal use
(not really possible in my working hours, of course), I found OpenOffice.org 2.1 to be an acceptable
substitute for Microsoft Office for all my nonbusiness purposes. But as far as I know it does not include
a photo editor. Advised by friends who do that sort of stuff more than I do, and who understand that
freeware is a requirement in this case, I came up with IrfanView, a freeware editor packed with features
and containing respectable implementations of some good algorithms (the resize/resample yields great
results, for example). As I am regularly blogging from the laptop these days, and as I do not have
Microsoft Office with its photo editor installed on the laptop, I'm using IrfanView a lot more. The
primary problem I have with it is that its very, very young programmer has chosen to do some standardized
interface matters "better"; i.e., differently from the rest of the world. For example,
- Alt-F, S gets you "save as" instead of "save".
- Dragging a rectangle selection and single-clicking in it causes a zoom of the selection to fill
the window (most programs allow one to click-and-drag the selection to another location; that's
accomplished by right-click in this software).
- Finally, if you close the application with files
unsaved, unlike every other Windows app I know of, it closes without reminding you. Too bad; whatever you
left unsaved, expecting to save during the reminder, is irretrievably gone.
A note to very, very young programmers out there: please don't fuck with the conventions of the
platform you're writing for. If you're going to be radical, I encourage you to do so in the
sociopolitical arena; leave the software conventions intact.
- Added later: new Blogger comments suck. They penalize anyone who types slowly (I type quickly,
bat-out-of-hell quickly, actually), anyone who writes a longer post (the threshold seems to be about a
minute or so) and anyone who has difficulty reading those blessed random character strings (challenging
for me even with reading glasses, and my eyes simply aren't that bad). Oh, and the deliberate randomizing
of the tab-index order so that one cannot navigate by keyboard deserves some kind of extreme punishment
for the programmer who thought of it. I know that comment spam is annoying, or worse than annoying, but
HaloScan seems to combat the spam without introducing any of the gross user inconveniences of Blogger. If
you see my comments on HaloScan, TypePad, WordPress or unprotected Blogger threads more than on
spam-protected Blogger threads, now you know why.
I'm sure there was something else, but I'm about ranted out at the moment.
This evening I have to attend a birthday party for one of Stella's very religious friends whose politics
do not match our own, so I will not be blogging again until very late this evening at the earliest. Cross
your fingers that I am able to hold my temper in the event the conversation turns to Supreme Court
decisions.
Steve
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Honor And What?
Glancing at
Talking Points Memo,
TPMMuckraker
and
Firedoglake
over the past couple of days, I can't help noticing a pattern:
- FBI raids
of GOP members of Congress.
- Indictments and convictions
of big GOP players, including members of Congress.
- An Attorney General
who can't remember squat... except when it suits him.
- A "president"
who cannot remember what it is, exactly, that he cannot remember... but who remembers who can be tossed
under the bus to save his sorry butt. (UPDATE:
here
is the video I was looking for. Duncan posted it. On this video, he's a blithering idiot... Bush, I mean,
not Duncan.)
And on. And on. And on.
Hey, GOPers... how's that "restorin' honor 'n' integrity to Washington" thing working out for you?
Steve
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Friday Whispered Secrets Blogging
Tabitha: "Don't look now, Samantha, but I believe we are under surveillance..."
Steve: "Get used to it, girls; these days, we all are."
Steve
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Gonzo: 'I Know Nothink'
It's probably politically incorrect of me to think of
Sergeant Schultz
in the context of a serious hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee taking testimony from AG Alberto
Gonzales on the matter of the possibly politically motivated US Attorney firings. But I can't help myself.
When a transcript becomes available, somebody should do a count of the number of responses AG AG prefaced
with the words "I don't recall..." Perhaps he believes that those three words are the ultimate perjury
prophylactic, and perhaps he's right.
I don't have cable, which means I don't have CSPAN or CSPAN3. The good news is that Christy Hardin Smith
of Firedoglake is
liveblogging
Gonzales's testimony. Start at the link and work your way forward in time; for a variety of reasons,
Christy is breaking the testimony up into several posts. Remember that these are not transcripts; they
are the best approximations she can make of what she hears, combined with her own comments on potential
issues involved. Remember that Ms. Hardin Smith is a retired prosecutor; her insights are worth reading.
TPMMuckraker is also providing a series of posts, and some video clips. Start
here
and work your way downstream (i.e., up-blog). Their servers were hammered earlier, but they seem to be
doing fine for about the past hour.
See? Those of us without cable are not cut off from the world after all! So... why are you still here?
Go check out what's happening! Oh... I think they may be on lunch break at the moment. There's time to
grab your hamburger and Coke before watching Leahy et al eat Gonzales's lunch...
Steve
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Give 'Em Hell Harry
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is beginning to earn the title and the mantle of his namesake. From
TPMCafe's Election Central:
Reid To Bush: If You Come After Us, We'll Hit Back Every Bit As Aggressively
By Greg Sargent | bio
Okay, here's some color from inside the meeting today at the White House between President Bush and
Congressional leaders about what to do to resolve the impasse over Iraq.
...
[Sargent cites a "source familiar with the meeting"...]
...
"Reid talked about a recent conversation he had with a retired general where they talked about the
similarities between the current situation and Vietnam," the source relates. "He talked about how the
President and Secretary of Defense [during Vietnam] knew that the war was lost but continued to press on
at the cost of thousands of additional lives lost."
"The analogy to Vietnam appeared to touch a nerve with the President. He appeared a little sensitive to
it," the source continued. "And he clearly didn't like to hear people in the room say that the war
couldn't be won militarily."
More: "Reid made it clear to the President that he understood that the President and Vice President after
the veto would come after him and Speaker Pelosi with everything they have. Reid said that he and Pelosi
would respond just as aggressively. He said he was convinced that they were on the right side of the
issue."
...
And apparently Pelosi is equally unrelenting. If this report is correct... at last, we have a pair of
Democratic leaders apparently willing to take personal political risks to do what we sent them there to
do.
Give 'em hell, Harry. Give 'em hell, Nancy. Do what must be done.
Steve
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When Judges Practice Medicine - UPDATED
... you get bad law and bad medicine.
Melissa McEwan
has the details. Her conclusion is pretty much my own:
Five men—Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Antonin
Scalia, and Clarence Thomas—just decided that the health of every woman is America is worth less than a
terminally ill fetus.
This is nothing about saving one or another life: it is about controlling women. The operation
specifically banned by the 2003 law the Supreme Court upheld, a procedure now known as "partial birth
abortion," is rare, and is performed only in the most extreme cases. The fetus typically has no real
chance of living, while a full-term pregnancy may endanger the woman. The decision of whether such major
surgery is medically necessary or appropriate should be in the hands of skilled practitioners... of
medicine, not law. Now it isn't. There's no way around it: the formerly Republican Congress and the
Supreme Court are now in the business of practicing medicine... and they'll practice on you, if you are
unlucky enough to be a woman of childbearing age.
The only reason this specific procedure was chosen for banning in the first place is that a description of
it could be used politically in an inflammatory way. A triple bypass operation is just as upsetting to
watch (I saw about five minutes of one in real life long ago from a dome above an operating room; I don't
faint at the sight of blood, but my lunch threatened to depart), but there is no political value to the
anti-abortion faction in opposing cardiovascular surgery. And so, to advance their political cause, they
pick on the very women most medically vulnerable in their hour of greatest need of medical help... and
metaphorically kick them out of the hospital.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, dissenting, always one of the more even-handed Justices and inclined to base her
decisions on established law (about which she is recognized as a scholar), had much to say, but this
passage (via
SCOTUSblog)
struck me as particularly to the point:
Ginsburg, in a lengthy statement, said "the Court's opinion tolerates, indeed applauds, federal
intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American
College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. For the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition
with no exception protecting a woman's health." She said the federal ban "and the Court's defense of
it cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again
by this Court -- and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women's lives. A decision of the
character the Court makes today should not have staying power."
That final comment, concluding angry remarks that were delivered without an open display of emotion,
clearly was a suggestion that the ruling might not survive new appointments to the Court -- just as the
arrival of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and, especially, Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. -- had led to
the switch she claimed had come about this time. Ginsburg pointedly noted that the Court is "differently
composed than it was when we last considered a restrictive abortion regulation" -- in Stenberg in 2000.
I am old enough to remember the days of coathangers and back alleys. A former girlfriend of mine went
through two life-threatening abortions, almost dying of sepsis from the second one. (No, I did not get her
pregnant; this happened in the late Sixties or early Seventies, years before I met her.) Women in socially
desperate situations... e.g., victims of spousal or parental abuse... will find ways to obtain abortions.
Women in medically desperate situations will either find doctors qualified to perform the procedures they
need to stay alive, or will die attempting desperate measures. If abortions are not performed medically,
the blood of the women who die is on the hands of those five justices... and the members of Congress who
forced this awful law through in the first place.
UPDATE: this decision is worse than I originally imagined. Again from
the SCOTUSblog site:
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
A Sharp Reversal: Commentary from the Center for Reproductive Rights
Posted by Jason Harrow at 06:17 PM
The following commentary is by Bonnie Scott Jones, a senior attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights.
In a stunning sacrifice of women’s health and physician judgment, the majority has held that where
differences of opinion exist in the medical community, politicians may decide what doctors should do.
This decision gives legislatures sweeping reign in the abortion context because there will always
be differences of opinion among experts and practitioners about how best to protect the health of women
seeking abortions. Indeed, given the nature of science, the diverse religious and moral views held by
Americans, and the ease of creating and publishing (junk) science, those differences are inevitable on any
issue intertwining medicine and morality. Accordingly, the decision opens the door for legislatures to
dictate medical treatment in virtually any area of medical practice. By holding that legislatures are
free to regulate whenever such differences of opinion exist, the Court has left Americans with politicians
rather than doctors making medical decisions for them. The health costs of that holding today fall upon
the one-third of American women who will obtain abortions in their lifetime.
...
Read the rest. This is far-reaching, frightening, precedent-ignoring, precedent-setting, (ahem)
agenda-based adjudication. Bush is getting what he hoped for when he appointed his justices.
Steve
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Freeway Blogging In Houston
No, I haven't done
this
yet. But I might:
Those bridges... relatively new and architecturally more pleasing than most over-the-freeway bridges...
are on my path to several friends' homes and other places I regularly visit. And goodness knows, the
message gets out: according to the article, 300,000 vehicles a day traverse the Southwest Freeway, and
many of them probably cross under those ground-level bridges.
A shout out to FreewayBlogger (see blogroll), who started this trend. The more wars Dubya starts, the more
attention the opposition is sure to receive. Every little bit helps... and this bit is not so little. If
we're going to put an end to perpetual war, we have to inform people by the thousands... or the hundreds
of thousands. This is one way to do that.
(Picture added after initial posting.)
Addendum: the anti-Israel crowd shows up at every protest of any sort, in an attempt to co-opt it.
Presence at an antiwar protest means putting up with people with other agendas. Deal with it.
Steve
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Tax Postpartum Postmortem - UPDATED
As much tragic and needless death as we've seen both in America and around the world in the past few
days, I hesitated to use "postmortem" in my subject, but it is the usual slang for an analysis after
something is over and done with. As for "postpartum," while I've never borne a baby, I can imagine that
women among my readers who have both given birth to children and labored and delivered their taxes
may be suffering comparable depression after the latter event. I know I'm depressed, not so much by the
taxes I pay as by what I seem to be getting for my money these days... tragic and needless death, as I
said earlier, particularly the systematic infliction of the same around the world. Now that's depressing.
But that's not the real topic of this post. Let's focus on the unfairness of the American tax system,
taken all together and rationally evaluated, unfairness to everyone who is not wealthy, and in particular,
let's note that the system had gotten more unfair in the years since Reagan's presidency. Or rather, let's
let
Jared Bernstein,
former chief economist in Clinton's Department of Labor and now of Economic Policy Institute, do it for
us.
Here's the short version of his message (though you should read his post; it's entertaining): many
conservatives... and I'm not just making up the "many conservatives" part; read Bernstein's post... argue
that the system is unfair to the wealthy, because the wealthiest 1% pay 25% of total tax receipts. You've
surely heard that whine if you've ever discussed taxes with a conservative.
But even if it's true, that statement is irrelevent to the fairness issue. Bernstein points out that the
only metric that really makes sense is an individual's effective federal tax rate: your total federal
taxes of all sorts (including, significantly, the payroll tax) divided by your income. Because there's a
cap on income subject to the payroll tax, the poorest among us pay a higher effective tax rate than the
wealthiest citizens. Moreover, that rate is in fact falling for all income groups, but for which group is
it falling fastest? Right... the very wealthy:
...
The Bush cuts are at play here: analysis by the group Citizens for Tax Justice shows that the Bush cuts
lowered the effective rate of the top 1% by three percentage points, the middle group by two, and the
bottom group by less than one. That translates into tax cuts of about $50,000 for the top, $700 for the
middle, and less than $100 for the bottom.
Now that's compassionate conservatism for you.
There's another issue Bernstein doesn't address, because it isn't in the scope of his article, and that
is what federal taxes will look like in a very few years. Mr. Bush's wars have not only erased Mr.
Clinton's leveling of the deficit, but have plunged the debt to a point exceeding the national debts
of all other presidencies combined, back to George Washington. Sooner or later, that debt must be paid
down, or other nations will cease to support the lifestyles of America's rich and infamous, even if
those nations are threatened with force. No one likes a freeloader, especially if that freeloader is also
a bully. Don't look now, but your children's children's taxes have just been raised by presidents Reagan,
Poppy Bush and Junior Bush. Since 1980, only President Clinton has even tried to avoid this. Dubya is
working on bankrupting your kids and grandkids... no matter how wealthy or poor you are.
Happy day after Tax Day!
UPDATE: via
trifecta,
via
NTodd,
here's a Boston Globe column by Christopher Shea titled
Soak the rest of us,
summarizing the results of a study by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez that shows the degree
to which the former progressivity of our tax system has been compromised, to the advantage of the
wealthy, particularly the very wealthy. I cannot count the number of times I've been told by conservative
acquaintances that my position amounts to a "soak the rich" or "eat the rich" policy. Here is strong
evidence that the rich are by no means being eaten.
Steve
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Maintenance Matters
Apologies for my absence; it was a busy weekend. Apart from making yet another backup of everything on
the allegedly failing PC and copying useful things to this laptop for convenience, I located a computer I
want to buy... as soon as Micro Center restocks the version shipped with Windows XP Pro SP2. Nothing
personal against Vista, but this is to replace my primary working desktop computer I've used for the last
few years, and I don't care to change OS horses in mid-workstream. I know there are Win XP Pro drivers for
every device I own and use; I don't care to spend even more time finding out if they work with Vista.
With luck, I'll have a new computer either Wednesday or Friday, if it's on the Micro Center truck.
Just for good measure, I bought one of those tiny WD Passport drives, a literally pocket-sized HD
connected and powered by a USB port. My plan is to use it for quick backups of things most recently
changed. I may (but probably won't) even install their syncing software... but I feel the need of being
able to back up individual folders without even getting up to get a CD to burn. One can never have too
many backups; this week's events prove that. A word to the wise...
As to the old desktop, it continues to run. It's very slow to boot, and the last time I did so, it
still reported a S.M.A.R.T. problem on the hard drive. I will not create any new documents on that
computer, but I'm leaving it up and running until I obtain and configure its replacement. Here's the real
oddity: I downloaded the most popular freeware S.M.A.R.T. viewer; it shows all the hard drive's S.M.A.R.T.
params, and says there's nothing wrong with them. It doesn't show temperature for this drive, but all fans
are visibly running, and nothing feels hot to the touch.
Here ends the boring technical summary for the day. I'll probably be busy with the usual stuff... am I
the only one who truly hates getting a new computer? ... for a couple of days. I do hope to pause for
some Gonzales blogging a couple or three times this week; please do drop in.
Steve
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Saturday Sunday Signs
Asian food; American breakfast food... you can get anything you want. Excepting Alice. Though this place
is only a few blocks from us, we tried it for the first time a week ago. The food is OK at best and the
service is painfully slow, but the sense of a community family restaurant is hard to beat on a lazy Sunday
morning. This picture was taken last Sunday.
Steve
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Selected Links To Recent Posts
Click any permalink below to go to the original article on a previous page.
Click a comment link below to add a comment to the original article.
Your comment will be noticed, by the YDD at least:
HaloScan has a page allowing me to view recent comments, no matter which post they refer to.
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One Nation Under Surveillance
Steve
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Extended DSL Outage - 3 UPDATES
Steve
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Friday Queen Tabitha Blogging
Steve
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O Rahm, O Rahm Emanuel
Steve
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Reagan Revolution Revolting?
Steve
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Last Throes
Steve
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Some Good News Indeed
Steve
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Fox Outfoxed
Steve
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Not A Coincidence
Steve
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Against Theocracy
Steve
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Easter Sunrise Disservice
Steve
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Saturday Signs
Steve
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There You Go Again, Mr. Cheney
Steve
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New Dust Bowl?
Steve
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That's Entertainment
Steve
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Friday Greek Cat Blogging - UPDATED
Steve
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Domain Fever Infects Hooligans
Steve
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Dudley Screw-Tight
Steve
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The Sound Of One Man Scrapping
Steve
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USDA Regs May End Organic Coffee
Steve
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The Safest Place To Be
Steve
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Library Story Hour
Steve
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Blowing And Going
Steve
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Bevo The Clone - On Your Table? - UPDATED
Steve
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