URLs du Jour

2008-05-15

  • Peggy Noonan rips Republicans a new one in this week's WSJ column. Building off the recent loss of a Mississippi house seat in a special election:
    "This was a real wakeup call for us," someone named Robert M. Duncan, who is chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the New York Times. This was after Mississippi. "We can't let the Democrats take our issues." And those issues would be? "We can't let them pretend to be conservatives," he continued. Why not? Republicans pretend to be conservative every day.
    Emphasis added.

  • And Peggy doesn't even mention the recently-passed Farm Bill, which would only reinforce her point. Commentary is easy to find, but here is the National Review editorial:
    The House (318-106) and Senate (81-15) have passed a new $300 billion farm bill by veto-proof margins this week. The bill is worse than the 2002 farm bill, which at the time was considered the most bloated and wasteful in history. President Bush should not only veto it, he should take his time in doing so. We have a feeling that the more time the public has to get to know this bill, the less they will like it.
    Read the whole thing to savor just how profligately your representatives in Congress are shoveling your money (both in taxes and food prices) to the politically well-connected.

    The Senate roll call is here, and the House's is here. New Hampshire's senators, John Sununu and Judd Gregg were among the courageous 15 senators voting against this monstrosity. NH Congresspersons Hodes and Shea-Porter were for it.

    McCain, Obama, and Clinton did not vote, being out on the campaign trail, but Prof Mankiw reports that McCain was against it, Obama and Clinton for. Advantage: McCain. Prof Mankiw also links to NYT and WSJ editorials on the bill, a point of rare agreement between those two editorial boards. ("Disgraceful" and a "rural giveaway", respectively.)

  • Scott Adams talks about his relationship with his "office cat," Sarah:
    I know I am special because she only licks the things she loves the most, including soft cat food, my chin, and her own ass, not always in that order.

Fedora 9

Pun Salad is now coming to you via a shiny-new upgrade to the Fedora 9 distribution of the Linux operating system. Notice the improved clarity of my prose, a new feature contained in the Apache 2.2.8 web server!

A semi-serious note: this machine's video uses an ATI chipset and the pain in the wazoo experienced in my initial Linux install was reintroduced post-upgrade: a less-than-native-resolution video screen. Don't buy ATI!

The issue was finally resolved by some blind hacking away at configuration files and installed drivers that I could not begin to reproduce in a million years. But all this caused some unusual downtime, so my apologies if this inconvenienced any readers.


Last Modified 2024-01-23 2:06 PM EDT