Events

The Illinois Republican Party will vote tomorrow on whether to kick out chairman Pat Brady after he took public positions contrary to the party platform: Brady, of St. Charles, could be ousted over his statements supporting same-sex marriage Saturday, with committeemen meeting in Tinley Park to decide his fate. State Sen. Jim Oberweis of Sugar Grove, 14th District Republican committeeman and a leader in the effort to remove Brady, said Brady's situation is different from committeemen who stray from the...

Glad we cleared that up: White House Press Secretary Jay Carney announced during Thursday’s briefing that Attorney General Eric Holder sent a letter to Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) this morning regarding the administration’s policy on drone strikes targeting Americans on U.S. soil. Holder’s letter stated definitively that the U.S. would not use “weaponized” drones to targets American citizens on domestic soil. Reading directly from Holder’s letter to Paul, Carney said, “Does the President have the authority...

That's the problem. People inhale and exhale mentally, and right now, I'm exhaling. This means I get a lot of work done, but not a lot of reading. This, in turn, means more lists like this: Scott Adams ruminates on how power works. James Fallows examines threat inflation. Hugo Chávez is still dead. Bill Gates writes book reviews? American Airlines and USAirways won't expand O'Hare. Elizabeth Kolbert needs more sleep. Lunchtime!

Principally, it means not having to commute in 15 cm of snow. It also means several uninterrupted hours of working on stuff. And, unfortunately, not reading all this yet: Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez died, finally. Americans are weird, bringing a lot of economics research into question. SimCity 5 came out today, to some criticism. Bad Lip Reading hits SpiderMan. Now to walk Parker in the snow, and keep working...

Netsch was Illinois' first female nominee for governor and the Illinois controller in the 1990s. She died this morning at age 86 from complications from ALS: She was one of the first female law professors in the United States. A liberal Democrat, she defeated the Machine-backed incumbent state Sen. Danny O’Brien to win a seat in the Illinois Senate in 1972 that she held for 18 years. Elected comptroller in 1990, she was the first woman elected to statewide office in Illinois and, four years later, the...

Exhibit 1, yesterday at 4:58pm:

I don't know what to do with myself the rest of the day. I've just deployed the completely-redesigned Weather Now application. I feel 10 kilos lighter. Check out the preview on Windows Azure. The application started in mid-1997 as a feature of the now-defunct braverman.org, my proto-blog. The last major changes happened in 2006, when I gave it a face-lift. I've occasionally pushed some bug fixes, but really, until today it has looked and acted essentially the same way for 6 years. (The GetWeather...

James Fallows has a thoughtful piece looking back at the start of the Iraq War, ten years ago this month: Anyone now age 30 or above should probably reflect on what he or she got right and wrong ten years ago. I feel I was right in arguing, six months before the war in "The Fifty-First State," that invading Iraq would bring on a slew of complications and ramifications that would take at least a decade to unwind. I feel not "wrong" but regretful for having resigned myself even by that point to the...

I've just finished—I mean, finished—the Weather Now worker role. The worker role runs in the background and performs tasks like, for example, downloading the weather from outside sources, parsing it, and storing it. I have three tasks left to enable me to publish the new version of Weather Now to its new home in Windows Azure: Create a script to initialize the lists that appear on the site's home page; Upgrade the existing ASP.NET website to an ASP.NET web application; and Create an Azure Cloud Service...

I'm just a day from losing my mind (or "loosing," to all you Facebookers out there), a day from my workload returning to normal levels, and a day from deploying Weather Now to a test instance in Azure. Then, maybe, I'll have time to take all these in: Andrew Mason got fired from his billion-dollar CEO job at Groupon. Because of human-caused climate change, the National Aeronautic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will start mapping more of the ice-free arctic soon. WBEZ wonders if our recent snow is...