"A Washington watchdog group that promotes ethics and accountability in government and public life is setting its sights on computer manufacturer Dell. Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a complaint with District of Columbia Attorney General Peter Nickles on Monday asking for an investigation into why the Austin, Texas-based Fortune 500 company reportedly refused to honor its next-day service warranty, which guarantees on-site response. The victim of the alleged breach of contract: CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan."
"Once you have lost faith in your trade or in your masters you tend to become careless, even auto-destructive. It is not deliberate but sub-conscious. You are not planning to jump off a bridge or gulp down phials of sleeping pills. No, it’s like a disease gradually creeping through your being, sapping your energy, reducing your vitality, sliding you into a state of melancholy or what the Germans call Weltschmerz. You suffer from flashes of rebellion followed by periods of depression and a sense of futility. At times it is like waking up from an exciting dream and realizing it was an illusion. The sense of disappointment becomes permanent. You begin to question values – yours, theirs."
"The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reckons that the deficit will run for a decade and will still exceed $1.2 trillion in 2019. By that time, the United States will have virtually doubled its national debt, to over $17 trillion. Then, after 2019, we get another turn of the screw as the peak waves of baby boomers move into their retirement years and costs soar for the major entitlements, Social Security and Medicare."
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"part of the research has included studying and categorizing newspaper readers. Some Web users are casual users, who may read just a few stories a month and enter through a search engine. Some online newspaper readers have registered with the newspaper.com and visit a bit more often, and others are print subscribers or 7-day print subscribers who also access their local newspaper Web site.
The task force is discussing giving different types of readers different levels of online access, and rewarding the most loyal readers with premium or specialized content. The company seems to be looking at a price point of $5 to $10 per month for online subscriptions. But, Bessen emphasized, all plans are hypothetical at this point. The task force is also evaluating vendors."
"Last week, we saw white firefighters under assault by agents of Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor," said Limbaugh (emphasis his). He added: "Now, white policemen are under assault from the East Room of the White House, by the President of the United States, after admitting he had no -- he didn't know all the facts, what went on in there.
"..the cultural role of philosophy was “never to let the inquisitive energy of mind go to sleep, never to stop questioning what appears to be obvious and definitive, always to defy the seemingly intact resources of common sense” and “never to forget that there are questions that lie beyond the legitimate horizon of science and are nonetheless crucially important to the survival of humanity as we know it."
"There are six statewide elective offices. Four of them are now filled by politicians who were not the people’s choices. They fell into their positions by virtue of someone else’s malefaction or ambition.
The governor, as noted, is unelected. He has now named a lieutenant governor, an appointment whose legality is uncertain. The state comptroller was handed the job by his Assembly colleagues after his elected predecessor resigned in disgrace. The junior United States senator is also an appointee, selected by the unelected — dare we say accidental — governor.
Such is the state of democracy in New York. Let’s not even get into the State Senate crisis that paralyzed Albany for more than a month, or the way that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the New York City Council nullified the expressed will of the people to extend term limits."
"But since entering Congress in 1992, Representative Maloney has worked hard to make sure she was the only choice for Democrats in her Congressional district, as her operatives and supporters moved on multiple occasions to block potential Democratic opponents from getting onto the ballot. (It's standard operating procedure to challenge petitions, but it's a tactic that seems pretty starkly at odds with the logic of Maloney's Iran analogy.)"
Madeline Laurano, principal analyst at workplace research and advisory firm Bersin and Associates, argued that the recession-spurred trend of working for free is a great way for companies to build a "talent pipeline" to tap when the economy recovers.
"Employers need to think about the same strategies that they would if they were hiring someone who was getting paid. You still want a quality person," Laurano said. "Job seekers also need to think the same way, 'I still want to invest my time in a company I believe in, that I can grow and learn from.'
"A Republican senator added, "from what I've seen in that room, I think Dean stays as the leader and we move on, and what we did has some positive effects."
"It's because people have more at risk. As Jerry Pournelle wrote a while back, "We have always known that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. It's worse now, because capture of government is so much more important than it once was. There was a time when there was enough freedom that it hardly mattered which brand of crooks ran government. That has not been true for a long time -- not during most of your lifetimes, and for much of mine -- and it will probably never be true again."
"The era we face, that is soon upon us, will require a great deal from our leaders. They had better be sturdy. They will have to be gifted. There will be many who cannot, and should not, make the cut. Now is the time to look for those who can. And so the Republican Party should get serious, as serious as the age, because that is what a grown-up, responsible party—a party that deserves to lead—would do.
It's not a time to be frivolous, or to feel the temptation of resentment, or the temptation of thinking next year will be more or less like last year, and the assumptions of our childhoods will more or less reign in our future. It won't be that way.
We are going to need the best."
"More surprisingly, the Senate took the rare step of actually voting down a bill, rejecting by 34 to 28 a controversial proposal backed by Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli that would have allowed local governments to borrow money from the state to pay their pension bills.
The defeat, however, was widely seen as having little to do with policy. Mr. DiNapoli, at the governor’s urging, had withheld the paychecks and travel vouchers of senators in recent days, arousing anger. There was broad laughter in the chamber after his bill was defeated."
"Bronx state Sen. Pedro Espada, whose defection to the Republican camp helped trigger the current Senate crisis, will return to the Democratic fold and end the month-long Senate stalemate."
"This policy shift is a long overdue admission that anti-drug efforts in Afghanistan are strengthening the Taliban insurgency and undermining stability. But the reasons Holbrooke cited for the change apply more broadly than he is willing to acknowledge, indicting not just poppy pulling in Afghanistan but an international drug control regime that has been an expensive flop for nearly a century."
"Ravitch, a 76-year-old lawyer, is a veteran public servant, having been chairman of the state’s Urban Development Corporation under Gov. Hugh L. Carey in the 1970s before leading an overhaul of mass transit financing during his tenure as M.T.A. chairman, from 1979 to 1983. He has never held elected office, though he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for mayor in 1989."
"51% of registered voters in New York City say, “Out with the old and in with the new.” That’s the proportion of the electorate who believes it’s time to oust Mayor Michael Bloomberg from office and elect someone else...However, regardless of whether voters support a third term for Bloomberg, more than seven in ten voters –73% — think the mayor will be re-elected."
