Sorry for the low-tech rerouting, but: 

If you reached this page because of a link to a numbered item that is no longer on my main page, you can get to it by adding "#" and the number -- e.g. "#403," to the end of the URL above.

4/30/04 1:07 p.m.(Link here.)

 A fellow Orwell fan at MBC Views notes that Paul Krugman is quoting Orwell this morning. The quote is from one of the fine old 1946 essays, too -- one of the slightly less read ones, although its title, "In Front of Your Nose," does appear on the last and best volume of the 1968 Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. Trust Krugman to have read more Orwell than just the two Cold War Classic novels.

 Krugman has learned one kind of Orwell lesson anyway -- the one about saying something bluntly or not at all. He doesn't hedge, and when in doubt he chooses the word that sounds almost impolitely direct. This isn't the only kind of good writing of course, but it's an interesting and effective kind.

4/29/04 11:30 a.m.(Link here.)

 As the Monty Pythons memorably told us, There Is No Such Thing As A Fish License. But that doesn't stop the BBC from offering Pet TV.

4/29/04 12:43 a.m.(Link here.)

 Via A&L Daily: George Packer "hates" but can't avoid weblogs:

...I gorge myself on these hundreds of pieces of commentary like so much candy into a bloated — yet nervous, sugar-jangled — stupor. Those hours of out-of-body drift leave me with few, if any, tangible thoughts. Blog prose is written in headline form to imitate informal speech, with short emphatic sentences and frequent use of boldface and italics. The entries, sometimes updated hourly, are little spasms of assertion, usually too brief for an argument ever to stand a chance of developing layers of meaning or ramifying into qualification and complication. There's a constant sense that someone (almost always the blogger) is winning and someone else is losing. Everything that happens in the blogosphere — every point, rebuttal, gloat, jeer, or "fisk" (dismemberment of a piece of text with close analytical reading) — is a knockout punch. A curious thing about this rarefied world is that bloggers are almost unfailingly contemptuous toward everyone except one another. They are also nearly without exception men (this form of combat seems too naked for more than a very few women). I imagine them in neat blue shirts, the glow from the screen reflected in their glasses as they sit up at 3:48 a.m. triumphantly tapping out their third rejoinder to the WaPo's press commentary on Tim Russert's on-air recap of the Wisconsin primary....

But really, now, are weblogs really so bad, or so closely shackled to insider political arguments? Here's Packer again:

...this particular branch of the Fourth Estate just doesn't lend itself to sustained narrative and analysis. Blogs remain private, written in the language and tone of knowingness, insider shorthand, instant mastery. Read them enough and any subject will go dead.

4/29/04 12:11 a.m.(Link here.)

 So some non-union day laborers raise a claim for unpaid wages. Advocates noisily press the employer to pay. The employer turns around and sues the advocates for $3 million. Pretty outrageous.

Fortunately, the advocates have a chance of turning the tables again using the California SLAPP statute. In California, people who bring "strategic lawsuits against public participation" -- lawsuits designed to stop or punish the exercise of free speech rights -- can not only get their complaints thrown out of court post-haste, they can also end up owing attorney's fees and costs. Oddly, there aren't all that many other jurisdictions with SLAPP statutes. There should be more. A SLAPP statute can be a powerful comfort to anyone who is thinking of blowing a whistle or standing up for an underdog.

4/28/04 2:51 p.m.(Link here.)

 Eat Your Vegetables:

 Reading William Greider's economics columns in The Nation is tiring, I admit it. But good for you. In this one, he explains that when Americans buy cheap foreign imports they are effectively living beyond their means at the cost of putting their country in debt to foreign investors who may or may not be kindly creditors in the long run.

And still we're told that binge shopping for things we don't need is patriotic.

 So read the Greider column. Or, I dunno, cruise your Hummer over to Wal-Mart and buy another singing plastic fish for your living-room wall.

4/28/04 11:13 a.m.(Link here.)

 "Cheney: Kerry's Wife Still Owns Bra She Claimed She Burned In '72": The SF Chron's Don Asmussen goes to town on Republican control neuroses.

4/28/04 11:04 a.m.(Link here.)

 R.I.P. Thom Gunn, poet and San Franciscan. Here's his Academy of American Poets entry.

4/26/04 2:25 p.m.(Link here.)

 "Nyah-nya-nyah-nya-nyah-nya-nyah-nya/ This is where your sockses go..."

We love the new Sprint-PCS ad with the funny rude little sock gremlin. Only place we can find it online yet is [Edited January 2007: Our original link is not displayed in at least some browsers, so I'm gonna give two alternative links here without using HTML. The site displaying the ad is a kind of advertisers' trade journal called Adland. The link I found first is http[colon slash slash]ad-rag[dot]com[slash]110218[dot]php. You can also go to http[colon slash slash]commercial-archive[dot]com and search for "Sprint Socks."] You have to register and pay two bucks there to view the whole ad -- which appears during the Fox Sunday night broadcast comedies -- but you can find a picture of the gremlin by searching the Adland site under "Socks."

Yes, it's an ad for a big corporation that has faults, but it's a nice cheerful ad that doesn't insult the viewer, which in the Fox Sunday night lineup is rare. So many TV ads are basically, "you can't help being a miserable loser but our product temporarily reduces misery."

Refreshingly, the Sock Gremlin ad gets its kick from mild ribaldry, not insult. It's even (dare I say) empowering. Homeowner catches Sock Gremlin stuffing socks from her clothes dryer into his trousers; Sock Gremlin waggles his sock-decorated midsection at her and says she'll never prove he's real; homeowner fumbles with her camera phone to snap a picture of him; trenchcoated Sprint-PCS guy comes to the rescue with an easy-to-use camera phone; she photographs and apparently foils the Sock Gremlin. Unclear, however, who ends up with the socks.

It could sound anti-feminist, what with the link between woman and laundry and the man coming to the rescue, but it's not. The woman defending her clothes dryer is not frightened of the gremlin, nor does she express the ad world's conventional female anxiety about living up to a family's demands. This woman has a life beyond laundry. She's merely annoyed at the gremlin's trespass, and later glad to have solved a problem. The cell phone man isn't Father Knows Best, he's a technician who will leave when the problem's solved.

 And the gremlin is really cute.

Listen, these days ya take yer decent humane originality where ya find it.

4/25/04 11:58 p.m.(Link here.)

 Unbelievable (via Atrios): "The Multilevel Marketing of the President," in Amway lockstep. Complete with prizes. No kidding. Listen, I don't like the NYT registration process either but it's worth the trouble to read this feature article. In Section 3, for example, it appears that the next pro-Bush letter to the editor you read, or the next dittohead talk-show call you hear, may come from someone trying to meet a quota for "a presidential screen-saver" prize.

"...'Train volunteers in each of the '7 Steps', ' the brochure commands. 'They will be the implementers.'...."

And this is the, uh, party of ornery individualism, is it?

Just one thing seems off in the article, in Section 7: "Just as the country has divided, so that most states now firmly belong to one party or another, so, too, have individual counties come to look more lopsided than before..." I don't know about that. I think that's something Republicans say because they think the impression of polarization helps them.

Otherwise weirdly good reading.

It's kind of hard to believe these methods work with grownups. Be sure and ask the next Republican evangelists you meet if they've earned their "presidential screen savers" yet. And how many box tops will they need for the sea monkeys?

[UPDATE: As a reminder just how weird Amway itself is, here's an excerpt from the Baffler's 1997 article on same.]

4/25/04 4:22 p.m.(Link here.)

 The SF Chron reprints a column today by the late columnist Art Hoppe. It's 1971 and Hoppe is torn up with disgust both at U.S. behavior in Southeast Asia and at himself: "This is how close I border on treason: Now I root against my own country." A closing note says it got more mail than any other column he wrote.

 This is how an agonized solid citizen sounds when an American adventure hits rock bottom. We're not at that point yet with Iraq. I hope we don't get to that point.

4/24/04 11:04 p.m.(Link here.)

 "Patriotism Is Making Sure Your Country Is Worth Defending."

 This and other fine propaganda items available at www.northernsun.com, a Web address spotted s'afternoon on a bumpersticker that said, "It Ain't Over 'Til Your Brother Counts the Ballots." No, I don't love every single item these guys sell, so don't bother yakking at me about the ones you don't like. Maybe we even agree. But I do like a lot of them. They seem more original than most.

4/23/04 8:17 p.m.(Link here.)

 The Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program for pregnant women and young families is one of the best welfare programs left in the United States. A pity its ad campaign is shockingly clueless, not to mention cluelessly shocking.

This ad is on a billboard South of Market in San Francisco. Per the Ad Council  website, that's the "Caucasian Baby" (sic) version. This is the "Ethnic Baby" (sic) version. And, no, the sad fact of infant segregation in public service ads is not why I draw your attention to these images. That comes next:

The ads show infants -- presumably Children of The Poor -- with nutrition labels inked on their foreheads. The idea apparently being that babies are not born with care-and-feeding instructions attached, so WIC's friendly nutritionists are there to help new parents. That's an exceptionally nice idea in these days of cold Personal Responsibility preaching.

But, erm, have these advertising folks actually never heard of Jonathan Swift?

4/23/04 12:57 p.m.(Link here.)

 Read the current Harper's if you can. Lewis Lapham is upset, and you should be too, about this report on the Bush Administration's anti-empirical treatment of scientific research.

4/23/04 11:09 a.m.(Link here.)

 Not much of my own to say today, so here's Josh Marshall with a combination of anger and decent ambivalence over the photos of coffins from Iraq.

4/22/04 1:18 p.m.(Link here.)

 It's not over but for the moment the Sierra Club's honor is saved. They've defeated the takeover attempt by these anti-immigration characters, who seem to be missing the basic insight that the United States cannot remove itself from its host planet.

4/22/04 1:13 p.m.(Link here.)

 Tami Sicilio, who took the photo of the soldiers' flag-covered coffins in the transport plane, has been fired by her military-contractor employer. So has her husband.

 [UPDATE: Here, read what Jerry and his commenters are saying about it.]

4/21/04 11:06 a.m.(Link here.)

 Not-so-funny funny papers for not-so-funny times: B.D. of Doonesbury has lost a leg. Farley comments here. And the Get Fuzzy guy can't get a straight answer why his cousin, also missing a leg,  is being brought home at two in the morning.

4/20/04 6:19 p.m.(Link here.)

 Housekeeping item:

 A couple months ago Harper's published, and I quoted, a report saying San Francisco's new Democratic Party mayor, Gavin Newsom, had contributed to Bush in 2000. Harper's now has a correction out. It's this: 

In 2000, Democrat Gavin Newsom, now mayor of San Francisco, made a $500 donation not to the Bush-Cheney campaign [Index, March] but to the Republican Party of San Francisco, which distributed campaign materials endorsing him for supervisor and Bush for president. We regret the error.

4/20/04 2:41 p.m.(Link here.)

 Hope I'm wrong here, but I think this will not be the last right-wing attack we see on the public good name of the senior Kennedy brothers. It's actually not the first I've seen in recent weeks. I had thought John and Bobby were still safe from Republican smearing if only because their martyrdoms were once mourned worldwide with real tears. But the Kennedys are identified with Candidate Kerry, and as Jimmy Breslin reminded us, the folks now in power are not above molesting the dead.

4/20/04 12:10 p.m.(Link here.)

 Flying pigs, blue moons, hot ice... That, or, as Shakespeare never said, someone at the Gap is snorting wondrous strange snow.

To wit: the Gap is cooperating with both a U.S. and a Salvadoran union to work with a new all-union factory staffed and part-owned by displaced textile workers in El Salvador. Yes, the wages are probably lower than U.S. levels. Yes, one wonders if the Salvadorans' work will go to Gap's "Banana Republic" stores and if so how they feel about same. But it's still pleasantly shocking good news.

4/19/04 5:58 p.m.(Link here.)

 Not the worst thing Grover Norquist has said, but certainly one of the most interesting:

"'We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals - and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship."

Anti-democratic, intentional drives toward polarization have been seen before. Read your Isherwood Berlin Stories, everyone. And do support members of the conventional political process -- yes, even conventional conservatives -- when they're under pressure from the antidemocratic right. The thing we have to save now isn't a particular agenda: it's the whole liberal idea that politics consists of negotiation within a shared democratic framework.

 The extent of the trouble is a little clearer to me since reading "The Enemy of Liberalism," Mark Lilla's prescient 1997 NYRB article on the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt (thx to Alan Hogue for the recommendation). From the conclusion:

Like any other political doctrine, liberalism makes assumptions about things human and divine, and these assumptions are, and ought to remain, open to disinterested reflection. Those who seriously question such assumptions are not necessarily wrong to do so and their arguments ought to be engaged. But for nearly two centuries now, the advocates of liberal ideas have also found themselves confronted by opponents like Schmitt, who are so convinced that the modern age represents a cosmic mistake that they are willing to consider any extreme, intellectual or political, to correct it. While few of Schmitt's contemporary promoters may share his peculiar theological vision, many display his violent distaste for liberal society; and like him they long passionately for a new dispensation. Given the power of such passions, and the damage they can cause, we should be scrupulous in distinguishing liberalism's genuinely philosophical critics from those who practice the politics of theological despair. Anyone who tries to learn from Carl Schmitt without making this elementary distinction will have learned nothing at all. 

4/19/04 10:57 a.m.(Link here.)

 As J. was saying this morning, the casualties have made it into the funny papers. The "Get Fuzzy" guy has a relative with a missing leg (of course, per revised military lingo, he doesn't really count as a "casualty" any more) and Doonesbury's B.D. is at least down for the count, possibly worse.

The casualties have made it into the funny papers but not yet into the songs, so this old song will have to do duty for a while yet. Afraid it mentions rain where it should mention dust. Better write something new.

4/18/04 10:34 p.m.(Link here.)

 "Nous sommes desoles que notre president soit un idiot. Nous n'avons pas vote pour lui" (sic).

4/18/04 1:34 p.m.(Link here.)

 Been reading more of the Raffles stuff. A lot of Hornung turns out to be available in online text. The specifically gay subtext gets less heavy as the series goes on, though it's certainly there at moments. What's often shown to the reader instead is a generic wistfulness about being marked as different -- a wistfulness that only happens to be more persuasive if the real "difference" is read as being homosexuality and not burglary. Interesting stuff.

The book I bought is in its proper place on the shelf now between Sherlock Holmes and Arsène Lupin. Funny: per today's paper Daniel Handler alphabetizes his books. I can't understand alphabetizing your own books unless the collection is really library-sized. It gives up the fun of deciding which shelf a new book might like to live on.

 [UPDATE: I mentioned "Victorian prejudice" earlier. As I read further, it's worse than I thought. One of the early stories especially is unpleasant, but it's soon over. The novel, however, is persistently ugly. A pity. Taking the bigotry together with, e.g., the slightly overheated interest in tying people up, there's a fair amount of gratuitous cruelty in Raffles, acknowledged and otherwise. Strange, really, that Raffles was the Victorian/Edwardian antihero Orwell picked to contrast with the hard-boiled mobster antiheroes of the '30s. The difference between the two is smaller than you'd think from just reading the "Raffles and Miss Blandish" essay. Yet meanwhile there are fragments all through these stories of what became Orwell's own romanticisms. Even a few half-familiar phrases. That man's imagination had very tangled roots. It all takes thinking through.]

4/17/04 9:45 p.m.(Link here.)

 We've got "The Grapes of Wrath" on TV here tonight. The American Enclosures of the 1930s. Heavy-muscled men ordering poor households to pack up their old trucks and move along. The authoritative man's car pulls up and he speaks from the driver's seat, neither offering the courtesy of a guest nor expecting the courtesy of a host: "You haven't forgotten, have you?" "No, sir, we'll be gone by morning." That's too familiar. I've seen too much since last October of the police rousting campaign against RV campers in a part of the San Francisco waterfront that's wanted for development. Not so dramatic now, of course. Not the same thing -- nothing ever is. But topheavy trucks with poor shocks still waddle the same way, and the tone of voice from the driver's seat of the shiny car is pretty much the same.

Funny, in the days when people wrote lyrically about such things there weren't urban Enclosures, only rural ones. Now I guess we're on our second urban Enclosure, the first being the "urban renewal" evictions at mid-century. Now they call it "gentrification."

4/17/04 7:23 p.m.(Link here.)

 Small world: would you believe it, Hornung and Gissing are buried side by side in a French graveyard. They're not only together on the remainder tables.

4/16/04 10:58 p.m.(Link here.)

 There's a new cut-rate store here that sells overstock and damaged books for a chain of market-rate bookstores. There was a table with second-string Classics of English Literature and I started thinking it was the kind of place to see New Grub Street by George Gissing just before I did spot the first of about a dozen copies. Gissing is unreadable pretty much: I only pay attention to it because New Grub Street was one of Orwell's favorite books.

What I didn't expect to find among these Unpopular Classics was another Orwell favorite, E.W. Hornung's Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman. First copy I've ever seen of a Raffles book except for once a collector's item in a display case. The series, concerning a gentleman-about-town who has a secret career as a burglar, is probably best known through the essay, "Raffles and Miss Blandish," in which Orwell makes the case that the "hard-boiled" crime fiction of the 'thirties shows an unhealthy admiration for power and bullying that was absent from earlier -- he suggests, healthier -- adventure series like Raffles and Sherlock Holmes.

 Well, um.

I can see his point that Raffles is more chivalrous than your basic fictional Chicago gangster, provided we treat the Amateur Cracksman's Victorian prejudices as a product of their times. But healthy-minded? No, not really. Every story turns out to be laden with closet-era gay innuendo. It's smirkier than Holmes' affection for Watson: the admiring (male) sidekick named Bunny is the least of it. Apart from many double entendres, there's a lot of metaphorical stuff about double lives and thrilling secret crimes. The adventures are fun to read, sure, but reading them places Orwell's essay in a whole new light.

One more argument for the Orwell-As-Closet-Case theory, I think.

4/15/04 8:47 p.m.(Link here.)

 I can't come up with printable words of my own this evening, so I'll let poor old George Orwell have a turn:
 
 

...I have always suspected that if our economic and political problems are ever really solved, life will become simpler instead of more complex, and that the sort of pleasure one gets from finding the first primrose will loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eating an ice to the tune of a Wurlitzer. I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and—to return to my first instance—toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship. 

At any rate, spring is here, even in London N.I, and they can’t stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t. So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

4/14/04 5:06 p.m.(Link here.)

 "Accrual, accrual world," says Joel, and that it is, especially for folks on the cash method.

 Yes, it being tax time. And I wish The Nation had published an online version of its report on the ACORN campaign against exploitive tax refund loans. 

4/13/04 10:00 p.m.(Link here.)

 Not at all an original point, but in case I haven't said so before, the Sierra Club is in grave danger of right-wing takeover. Tell everyone you know.

4/12/04 1:03 p.m.(Link here.)

 "Do androids dream of electric sheep?"

4/11/04 12:11 p.m.(Link here.)

 Wonderful news: they're re-releasing "The Life of Brian" as an answer to that overheated Mel Gibson thing. Remember, always look on the bright side of life.

4/10/04 1:23 p.m.(Link here.)

 Paging Stanley Milgram:

 A mysterious pervert has brought off the same stunt dozens of times: he calls a fast food joint, claims to be a policeman, and tells the manager there's a thief on the premises. He "orders" the manager to stop and strip-search a particular employee or customer. In many cases, the managers have complied.

 Some of the managers who fell for the hoax have ended up in court facing civil suits or criminal charges. Their main defense has been that they were just obeying orders.

4/9/04 6:49 p.m.(Link here.)

 Welcome to the dulce et decorum biz: on FTD's "Sympathy & Funeral" catalog page, "The FTD Salute to a Patriot Bouquet" is listed among "best sellers."

 My stomach hurts.

4/9/04 11:51 a.m.(Link here.)

 A sentence that could only have been written in Washington:
 
 

As the national security adviser spoke to the panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. troops were battling a ferocious insurgency that could undermine Bush administration policy. 

4/8/04 8:44 p.m.(Link here.)

 We got talking about the world news tonight and had to put on Louis Armstrong: "What A Wonderful World."

4/7/04 9:28 p.m.(Link here.)

 As an Orwell fan I can't go without noting that the date Winston Smith first writes in his diary is April 4, 1984 -- twenty years ago this week.

In possible honor of same, the UK Guardian is reporting on a deal made by the British public health system with a private company that supplied 17,500 hospital beds with TVs lacking off switches -- which the company described as "an accident."

4/5/04 11:35 a.m.(Link here.)

 From Alan Hogue, who should've put this on his weblog, and also via Arts & Letters Daily, here's a creepy link between a Nazi philosopher and the current political landscape. Not sure I agree with it all, but it's worth reading.

4/4/04 3:50 p.m.(Link here.)

 Interesting, interesting site: the U.S. Department of Energy's Country Analysis Briefs. Written in spare, fact-packed administrative prose like that of the Encyclopedia Brittanica in the early twentieth century. As with the Brittanica entries on topics like "Cotton" and "India," these are practical geopolitical briefings for use by busy geopolitical functionaries. So much of what the current administration produces is angled for consumption by a poorly educated general public. These entries have a refreshing seriousness and density, if not precisely a lack of spin.

The indexing is a little fluky: a few country reports are linked from the main page, but many can be found by choosing a likely intermediate page through the "Select a Special Topic" function and glancing over the links at the top of the resulting screen.

Whenever there's sudden official concern about a previously obscure part of the world, people of any political seasoning wonder, "do they have oil there?" Unfortunately, we'll probably have to go on wondering the same thing about a different hellhole every few years, and we'll want a convenient way to answer the question. Might as well bookmark this page.

4/4/04 3:02 p.m.(Link here.)

 Have they heard of the First Amendment in Crawford, Texas?

4/4/04 [late morning-ish].(Link here.)

 Credit where due: per Matier & Ross (scroll down), the Customs and Immigration folks at our local airport did stop a local policeman from using the airport surveillance cameras to ogle women.

Also a friend from the UK says novelist McEwan brought his troubles on himself by not checking ahead about visa requirements. But did those folks really have to spend the taxpayers' money locking the guy up and asking him silly questions when they could have been out chasing smugglers or something?

4/3/04 11:49 p.m.(Link here.)

 In today's SF Chronicle:

- The Department of Homeland Security recently protected the American public from an award-winning British novelist -- at least until his visa got straightened out -- and interrogated him with searching questions like: "What kind of novels do you write: fiction or nonfiction?"

- The Transportation Security Administration hotly pursued a "security breach" to the point of firing an employee, which sounds fine until you learn the "breach" consisted of providing information to a union lawyer, within the attorney-client privilege, and oh, no, that's certainly not the same as firing someone for union organizing, absolutely not a bit.

Don't these guys have anything more important to do?

4/2/04 7:13 p.m.(Link here.)

 "God Breaks Ranks With GOP, Finks to 9/11 Commission."

Listen, ya laugh or ya cry.

4/2/04 11:20 a.m.(Link here.)

 With talk of a housing bubble gaining strength -- emphasized in the Washington Monthly this week (and see added perspective at BadAttitudes), and reviewed seriously though downplayed by the FDIC -- why is HUD coming up with new ways to put federal insurance behind adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) that would get more expensive if interest rates went up? Here's the Federal Register rule and here's a further regulatory interpretation. I'm no expert on ARMs, so could someone please tell me why this makes sense?

 [UPDATE: Novogradac has further resources on the bubble debate.]

 [FURTHER UPDATE: "Moe Blues," in comments on the abovementioned BadAttitudes item, came out and wondered something I had been too charitable -- or maybe I mean too incredulous -- to wonder in public: is this recent ARM promotion a conscious effort to spread out risks onto ordinary people's shoulders that would otherwise be squarely the big institutions' problem? I dunno, maybe I'm still missing something here. It's true, a friend who knows about property investment at a practical level was saying some ARM mortgages can be tied to rates that go up in a very slow, controlled way if they do go up at all. But is it possible these federal folks are putting the ARM on the public in a way that could really hurt? And if so, does it bother them that they're asking ordinary people on ordinary streets to risk the loss of their irreplaceable life's savings?]

4/1/04 10:28 p.m.(Link here.)
 
 

"Charlie McCarthy Hearings."

4/1/04 9:15 p.m.(Link here.)

 Sign of the times: The IRS has seen fit to issue a notice explaining that as a taxpayer you cannot claim a theft loss if you own stock whose value has dropped due to corporate misconduct -- not even if it has dropped all the way to zero. In other words, if you're robbed with a six-gun, it's a theft loss, but if you're robbed with a fountain pen (in this particular manner -- through a decline in the value of stock "acquired on the open market for investment"), it's a capital loss. Sad part, of course, being that the IRS sees enough of this problem to make a rule about it.

4/1/04 7:38 p.m.(Link here.)

 Maybe I'm reading too much into this Census Bureau press release, but what would you say were its intended implications about what makes a good (or a bad) childhood environment?

4/1/04 11:08 a.m.(Link here.)

 Oh dear, the co-optation is already starting: Air America just ran a commercial for Tyson chicken products.

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