EdDriscoll.com

Posted 8/1/2002 11:50:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHY SHOULD WE ATTACK IRAQ? Steven Den Beste gives lots of reasons, including these, in a must-read essay:

The problem is that Saddam is a monster, and he is set to be followed by a son who is even worse. He has weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), and despite certain claims to the contrary, we cannot be sure that he will not give, or otherwise provide, them to groups who will smuggle them into the US. I do not want 500 kilos of VX being released in downtown Atlanta. I do not want Pittsburgh getting nuked. I do not want thousands of people in Seattle dying from anthrax. And I don't want New York to bleed anymore. Nothing in the future is certain, but in my opinion the chance of this happening is too high if the Baath regime in Baghdad is permitted to continue to rule. So we'll have to go take it out, and put a better (for us) regime in place. We did that in Japan, too, and it's a damned good thing both for us and for the Japanese. Yes, we meddle in the world. It's part of the role one takes on by being rich and strong. And it does make us hated.

Den Beste ends by saying "So what gives us the right to go attack Iraq? The right of survival, the fact that if we don't go to Iraq to fight, there's an unacceptably high chance that Iraq's WMDs might come to us.", paraphrasing, perhaps unconsciously, Trotsky's famous phrase, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." Right now, we should be very, very interested in finishing off Iraq as a threat to the world.

Posted 8/1/2002 10:35:33 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT WERE YOU DOING ON SEPT 11th? Here's what I was doing--which is probably pretty close to what most of America was doing. However, one person was making a pretty good profit that day.

Posted 8/1/2002 10:31:20 PM by Edward Driscoll
CRAZY JIM AND SLICK BOB: Jacob Sullum of Reason looks at two styles of sleaze.

Posted 8/1/2002 08:33:29 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE FBI WANTS TO GIVE LIE DETECTOR TESTS TO SENATORS: Life becomes more and more like The Onion every day.

Posted 8/1/2002 06:23:01 PM by Edward Driscoll
RED SCARE: John Fund asks will Germany's communists make a comeback? (Found via Pejman Yousefzadeh.)

Posted 8/1/2002 05:49:28 PM by Edward Driscoll
SOME PEOPLE NEVER LEARN: In a classic case of "buy high, sell low", investors pulled $47 billion out of equity mutual funds in July. Or as I posted a while back, "where there is no fear, there is no value".

Posted 8/1/2002 05:11:41 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT DOESN'T KILL YOU MAKES YOU STRONGER (or really hung over): VodkaPundit is off to his bachelor party. Pray for him. And for everyone else in Colorado, if things get out of hand.

Posted 8/1/2002 04:45:30 PM by Edward Driscoll
BUT OF COURSE: America is at war. The Bay Area economy is hurting. Anti-Semitism haunts local colleges. Fortunately, the Berkeley city council knows what it must do...

Posted 8/1/2002 03:35:58 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE: At last, one of the great mysteries of our time is solved: Traficant wears a toupee. For more on our continuing coverage of this important issue, click here.

Posted 8/1/2002 01:18:14 PM by Edward Driscoll
POSSIBLY THE SINGLE MOST DEPRESSING THING I'VE READ ABOUT BILL CLINTON: Ruffini also has a long essay on John Judis' and Ruy Teixeira's upcoming book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, (a spoof of Kevin Phillips' The Emerging Republican Majority, written in 1969). In it, Ruffini quotes from an essay in Dissent:

In the 1996 presidential campaign, Dick Morris and Mark Penn, Clinton's two closest advisers, devised a mechanism for identifying voters likely to back Clinton and voters likely to back his Republican opponent, Bob Dole. Morris and Penn asked five questions, each one of which, according to the pollsters, directly or indirectly reflected a voter's key cultural and moral values and thus his or her likely voting behavior: (1) Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong? (2) Do you personally look at pornography? (3) Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong? (4) Would you look down on someone who had an affair while they were married? (5) Is religion very important in your life? Voters who were pro-Clinton replied "no" to questions one, three, four and five and "yes" to question two, with the converse true for Dole voters. The way in which voters answered these questions was more predictive of their presidential vote, Morris and Penn found, than every other demographic measure except race and party identification.

Talk about cheapening the office: setting aside the moral implications of Morris and Penn's questions, just think about what they do to the American voter: turn him into a mass of hormones, whose sexual proclivities determine how he'll vote for the most important elected official in the world. Try to picture FDR, Truman or even JFK approving a poll like that.

Posted 8/1/2002 12:43:55 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE GRAY DAVIS / MR. BURNS CONNECTION, as spotted by Patrick Ruffini.

Posted 8/1/2002 12:26:21 PM by Edward Driscoll
BUH-BYE: Israeli cable companies get authorization to remove CNN from their programming, according to this Ha'aretz article. Gee, I guess stuff like this didn't weigh into their decision, did it?

Posted 8/1/2002 12:17:38 PM by Edward Driscoll
FREQUENT FLIER GATE: Wow, German politics really does have a sense of humor!

Posted 8/1/2002 11:25:04 AM by Edward Driscoll
SENIOR CITIZENS BEING SCREWED BY BIG CORPORATIONS: Instapundit.com has a surprising example of someone who has spent a lifetime with a single corporation, and has little to show for it.

Posted 8/1/2002 12:25:40 AM by Edward Driscoll
MILTON FRIEDMAN UPDATE: I didn't get a chance to post this story on Wednesday, but Nick Schulze has a nice piece about Friedman, whom he dubs "The Happiest Warrior".

Posted 8/1/2002 12:21:57 AM by Edward Driscoll
LOTS OF NFL HALL OF FAME COVERAGE AT ESPN Classic.

Posted 8/1/2002 12:19:55 AM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT HATH WILLIAM PERRY WROUGHT? Warren Sapp may dabble on offense for the Bucs.

Posted 8/1/2002 12:10:20 AM by Edward Driscoll
DEATH WISH: How the British maximize crime is the subject of this essay by Paul Craig Roberts, who asks "Did you know that in England self-defense of person or property is regarded as an antisocial act, and that a victim who injures or kills an assailant is likely to be treated with more severity than the assailant?" It's painful to see the remarkable English civilization descending into such depths, and to see the famous National Rifle Association phrase, "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws have guns," once thought to be simplistic, to be proven simply true.

Posted 7/31/2002 11:18:29 PM by Edward Driscoll
DOW 36,000 REVISITED: James Glassman and Kevin A. Hassett take an updated look at their 1999 book, Dow 36,000 in The Wall Street Journalin light of the recent gyrations of the market, and find its principles still sound. The whole piece is a very good, especially these paragraphs:

For students of modern finance, the real mystery is how to reconcile these two facts: Over the long term, stocks return much more than bonds, but stocks are no more risky than bonds. This paradox is called the "equity premium puzzle"-- the premium being the extra return that stocks provide over benchmark bonds. For decades, economists were at a loss to explain the puzzle. A 1997 paper by Mr. Siegel and Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago concluded that the answer was "myopic risk aversion." In other words, investors are so frightened of short-term losses in the stock market that they can't see beyond their noses. We argued, to the contrary, that investors were finally solving the equity premium puzzle. Starting about 20 years ago, irrational risk aversion to stocks began to decline, thanks mainly to the spread of new research, better financial education, the rise of defined-contribution retirement plans, and increased world stability.

Posted 7/31/2002 03:30:24 PM by Edward Driscoll
HAPPY 90th, MILTON FRIEDMAN! National Review Online has two articles in honor of the great economist (including one by Donald Rumsfeld), and so does Reason magazine.

Posted 7/31/2002 03:25:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
MORE BAD PRESS FOR AOL-TIME WARNER: Time Warner to charge flood victims for cable boxes, according to this Houston Chronicle story. Just when AOL-Time Warner's reputation is at its worst, they could have looked like big heroes for replacing the boxes for free, but no....

Posted 7/31/2002 12:51:19 PM by Edward Driscoll
DYNAMIC DUO REUNITED: John Stallworth and Lynn Swann are together again in the NFL Hall of Fame.

Posted 7/31/2002 11:49:01 AM by Edward Driscoll
MARSUPIAL LIONS AND WOMBATS THE SIZE OF CARS: Come for the incredible headlines, stick around for the multi-part series on reductions in English civil liberties on Group Captain Mandrake's Weblog.

Posted 7/31/2002 11:45:54 AM by Edward Driscoll
ELECTRIC CAR BURNS SUPER MODEL'S HOME: The New York Post's Page Six says "Veronica Webb's eco-friendly electric car turned into a fire-spewing death machine the other night, burning down her Key West house and killing her beloved dog, Hercules." Here's more:

Firefighters who rushed to the scene told Webb that good intentions often turn lovely homes into blazing death zones. "They said they see this kind of thing with electric cars all the time," she says. "Electric cars and golf carts are always overloading their chargers and burning up, but no one knows about it." Among the hidden dangers, Webb says, were four hidden high-powered batteries. "There are four extra batteries that aren't shown in the [owner's manual] diagram. They need to be serviced but you can't service them if you don't even know that they're there." Luckily, Webb was in New York shopping for baby furniture when the blaze erupted, but her new husband, Wall Streeter turned amateur archaeologist George Robb, was asleep in bed. He barely escaped with his life. "By the time the fire department showed up, they didn't even go inside to look for survivors because they assumed that anyone left inside was long dead. They said George got out with 30 seconds to spare."

Posted 7/30/2002 11:01:19 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE ULTIMATE TAILGATE PARTY: The NFL is planning a Times Square bash to kick off the upcoming season.

Posted 7/30/2002 10:34:40 PM by Edward Driscoll
DOA: That's what the UK Sun says is the condition of George Michael's career, with his current single, the one with that generated all the controversy in the Blogosphere selling only 3,000 copies. I actually liked the elegiac sound of "Playing for Time" on his Listen Without Prejudice album. But I'm not at all sure why entertainers like Michael feel they have to insert politics into their songs, when most people listen to music to escape from the events of the day. Having heard my share of Crosby and Sinatra from my father, I can't remember a political statement from either of them (except maybe for obvious WWII, let's kill Hitler and Tojo stuff--that's not politics, that's common sense). The Beatles and Stones of the 1960s kept their political statements sufficiently vague so that most of their late '60s stuff is still very listenable today. The exception of course are John Lennon's political songs, both with the Beatles and with Yoko--and those songs had a very, very short shelf life--their expiration date expired with the arguably the end of Vietnam and most definitely the end of the 1970s. (I cringe whenever I hear "Imagine" these days, whereas most of Lennon's stuff with the Beatles is still amazing and fresh.) I do think that pop music fans have short memories--and if Michael starts thinking of making music that entertains--and sells--rather than proselytizing, his career could rise from the grave. In the meantime, RIP, you old Whammer.

Posted 7/30/2002 10:12:06 PM by Edward Driscoll
HOORAY FOR JOE BIDEN!, says Jonah Goldberg. As to why, read his syndicated column.

Posted 7/30/2002 09:39:17 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE HEART OF THE MATTER: Tres Producers boils it all down to what we'll miss about Jim Traficant: his unbelievable hair and muttonchop sideburns, and compiles a list of media quotes (and creates a few of their own) of the most incredible hair in politics, the anti-JFK, the Bizarro-Gipper, the alternative Star Trek universe where Lt. Uhura wears a uniform with a bare midriff, and Spock sports a goatee Trent Lott (insert the name of your favorite politician with incredible hair--real or Sy Sperling-created, here). It's easy to feel sympathetic to the Traficant locks, (although to be honest, I suspect they'll be spared prison time, if you get my drift...), and to agree with Eric Olsen's comments that:

Perhaps the hair should have been afforded independent counsel and mounted its own defense. The thought of it shorn, constrained or incarcerated is hardly bearable. Traficant may be more concerned with locks of another sort, as he plays his final act on the public stage, but the rest of us should behold it while we can. What is hair today will be gone tomorrow.

Posted 7/30/2002 03:55:36 PM by Edward Driscoll
TURNING JAPANESE: Niners ready to take American football to Japan.

Posted 7/30/2002 03:45:36 PM by Edward Driscoll
ANTI-GRAVITY PROPULSION comes �out of the closet�, in a way cool Jane's Defense Weekly article. (Link via InstaPundit.)

Posted 7/30/2002 01:05:49 PM by Edward Driscoll
SIMPLY RED: Martin Amis' new book, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million has definitely generated some good discussions on Stalin and the Soviet Union. Here's Andrew Stuttaford's book review, Andrew Sullivan on The Times and Stalin, James Lileks on Diego Rivera, and Group Captain Lionel Mandrake on communism's lasting appeal to intellectuals. Meanwhile, Orrin Judd has a long reader letter and his rebuttal, on the wintry George Orwell, arguably the first neo-conservative. Or the last honest socialist. Or something.

Posted 7/30/2002 08:55:46 AM by Edward Driscoll
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE IN THE MILITARY: Sgt. Stryker and Tres Producers are on the story, which involves the killings of four military wives in the past six weeks, allegedly by their husbands, who are based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Posted 7/30/2002 07:58:43 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE PASSOVER MEAL THAT WASN'T A BIG SELLER: Hilarious photo of an not-very-well thought out ad on Howard Fienberg's Kesher Talk blog.

Posted 7/30/2002 07:51:27 AM by Edward Driscoll
WHITHER WI-FI, asks Duane Freese in Tech Central Station. (Freese did a superb job editing my earlier piece on Wi-Fi for TCS--which he links to in his story--by the way. Thanks on both accounts.)

Posted 7/30/2002 07:44:49 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE GOOSE AND GANDER AMENDMENT, as proposed by Dave Kopel & Robert Racansky.

Posted 7/29/2002 11:30:43 PM by Edward Driscoll
WOW, DREHER REALLY IS A GRANOLA CONSERVATIVE...

Posted 7/29/2002 10:00:17 PM by Edward Driscoll
HEAVY HANDED BIAS IN ACTION: Little Green Footballs finds the New York Times running roughshod over an op-ed critical of the United Nations. Andrew Sullivan also weighs in, in a post called "Even Op-Eds Get Neutered".

Posted 7/29/2002 09:38:46 PM by Edward Driscoll
JEWISH SUPERHEROES (The comic book kind, not Milton Friedman), were the debate of the day on The Corner on National Review Online. If you're interested, start here (with the New York Post's announcement that Benjamin J. Grimm, aka The Thing, one quarter of the Fantastic Four is Jewish), then scroll up.

Posted 7/29/2002 08:38:27 PM by Edward Driscoll
BEST SERVED COLD: The Digital Bits reviews the new deluxe director's edition DVD of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Posted 7/29/2002 07:49:34 PM by Edward Driscoll
AS HEADS IS TAILS: Victor Davis Hanson finds an interesting duality amidst the usual tired old cliches that Europeans give for hating America:

[W]hen these criticisms are probed, a startling revelation appears: Far from being radicals, Europeans are, in fact, in a fundamental sense more reactionary than Americans. And here things get interesting. In conversations, the Europeans very soon begin to voice all the old right-wing complaints about America that explain why they see our country as so insular, crass, and dangerous: We have no respect for tradition; our movies and television are uncouth; our volatile citizenry is increasingly ignorant, multicultural, and lawless, and so blinkered to the concerns of others. Welcome to radical democratic culture.

Read the rest of the article--as is usual with Hanson, it's very, very good.

Posted 7/29/2002 07:30:27 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE TEN MOST SHOCKING MOMENTS IN NFL HISTORY, on ESPN.com's "Page2" section. Can't argue with #1.

Posted 7/29/2002 07:19:49 PM by Edward Driscoll
FALSE PROPHET: Tech Central Station looks at the long strange history of Kevin Phillips, who got things right in 1969 and rarely has since.

Posted 7/29/2002 05:44:16 PM by Edward Driscoll
GEORGE MCGOVERN: LUDDITE: The Walter Mondale of the 1970s has an essay in the Wall Street Journal, complete with these eye-popping lines:

The computer has become a new weapon of mass destruction to overrule our minds and our common sense. Did I tell you that I am terrified by computers, e-mail and the Internet? The only things worse are automated telephones that tell you to press numbers 1 through 99 and then inform you that the item you want is no longer in stock. Civilization is crumbling before these awful gadgets--although my grandsons are threatening to show me that they are not any more dangerous than the atomic bomb or AIDS. I'll probably yield to the computer age eventually despite my strong instincts against it.

Well let's see, computers first started showing up right after World War II. The Altair, Apple II and TRS-80, those first home PCs, arrived in the mid-1970s. So you've had well over 25 years to "yield to the computer age", and haven't yet? Keep 'em flying, George!

Posted 7/29/2002 05:29:09 PM by Edward Driscoll
SNORT: Speaking of time warps, the Brothers Judd finds a writer at the Washington Post with a rather short memory...

Posted 7/29/2002 05:26:06 PM by Edward Driscoll
SURFING USA: Eric Olsen has long essay, and lots of links on the subject. I've never surfed, but I was an avid skateboarder in my teens, which combined similar skills with the appealing expectation (at least to someone who was never a very good swimmer) of not drowning!

Posted 7/29/2002 04:47:34 PM by Edward Driscoll
FAULK, RAMS, INK SEVEN-YEAR DEAL: "We want to make sure Marshall finishes his career as a Ram,'' Martz said. The impact he's had not just on this team but this entire organization is pretty extreme.''

Posted 7/29/2002 04:22:54 PM by Edward Driscoll
HAPPY BIRTHDAY: The great Milton Friedman turns 90 this week.

Posted 7/29/2002 02:32:58 PM by Edward Driscoll
INTELLECTUAL DISHONESTY, 101: Check out this astonishing quote by Joe Lieberman:

"In just eighteen months, this administration has unraveled the fiscal discipline it took us eight years to build," said Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, who spoke to the Democratic Leadership Council's annual policy meeting along with Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.

Let's parse this out, shall we?The economy of the 1990s would have been in the dumps if (a) Hillary-Care had come to pass. Fortunately, it didn't, but Americans were royally p.o.'ed by it, resulting in them electing (b) a Republican-held House and Senate in 1994, which attempted to balance the budget and blocked the most egregious of wealth-destroying Democrat ideas. (c) The Nasdaq began to tank during the Microsoft Lawsuit, in mid-2000. Who was President then? (d) It was at its peak during the late-1990s, when both parties were too distracted by Clinton's impeachment to monkey with the economy. And finally (e) the current economy has its roots in the combination of early-80s tax cuts by the Reagan administration and inflation destroying actions by Paul Volcker. Lieberman must be caught in the same distortion of the space-time continuum that Al Gore is in.

Posted 7/29/2002 02:06:13 PM by Edward Driscoll
AL GORE IS A VICTIM OF THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM, according to Jonah Goldberg.

Posted 7/29/2002 02:03:57 PM by Edward Driscoll
DOW 9000, NASDAQ 1500: I know, I know, we're not there yet, but a man can dream...

Posted 7/29/2002 01:45:17 PM by Edward Driscoll

THE ROLLING LAPTOPS GET THEIR YAH-YAHS OUT: I have a major geek-a-palooza in the August issue of Nuts & Volts, complete with a profile of Evolution Robotics and their two pre-fab commercial robots, and a product review of Line6's GuitarPort product, which allows electric guitarists to plug their axes into their PC's USB port, and then simulate the sounds of vintage tube amplifiers (and a lot of other nifty features). It's also a great interface for recording the guitar via multitrack recording programs. The Evolution Robotics piece is the centerpiece of a separate, robots only mini-mag that's bagged with the main issue! Call R2-D2 and Robby! It's robot mania! Seriously, robots and electric guitars--what more do you want? Run out and buy an R2D2-sized stack of copies today!

Posted 7/29/2002 12:03:02 PM by Edward Driscoll
AUDITED BY CLINTON, UNDEFENDED BY BUSH: I guess Judicial Watch really is bipartisan. UPDATE: Jonathan Adler has more.

Posted 7/29/2002 11:49:11 AM by Edward Driscoll
A 'BERG TO REMEMBER: Group Captain Mandrake says that the only known photograph of the iceberg that sank the Titanic may go on display in the UK.

Posted 7/29/2002 11:45:53 AM by Edward Driscoll
AIR TRAVELERS OF THE WORLD UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR BOXED LUNCH! British passengers stage EasyJet revolt.

Posted 7/28/2002 11:50:00 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT'S AETNA GOT TO DO WITH IT? Patrick Ruffini says we need to rein in awards from huge malpractice lawsuits.

Posted 7/28/2002 11:28:40 PM by Edward Driscoll
NIFTY ANALYSIS OF LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES, by Orrin Judd, on The Brothers Judd Blog.

Posted 7/28/2002 11:12:40 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE BLEAT IS BACK! James Lileks' Weblog returns after a month of...well, read his latest post to see what Lilek's month was like. ...And to check out the spiffy California Zephyr Vistadome illustration at the top of the page!

Posted 7/28/2002 10:13:34 PM by Edward Driscoll
DASCHLE EXEMPTION UPDATE: Michelle Malkin says what's good for Daschle is good for the rest of the country. Click here for our original coverage of this item.

Posted 7/28/2002 10:02:53 PM by Edward Driscoll
MEN ONLY NEED APPLY: Not at Field & Stream or The American Rifleman, but...The New Yorker according to this Matt Drudge piece. It is pretty staggering, considering that I'm sure the vast majority of the readers of The New Yorker are suburban housewives who want to feel some sort of psychic connection to the Big Apple, as well as peruse The New Yorker's endless classified ads. (We get The New Yorker delivered to us, thanks to my wife's mother, who wants to make sure that we pioneer settlers in the hinterlands, living in our little house on the prairie, have some culture in our lives.) I guess male tiny mummies only should apply for a gig there.

Posted 7/28/2002 09:02:31 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE BEST COMPANY NAME, EVER. As found by Neal Boortz.

Posted 7/28/2002 03:47:24 PM by Edward Driscoll
RESTORING THE VERY BADLY TARNISHED REP OF THE FOREST SERVICE: Excellent article in The Washington Times by Valerie Richardson on the Forest Service's currently exceedingly poor reputation, how it got that way, and how to restore it.

Posted 7/28/2002 03:36:51 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE FINAL CUT: A fan has created "The Kubrick Edit" of Steven Spielberg's A.I. (which of course Kubrick had gestated for nearly 20 years before Spielberg finished the film after Kubrick departed for the great Castle Hackton in the sky.) Link via Nick Denton.

Posted 7/28/2002 03:18:21 PM by Edward Driscoll
PARTYING LIKE IT'S 1933: Larry Kudlow's latest column on banks and liquidity begins with a lead that sounds straight out of the era of FDR:

We dodged a bullet yesterday. A threatened run on the banks � on top of the plummeting stock market � was halted.

Kudlow calls for a combination of sound medicine: a Fed rate cut, and some jawboning:

[S]ources also tell me that President Bush and senior advisors are catching their breath and realizing they need to get back on message � which was the optimistic growth message of 2000 and 2001. It would also be nice to hear some new thinking on regulatory and tax reform that would promote growth and offset the negative effects of higher regulatory costs for accounting, securities, and corporate governance. Yesterday, the market stayed up � marking its largest one-day gain in more than a decade and a half � and we dodged a bullet. One day at a time is the best way to get through this financial crisis � and just about everything else in life, too.

Posted 7/28/2002 03:10:22 PM by Edward Driscoll
FREE MUSIC: Tres Producers wants to turn the Blogosphere into a critical mass. Or a mass of critics. I'm game, but I suspect I'd write a number of brutal reviews of most new music. Come to think of it, that used to be exactly what Rolling Stone did, back when it was fun to read.

Posted 7/28/2002 02:08:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
REPRESENTATIONAL SECURITY: Now this is just silly.

Posted 7/28/2002 12:27:52 PM by Edward Driscoll
SAN FRANCISCO TOURISM DOWN: Instapundit linked to this story in the LA Times about San Francisco tourism down. I can't help but think that if I were from the so-called "Red States", San Francisco would be the last place I'd want to go: Liberal politics run amok (9th Circuit Court, anyone?), homeless people running amok, anti-Semitism, lots of rundown areas, a city government that oozes corruption, etc., etc. This quote probably says it all:

Patrick Tierney, a tourism and hospitality professor at San Francisco State University, said that at least until business travel fully rebounds, the city may have to do more to position itself as a family-friendly destination. The city's reputation as an adult playground, with its pricey restaurants, urbane nightlife and sexually liberal ambience, may not be the most desirable in a climate in which families are looking to spend less money--and more quality time together--on vacations, Tierney said. "Forget about business travel meltdowns and the dot-com exodus," he said. "To survive right now, you have to be affordable and you have to have a family market. San Francisco is becoming a little more affordable--but only out of desperation. So now it has to highlight its family attractions too."

As I said before, the city is where Philadelphia and New York were in the late 1980s. If even a liberal Republican like Guliani is unelectable, is there a West Coast equivalent to the former mayor of Philadelphia, Democrat Ed Rendell, who will step forward and try to clean up the mess? (By the way, the LA Times email registration I had to go through is just silly. I simply used my rarely checked Yahoo email address, registered my name to John Doe at 123 Any Street, Beverly Hills 90210 and registered to read the article. If the LA Examiner had had enough of it quoted, I wouldn't have even bothered to do that.)

Posted 7/28/2002 12:27:43 PM by Edward Driscoll
GOD, MAN AND HACKERS AT YALE: Jane Galt, in her Live from the WTC blog, looks at the declining moral standards of the Ivy League, by way of the Yale hacking Princeton story. (By the way, at one point do standards simply hit rock bottom, instead of declining?) Link found via Group Captain Mandrake.