Me: Frank Lynch

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For something less spontaneous, I maintain The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page (over 1,800 Johnson quotes).

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In local news, a big step forward. New York City's City Council has approved Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan. It's not settled yet — the State has to approve it, too — but it wouldn't be going to the State for approval is the Council had rejected it.

I happen to be fond of the idea; I also liked the idea of tolls on the East River bridges. There are just too many cars in Manhattan, and they hurt us all with the emissions. If it means more parking garages in the outer boroughs to create Kiss and Rides, then so be it. Seeing as how the Atlantic Yards project is apparently floundering in the tight capital market, there's obviously a big piece of land right next to a major transit hub which would suit nicely... Or maybe further out, down the LIRR's route.

And there's lots of space on the way to JFK: run more trains in from there.

The whole idea is to move people, ASAP. And bottle necks in Manhattan are no help.

(Disclosure: I work for a marketing research company, and my group's clients are in public transportation and transportation planning.)
Link | | | 8:39 PM | Home
 

Carville couldn't be more wrong on his 'Judas' comparison. In an attempt to defend his having compared Bill Richardson to Judas Iscariot for endorsing Obama over Clinton, Carville (after claiming that the date of Good Friday meant the allusion was "too good to pass up"), defends it on the concept that Richardson was "disloyal":

I believe that loyalty is a cardinal virtue. Nowhere in the world is loyalty so little revered and tittle-tattle so greatly venerated as in Washington. I was a little-known political consultant until Bill Clinton made me. When he came upon hard times, I felt it my duty -- whatever my personal misgivings -- to stick by him. At the very least, I would have stayed silent. And maybe that's my problem with what Bill Richardson did. Silence on his part would have spoken loudly enough.

Most of the stuff I've ever said is pretty insignificant and by in large has been said off the cuff and without much thought to the potential consequences. That was not the case in this instance. Bill Richardson's response was that the Clinton people felt they were entitled to the presidency. In my mind, that is a debatable hypothesis. But, even more than that, I know that a former president of the United States who appointed someone to two Senate-confirmed positions is entitled to have his phone calls returned.

If Richardson was going to turn on the Clintons the way he did, I see no problem in saying what I said. Because if loyalty is one virtue, another is straight talk. And if Democrats can't handle that, they're going to have a hard time handling a Republican nominee who is seeking the presidency with that as his slogan.

Yes, loyalty is a good thing (not sure it rises to virtue), but blind loyalty is certainly not a virtue, it's closer to a vice. At the minimum it's a lapse in judgment. And Richardson had good reasons to endorse Obama; the fact that they trumped loyalty is no reason for derision, certainly not the venomous language which Carville used.

Carville's allusion was low. And he doesn't help himself by arguing for the kind of loyalty he expected of Richardson.
Link | | | 1:34 PM | Home
 

Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle. Loudin Wainwright III, of course.

I remember when Letterman had a morning show on NBC, and Wainwright, if he wasn't his Ed McMahon, was his constant musical performer.
Link | | | 9:43 PM | Home
 

Mumia Abu-Jamal. So he's being given a new sentencing trial. It seems to me that if Obama is serious about the Presidency he'll have to deal with this issue.

(Of course not.)
Link | | | 7:52 PM | Home
 

Been eating farmed salmon? We sure have — and we always thought it was a healthy thing to do. But this article will make you think twice. It takes an abundance of resources to farm salmon, has significant environmental costs, and salmon farms in Chile have been hit by a virus — due, perhaps, to the over-concentrated conditions in which the fish are bred and raised.

I know we can't risk depleting the oceans of all the big fish, and know we've seen low salmon counts in the north west, but this is a pretty strong argument for eating more plants.
Link | | | 10:38 PM | Home

John McCain's going to need a new credibility platform. Because supporter Lindsay Graham can't make the case that McCain understood the hurdles ahead of us in Iraq; and, as Kevin Drum has pointed out, perceptions that McCain has "credibility" are baseless.

These points need to be repeated. And repeated. Over, and over again.

Who needs to circulate scurrilous emails about what John Kerry didn't say at Reagan's funeral when you have the truth about John McCain as a weapon?
Link | | | 9:43 PM | Home
 

Another specious argument from the Clinton camp. In another effort to persuade super-delegates to support Clinton over Obama, supporter Evan Bayh says they should think about the electoral college implications of the states where Clinton has beaten Obama. Kind of a funny argument, pointing to Clinton's "big state" wins: first, it confuses preference with insistence (e.g., if big states that went for Clinton couldn't vote for Clinton in November, they'd vote for McCain), and second, forgets that in the "small" states voters have a disproportionately high number of electoral college votes.

I remain uncovinced on the first part (I very much doubt that Clinton supporters would be so distraught over an Obama v. McCain slate that New York would go for McCain, and I can't see Clinton withholding an endorsement of Obama should she fail to win the nomination).

The sad thing is that the appeal is just so unseemly, and classless, kind of like Carville's comparison of Richardson to Judas Iscariot. They sound like they're clutching at straws. (I think they'd be better off by starting to take an approach along the lines of "the better statesman doesn't always win, look at 2000: America had better think very seriously about me vs. Obama and make sure they get it right.")
Link | | | 10:06 PM | Home
 

Ewwwwwww.... Following former Clinton cabinet member Bill Richardson's endorsement of Obama, James Carville compares Richardson to Judas Iscariot. Yglesias brings up that, by extension, Hillary (or Bill?) is akin to Jesus. A bit disquieting, Mr. Carville.
Link | | | 7:01 PM | Home

3,996 and counting. Four more US troops have died in Iraq, thanks to our Glorious Pharaoh's attempt to make over a region. What an awful, arrogant, stupid man.
Link | | | 11:18 AM | Home

Internet content has value, and so do synergistic relationships. In an op-ed column at the New York Times, Billy Bragg notes that the proprietor of the networking site Bebo just pocketed scads of money in a sale to AOL, $850 million. I've never visited Bebo, but Bragg says that much of the appeal of the site is the music that's there, allbeit contributors still hold copyrights.

Bragg feels as if some of the sale value should go to site contributors. Certainly there's an argument that the value of site increases considerably when there's a concentration of contributors — and it's not linear. And certainly there's an argument that a site's popularity with users might increase or decrease according to the price of downloads — but maybe it's only the downloads which increase or decrease.

But Bragg is making an important point: whether or not they were undercharging for downloads, contributors built up that non-tangible assett of "goodwill" by choosing to contribute to Bebo.

This isn't often thought about: your ISP can charge you money for your bandwidth not just because it provides a service, but because there's content out there for them to deliver to you. Does your ISP share any of its profit with the myriad content providers? And search engine companies: would their stocks have any value if there was nothing to search for, and nothing to relate their ads to? Does Google share any of its profit with the sites that come up in its searches?

Of course not. Just something for you to think about.

Now that I've got that off my chest, here's how you can read some famous subscriber-only content for free.
Link | | | 11:02 AM | Home
 

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