So President Bush has nominated a new Treasury Secretary. Would it surprise you to learn that this captain of industry is a railroad executive, hardcore Republican donor, and former Ford administration official? The nominee, John Snow, is such a blue blood that he was a member of Augusta National Golf Club (he has resigned to avoid controversy). I really don’t have any idea what the Secretary of the Treasury is supposed to do, but I can’t really see Snow bringing in a fresh new vision for our country’s economy. I guess the philosophy here was to bring in someone indistinguishable from Paul O’Neill in every way except that he can keep from putting his foot in his mouth.

How’s this for a speedy reaction: Citizens for Tax Justice has pegged Snow’s company (CSX) for not paying any federal income tax at all for three of the past four years. I don’t get why Republicans are so much in favor of tax cuts — plenty of them have figured out how to avoid paying taxes already.

Regardless of the outcome of the Eldred v Ashcroft case, one thing it has served to do is spur a lot of discussion in this country about the value of the public domain. Not long ago, it seemed like nobody was talking about the problem of repeated copyright extensions and the idea that perhaps nothing would ever enter the public domain again. Now, the issues have major currency. I offer as further proof the fact that the MacArthur Foundation is granting major dollars to research the preservation of the public domain.

Is it really a surprise that some insiders managed to sell millions of dollars worth of stock before their companies went down the tubes when the dot com bubble burst?

A Council on Foreign Relations poll shows that 66% of Americans believe that Iraq assisted al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks. I guess it really is too much to think that people are paying attention to what a bad job this administration is doing.

Is it just me, or are Trent Lott’s boneheaded and probably heartfelt comments about Mississippi supporting Strom Thurmond’s 1948 pro-segregation candidacy not getting the outraged response that they deserve? It’s times like this that I get a really good laugh out of the idea that we’re somehow burdened with a liberal media establishment. Shouldn’t we be seeing editorials calling for his resignation, or at least some criticism. You can see the quote itself at Slate, and the Washington Post has a reaction piece.

It was bad enough that Trent Lott cops to still being proud of supporting Thurmond back in 1948, but it was this sentence that should have ended Lott’s political career, “And if the rest of the country had of followed our lead we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.” Which problems, exactly, Senator Lott?

By the way, to get a feel for the lack of coverage of Lott’s statements, check out this Google News search. One thing the Republican punditry excels at is viciously punishing Democrats for anything they say that’s percieved as out of line. Where are the liberals here?

He’s catching a bit more flack in the blog world.

Iraq’s government has turned over 12,000 pages of documents that declare that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction. Considering that the UN weapons inspectors were not able to fully disarm Iraq before they were forced out by the Iraqi government in 1998, one wonders where all of the weapons went. Did Iraq unilaterally disarm without telling anyone, despite the fact that doing so would have ended the sanctions regime? That seems unlikely. It seems more likely to me that Iraq’s goal is to bury the UN under a mountain of paperwork that will delay the Bush administration’s march toward war, and that Iraq believes that its WMD programs are well-concealed enough to prevent the current weapons inspectors from finding anything. Is there anyone out there who really believes that Iraq has fully disarmed and has suspended all of its WMD programs? It boggles the mind.

My desktop PC at home is running Windows XP, and it has this problem where it hangs on boot all the time. At first I just put it down to basic Windows stupidity and didn’t even try and diagnose it, but after awhile, I tried booting in safe mode and saw that the system always hangs while trying to load the file mup.sys. After searching the Web for awhile and seeing that people were asking about this problem but none of them were getting answers, I turned to Google Groups. This is a problem many people seem to be having, and nobody seems to know the solution. Possible solutions include:

• Reinstalling the whole OS from scratch.
• Updating your BIOS.
• Randomly removing hardware from your computer and seeing if things start working.
• Removing the current version of mup.sys and putting the previous (insecure) version back into place.

In the meantime, nobody from Microsoft has even acknowledged the bug, much less proposed a real solution. Microsoft, you suck.

First Harvey Pitt. Now Paul O’Neill and Lawrence Lindsey. The fact that Bush’s economic team is collectively excusing itself just goes to show you how badly the Democrats botched the election. We knew a year ago what we knew now, which is that the economy is in the crapper and the Bush administration can’t figure out how to make it better. The Republicans have blown it when it comes to fiscal policy, and nobody seems to care. Don’t get me wrong, the economy would have fallen over regardless of what the Bush administration did, but their response has been predictably miserable. Now we have to wonder when Mitch O’Donnell will get the boot. Surely his pathetic performance has earned him a one way ticket to the private sector.

Didn’t get a chance to post anything here yesterday because we had a major ice storm that knocked out both power and phone service. One of the most disturbing things I’ve noticed is that nobody here seems to know that when a stoplight is out, everyone is supposed to treat it as a flashing red light. People on the larger road just seem to blow through indiscriminately, and when those people finally do stop, as soon as one person goes many cars behind them go on ahead as well. I’m amazed that this basic bit of driving knowledge appears to be missing completely. The second thing is that my Cingular phone has been in “Emergency Only” mode since the storm and I haven’t been able to make a single call on it. Not very useful when both your power and the land lines are down.

One argument that’s commonly made by the entertainment industry is that copyright protection is what insures that works get distributed. That’s how they justify bribing Congressmen to keep extending the copyright term into infinity. Using a quick IMDB search, Jason Schultz discovered that 93% of the movies released from 1927-1946 are currently unavailable. I’d expect that numbers are similar for music and publications distributed at that time. Because we can expect that the extension of copyright terms will never stop, it means that the vast majority of works produced in the 20th century will never enter the public domain, and thus will not be available in any form. These extensions don’t serve anyone but the cabal of huge media companies that have a few valuable assets that they want to protect. How is the deceased author whose books are out of print served by the almost absolute unavailability of his works?