Internal Monologue

Here are some photos from Bell Labs in the 1960's : HT: Gregg Favalora on Facebook .

Looks like it might happen . If you want to gum up the Senate, you shouldn't be able to just phone it in. You should have to show up. And lets get rid of things like anonymous individual holds on nominations, too.

Yes, that Pat Robertson . Let sanity prevail. End the drug war. It won't be perfect. But it will be so much better than the status quo.

from xkcd , of course. Stockings are LIFO .

"Starting in the early 1980s, up through well into 2009, the individual mandate was an eminently respectable Republican position , embraced by conservative policy wonks and leading Republicans. Since then, virtually the whole of the conservative movement has coalesced around the position that the individual mandate is not merely misguided but actually unconstitutional, a fact conservatives somehow overlooked during the previous three decades. [...] Conservatism's sudden lurch from supporting (or tolerating) the individual mandate to opposing it as a dagger in the heart of freedom is a phenomenon that merits not intellectual analysis but psychoanalysis." - Jonathan Chait

Heard a story on NPR this morning about a domestic tourism lobby group that is seeking to increase the number of foreign visitors to the United States. My thought was, "Thank God there's a moneyed interest with a financial incentive to push back on all the intrusive security measures we're undergoing." I hope it helps. It cannot be said enough: There will never be perfect security. We will be attacked. Sometimes attackers will succeed. There are tradeoffs between security, appearance of security, convenience, civil rights, and fostering a welcoming atmosphere. I think we are spending way too many resources on the first two.

from Sand in the Gears via Sullivan