Quote for the day

To me, the fact that the FBI is pursuing the wiretapping issue with respect to VOIP is just one more reason to doubt that the Bureau is the right agency to fight terrorism. I would have more confidence in a security agency that is working with the latest technology, not against it.

Arnold Kling

AFAIK, Skype is still available.

Sauce for Lott, sauce for Hollings

Pressure Fritz to resign from office in disgrace. You have to bid higher than you're willing to take. We'll accept his resignation from the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee.

TIC: He should be aware that Jews relinquished control of the world economy nearly two months ago. Don't Senators read the friggin papers?

He will not lack gainful employment---his current constituency surely could cast him in some upcoming projects.

FrankenBoy

This is what ten stitches on the forehead look like, 36 hours later.



I wasn't there to see this, or hear the stitches going in. Barbaloot surely would have appreciated the help.

The '05 Grosstod

About 15 years ago, National Lampoon printed a spoof car review---a central African dictator strained his broken English to praise his Grosstod, a conspicuously-consuming 4X4 behemoth, a precursor to the SUV because his corrupt, impoverished country lacked roads suitable for better-known luxury marques. Countless Google searches have failed to turn up a version of the spoof online. Perhaps a gentle reader who has a print version could scan it up for me.

I think of the Grosstod every time I hear the smooth-jazz string riff that is now the theme for Chrysler's TV commercials, and cast my eyes on the '05 restyling of the 300.



It is almost as if Daimler-Chrysler brought German designers over from their MB division, and committed thems to make a vehicle so Big'n'Ugly that it has passed the pale and is beginning to look cool again. In turn, it looks like a bronze brick with wheels and a grille; a lowered Dakota with a trunk; what Peterbilt would deliver if they secretly entered the passenger car market, repeating aloud to themselves in the skunkworks, "not a Hummer . . . please God, don't give us a Hummer."

It is a broad-shouldered post-post-modern car copped from the Adventures of Batman, sans fins. Like the new Thunderbird, I like the look, though I will pay for several college degrees, maybe one of them my own, before I will ever afford one. By then the design will be obsoleted, then retroed, like the cycle of skirt lengths. (Hmmm, wait a minute. Rental fleets will carry a few of them. Maybe in four years . . . )

Me gusta. Now what it needs is a turbodiesel and a receiver hitch. And central tire inflation.

Full faith and credit, privileges and immunities, and so forth

NPR's analysis of same-sex marriage, found through Volokh Conspiracy, inspires us to ask:

Some supporters of same-sex marriage argue . . . that the DOMAs are indeed unconstitutional, and the Full Faith and Credit Clause mandates recognition of out-of-state marraiges.

Okayyyyyy, so if all States are mandated to recognize any official public act of any State, why wouldn't the State of New York recognize my Pennsylvania CCW? That's an, um, extremely official act that the Commonwealth made, my paying the fee, their running the background check and all . . . Assuming that having to get a license to do so is legit, that license should be as portable as any other. And mind you, my Commonwealth CCW was a license, not a permit. Let's hope that's a genuine difference rather than a semantic distinction.

If by public we presume that this State act is a matter of public record, much like a real estate transaction, say, then this cements further that a CCW license would be even harder to ignore by another State, if it was issued by a State that makes the identities of licenses applicants and holders public.

Oooops. Licenses to practice medicine aren't portable either, are they? Acupuncture? Law? Pharmacy? Massage therapy?

Still, this deserves some exploration. All of the conditions, hoops, pitfalls and minefields applied to CCW legislation by those who want to defeat it must be turned into countervailing legal strategies to liberalize CCW.

If same-sex marriage can be used as a tool to demand CCW reciprocity from intransigent states like New York or California, then I could change my position on the matter from apathy to active support.

Let the Left's activists be careful what they demand in Court.

They pay us to do this?

My boss Advon and I just finished a week at Undisclosed CRTC, working for Cadre. We tested out the USAF Counter Chemical Warfare Concept of Operations on a Reserve wing.

We worked some long days, and I was cast as a Czech coalition partner so I was in the muck with the exercised unit, MOPP 4, with an accent that made me sound more like Dexter than former Warsaw Pact.

Now we're at a hotel near MSP, overnighting for a flight back to Colorado tomorrow morning.