what is this?

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
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City living for sex

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution asks if people move to cities to enjoy anonymous sex? One of the first things I learned when I moved to New York was that logistically having lots of sex could be easy if one lived in Manhattan.

Take a look at Williamsburg sometime. This seems like an attempt to recreate the East Village across the river. I think sex has quite a bit to do with it. Sure Williamsburg is a little hipper the Manhattan. I believe it was made that way (accidentally) to combat anti-L train partners. In other words, potential sex partners were unwilling to take the trip due to inconvenience.

Support H.R. 5388: D.C. Voting Rights Act

In my opinion, the worst thing about living in the District of Columbia is the lack of a right to vote. Yesterday, our mayor elect Adrian Fenty wrote an excellent opinion piece in the Washington Post that hits all of the most important points. If you take a look at the very informative D.C. Votes website they show how strongly Americans support equal voting rights for the 600,000 citizens of our nation's capital.

Personally, I want full statehood (and I would like to see the Democrats push for it). The compromise on the table seems more than reasonable and giving a vote to the state of Utah at least seems like it should be enough to placate Republicans.

I really want to know what the argument is against the district getting a voting Congressman. Surely it can't be about voter suppression can it? What is the principled reason?

Did he?

RavenHawk15 reports:

Is OJ's media blitz a crass half-assed confession or a crass media teaser? It may well yet turn out that the book and TV show is nothing more than a poor rhetorical argument designed to highlight the improbability of his involvement ("I don't think any two people could be murdered without everybody being covered in blood") . If so, publisher Judith Regan's well-publicized statement that she considers this to be his confession may be more PT Barnum hucksterism than stern historic pronouncement.

Hoyer wins!

Steny Hoyer has become the new Democratic majority leader in Congress. Initially, we were leaning towards Murtha strictly because he was Pelosi's pick and we felt that anything to solidify her control couldn't be a bad thing.


The more we learned about Murtha's alleged corruption the less we came to like the man. We still are surprised that Pelosi was willing to expend so much political capital in an election that she couldn't win. The secret ballot process really takes a lot of the arm-twisting ability away.

U.S. Gambling Law

Henry Lanman over at Slate offers what in my lay view is a pretty good summary as to where the United States stands in regards to its pursuit of international internet gambling prohibitions. I have been aware of the WTO ruling in favor of Antigua for a couple of years, but until the port security bill (now a law) passed the U.S. Congress was unaware of what retaliatory measures the island nation would be able to take. Lanman suggests (and I've heard it argued but can't find the source) that it is conceivable that Antigua would be allowed to ignore intellectual property rules. Can anyone give me an example of when the WTO has allowed this type of retaliation in the past?

The Colonel's face from Outer Space!

The Sun tells us that KFC has created a 87,500 square feet Colonel Sanders.

RavenHawk15 sends us this:

On Dobbs:

Aside from his daily duty dusting-off the multinational elite, Lou Dobbs managed to find time to co-founded the Imaginova Corporation (as well as CNNfN). Imaginova, like any large multinational, has several subsidiaries, one of which, LiveScienceStore.com, is an online science gizmo clearinghouse (think Crazy Eddie for nerds). Among the bestsellers is a glowing robot head that asks you trivia questions called the 20Q Deluxe, and oddly enough, it's not made in Ohio.

The point here is not that Mr. Dobbs should specificaly know of the existence of a glowing robot quiz head sold by his company made in Southern China. It's that a Harvard-trained economist who owns a minority stake in a large corporation knows damn well where his stock of electronic gizmos is likely to come from and that its a smart business move. Don't believe the hype.

The new GOP whip is... Trent Lott?

I thought we were done with this guy. Apparently there is a dearth of leadership amongst the GOP so the controversial (and from what I've heard unliked) Lott is allowed to climb back into the leadership.

This kind of stuff is one reason why I've haven't been too worried about the Democrats chances in 08. In my view the Republicans would never considered someone like Trent Lott if they had any amount of depth to their ranks.

the Abscam tapes

If you haven't had a chance to review the Abscam tapes, yet you can take a look at them here.