Alternate Entries

Friday, November 07, 2003

NEW ORLEANS (AP) � Gertrude M. Jones didn't want flowers or cards when she died. She wanted to get rid of President Bush.

The 81-year-old woman's obituary asked that memorial donations be given "to any organization that seeks the removal of President Bush from office."

And people around the country are following her wishes.

Read about it in the paper that printed the obituary.

Via a listserve.

posted by jeev | 8:15 PM |

I did not have real sex with that woman:

New Hampshire's Supreme Court ruled Friday that if a married woman has sex with another woman, it is not adultery.

The upside of being maritally disenfranchised.

posted by jeev | 4:49 PM |

A fun new feature for you Windows folks: Google without the browser. It's a little toolbar that lives down on the Taskbar next to the clock - type in your query and a little window pops-up with the results. Click the little down-arrow menu thingee and you'll get a whole raft of options. And installation's a snap. Get it here.

posted by jeev | 2:07 PM |

Questions? Too bad:

The Bush White House, irritated by pesky questions from congressional Democrats about how the administration is using taxpayer money, has developed an efficient solution: It will not entertain any more questions from opposition lawmakers.

Any more questions?

posted by jeev | 12:48 PM |

Thursday, November 06, 2003

What The Economist thinks about the economy:

This time the turnaround will be much tougher. There will be no �peace dividend� from the end of the cold war (indeed, the pressure on military spending may continue to increase). America is unlikely to see another stockmarket bubble, with its surge in tax revenues. As baby-boomers retire, the pressure from entitlement spending will be more acute. Set against this background, the path back to a sustainable fiscal policy will be extremely painful, even without any dramatic fiscal crisis. Long after Dubya is back on his ranch, Americans will be trying to recover from the mess he created.

posted by jeev | 4:29 PM |

Wednesday, November 05, 2003

Silly word games, indeed.

�No member of the administration,� conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan recently wrote, �used the term �imminent threat� to describe Saddam Hussein�s Iraq. No one. � [Wesley] Clark is repeating a lie that has been thoroughly exposed on the Internet and elsewhere, a lie that even The New York Times has stopped repeating.�

But, as Josh Marshall points out, this is just craven language slicing:

Last October, a reporter put this to Ari Fleischer: �Ari, the president has been saying that the threat from Iraq is imminent, that we have to act now to disarm the country of its weapons of mass destruction, and that it has to allow the U.N. inspectors in, unfettered, no conditions, so forth.�

Fleischer�s answer? �Yes.�

In January, Wolf Blitzer asked Dan Bartlett: �Is [Saddam] an imminent threat to U.S. interests, either in that part of the world or to Americans right here at home.�
Bartlett�s answer? �Well, of course he is.�

A month after the war, another reporter asked Fleischer, �Well, we went to war, didn�t we, to find these � because we said that these weapons were a direct and imminent threat to the United States? Isn�t that true?�

Fleischer�s answer? �Absolutely.�

See, the thing is, no White House spokesperson actually said the exact words "imminent threat". Tthey just agreed when other people so characterized it, and then used other words, the kind we usually call synonyms, to describe it. Even for Sullivan, this is so ridiculous as to be pitiable.

posted by jeev | 2:12 PM |

Monday, November 03, 2003

Over to the right there, you'll see a Meerkat link. Meercat is O'Reily's tech news aggregator, and they've put together a whole bunch of APIs for getting your very own copy. The one I've used consists of essentially one line of JavaScript, which is cool because even a dweeb like me can set it up, but there are also fancier ones for those of you who feel like experimenting.

posted by jeev | 10:07 PM |