At times I’ve been mildly interested by Thomas Friedman. But these two articles make me laugh. The first is a blog posting on Power Line about Friedman. My favorite part of that posting is an email sent to the guys at Powerline. The email says:

Friedman is the oracle of the half-hearted left because he is the Hans Blix of commentators. He keeps himself safe by delivering something for everyone in his assessments. In the end this aids only those who are served by public uncertainty — the cowards and the ruthless. But it also flatters the vanity of those who mistake their ambivalence for sophistication.

Friedman’s final pre-war piece today is a classic of smug gutlessness. He wants to see Saddam ousted. But he’s disgusted with Bush. He’s also ashamed of the French. So where does he stand? Everywhere and nowhere. He’s adamant only that everybody’s a beast or a fool except Tom. Whatever happens, he’ll have been proven right.

Pretty funny suff. Even more amusing is this piece in the New York Press. In the article Matt Taibbi writes:

Start with the title.

The book’s genesis is conversation Friedman has with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys. Nilekani causally mutters to Friedman: “Tom, the playing field is being leveled.” To you and me, an innocent throwaway phrase

This screenshot is from Drudge. I love how Drudge likes to point out how much of a whack job Howard Dean is.

Recently HP hired a new CEO. HP, as a company, hasn’t been doing too well lately and the previous CEO, Carly Fiorina was fired in February. It seems to me that the problems at HP are far greater than merely their CEO. I don’t think their board understand business. On hiring a new CEO, HP Chairwoman Patricia Dunn said in a statement:

“Mark came to our attention because of his strong execution skills, his proven ability to lead top performing teams and his track record in driving shareholder value.”

What? What does any of that mean and why does it qualify Mark Hurd as a good CEO? All of it is business gobbledegook instead of actual english.

Then again, apparently this crap sells on Wall Street since shares of HP stock rose 10% when the new CEO was announced.

Read what Lileks has to say about the new pope and the people who are complaining about him.

Mark Bittman writes about his new book, “Mark Bittman Takes on America’s Chef’s” in the NY Times. His point in writing the book is this:

My main point was this: Like almost everything else in life, cooking has a cost-benefit component. When I cooked with Daniel Boulud, he took apart a lamb and cooked it four different ways. He used exotic ingredients galore, ones that would take you days to find, but that he pulled (or had pulled) from the pantry or walk-in. He had several assistants, hours of preparation, the best equipment money can buy and 35 years of experience in the world’s best professional kitchens. His dishes took him all morning and filled a platter the size of a table. He then proceeded to laugh as I assembled my stuffed lamb shoulder in 10 minutes, threw it in the oven and went out for coffee.

I’m not saying that you’d be as happy paying $35 for my roasted stuffed lamb shoulder as you would for Daniel’s boned, stuffed and tied saddle. As he said when I served him a piece of lamb on a small plate, “The complexity of your recipe is directly proportional to the size of this dish.” But I am saying that you would probably be happy eating either. And in this as in just about every other case featured in the TV series and book, my dish was faster and required less work, no assistants and fewer ingredients.

Most important, it required less skill. Daniel, who called me an accidental cook, gave my dish an “eight” for flavor and a “two” for complexity, which seemed just about right for me. I gave his a “nine” for flavor and a “two” for accessibility. Our group tasters pretty much agreed on all counts.

The left continues to lose because they are out of touch with reality. Here’s a good example. This is what Cory Doctorow saws about the music on Bush’s iPod:

President Bush has a treasured iPod full of songs that were decanted into it by a media strategist. This makes him: a downloader, an INDUCEr, a Darknet user and an infringer. Who’d a figgered the prez for a copyfighter?

The president also has an eclectic mix of songs downloaded into his iPod from Mark McKinnon, a biking buddy and his chief media strategist in the 2004 campaign. Among them are “Circle Back” by John Hiatt, “(You’re So Square) Baby, I Don’t Care” by Joni Mitchell and “My Sharona,” the 1970s song by The Knack that Joe Levy, a deputy managing editor in charge of music coverage at Rolling Stone, cheerfully branded “suggestive if not outright filthy” in an interview last week.

Link (Thanks, Jason)

Update: To forestall more email on this subject: please read the quotation from the article reproduced above, with special attention to the boldfaced section. While the article states that Bush has a staffer load his iPod from the iTunes Music Store, it also says that he has his friend download music to it from his personal collection. The former, obviously, is not particularly radical, but the latter is exactly the kind of behavior the music industry characterizes as theft. Is Doctorow and the other people who have linked to him absolutely nuts? Because and article says that he music was “downloaded into his iPod” they think that means that his buddy illegally downloaded the music instead of merely tranferring it from his legal collection. I can’t figure out what is illegal about copy music to your iPod from CD, but maybe Doctorow knows.

Even though I don’t think Dubya is a bad President like Seriph, his analysis of this is right on. Seriph writes:

C

Via Studes, John Stewart said:

We’re going to talk little bit about baseball. By way of an apology, Barry Bonds, star slugger for the San Francisco Giants, is having a bit of a rough offseason. He had surgery on his knee last week and as you know he’s suspected of steroid use, which he’s never actually denied, but a woman last week claiming that he was his mistress for nine years has just testified under oath that Barry said he had been taking steroids since 2000. So it’s really starting to pile up on him and yesterday he held an impromptu press conference to take some accountability and put the blame for his troubles where it belonged.

[Cut to Bonds]

Bonds: You guys wanted to hurt me badly enough. You finally got there.

Reporter off camera: You say you guys. Who do you mean?

Bonds (pointing): You. You. You. You. The media. Everybody

[Cut to Stewart, with eyes downcast and looking regretful] Sorry. And I am sorry. I do take responsibility. I do remember, this was years ago, when I saw Barry Bonds for the first time and I remember saying to him, “You’re skinny. And very weak. You might want to do a little (mimes sticking a needle in his arm).” So I do take responsibility for convincing him to do steroids for a long, long time. And about having a mistress, again, I should never have begged him to f*** someone outside of his marriage.

Nobody’s Business writes:

One of the more thought-provoking and entertainingly ornery websites I’ve seen of late is called The Hittman Chronicle, run by a guy called Dave Hitt. He stole my heart with a piece called “Name Three.”

When I was a kid, my father used to try to get me to eat stuff I didn’t like by claiming, “There are millions of starving kids in India who would love that!” One day I replied, “Name three!” I received a quick slap in the head, and later that night he spanked me to sleep. This taught me two important lessons. One: don’t say that to dad again. Two: “Name Three” is a great comeback to people spewing bogus numbers.

Which is exactly what Hitt proceeds to do. With pitbullish tenacity and a Merry Prankster’s fondness for provoking authority, he happily pesters tobacco experts who wax dramatic about the deaths supposedly caused by second-hand smoke. Hitt’s question is the simple, time-tested “Name three.”

It’s not as childish as it may seem. The debate about smoking is infused with dishonesty and junk science. Critical, to-the-point questions are needed. And surely, if, according to the anti-tobacco lobby, upwards of one million people have died from second-hand smoke over the past twenty years, the experts shouldn’t have the slightest trouble supplying Hitt with a few names.

You know where this is leading: Not one of the nicotine nannies can do it. Not one. “Why not?”

I don’t know what to think about the ethics charges against Tom DeLay. For his sake I hope those charges are not true. To understand why Republicans haven’t pushed harder for him to step down, here’s what Robert Hovak has to say:

On March 24, former Congressman Bob Livingston was sent an e-mail by a New York Times editorial page staffer suggesting he write an op-ed essay. Would Livingston, who in 1998 gave up certain elevation to be House speaker because of a sexual affair, write about how Majority Leader Tom DeLay should now act under fire? In a subsequent conversation, it was made clear the Times wanted the prominent Republican to say DeLay should step aside for the good of the party.

Livingston in effect declined by responding that if he wrote anything for the Times, it would be pro-DeLay. But this remarkable case of that august newspaper fishing for an op-ed piece makes it appear part of a calculated campaign to bring down the single most powerful Republican in Congress. The Democratic establishment and left-wing activists have targeted DeLay as the way to end a decade of Republican control of the House.

Ironically, this campaign’s intensity may protect DeLay from Republicans who in their secret hearts would like to see the sometimes-overbearing Texan fall. No GOP politician wants to be the handmaiden of DeLay’s Democratic detractors. Last Wednesday’s closed-door caucus of House Republicans gave DeLay a standing ovation. Contrary to claims on leftist websites, no Republican member has called for the majority leader’s resignation.

Personally I think Kofi Annan is complete scum. How he lets UN staff sexual abuse people and get away with it is beyond me. Sure the food for oil scandal is bad, but it doesn’t turn my stomache like this.