Tag: Uncategorized

The entire list is here. It includes how much he gave and when.

Improve My Health

• Exercise 3 times a week
• Cook 3 times a week

Maintain My Hobbies

• Shoot 36 film and/or digital exposures a week.
• Post 3 shots on the photoblog each week.
• Start re-learning the piano.
• Go skiing once more (or snowboarding twice) this winter.

Strengthen My Faith

• Read the Bible every day
• Pray every day
• Help out with a church activity once a month

Improve My Career

• Work on a business plan once a week.
• Learn Ruby
• Attend one technology conference this year.
• Attend one business conference this year.
• Write a technical blog post once a week.
• Contact a different person in my network once a week.

I admit it–I’m a C-SPAN junkie. The purpose of the open phones topic this morning was to air people’s opinions on how the Clinton presidency should be taught in middle and high school history classes. As is usually the case with these shows, the callers didn’t so much answer the question posed as bash George W. Bush or Bill Clinton. The calls I found the strangest were the ones that blamed Clinton for the current Bush years and for how divided the country currently is. Those opinions aside, my own is this: teach Clinton’s successes and his failures–all of them.

I voted for Clinton both times. Despite that, I don’t consider him the best president ever, or even a great president–merely a good one. In the success column: NAFTA, welfare reform, the economy. Perot said plenty on the “giant sucking sound” of jobs leaving the U.S., and that’s true. But that has as much to do with companies not doing what was necessary to modernize as it does with lowering tariffs. I remember being disappointed that Clinton signed the welfare reform bill, but in retrospect, it did get a lot of people off the welfare rolls. Clinton should get credit for mostly staying out of the way as the economy recovered from downturn under the first Bush. He should also get credit for increasing taxes on the highest earners in this country. That contributed a lot to the government going from deficit to surplus. I would count Clinton’s actions on Bosnia as a success too, if only because he helped get NATO involved in stopping the slaughter of Muslims there.

In the failure column: healthcare reform, Rwanda, impeachment. The failure of healthcare reform is perhaps the one with the most consequences for the present day. The voices who said there was no healthcare crisis when Clinton was trying to get this passed are probably the same ones who passed the narrow, expensive and poorly-planned prescription drug benefit. While Clinton isn’t the only one to blame for the genocide in Rwanda (the whole world stood by on that one), as the leader of the greatest military power in the world, his government’s inaction was very disappointing. Impeachment ranks as the worst of his failures from an opportunity cost perspective, not just the moral one. A lot of time was wasted that could have been spent doing far more useful things (like chasing al-Qaeda for example). It allowed people to question his motives for trying to do what was ultimately the right thing.

This article from the NY Times (free subscription required) tells us that those of us who use Google will soon have to contend with graphical ads. I suppose it was only a matter of time, but I’m still disappointed by the news. There are areas when simpler is better, and search is definitely one of them. We can only hope they’ll be small and tasteful (or that CustomizeGoogle will still allow us to remove them).

I came across this article via the Signals vs. Noise blog. While the entire piece is 100% on target, this passage really spoke to my current situation:

But the worst are the ones that become slaves to their clients–often driven by the fear of losing one.

And fear leads to underbidding. And underbidding leads to… pulling all-nighters to make an impossible deadline on too few resources. (And the dark side is in there somewhere.)

It’s more fuel to do things differently when I (finally) start my own business.

Trying to find some information about Bush’s latest appointee to the Supreme Court, I found two comments especially troubling:

“The reaction of many conservatives today will be that the president has made possibly the most unqualified choice since Abe Fortas who had been the president’s lawyer. The nomination of a nominee with no judicial record is a significant failure for the advisers that the White House gathered around it. However, the president deserves the benefit of a doubt, the nominee deserves the benefit of hearings, and every nominee deserves an up or down vote.”
— Manuel Miranda, chairman of the conservative Third Branch Conference

“This is a smart move. You try to pick a nominee that Democrats won’t be able to criticize as much because they are a woman or minority. This is a classic Clarence Thomas strategy.”

— Artemus Ward, Northern Illinois University political science professor.

For other reactions, see the full version of the article (free registration required).

They are minority opinions to be sure, the bulk of the comments so far range from polite to unalloyed praise for Harriet Miers. Still, I shudder at the mention of Clarence Thomas in connection to anything at all. Few things in politics have made me more angry than his nomination and confirmation to the Supreme Court. Thurgood Marshall’s record as a lawyer, his tenure as judge on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals (none of his 98 majority decisions was ever reversed), and his record as solicitor general of the United States (winning 14 of 19 cases he argued before the Supreme Court), stand in stark contrast to Thomas’ brief and unremarkable tenure as an appeals court judge. Thomas was notable only for being a black conservative (and his alleged conduct while head of the EEOC). To replace a lion of civil rights like Thurgood Marshall with someone so opposed to what he’d fought his whole life for was has always disappointed me.

What’s sad is that Artemus Ward is probably correct. Miers won’t have enough of a paper trail for anyone to effectively oppose her–unless a significant amount of conservative reaction falls along the lines of Mr. Miranda’s commentary.

I was listening to C-SPAN on the way into work and one of the callers had an interesting question: why are the people suffering in New Orleans being called “refugees” in the press when people in Florida suffering from hurricane damage aren’t?

I checked out the Wall Street Journal this morning and sure enough, there was that word. Checked the Washington Post, same thing. Was the caller being overly sensitive? Maybe. Was he reading some racial connotation into the use of the word? Probably. But it may also be that the press has been sloppy in how it uses words. Usually you see the word “refugee” in the context of someone fleeing another country from religious or political persecution. The people in New Orleans aren’t running from some dictator, they’re from here. They’re just unfortunate enough to be too poor or too ill to get out of the way of the storm in time.

Paul Krugman seems to believe so. Check out his complete column in the New York Times online (free registration required).

I live in what Krugman describes as the “Zoned Zone”, a few miles north of D.C. in Wheaton, Maryland. While a townhouse in my neighborhood recently sold for about $400,000, it took 2-3 weeks. I think they started out asking for $450,000 and had to drop the price some. Another bit of information I got, which supports Krugman’s idea somewhat, is a conversation I had with a realtor a month or two ago. He was essentially trolling my neighborhood for people interested in selling their townhouses and I asked him about some new ones being built (a 5-10 minute walk from my townhouse). He said the price tags on those went as high as $800,000, but that the builders were having to rent them out because they couldn’t sell them at that price.

Between this information and the increasing popularity of interest-only loans, real estate prices have to come back to earth sooner or later.

I came across this story late, but it has to be one of the most bizarre and sad stories I’ve read in awhile. It’s worth subscribing to the LA Times website to read the whole thing, but in summary, this is what’s happening:

2002: 17 POWs from the 1991 Gulf War filed a lawsuit against Iraq for the torture they endured from Iraq troops at the now infamous Abu Ghraib. They’re allowed to do this by the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996.

2003: Judge Richard W. Roberts awards them $653 million in compensatory damages and $306 million in punitive damages.

Soon after this, the Bush administration argues the case should be thrown out. Why? Reasons include:
–President Bush had voided such claims against Iraq because of the current occupation
–This Scott McClellan quote: “These resources are required for the urgent national security needs of rebuilding Iraq.”

When the case goes to the US Court of Appeals for the DC circuit, the 3 judges ruled unanimously for the Bush administration and throw out the lawsuit. The case is now before the Supreme Court.

For their sakes, I only hope that the Supreme Court has far more sense than the government on this case.

Even though I haven’t been a registered Democrat for some time now (switched to independent 5+ years ago), I’m very interested in this turn of events. I hope it means that we’ll actually have a two-party system again, instead of a party-and-a-half like we’ve had for awhile. How he’ll play in the South is anybody’s guess, but I think a lot of his views will turn out to be more moderate than people expect.