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Here’s the very best summation I’ve seen connecting the dots
“If I go hire a lawyer, what am I looking for? I’m looking for competent advocacy. Whatever else you say about these people in Justice, they have fucked up confirmations of a Supreme Court justice; they’ve mishandled the prosecution of terrorism cases; they’ve mishandled the writing and the passage of the Patriot Act. And now they have aggressively and foolishly taken on the appointment of U.S. attorneys”—who traditionally get named via consultation with the U.S. Senators from the state in which the district is located—”and turned this political move into a seeming criminal conspiracy. If these guys were the lawyers you hired to handle your divorce, you’d complain to the state bar.”
—- Jonathan Shapiro, USC Law School (former Asst US Attorney under Bush 41)
( the whole piece by Chris Lehmann is perfectly framed, at NYObserver.com: http://observer.com/20070402/20070402_Chris_Lehmann_opinions_newsstory1.asp )
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I am such a geek…
A list of infrequent HTTP/1.1 status codes.
HTTP 220 (The Clooney): Same as 200 with a little something in there for your trouble.
(thx, djacobs)
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… and a lot’s happened.
From today’s Chicago Sun Times, Obama’s wife Michelle is quoted introducing her husband to the crowd at the University of Illinois on Sunday 2/11, “Don’t be fooled by people who claim that it is not his time. The kind of leadership we need now is more intangible — it’s not practiced, it’s not calculated.”
Excuse me, but I sort of WANT a little “practiced” in my President. (Haven’t we just lived through six years of un-practiced?)
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From a monday night check of the Lansing State Journal website (the complete, published story):
Two East Lansing students diagnosed with whooping cough
Midday Update
By Nicole Geary
Lansing State JournalLocal health officials are concerned that staff and students at East Lansing High School may have been exposed to pertussis, or whooping cough, since two ninth-graders were diagnosed with the contagious disease.
Ingham County Health Department Medical Director Dean Sienko said anyone experiencing symptoms should seek medical attention. He recommends all students and staff, especially those connected with the ninth grade, get an optional booster vaccine for protection.
Whooping cough is spread by respiratory droplets dispersed into the air by coughing or sneezing.
Superintendent David Chapin said free vaccines will be available at the school on Wednesday and Thursday.
He’s sending a letter to all high school households today.
For more on this report, read Tuesday’s State Journal.
What are the symptoms? What does the letter say? Why are there no links to WebMD or wikipedia?
This is bad journalism, and bad for public health to boot. Sadly, typical for the LSJ.
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From a response to the WSJ “Capital” column on executive pay:
Check out a chart of the income tax rates (Siegel has a good one in his book “Stocks for the Long Run”) and you’ll see the tax rate on the highest incomes was 90% from the mid-1940’s to 1962 and then 70% from 1962 to late 1970 — hmmm — the same time when CEOs’ comp stayed relatively the same as hourly workers. In 1981 the top marginal tax rate dropped to 50% and is now 35%. When the extra dollar earned by CEOs stopped going mostly to Uncle Sam, the CEOs decided they wanted/needed more.
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LOVING: crisp fall pre-election fall days, with enough sleep/time to enjoy them.
HATING: people who ask for professional advice by email and then never even acknowledge receiving the reply. What’s up with that?
(guide to life tip: thank people even if you don’t agree with them)
Filed under: guide to life
I am liking Peggy Noonan these days. And not just because she’s confirming one of my central principles of decisionmaking: we are all prisoners of our own experience. She illustrates this twice in one column (in today’s WSJ), two sides of the Bushies’ coin: they had no combat experience, but did have experience listening to State Dept. drones:
“…I have come to give greater credence to the importance, in the age of terror, among our leaders, of having served in the military. For you need personal experience that you absorbed deep down in your bones, or a kind of imaginative wisdom that tells you even though you were never there what war is like, what invasion is…”
(snip)
“…Here I add something I have been thinking about the past year. It is about the young guys at the table in the Reagan era. The young, midlevel guys who came to Washington in the Reagan years were always at the table in the meeting with the career State Department guy. And the man from State, timid in all ways except bureaucratic warfare, was always going “Ooh, aah, you can’t do that, the Soviet Union is so big, Galbraith told us how strong their economy is, the Sandinistas have the passionate support of the people, there’s nothing we can do, stop with your evil empire and your Grenada invasion, it’s needlessly aggressive!” Those guys from State — they were almost always wrong. Their caution was timorousness, their prudence a way to evade responsibility. The young Reagan guys at the table grew up to be the heavyweights of the Bush era. They walked into the White House knowing who’d been wrong at the table 20 years before. And so when State and others came in and said, “The intelligence doesn’t support it, we see no WMDs,” the Bush men knew who not to believe.
History is human.”
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The Chairman of GM, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal:
“I’d say the best thing the (U.S.) government can do is to raise the gas tax by 10 or 15 cents a year until it reaches European levels,” Mr. Lutz said, during an impromptu interview just before GM Europe’s media event last Thursday.
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From a Rolling Stone interview of David Simon, auteur of The Wire:
What’s The Wire’s fifth season going to be about?
For the last theme in the show, we want to address the mass media. We’re really going to examine the media culture and not in that stupid way where it’s just a hungry pack of hounds thrusting microphones, if you’ve ever been a reporter, you know it’s so much more subtle and nuanced than that. Sensationalism is not the problem. Attention Deficit Disorder might be. But everybody picks the low end of journalism as if that’s the problem, my fear is that there’s no high end anymore. There’s not a lot of huge intellects running media organizations and those that are, are preoccupied with shit that doesn’t matter.
