Will the Real John McCain Please Stand Up?

Maureen Dowd wants to know what happened to the senate's Mr. Maverick, but the truth is that what you currently see is what we've been getting since the Arizona senator was a boy. He's agin it, just like he's always been.

The former fly-boy has a long history of being a trouble maker and a mediocre student. His notion of a fresh idea culminated in a pretty face for a running mate. Let's not forget that the senior senator from the sunshine state worked his way up the Washington ladder by being a party boy for the Washington elite before he ever ran for an office, thus bringing about the end of his first marriage. Later, he married money and more houses than he could count.

McCain's a maverick only because it makes him the center of attention, not because he actually has any opinions about anything other than his notion of his personal entitlement. He's about as much a statesman as Rush Limbaugh is a journalist.


To Gift: "Thank" Is Related to "Think":

Margaret Visser expounds on the act of "gifting" in today's op-ed pages of The New York Times, presenting some thoughtful reflection on the meaning of offering presents, including cultural differences when gifts received are passed on to others.

Disgusted:

While Paul Krugman castigates the right for holding up healthcare reform in Washington, Ross Douthat, a conservative, tries to distract our attention with religion on today's New York Times' Op-Ed pages.

Krugman wants the senate to change its policy to limit filibustering. Douthat wants to rant about what he terms Hollywood's pantheism. Krugman wants lives to be saved by attempting to patch up the shameful healthcare system in this country, while Douthat and the rest of the right wants to distract us from their political tactics.


Slow Recovery:

New stats on labor show a continued upswing in the hiring of part-time and temporary workers, usually a precursor to an improvement in the economy. At this point, no one wants to be guilty of overoptimism. (See today's New York Times.)


The Times Is a'Changing:

The Washington Times, that is. The right wing voice in the nation's capitol, owned by the Rev. SunMyung Moon, is ceasing Sunday publication. According to The Washington Post, the newspaper has been losing money for a long time, and the good reverend who never met a group of people he didn't want to marry in a mass ceremony is passing along ownership to his four kids who have no tolerance for losing money.

Legal and Deadly: The Water You Drink

In a lengthy article in today's New York Times, Charles Duhigg reports on the state of America's drinking water. The laws regulating our water have remained unchanged since 1974 and are far behind the development of deadly chemicals being dumped into reservoirs and waterways.

Complicating the matter, many citizens object to measures taken by officials to reduce the risk, claiming that if the water is "legal" nothing should be done. In other words, you should have the right to poison yourself—unwittingly—as long as 1) it keeps taxes down (especially for big business) and 2) it allows you to pretend that you are in control of your life.

Currently, we are in a battle to determine whether we trust big government or big and small business. (See the healthcare issue.)


What Should You Be Reading?

As the end of the year rolls around, we start to see reading lists pop up just in time for the holiday buying season. National Public Radio has provided their list, with more than one book that ought to keep you busy for a good portion of the winter, including The Paris Review Interviews, which is 1982 pages long. Who says they don't publish big books any more. And then there's American Fantastic Tales which is 1500 pages.

Don't worry, there are plenty of other books on the list in the 300-page range, including In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, which was reviewed here not long ago.


Other Worlds:

Today's New York Times reports on the discovery of a planet outside our solar system that appears to be composed entirely of water, with a surface temperature of 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Don't get your fishing equipment out yet. It's 40 light-years away, and a year there lasts 38 hours.

December's National Geographic reported on the number of new planets found in the past few years, now that technology allows us to "see" beyond our own solar system with enough precision to discover them.

Guys Do Like Céline Dion!

Today's New York Times posts some entertaining results from new poling that reflects the tastes of American radio listeners. (Yes, people still listen to the radio, doodliwinker!) It turns out that the skinny as a toothpick crooner from Canada is far more popular with young men than they've been willing to admit.

Both classical music and conservative talk radio lose points in the poling. Seems when folks self-report they like to proclaim they are either high brow or low brow, but when they are actually tracked electronically, the results turn out somewhat differently.

When interviewed, most men blame their feminine significant others for their choices. "I have to listen to what my wife wants to listen to on the commute." And then there's that noise they play in malls.

Self-reporting has always been highly suspect.

The Fourth Paradigm:

When will the world's greatest super computer be created? Well, it already exists. John Markoff reports on the status of parallel computing in today's New York Times. In January 2007, Jim Gray, a Microsoft employee, argued that focus should shift from creating ever faster, single super computers to shared computer power utilizing cheap equipment spread across the planet. Some of that is currently taking place.

A few years ago, I suggested the same possibility to the IT department where I'm employed, when one of our physicists received a large grant so that he could travel to a super computer location for just two hours of computing time in order to conduct research. Why not, I suggested, just set up the machines in our labs here to perform parallel computing functions? Our physicist would actually have more computational power, and he'd be able to use it for eight hours every night to his heart's content. I was told to shut up and never mention that idea to our physicist.

So much for getting out in front of the curve.

Must Read:

Tara Siegel Bernard exposes the scam perpetrated by stores who push their branded credit cards on eager customers, in today's New York Times. Higher than the normally outrageous interest rates and the fact that simply applying for a new credit card can lower your credit rating are some of the issues she raises.

Some of the areas she doesn't cover are how some employees will fill in faulty information for customers who start to sign up and then change their minds, including forging customers' names and putting in fake social security card numbers. These tend to cause the card to be rejected, which further lowers a customer's credit rating.

Employees at stores that offer such cards are usually under enormous pressure to sign up as many customers as possible, regardless of whether the customer is granted a card or not.


How about Those Gift Cards?

Here's a shocker for you: Ron Lieber reports in today's New York Times that the "TowerGroup, a financial services consulting firm" says that "nearly $5 billion of the money that well-meaning givers have put onto gift cards will go unspent." Now that sounds like a stimulus package to me.

In the business, it's called, "breakage."

Prognosis:

Back in the summer of 2005, I was sitting in the living room of my friend Andy, who asked me who I thought the presidential candidates would be in '08. "The black senator from Illinois," I said, "and he'll run against McCain and kick his butt."

"Obama?" Andy said. "Against McCain? It'll never happen. The Republicans will never run McCain, and nobody's even heard of Obama."

"That's okay," I said. "Wait and see."

Andy hasn't spoken to me since.

Now I'm going out on a limb again. Here's my prediction for 2014: President Obama will be campaigning for fellow Democrats based on being very close to a balanced budget.

Remember, you saw it here first. (Check out Jackie Calmes article in the afternoon edition of The New York Times.)

eBooks Maturing:

Electronic books are finally moving into the key area of textbook publishing. The big bucks in book publishing are derived from those massively expensive texts that students need for classes, especially the ones that employ color and large images.

Anne Eisenberg reports in today's New York Times on the current advances in this sort of publishing, including the new eDGe ebook reader that employees two screens, one to handle standard black and white eBook printed word material and the other that addresses color with an LCD screen.

The real issue, however, that is not addressed in the article is copyright. These sorts of textbooks often have multiple rights issues well beyond those of novels and the like. Usually this is what drives their printed costs up so high ($100 to $350 per printed copy). Currently, the biggest advantage of the eBook is that it eliminates the costs of warehousing and moving the texts. That in itself is also a major cost.

The Supreme[ly] "Whimsical" Court:

The Rehnquist Court may have been conservative, but at least it was consistent. Linda Greenhouse, perhaps the most knowledgeable observer of the Supreme Court America has ever had, discusses the whimsical approach the Alito Court takes in the most serious cases it will review: those which determine whether a citizen should be stripped of every right he or she has and to be put to death.

Without explanation, the Alito Court is allowing some defendants' death sentences to be carried out while others are commuted when the circumstances and rational are as nearly identical as can exist.

Apparently, the sole rational for commuting one death row inmate's sentence was to appeal to right wing veterans' groups, while refusing to commute the other inmate's sentence was to appeal to right wing political groups who demanded it be carried out.

You Knew It Was Bound To Happen:

Fake H1N1 flu alerts are flying around the web, installing malware on end users' machines. "No, Charlotte, ain't nothin' sacred." You can read about it on ZDNet. The email messages contain a link and ask you to go to a website and "create your personal H1N1 (swine flu) Vaccination Profile." The language looks legitimate enough, but when you click the link, you're in for a malicious download. The government doesn't send out email making these sorts of requests. That includes the IRS.

And while we're on the topic, no one is going to give you millions of dollars.

Somebody's having a birthday this month. Now if I could just remember who it is ...?