Posts from — January 2009

My favorite part of the inauguration speech, with my copious emphasis added:

Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America. For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act – not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do. Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions – who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage. What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them – that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works – whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account – to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day – because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government. Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control – and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart – not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good. As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.

This is the sort of pragmatism I’m looking forward to. Obama seemed to complete the thought I had on Inauguration Day (before hearing the speech). This speech used plenty of language with which conservatives and Republicans would be comfortable, tying together liberal and conservative ideas and saying “let’s see what works”.

[Obama] has taken the idea of increasing gasoline taxes off the table, saying that Americans had enough economic burdens at the moment. Nominees like Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize winning physicist who will become Energy Secretary, dutifully echoed Obama’s view even though in Chu’s case he has long supported higher fuel taxes.

(source, my emphasis)

Politically, this makes a lot of sense, but I’m not sure that it’s pragmatic to take that off the table. Taxing things that we want to discourage makes economic sense, regardless of whether you think taxes should be increasing or decreasing for different demographics.

People in the southern French district of Lozeyron are having a hard time swallowing US President George W. Bush’s parting gift: a tripling to 300 percent in import duty on their world-famous Roquefort cheese.

“Tonnes of produce are going to go up in smoke,” protested one of the seven local producers of the distinctive soft blue cheese. It was a hammer blow to the local region, he said.

The swingeing tariff increase, part of a longstanding trade row between the United States and the European Union, has effectively priced them out of the US market, say producers.

(article)

Take that, France!

From an interesting article in Wired:

To test whether I was being paranoid, I ran a little experiment. On a sunny Saturday, I spotted a woman in Golden Gate Park taking a photo with a 3G iPhone. Because iPhones embed geodata into photos that users upload to Flickr or Picasa, iPhone shots can be automatically placed on a map. At home I searched the Flickr map, and score — a shot from today. I clicked through to the user’s photostream and determined it was the woman I had seen earlier. After adjusting the settings so that only her shots appeared on the map, I saw a cluster of images in one location. Clicking on them revealed photos of an apartment interior — a bedroom, a kitchen, a filthy living room. Now I know where she lives.

Location-aware mobile web apps are certainly the future, but they bring along some interesting challenges and choices. Like most things, it comes down to a cost/benefit decision. For me, I typically like to free data more than control it. I blog here publicly, even though I say stupid things sometimes (or often). I manage my finances on Mint.com even though there’s some risk of identity theft. I communicate publicly on twitter instead of doing whatever the kids do on facebook these days. On facebook, anyone in SF or who goes to Lehigh can get my phone number and other contact info. I post my photos publicly in Picasa and Flickr. All of these have some potential cost, but I haven’t had any problems yet. Others make the opposite decisions, and that’s perfectly fine.

If someone wanted to find out where I live, they could probably do so without much problem. But, this isn’t really secret information. It’s in phone books. If someone asks me where I live, I wouldn’t need that much convincing before telling them.

I think I had a more meaningful comment to make with this post, but I’ve since forgotten it, so I’ll just publish. (If that sentence doesn’t sum up this blog, I don’t know what does!)

From the NYT article Obama Reaches Out for McCain’s Counsel:

Over the last three months, Mr. Obama has quietly consulted Mr. McCain about many of the new administration’s potential nominees to top national security jobs and about other issues — in one case relaying back a contender’s answers to questions Mr. McCain had suggested.

Mr. McCain, meanwhile, has told colleagues “that many of these appointments he would have made himself,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and a close McCain friend.

Fred I. Greenstein, emeritus professor of politics at Princeton, said: “I don’t think there is a precedent for this. Sometimes there is bad blood, sometimes there is so-so blood, but rarely is there good blood.”

Think about it: regardless of who won the 2000 and 2004 elections, can you imagine Bush, Kerry or Gore consulting with their opponent? I can’t. It’s a credit to both Obama and McCain.

So far I’ve been very pleased by what I’ve seen of Obama in the transition and the first days of the administration. They have, for the most part, focused on gathering people who are smart and get things done instead of hiring adherent ideologues. Most of my problems with Bush weren’t that his administration was too conservative, it’s mostly that it was bad.

Here’s the full O’Reilly segment with Dennis Miller, though I might recommend just reading the quote below instead of watching the whole thing:

I only want to comment on a short part of that, quoted here:

I didn’t like the line in the speech, and I didn’t nitpick it last night, because I wanted to think about it for 24 hours, about we don’t have to compromise our values to protect ourselves.

I think sometimes we do. I think sometimes we have to be realistic and do things that aren’t Army Field Manual polite. We can’t give the Lay-Z-Boys to the captured terrorists. We can’t give them the ice tea and the wind chimes. Sometimes.

And I think that that was oversimplifying, and that was kind of a cheap shot at the Bush administration, which was successful, No. 1, at protecting us and, No. 2, really damaging al Qaeda. It would be interesting to see in four years, if the Obama administration can damage al Qaeda.

(fully transcript, which was harder to find than it should be)

First of all, it’s funny that he calls out other people for “oversimplifying” and making a “cheap shot” right after referring to the rules defined by the Army Field Manual as giving them “Lay-Z-Boys” and “iced tea and wind chimes”.

The Bush administration certainly did damage al Qaeda on many fronts, but the torture that O’Reilly is advocating has provided the single greatest recruitment poster for them (and other anti-American forces) in the world. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are very well known in the Arab world, and the power of those images has certainly cost American lives.

Supporting this fact is the testimony of former Navy general counsel Alberto Mora:

Key quote:

[T]here are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq — as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat — are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

(click to view)

The Daily Show is certainly the most tolerable lens through which you can watch cable news and listen to talk radio. This clip from Thursday was one of my favorites:

Stewart’s response to O’Reilly is perfect.

I’m just waiting for Andy to parody this…

I’m not sure why anyone would need a new president in order to start shutting their lights off…

I still haven’t caught up with the Inauguration stuff (I haven’t even seen Obama’s speech yet), but I was wondering why they need to have an outdoor ceremony in the middle of Winter. This is apparently is set by the 20th amendment. Before the amendment’s ratification in 1933, inaugurations were held in the first week of March (typically the 4th). The time between election and inauguration had been so long so that incoming presidents would have time to get their affairs in order and travel to Washington. With modern travel, this is no longer needed, so they moved the date up. In times of crisis (like these), shortening the transition period makes a lot of sense.

Apparently the March 4 inauguration date still wasn’t warm enough for William Henry Harrison.

(Science note: being in cold weather does not actually make you get a cold. Harrison didn’t die because of his record-setting inaugural speech.)