San Francisco Examiner Goodness
This op-ed nails exactly why I'm libertarian/conservative, though it casts aspersions on my still actually living in this city.

Theory: Lunatic governments can get away with much more in achingly beautiful places. To me, right now, everything good this city has to offer (none of which its government is responsible for) outweighs everything bad about it (most of which is caused by insane decisions by that government). If this were some other place--Philadelphia, say--people like me would vote with their feet and everyone left would be trapped in a nightmare.

Speaking of the Examiner, I also happened to walk past a newspaper box this morning with the Examiner front page showing the headline: RICH MAN'S GAME and a graphic showing the net worth of some Bush cabinet members.

As a conservative, a Republican, and (non sequitur coming up?) a baseball stathead, I'm skeptical about what this article actually shows. Net worth is a number, like batting average, that seems dispositive but may not actually tell the whole story. In particular, "rich"? That's not some immutable quantity, in the way Colin Powell is black or Barney Frank is gay. Someone may be rich now who was quite poor growing up or the other way around.

I'm curious what sort of marginal increase in wealth these people have had, whether they're rich because their daddies were rich (Kennedy's or the like) or because they went out and earned their money.

More to the point, I wonder if some econometric wonk/baseball stathead could come up with a metric for wealth added to others by a given person's decision to go out and work his ass off and make a ton of money. Someone who starts a small business, grows the business, and hires more and more people, is contributing to wealth.

(Obviously you can't assume that those particular people would have gone unemployed but they work at this job because it's marginally better than their next best alternative, and other people on down the line have a slightly better job in turn. To the extent that this is all fungible, I think if I hire 25 people then that really does mean 25 other people have jobs who otherwise wouldn't have. Either that or 25 jobs go unfilled--but the labor market isn't as tight as it used to be, and probably never was.)

Things that are still technically correct, even though I can see why people think they stink...
1. This decision

2. The NFL's "tuck rule." (Last game ever played at Foxboro Stadium.)

E-mail forwarding goodness
Somebody who apparently has no idea what my views are (the recipient list is large enough that he may not care), sent me the ACTFORCHANGE ACTIVISM UPDATE.

Item 1 is to urge Minnesota's Green Party candidate to stand down. Currently, only the vote of a single Independent senator keeps the Bush administration from ramming through hundreds of right-wing federal judicial appointments, inflicting deep damage to the environment and rushing to war with Iraq.

1. So tell me all about these "hundreds" of "right-wing" judges. What about them is right-wing? Don't worry about disk space, I have plenty of time. As apparently do you, if you have the misfortune of being involved in litigation that's been delayed by all the unfilled judge positions. I seem to remember that in the 1990s Democrats thought of this as a problem.

2. I'm not convinced that the Bush administration is capable of "inflicting deep damage to the environment." What is it they'd do and how is it that the Senate would prevent it?

As for "rushing to war with Iraq"...

Modern warfare is both extremely expensive and deadly, not a CNN-ready videogame. Before we let loose the bloody dogs of war, let us give inspections and weapons destruction a chance:

I've heard this "not a videogame" line before and it infuriates me, maybe because it's so patronizing. On the flip side, modern tyrants are belligerent and genocidal, not some Model U.N. dorkwad who will disarm if you just ask nicely.

Scott Ritter, restaurant inspector.

Not really politics so much as research accuracy
Can you spot all the method flaws in this study? The reporter outlines most of them but then glosses over them.

Crap
Now I can't vote for any California governor candidate.

Meta-Complaint
About every third or fourth time I hit this page (or my other comment-enabled page), the comment links will be mysteriously missing.

Drop me a line if/when you run into this, especially if you were just about to comment. For some reason republishing my template usually works. Annoying but not fatal.

Letter to the World
This is beautifully written.