Events

Sometimes it's sad reading the morning papers. The President is reacting to public disclosure of illegal surveillance programs disgracefully: President Bush offered an impassioned defense of his secret international banking surveillance program yesterday, calling it a legal and effective tool for hunting down terrorists and denouncing the media's disclosure of it as a "disgraceful" act that does "great harm" to the nation. See, it's the surveillance, wiretapping, eavesdropping, and leafing through bank...

I changed the thumbnail for the blog just now. Here's a larger version: For comparison, here's the old one: Yes, I'm sitting at the same table at Jack London's Pub in Carmel by the Sea, Calif. (Here's the original post.)

In this month's Washington Monthly: About the only failure more pronounced than the president's has been the graft-filled plunder of GOP lawmakers—at least according to opinion polls, which in May gave the GOP-controlled Congress favorability ratings in the low 20s, about 10 points lower than the president's. This does not necessarily translate into electoral Armageddon; redistricting and other incumbency-protection devices help protect against that. But even if many commentators think that Republicans...

The Daily WTF: http://thedailywtf.com/

Ma Bell, risen from near death like the hydra, now says they own your phone records and will disclose them however they see fit: The new policy says that AT&T—not customers—owns customers' confidential info and can use it "to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process." The policy also indicates that AT&T will track the viewing habits of customers of its new video service—something that cable and satellite providers are prohibited from doing. Moreover, AT&T...

I love the Straight Dope: Q: I have asked flight attendants on airplanes all over the world. No one knows. No one even hazards a wild guess. ... Why doesn't the plastic bag inflate? Since it doesn't, what is it for? First an inside secret: the bag does inflate, but only when you exhale. Here's the deal. Passenger oxygen masks give you a continuous flow of oxygen (as opposed to oxygen on demand, which only flows when you inhale). The oxygen obviously can't flow into your lungs while you're exhaling, so...

Scientists find more evidence that the planet is, on average, its warmest in 400 years: A panel of top climate scientists told lawmakers that the Earth is heating up and that "human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming." Their 155-page report said average global surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rose about 1 degree during the 20th century. Overall, the panel agreed that the warming in the last few decades of the 20th century was unprecedented over the last 1,000 years...

New Scientist is reporting this hour that a man died in Beijing of H5N1 bird flu fully two years before China admitted any human cases: The case suggests that, as has long been suspected, many more people have caught H5N1 flu in China than have been reported, and for a longer time. The more human cases there are, the more chances the virus has to evolve into a human pandemic strain of flu. "It's a very important issue that needs to be clarified urgently," Roy Wadia, a spokesman for the World Health...

More on this later, but just keep in mind that oppressive regimes always attack the press before attacking the people. Keeping a free and open press is an absolute requirement of democracy. On that theme, three stories: The Chicago Tribune's Don Wycliff (reg.req.) says: "If intellectual dishonesty could be said to have a face, I saw it Tuesday evening as I watched Bill O'Reilly's program on Fox News." Craig Neumark (of Craigslist) admirably sums up on NPR today why net neutrality is a good thing...

I refer here to President Roosevelt's approval rating after the Battle of the Bulge. Josh Marshall's people found a beautiful document prepared in the 1940s; Marshall himself explains why this is not simply a poke-in-the-eye for Fox News—er, Press Secretary Tony Snow: There's a serious underlying point here about the administration's basic frivolousness in its conduct of the war. No one thinks you can fight a war or conduct any project of great consequence by following minor oscillations in polls. But...