My friend, Graeme Zielinksi, is following the Howard Dean through Wisconsin during the next week. Following Dean was supposed to have special significance because Dean say last week that if he didn’t win Wisconsin, he would quit. Well, Graeme reports in today’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that that isn’t so:

Acknowledging what he called an “obvious contradiction,” presidential aspirant Howard Dean said Monday that the Wisconsin Democratic primary was no longer the make-or-break contest he originally had foreseen.

Instead, on a day of crisscrossing the state in what was supposed to be a last-ditch tilt to save his campaign, Dean indicated he was going to remain in the race for the foreseeable future.

Strong Bad is back to explain why he didn’t build a monument to himself.

Radley Balko argues in an article at Tech Central Station that the states losing the most jobs to “offshoring” also happen to have tax and regulatory policies least friendly to business. This isn’t surprising. Balko readily admits that his analysis is anecdotal, but it makes sense. It would be interesting to see a good econometric analysis of the relationship (or lack thereof) between “offshoring” and tax and regulatory policies.

I’m a big fan of the Mozilla browers. While I liked the regular Mozilla brower, I really liked Mozilla Phoenix, which was renamed Firebird, and not it has been renamed Firefox. Firefox is a lame name, but it is a great program.

Firefox is better than Microsoft’s Internet explorer because Firefox has a pop-up blocker integreated (yes you can and should downlaod the Google toolbar for IE) and Firefox has a search bar (that allows you to seach google, amazon, merriam-webster, and a host of other sites without having to go to their websites first). Best of all, Firefox has a better implementation of tabs, so you can switch between tabs instead of having to open multiple windows. You can get this same feature with add-ons to IE like MyIE, for exmple, but I like Firefox’s implementation the best.

Get Firefox here.

CNN is now saying that it overplayed Dean’s Iowa scream. Why do they think they overplayed it? The story says that cable and broadcast news networks aired Dean’s Iowa exclamation 633 times. That’s a lot, but is it too much? It was awfully newsworthy. Dean’s scream encapsulated his Iowa meltdown and cemented his reputation as being an angry man. Maybe that reputation wasn’t deserved, but he screamed the screamed and it fit in with people

Jacob Sullum looks for signs of fiscal seriousness in the President’s new buget, but he fails to find many. For example:

The NEA’s primary mission is bringing culture to the benighted masses, especially those unfortunate enough to live outside a major metropolitan area. Typical of the noncontroversial projects the NEA likes to brag about is the Shakespeare in American Communities program, under which six theater companies performing four plays will visit “100 small and medium-sized communities in all 50 states.”

This is very nice. But is it, strictly speaking, necessary? The NEA’s budget, about $122 million this fiscal year, represents something like 1 percent of total arts funding in the U.S. One suspects culture would survive the loss.

By the same token, of course, eliminating the NEA would not have a noticeable impact on a federal budget deficit of more than half a trillion dollars. But as a sign of fiscal seriousness, the treatment given to programs like the NEA is important. If something so clearly dispensable cannot be cut, there’s little hope of reining in the biggest federal spending spree in recent memory.

Surburban Blight says that Patrick Stewart (Jean-Luc Picard) is a “space pussy” because he thinks that space travel is a bad idea.

This reminds of the top one hundred reasons why Captain Kirk is better than Captain Picard.
Continue reading →

I’m quite a fan of the Wonkette. Today she takes on silliness from 60 Minutes. She writes:

Wonkette operative J.C. forwards a press release being sent around by 60 Minutes that touts their upcoming interview with an evangelical. Apparently, evangelicals believe in something called “the Rapture” and have a lot of faith in “Jesus Christ.” According to the release, evangelicals are “major factor in American politics and culture” and “have several prominent American leaders among their ranks.” Now, this is ridiculous. Everyone knows that evangelicals are just a crazy made-up story invented to scare the children of Upper West Siders when they’ve been naughty. Why, they’re no more real than NASCAR or Wal-Mart!

Next week on 60 minutes. . . Kansas: More than just the name of some shitty band?

I currently have a Canon S30 and I love the camera. But, for my next camera, I want a digital SLR. Something along the lines of a Nikon D70 (see previews here, and here). Though the D70 has a lower model number and price ($1000 compared to $1500) than the Nikon D100, the D70 looks like it is the replacement for the D100.

The response to Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson flashing Janet’s breast during the Super Bowl was predictable. Early Monday, the FCC announced they were investigating the incident and later Monday, they expanded their investigation to the entire half-time show. Now some Congressmen are talking about new laws to combat “indecency on television” (it is an election year you know).

What is also predictable is the non-regulatory response from CBS. Because CBS only wants to offend people when CBS plans to, they are going to use technology so this doesn’t happen again. The Washington Post reports:

Starting Sunday, an “enhanced delay” of still undetermined length, combined with new technology, will allow for split-second video editing as well, designed to prevent another of those revealing moments that made CBS’s telecast of the MTV-produced AOL TopSpeed Super Bowl Halftime Show so memorable.

CBS’s answer is a far superior than having the FCC fine people. Fines are used by the people that get fined as self-promotion ploys. How much popularity did Howard Stern gain by being foul on the radio?

And how bad was this incident anyway? I was sitting too far from the TV to know for sure that Janet flashed her bare breast. Only because of HDTV coupled with the internet (ie. The Drudge Report) did I know for sure that it was her naked breast. I don’t know about you, but being flashed by a breast isn’t going to kill me. And I much prefer seeing a bare breast on TV than hearing this.

By the way, doesn’t the FCC know about the internet? This article says that the FCC is seeking the halftime show tape from CBS. Haven’t they seen the offending moments on the internet?