A tax form for the marginally employed

Designer Sam Potts creates a tax form for freelancers for the NYT, including deductions for "Your food blog", "Your other food blog", and the "David Foster Wallace Memorial Deduction for Writers Who Use Footnotes."

Link

[Via Kottke]

John Hodgman addresses the POTUS

Inarguably the nerdiest speech a sitting president of the United States has ever been asked to perform the lead-in to.

John Hodgman headlines the Radio & TV Correspondents' Dinner*, where he contrasts the current "nerd" White House with the previous administration of "jocks", and also outs President Obama as a Star Trek fan.

His performance is a brilliantly deadpan nerdcore triumph, complete with references to typeface nerds, Conan comics, and the David Lynch movie adaptation of Dune.



YouTube link

*A room filled with nerds, all old enough to remember when that wasn't cool to be AT ALL. Meaning: too old to find Hodgman especially funny.

Holding Obama's Feet to the Daily Show Flame

The question for the Daily Show was never really "Is there enough that's funny about Obama?" but "What will Obama do that's just as f-ed up as any other politician?"

This week had a couple of doozies.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Moral Kombat
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

100 days of Obama: the Facebook news feed

Slate writers Christopher Beam and Chris Wilson relive the first 100 days of the Obama administration through the lens (and language) of Facebook:



If you're not on Facebook (or not extremely in tune with Washington politics) a few of the jokes might fall with a thud. But I totally loved this.

I'd have more to say about it, but I need to go catch up on Lost.

Link

The "We didn't know" defense

The New York Times outlines how the members of the Bush Administration (and Congress) who advocated for and approved the torturing of prisoners in its custody had no fucking clue what they were agreeing to.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

The process was "a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm," a former C.I.A. official said.

This is why the rule of law matters. Because sometimes those in power lack the competence required to be put in charge of life-and-death decisions.

I am sick with disgust.

Read the entire story.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Economic Recovery by Design

This week Barack Obama unveiled two new executive branch logos, one for recovery.gov, and one for the DOT's TIGER project (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery).

Of course branding is no substitute for results, but what's notable about the Obama administration's efforts (in contrast to the Bush administration's) are that they 1) look crisply modern, and 2) don't come off as baldface lies.

The former was accomplished by hiring Mode Project, the design studio that helped develop Barack Obama's campaign logo. They in turn enlisted the help of designers Aaron Draplin and Chris Glass, two surprising hip choices for government work.

The question of lying is not entirely a political assumption I am making; Bush routinely appeared in front of backdrops that made actual claims ("Helping Small Business", "Strengthening America's Economy", "Mission Accomplished"). Had there been a functioning Office of Legal Counsel under Bush they might have insisted on adding an asterisk to each of these "logos".

Bold visual design can evoke emotions and create implications, but doesn't make such claims.

Of course over the coming years we'll see if the product actually matches the implied brand promise...

Link

(Via Communicatrix, @gruber, et al.)

The Big Picture on the Inauguration.

So yeah, it took me a couple of weeks to get around to The Big Picture's roundup of notable news photos of Barack Obama's presidential inauguration. (Link)

And yes there are striking images of the pageantry, and of the crowd in Washington (including that overhead satellite shot of those millions on the Mall, clustered in front of the giant video screens).

But as with most posts from The Big Picture, some of the most revelatory photos are taken in the margins--images not deemed central enough to the story to be featured in national media outlets.

Here some of the most striking photos are of people watching televisions. At an army base in Baghdad. A bar in Montana. A hotel room in Boston. A taco stand in Mexico City. Outdoors at night in Kibera, Nairobi. The Best Buy at the Mall of America.

And my favorites include the sea of cell phone cameras raised by ball attendees hoping to capture a tiny glimpse the Obamas dancing together. The changing of official photographs at Guantanamo Naval Base. Bush inside the helicopter after takeoff looking out across Washington.

If you haven't been already you should go look now.

Hot Topics 2008: General Election Ballot Measures

What's hot?
State propositions are hot!

Cal's Institute for Governmental Studies Library has once again provided state proposition analysis and an list of endorsements (updated as they come in) for all your democratic information-gathering pleasure!

Unresolved anthrax questions - Glenn Greenwald

Taking a break now from the general internet oddities I've posted of late.

I would feel remiss if I didn't point to this article by Glenn Greenwald posing questions about the apparent suicide of Bruce E. Ivins, the FBI's most recent lead suspect in the anthrax mailings of late 2001.

Greenwald generally offers smart, lengthy, ridiculously well-researched analysis for Salon.com. Here he is clearly struggling not to jump to wild assertions or theories, despite a series of facts that in their aggregate stink to high holy heaven.

If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick.

That means that ABC News' "four well-placed and separate sources" fed them information [about the presence of bentonite, a chemical additive used by Iraq] that was completely false -- false information that created a very significant link in the public mind between the anthrax attacks and Saddam Hussein.

Lots more, including reports of suspicious behavior by Ivins back in 2001 that went uninvestigated by the Department of Justice, and a sideswipe at McCain that asks why he was asserting a link to Iraq even before ABC's original bentonite report.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Slate: You've already spent your tax windfall on gas and bread.

Citing Merrill Lynch's chief economist, Slate's Daniel Gross writes:

The chunk of the stimulus package likely to get spent is roughly equivalent to the amount Americans are paying for higher food and gas prices because of inflation. Put another way, you've already spent your stimulus at ExxonMobil.

Here's the math. Merrill Lynch is basing its calculations on two assumptions:
1. that Americans will spend only 40% of their rebate (and pay down debt with the rest, or save it); and,
2. energy and food inflation combined is costing us $50 billion per quarter.

Total stimulus package in rebates: $120 billion.
40% of 120 is 48 billion, eaten up in one quarter.

At first I thought, big deal, there are still three other quarters in the year. People might--operative word, might --choose to spend more than 40% of their rebate. Say, 100%.

$120 billion minus $50 billion minus $50 billion minus $50 billion (3rd quarter) minus $50 billion (4th quarter)...

Oops.

We don't track the gasoline expenses in our house, but this year we're on track to pay $700 extra in groceries, not because the kids are eating more, or because of more organic produce, but simply the increased cost of everything at the store. $4.50 gasoline doesn't faze me. But $4.50 bread: I get sticker shock.

TSA head admits lighter-ban was lame

[via Boing Boing]

Kip Hawley, head of the TSA, has acknowledged that the (now lifted) restrictions against lighters on airplanes was merely "security theater", that "trivializes the security process."

Now maybe he'll start rethinking that whole liquids thing. (Although if they lift that ban it'll be a major financial blow to the makers of contact lens solution. Sales have--pardon the expression--exploded to contact-wearers on trips longer than two days.)

Link

Best Condi Quote Ever.

Via Daily Kos.

Asked by BusinessWeek about whether life after the Bush administration
might be in business or on Wall Street:

""I don't know what I'll do long-term. I'm a terrible long-term planner."

Link

Seeing Al Qaeda Around Every Corner - New York Times

The NYT's new public editor, Clark Hoyt, takes the paper to task for its increasingly sloppy use of the term "Al Qaeda" to describe opposition forces in Iraq, a use that (perhaps not coincidentally) has been on the rise in officialspeak out of the Bush Administration.

Chuck Hagel has had enough

I don't watch television news. And even if I had, I wouldn't have been able to see Senator Chuck Hagel's blistering, unscripted monologue at last week's Senate Armed Services Committee hearings on the Iraq escalation.



And here's the two minutes that was soundbited most often:



Almost makes me forget he's a rabid right wing Christian conservative who has voted with the Bush Administration more times than any other Senator.

Almost.

The Cure for Health Care

Courtesy of Bill in Portland Maine:

Stephen Colbert: What made [Tuesday's State of the Union speech] so groundbreaking, I think, was all the new stuff we've never heard from the president before...like a domestic agenda. Take his proposal to fix the whole health care mess with the only proven cure-all: tax breaks...

Bush clip: And for the millions of Americans with no health insurance at all, this deduction would help put a basic private health insurance plan within reach.

Colbert: It's so simple. Most people who couldn’t afford health insurance also are too poor to owe taxes. But...if you give them a deduction from their taxes they don’t owe, they can use the money they're not getting back from what they haven't given to buy the health care they can't afford.

San Francisco Solar Bond Sales to Date: 0

(via San Francisco Business Journal, which shuts off public access to their articles on July 24)

In 2001, San Francisco voters passed Measure B, allowing the city to sell $100 million in bonds to install solar panels on city-owned rooftops. With the blackouts of 2000 on their minds, and the prospect of becoming the nation's first "solar city," the measure passed with 73% in favor.

To date, the city of San Francisco has sold exactly zero bonds.

By law, the San Francisco bonds can only be sold to finance a solar project if the cost is cheaper than the price to generate power using traditional electric systems. Since the price of solar panels and related technology tends to exceed the price of fossil fuel-generated electricity, San Francisco hasn't sold any of the bonds.

I checked some other Web sites monitoring the state of the solar energy industry, and they all expect the price of solar energy systems that interconnect to the grid to become competitive "soon," with the most hyped coming from entrepreneurs with new companys and venture capital funding. But "competitive" means solar averages $3 per watt compared to a regular utitily's $1 per watt. No one is making predictions about solar ever becoming "cheaper" than traditional systems (except for off-the-grid remote systems, say, in rural Africa, where it soon will be cheaper).

San Francisco has been forging ahead with its commitment to solar anyway. The 60,000 square feet of photovoltaic panels on the roof of Moscone Center, for example, generates 65kW (the equivalent energy to power approximately 8,500 homes) is the larged municipally owned solar facility in the U.S. But it wasn't funded from the bond measure. The project, like projects at SF General, the airport, and Pier 96, are paid for out of Willie Brown's Mayor's Energy Conservation Account from PUC revenues.

So what's the statute of limitations on a bond sale? I'm thinking that by 2020, the cost of solar could drop to the threshhold to trigger the sale, but by then, SF may already filled its rooftops with PV panels.

Tax Cuts as Deficit Reduction

I've been attempting to parse Saturday's NYT story about the unexpected jump in federal tax revenue. This of course was a preview to the White House's communication offensive on the subject--by which the mad prince and his mouthpieces were able to trumpet the talking point success of the Bush tax cuts in boosting the economy, thereby leading to increased tax revenue.

I have always hated the supply-side argument, and how anti-tax radicals like Grover Norquist use the argument disingenously (because they don't *want* revenues collected by the government to increase).

But the counter-argument balance proffered in the mainstream media outlets I've sampled have run in two basic streams:

1. The deficit is still too big.

Argued by Congressional Democrats who have given up anyhow and so take whatever earmarks and pork they can while they have a chance. This argument (improvement is great, but the problem still isn't fixed) fails to connect with the increasingly capitalistic ethics of our republic. Within the moral framework of the CEO, problems need never be solved (or addressed, really), so long as you can point to measurable results (aka "good progress").

2. With the coming rise in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security spending, we're basically fucked.

Argued by those who've been arguing this for years, and basically no one in elective office can afford to listen. These people argue that the slight uptick in revenue won't matter in the face of the coming entitlement collapse. (These are the same people who are quoted out of context to imply that the Bush tax cuts aren't significant relative to our overall revenue requirements.)

The link is to a Wall Street Journal blog post, that finally reframed the question in a way that cuts through a lot of the bullshit:

Does the amount of revenue raised due to the tax cuts equal or exceed the amount of revenue lost due to the tax cuts?

According to the White House's own projections: not so much.

Senator Ted Stevens on the internets

Senator Stevens' internets service provider.

Is Iran next?

Looks like Iran's next. The following excerpt is Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker :

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”

The rationale for regime change was articulated in early March by Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and who has been a supporter of President Bush. “So long as Iran has an Islamic republic, it will have a nuclear-weapons program, at least clandestinely,” Clawson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 2nd. “The key issue, therefore, is: How long will the present Iranian regime last?”

When I spoke to Clawson, he emphasized that “this Administration is putting a lot of effort into diplomacy.” However, he added, Iran had no choice other than to accede to America’s demands or face a military attack. [Emphasis mine. d.n.] Clawson said that he fears that Ahmadinejad “sees the West as wimps and thinks we will eventually cave in. We have to be ready to deal with Iran if the crisis escalates.” Clawson said that he would prefer to rely on sabotage and other clandestine activities, such as “industrial accidents.” But, he said, it would be prudent to prepare for a wider war, “given the way the Iranians are acting. This is not like planning to invade Quebec.”

American Theocracy

NYT book review of American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips:

[T]hree broad and related trends — none of them new to the Bush years but all of
them, ... exacerbated by this administration's policies — ... threaten the
future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining
and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The
second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and
government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt — current and
prospective — that both the government and the American people have been
heedlessly accumulating. If there is a single, if implicit, theme running
through the three linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of
leaders to look beyond their own and the country's immediate ambitions and
desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future.