Events

From the White House Office of Management and Budget 2007 defense budget fact sheet: Since 2001, the Administration: Liberated nearly 50 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan The Administration did this? You mean, all by itself? You mean, "liberated," as in "made free" (or—certainly not!—"made liberal")? They have no shame.

Two noteworthy stories in today's Washington Post. First, Boehner Opposes Sweeping Changes In Lobbyist Work. There's not a lot in the article we didn't already know, but I was thinking it might have been titled "Burglar Opposes Sweeping Changes to Door Locks" without too much irony. To repeat: lobbyists are only a symptom of the much larger problem of Republican corruption. Having the guys who broke the rules in the first place propose new rules insults our intelligence. Second, Handful of Races May Tip...

World O'Crap over at Salon has more information about George Deutcsh, the suit puppy who wants NASA scientists to think about God. Note to WOC: Put a biographical bit on your blog to make attributions more meaningful.

Where to begin today? There's a smorgasbord of religious extremism on display today, with Bush administration incompetence on the dessert table, so much so that you might start to think there might be almost a symbiotic relationship between the two. First, in a not-entirely-unpredictable display of intolerance for Western tolerance, Lebanese terr--sorry, protestors burned the Danish Embassy in Beirut this morning: The violence in Lebanon came a day after thousands of protesters in neighboring Syria set...

From Anne: Now on Huffington Post: http://nsaseti.cf.huffingtonpost.com/, a fun replacement for your tired, old SETI@Home application.

Anne just sent this photo, and I almost had to clean up my office from laughing:

I've been watching the weather in Torino, Italy lately, and I've noticed it's awfully warm there. The Olympic Games start one week from today, but Torino's temperatures have stayed way above freezing. Last night's minimum temperature was 6°C (43°F), for example. Are we looking at a repeat of the St. Moritz games of 1928, in which the speed skaters swam through 25°C (77°F) weather? Maybe we're heading toward a future where the Winter Games won't be possible below 2500 meters (8000 ft) or south of the...

From Paul Krugman's column (sub.req.) this morning: This administration is all politics and no policy. It knows how to attain power, but has no idea how to govern. That's why the administration was caught unaware when Katrina hit, and why it was totally unprepared for the predictable problems with its drug plan. It's why Mr. Bush announced an energy plan with no substance behind it. And it's why the state of the union—the thing itself, not the speech—is so grim. And this little tidbit from Poynter...

From the Washington newspaper Roll Call earlier today: House Republicans are taking a mulligan on the first ballot for Majority Leader. The first count showed more votes cast than Republicans present at the Conference meeting. I wonder if Diebold counted the ballots?

One of my clients has had a recurring server issue caused, it seems, by McAfee Anti-Virus. So we're switching to Symantec. The problem has been that, for quite some time, the naPrdMgr.exe process (which handles product updates) has gone into a death-spiral, consuming 100% of CPU cycles and making the server totally unresponsive to anyone else. I've finally gotten in touch with McAfee, and they said the client's license has expired. OK, so how does an expired license crash a server? When McAfee...