Brad DeLong combines criticism of the federal budget and press coverage of the federal budget in one nifty item.

Steven Berlin Johnson has a good post on the causes of the Dean campaign’s recent troubles. Basically, his point is that it’s stupid to blame the Internet, social software, or any of the things that people thought were great and innovative about Dean just a few weeks ago. People knew all along that all of that innovation was necessary to combat Dean’s inherent weaknesses as a candidate. As it turns out, they didn’t go as far as Dean supporters would have liked in combatting them. Frankly, I hope that every Democratic candidate in the future learns the many positive lessons from the Dean campaign. I honestly think it’s too late for a Dean comeback at this point, but the Democratic party owes Dean a huge debt of gratitude for showing other politicians the way forward.

Apparently the Bush administration is treating the federal budget (the document itself) as yet another campaign brochure. The Decembrist has noticed that included in the budget are pictures of Bush doing good deeds and showing himself to be, I guess, a compassionate conservative. Bush is the first president to ever dress up the budget with this sort of crap, and it’s pretty sickening as far as I’m concerned. Bush has brought precious few innovations from corporate America to government (other than lying to shareholders at every opportunity), but I guess trying to make the federal budget look like an annual report is one of them. For all of the major outrages that torment me every day, it’s the minor ones like these that really stick in my craw for some reason.

My signed email experiment has hit a bit of a snag. I got Enigmail configured properly and it will sign and encrypt messages for me, but for some reason it insists upon always rewrapping my messages when it signs them, and it does a poor job of it. Sadly, I find this so offensive aesthetically that I can’t use it in good conscience. There’s probably a way around this problem, I just have to dig it up.

Update: Here’s the answer. Time for more experimentation.

Via the business2blog, this list of popular hits from my college years. Oh wait, it’s actually a list of the 50 most common used CDs. I weep when I think of how many of these CDs I or my roommates owned and listened to over and over again. Or listened to one track from over and over again anyway.

Hanan Cohen sent me a link to this BBC story about human experimentation in North Korea. Defectors and human rights activists are reporting that political prisoners were (and probably are) the subjects of chemical weapons tests in specially made gas chambers.

The New York Times ran a front page story looking back on the claims from Colin Powell’s speech before the United Nations this time last year. I tried to do the same thing last May. Their story is much longer and is based on interviews with real people rather than searches of Google News, so you probably ought to read it.

Dave Farber forwarded an interesting message to his email list about a personalized application of the old Nigerian scam targetted at a specific Ebay seller.