JayB

You can't be serious. Are you for real, or is this some kind of self-parody inspired by "Animal Farm"? "Free speech is sacred and inviolable *unless* it contains something that I object to, in which case I want the government to shut them down and charge them with crimes." ABC is acting within its rights here, however much you may disagree with the manner in which it is choosing to do so. If there are factual inaccuracies, I don't blame the members of the Clinton administration and others for being upset with the manner in which they are portrayed, and I am glad that there's a legion of private citizens, columnists, etc who will work hard to expose them. Write ABC and tell them why you think that they should not air the program, write to corporations that do business with the network, boycott the network, burn the head of the network in effigy, turn your house into a giant anti-NBC billboard, stroll up and down I-5 wearing an anti-NBC sandwhich board - but the moment you call for the government to silence and/or prosecute people who are expressing sentiments that you object to, you've become the very thing that you've been warning others about. I've never been too crazy about the docu-drama genre for many of the same reasons, but I'm happy to let public outrage and lost revenues work their magic in the event that a network chooses to air something along the lines of "Hero and Patriot: The Timothy McVeigh Story."

Maybe Canada should quit confusing complete and utter irrelevance with any particular merit and STFU. No one hates Canada because Canada is a staggering geopolitical nullity that could be erased from both the world and history without its absence having a significant impact on either.

If popular support were the sole determinant of which leaders one should support, then Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot would have been worthy of everyone's unqualified backing. Subcommandante Chavez is busy squandering the limited-duration oil-windfall, and production is declining on a daily basis. Let's see how popular the guy is when the Venezualan's are get a taste of poverty along with the mounting repression.

The odds that I'll ever contract AIDS, or starve to death, or die from malaria, etc - are virtually nil, but I am still concerned about the harm that these things inflict on the rest of humanity. I'm less concerned about the prospect of being blown to pieces or beheaded than of hundreds of millions of people being forced to live under a form of regressive totalitarianism that belongs in the Middle Ages.

Seems strange to me that more Mexicans aren't flocking to Canada.

Maybe they're thinking of all of the habitat reverting back to its original state south of the border as small, isolated villages lose population to El Norte. It seems kind of trivial next to the plight of the people who traverse it, but the desert on the border is slowly being converted to a diffuse landfill. To return to a familiar topic of conversation, the guy who wrote the article had a good chuckle when asked about the threat of Islamic terrorists using the Mexican border crossing to infiltrate the US. He said something to the effect that any Islamic terrorist who had the temerity to set foot in a northern border town would be spit-roasted in hours of setting foot there, and they know it. He didn't go into detail, but it sounded as though he thought the combination of lawlessness, ruthlessness, and old-school catholicism would not make for very friendly territory. Plus an attack routed through the Mexican border would probably be bad for the people-smuggling business. I have not idea if he's wrong or right, but he's lived on the ground there for decades so it was interesting to hear his thoughts on this topic.

If you pick up a copy of the Freeskier gear-guide they had a pretty good summary of all of the skis out there. Having said that, if you are looking for one ski that does everything pretty well, you should look into the Rossignol Scratch BC. Sounds like a pretty good match for what you're looking for.

9/11 has been sort of a global ink-blot test, and what people project onto the event says quite a lot about them. After reading through that passage, I had a difficult time choosing the most ironic statement, but after a moment's reflection, the clear winner was the concern about the US consuming Canada's resources. The irony here is that the greatest calamity that could possibly befall Canada vis-a-vis the US would come about if we suddenly *stopped* consuming their resources. The near decade of intense lobbying that Canada engaged in in order to insure that the US did not errect or enforce obstacles to the sale or shipment of a single Canadian resource to American consumers is quite telling in this respect, and I don't recall anyone in Alberta dancing in the streets when the US government imposed a ban on Beef imports. If the entire Canadian economy can be said to have a central organizing principle, it's the sale of whatever that Canada or its citizens can produce to the US. Millions of Canadian souls have toiled for well over a century to perfect the various mechanisms necessary to turn their country into a near perfect machine for exporting products to the US. Why send an army to enforce a duty that generations of your countrymen and your government have already volunteered for, and are executing to perfection? Sleep tight, JMcKay - you are already living in your nightmare-world .

Heard the author being interviewed on NPR today, and followed up by reading his article at lunch. There's a lot of historo-politico-economic analysis in the article that I'd take issue with, but it's worth reading for the in-the-trenches perspective, and the sober assesment of some of the facts on the ground. "They are no longer migratory workers. And it is not seasonal labor. The people walking north all around me are not going home again. This is an exodus from a failed economy and a barbarous government and their journey is biblical." Link to Article

Might as well be clear. What is it, exactly, that the existence of this film makes "you wonder about the Americain [sic] people?" Are you posting these links because you believe the conclusions they reach in the film, or because you can't believe that anyone would believe such things. My guess is the former, but feel free to chime in.

The fundamental claim, "Plame was outed by the administration in an act of political retribution" was not correct. With respect to Wilson's role, I'm sure that the record is consistent with your understanding of the events, Matt. Bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee Report Link Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, dispatched by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa, was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly. Wilson last year launched a public firestorm with his accusations that the administration had manipulated intelligence to build a case for war. He has said that his trip to Niger should have laid to rest any notion that Iraq sought uranium there and has said his findings were ignored by the White House. Wilson's assertions -- both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information -- were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report. The panel found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address. Yesterday's report said that whether Iraq sought to buy lightly enriched "yellowcake" uranium from Niger is one of the few bits of prewar intelligence that remains an open question. Much of the rest of the intelligence suggesting a buildup of weapons of mass destruction was unfounded, the report said. The report turns a harsh spotlight on what Wilson has said about his role in gathering prewar intelligence, most pointedly by asserting that his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, recommended him. Plame's role could be significant in an ongoing investigation into whether a crime was committed when her name and employment were disclosed to reporters last summer. Administration officials told columnist Robert D. Novak then that Wilson, a partisan critic of Bush's foreign policy, was sent to Niger at the suggestion of Plame, who worked in the nonproliferation unit at CIA. The disclosure of Plame's identity, which was classified, led to an investigation into who leaked her name. The report may bolster the rationale that administration officials provided the information not to intentionally expose an undercover CIA employee, but to call into question Wilson's bona fides as an investigator into trafficking of weapons of mass destruction. To charge anyone with a crime, prosecutors need evidence that exposure of a covert officer was intentional. The report states that a CIA official told the Senate committee that Plame "offered up" Wilson's name for the Niger trip, then on Feb. 12, 2002, sent a memo to a deputy chief in the CIA's Directorate of Operations saying her husband "has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." The next day, the operations official cabled an overseas officer seeking concurrence with the idea of sending Wilson, the report said. Wilson has asserted that his wife was not involved in the decision to send him to Niger. "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," Wilson wrote in a memoir published this year. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." Wilson stood by his assertion in an interview yesterday, saying Plame was not the person who made the decision to send him. Of her memo, he said: "I don't see it as a recommendation to send me." The report said Plame told committee staffers that she relayed the CIA's request to her husband, saying, "there's this crazy report" about a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq. The committee found Wilson had made an earlier trip to Niger in 1999 for the CIA, also at his wife's suggestion. The report also said Wilson provided misleading information to The Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong." "Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong' when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports," the Senate panel said. Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have "misspoken" to reporters. The documents -- purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq -- were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger. Wilson's reports to the CIA added to the evidence that Iraq may have tried to buy uranium in Niger, although officials at the State Department remained highly skeptical, the report said. Wilson said that a former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, was unaware of any sales contract with Iraq, but said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq -- which Mayaki interpreted to mean they wanted to discuss yellowcake sales. A report CIA officials drafted after debriefing Wilson said that "although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to UN sanctions on Iraq." According to the former Niger mining minister, Wilson told his CIA contacts, Iraq tried to buy 400 tons of uranium in 1998. Still, it was the CIA that bore the brunt of the criticism of the Niger intelligence. The panel found that the CIA has not fully investigated possible efforts by Iraq to buy uranium in Niger to this day, citing reports from a foreign service and the U.S. Navy about uranium from Niger destined for Iraq and stored in a warehouse in Benin. The agency did not examine forged documents that have been widely cited as a reason to dismiss the purported effort by Iraq until months after it obtained them. The panel said it still has "not published an assessment to clarify or correct its position on whether or not Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Africa."

Which part is incorrect? Is the editorial at odds with the factual basis of Corn et. al's summary?

Washington Post Editorial "End of an Affair It turns out that the person who exposed CIA agent Valerie Plame was not out to punish her husband. Friday, September 1, 2006; Page A20 WE'RE RELUCTANT to return to the subject of former CIA employee Valerie Plame because of our oft-stated belief that far too much attention and debate in Washington has been devoted to her story and that of her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, over the past three years. But all those who have opined on this affair ought to take note of the not-so-surprising disclosure that the primary source of the newspaper column in which Ms. Plame's cover as an agent was purportedly blown in 2003 was former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage. Mr. Armitage was one of the Bush administration officials who supported the invasion of Iraq only reluctantly. He was a political rival of the White House and Pentagon officials who championed the war and whom Mr. Wilson accused of twisting intelligence about Iraq and then plotting to destroy him. Unaware that Ms. Plame's identity was classified information, Mr. Armitage reportedly passed it along to columnist Robert D. Novak "in an offhand manner, virtually as gossip," according to a story this week by the Post's R. Jeffrey Smith, who quoted a former colleague of Mr. Armitage. It follows that one of the most sensational charges leveled against the Bush White House -- that it orchestrated the leak of Ms. Plame's identity to ruin her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson -- is untrue. The partisan clamor that followed the raising of that allegation by Mr. Wilson in the summer of 2003 led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, a costly and prolonged investigation, and the indictment of Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges of perjury. All of that might have been avoided had Mr. Armitage's identity been known three years ago. That's not to say that Mr. Libby and other White House officials are blameless. As prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has reported, when Mr. Wilson charged that intelligence about Iraq had been twisted to make a case for war, Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney reacted by inquiring about Ms. Plame's role in recommending Mr. Wilson for a CIA-sponsored trip to Niger, where he investigated reports that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium. Mr. Libby then allegedly disclosed Ms. Plame's identity to journalists and lied to a grand jury when he said he had learned of her identity from one of those reporters. Mr. Libby and his boss, Mr. Cheney, were trying to discredit Mr. Wilson; if Mr. Fitzgerald's account is correct, they were careless about handling information that was classified. Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously."

Pretty impressive. That's like a 2%-and-dropping real interest rate.

The availability of those loans also played a significant role in elevating prices. Take a look at I/O's, option arms, etc as a percentage of total loan origination and compare that to home-price increases in a given market and you have a pretty strong correlation, especially in coastal markets. If mortgage lending were governed by the same rules and regulations that investment companies have to follow when dealing with retail customers, this situation never would have developed. When you are dealing with a stock broker, your knowledge of financial markets, income, liquid assets, etc all determine how much risk they'll permit you to take - and they are subject to disciplinary action if they permit people to assume more risk than they are qualified to handle.

Never saw this coming. "Nightmare Mortgages They promise the American Dream: A home of your own -- with ultra-low rates and payments anyone can afford. Now, the trap has sprung For cash-strapped homeowners, it was a pitch they couldn't refuse: Refinance your mortgage at a bargain rate and cut your payments in half. New home buyers, stretching to afford something in a super-heated market, didn't even need to produce documentation, much less a downpayment. Those who took the bait are in for a nasty surprise. While many Americans have started to worry about falling home prices, borrowers who jumped into so-called option ARM loans have another, more urgent problem: payments that are about to skyrocket." Businessweek

No free lunch, but I suspect the waste issue could be dealt with fairly readily by recycling, which should prove more cost effective than extracting nickel, cadmium, and lithium at some point. It'd be interesting to see how the cars stack up in terms of real efficiency, if you follow the energy from turbine to transmission line to miles traveled. I suspect the energy balance is a bit more compelling for electric cars than for Ethanol, which usually yields a net loss when you take a careful look at inputs versus outputs. The energy's gotta come from somewhere, though, and at some point, necessity is going to compel a return to nuclear energy.

Steep, but pretty much every new consumer technology has been brought to market as a novelty for the rich early adopter/hobbyist. I don't think the car as we know it is going to change that radically anytime soon, but these cars are definitely a step in the right direction.

Sounds cool Murray. Here's another non-enviro-hairshirt electric car: $80K, 0-60mph in 3 seconds, range 150 miles. Wired Article Seems like these companies are both fueled by the same combination of idealism and the profit motive that drove the PC through its initial phases of development. This is the first alternative technology that I've been excited about for a while, because I can actually see people wanting to drive these cars, rather than being driven to drive them by the kind of autoflagelletory enviro-guilt that will eventually erode in the face of the ease and convenience offered by a normal car/house/diet/ or whatever else they've castigated themselves into giving up. I don't think these developments will have the fine folks that sit atop the vast majority of the world's oil reserves holding out the tin-cup anytime soon, but if I was in charge of budgeting in Jedda or Tehran I'd start dusting off the calculator and plotting things like population growth versus projected non-state employment growth and oil-windfall-fund portfolio-yields. Might not be a pretty picture in 20-30years.

Sounds like they'd sell in the sub-20 range if they could be manufactured in the 10,000+ range. Makes a lot of sense for a solo-commuter who lives within 30miles of work. My kind of solution. Innovation in response to market forces vs consumer capitulation driven by punitive taxation, e.g. 3+dollar-a-gallon taxes and LeCar's for everyone, all the time. Drive this thing to work, for groceries, etc and save the big vehicle for long drives with lots of people and/or cargo.

Much cooler than the Ed Begley Jr. Memorial Golf Cart. 0-60mph in 4 seconds.

I-25? The only sign that I can remember on I-5 is the Uncle Sam one....

Oh yeah - forgot about the flat-irons. Good rec.

Shelf is great but it's gotta be at least a three hour drive to get there from Winter Park. Eldo, Boulder Canyon, Golden, or Dream Canyon would work for the single pitch stuff. In guess one benefit of Shelf would be that they could hit up the Garbage of the Gods on the way back, AND stop by and pick up those books that you ordered from Dobson and Co and bring them back for you.