In one of Barack Obama’s recent stump speeches, Obama made the following remark about John McCain’s platform:

“At a time when we’re fighting two wars, when millions of Americans can’t afford their medical bills or their tuition bills, when we’re paying more than $4 a gallon for gas, the man who rails against government spending wants to spend $1.2 billion on a tax break for Exxon Mobil.  That isn’t just irresponsible. It’s outrageous.”

Obama’s point of view that a $1.2 billion tax break is an expense rather than a savings is fairly typical of big-party politics these days, especially on the political left.  How exactly does that work?  Why should a tax break be seen as an expense on the government’s behalf rather than money left in the hands of those who earned it?  He’s talking about a tax break, after all.  He never mentioned a rebate.

Whose money is it, anyway?

Does anyone else find this rant absolutely hilarious?

If a middle-aged white woman from New York is a second class citizen, then what does that make me?

It’s been at least a couple of years since I first toyed with the idea of brewing my own beer.  Last week, my roommate and I finally bit the bullet and split the purchase of a basic homebrew kit with a large stainless steel pot from Austin Homebrew Supply.  Yesterday (Wednesday) I finally took the time to head to the homebrew supply in person to pick up our first recipe kit. I settled on an extract kit, as suggested by one of the employees there. 

After dinner that night, my roommate and I went ahead and sanitized everything and put together our first batch.  After about 21 hours, the wort+yeast mixture has finally started fermenting and we’re seeing the very first traces of life: a bubble out of the airlock once every twenty-ish seconds.

Now, I’ve been told not to expect much out of the first batch.  Very often, something goes wrong in the sanitization process or elsewhere and the beer is probably going to be not very good at best.  But it was certainly a lot of fun, and the guys at AHS did a great job putting together a pretty comprehensive kit and great documentation.

I remain optimistic about the results.  Regardless of how this batch turns out, I’ll be making another one by the end of the summer.

In the following video, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) ties NAFTA, CAFTA, and the NASCO international highway to increased trade deficits, rising tuition costs, increased student debt, and, of all things, rising healthcare costs.

It seems to me that the advancement of free trade has been constantly and undeservingly bullied by Democrats (I hate to call them “the left”) lately.  In contrast to the anti-trade rhetoric, an October 2007 study entitled Trading Up conducted by the Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute found the following:

In 2007,

• There were 16.5 million more people working than in 1997,
• Trade accounted only for 3% of lost jobs (most were due to tech and domestic factors),
• Average real compensation increased 22% from 1997,
• Median household income is up 6% at comparable points in the business cycle from 1997,
• The net loss of 3.3 million jobs was overcome by a net gain of 11.6 million higher-paying (on average) jobs, and finally,
• The median household net worth rose from about $71k in 1995 to over $93k

Drew Carey addressed the so-called “middle class squeeze” in one of his informative (and entertaining) reason.tv videos.

Are middle-class Americans really worse off now than they were ten years ago?  If so, is free trade really to blame?  If anything, it seems that free trade has helped to create jobs and enhance the economy, not destroy jobs and ruin the economy.

A particularly cringe-worthy exchange took place May 21st on Larry King Live. The exchange was between Jesse Ventura, the former (independent) governor of Minnesota and a philosophical libertarian, and Charlie Rangel and Robert Wexler, two Democratic congressmen. A snippet of the transcript is included for those of you that missed it:

VENTURA: You know, people like me, who are fiscally conservative and socially liberal, we're made to choose the lesser of the two evils all the time. And, you know, if you're -- and it puts you in a precarious position, because there's no real candidate that I could say represents my viewpoint and my lifestyle [...] because we don't have more choices than the two that are offered, either liberal liberal or conservative conservative.

KING: Congressman Wexler, does he have a point?

WEXLER: No, he does not.

[...]

WEXLER: Senator Obama has offered a very fiscally responsible economic plan to both bolster the economic conditions of ordinary Americans. He's talking about an ambitious energy plan to relieve our dependence on foreign oil. He's talking about shoring up social security. He's also talking about giving tax relief to working Americans. I believe that this actually is a very practical, important economic proposal for the country.

At the same time, he's offering a different kind of foreign policy, which will make America safer, begin to extricate ourselves from the war in Iraq and engage, with a position of leverage and strength, with some of the most difficult parties in the world.

KING: I want Charlie Rangel to respond to what Jesse's thoughts were.

Do you think that there's a need for a third activist party here, Charlie?

RANGEL: Of course not. But he's entitled to his opinion.

(CROSSTALK)

RANGEL: And I assume when he reaches the point that he can bring out the crowds that Obama and Clinton are coming, then it would mean that he's been able to attract a lot of people to his point of view.

But right now, the country has done pretty well in electing outstanding leaders. And in this particular election, it is clear that Hillary Clinton and Senator Obama have captured the imagination of millions of people throughout the country.

So you can't deny one who says he doesn't want any of the options and he has the best view. And that's what makes America so great.

I don’t even know where to start. I swear I become more of a Jesse Ventura fan every time I hear him speak. In fact, his first statement embodies my entire political philosophy and explains my seemingly perpetual dissatisfaction with our elected officials. As a “small-L” libertarian, I feel like the 2008 election will either boil down to a lesser-of-two-evils vote or, more likely, a vote “wasted” on a third-party candidate.

And what’s this nonsense about America doing “pretty well in electing outstanding leaders”? This is an interesting point to make, given the fuss that Democrats (rightly) make about our current president. Further, out of the last forty years’ worth of US presidents (Bush Jr., Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan, Carter, Ford, and Nixon), we have had maybe two decent administrations. It’s quite a stretch to call them “outstanding.”

My primary gripe is this: the opinion shared by Wexler and Rangel that we do not need a viable third party for people that identify with libertarian values is just plain dumb. Rangel’s point about Ventura not receiving massive turnouts compared to a Democratic super-star is as mind-boggling stupid as it is shallow. Does Congressman Rangel completely discount the likely possibility that one of the reasons Ventura draws relatively small crowds is that he refuses to join a party and not the other way around? Is it completely inconceivable that if Obama hadn’t been a Democrat (or a Republican) then he wouldn’t be such a powerful politician? Does Rangel not understand that a primary factor in a person’s party identification is his or her parents’ political affiliation and identification, which further renders proof-by-popularity a moot point? I hate to succumb to Godwin’s Law, but the Nazi party enjoyed great popularity in its day, too.

Politicians have always been the sorts of people who have no qualms back-tracking over their own historical record to increase their own power. At a time when at least twenty percent of survey-taking Americans (that are, of course, susceptible to self-selection bias) hold libertarian beliefs, the statements by Rangel and Wexler are completely incorrect. One would think that the party that champions voter-fraud reform would want to see to it that the libertarian-leaning portion of America had its voice heard, not stifled. Plus, Rangel is a Clinton supporter and Clinton has been steadfast in her belief that Florida and Michigan votes should be considered in determining the Democratic nominee. What gives? Democrats in rule-breaking states should have votes, but the libertarian voice can be dismissed as a fringe that has no significant representation in society?

Or does disenfranchisement only apply to Democrats and Republicans?

The simple fact is that the liberal/conservative spectrum has a nice symmetry with our two-party system but it does an extremely poor job of accurately portraying the beliefs of many Americans. I’m for tax reform but against the drug war. Does that make me a liberal or a conservative? A slightly better partitioning of political philosophies is the two-by-two matrix developed by William S. Maddox and Stuart A. Lilie in “Beyond Liberal and Conservative”. A variation of this 2d matrix is used in the Enhanced Political Quiz. Even this approach is not perfect, but it is much better than the one-dimensional political spectrum.  Perhaps a similarly “enhanced” version of our one-dimensional two-party system would work better.

The Republicans used to have people like Barry Goldwater.  Until recently, the Democrats had Mike Gravel. But just as the one-dimensional liberal/conservative spectrum fails, so fails our two-party system. In a competition betweens Democrats (”liberal liberals”) and Republicans (”conservative conservatives”), libertarians like me have no viable party to consistently support.

It’s official — Hercules Double IPA is now available in 4-packs.  Follow the link, scroll to the bottom, and head to your nearest Central Market.  That’s where I got mine.

Well, I just finished my first day of my second internship at Centaur Technology.  It was every bit as great as I remembered.  In fact, my office was eerily similar to how I left it.  My desk and computer hadn’t even been touched since I left last summer.  I was still logged into a workstation remotely.  There was even a box of free lemon-lime tic-tacs that I remember leaving on the table next to my desk.

Oh, and there were over 4,300 new emails in my inbox waiting to be sorted through, even after moderate filtering.

Oh well, I’m not complaining.  The bureaucratic portion of my day (red tape and such — the necessary evils) lasted under an hour and, as always, I got delicious free breakfast and lunch.  Go team!

Apparently os.popen() has gone out of style.  I had no idea.  I’ve replaced calls to os.popen() with the much trendier subprocess.call() and subprocess.Popen().

It also now won’t set your wallpaper to nonexistant wallpapers that you’ve deleted since you last ran the update script.  If it picks a wallpaper and finds out that it no longer exists, it just tries again until it finds a suitable wallpaper or just gives up.

Grab the new tarball here.

And he’s probably the best thing to happen to SNL in the past decade.

In case you missed it, he just made a few appearances on SNL.  I can’t directly embed the first clip (available here) but I’ve included the second clip from last Saturday as well as an older sketch that he did.  Enjoy.

“Do I know how to sing?  [pause]  About as well as [Streisand] knows how to govern America.”

If this whole election thing doesn’t pan out in his favor, he should consider trying for a full-time spot on the SNL cast.  He’s already funnier than the rest of ‘em.

I’ve put together a couple of python scripts to automate switching wallpapers at regular intervals in Linux.  It uses localtime and the average color of individual wallpapers to try to choose wisely — the script should deliver bright pictures during the day, dark pictures during the night, and medium pictures in between.  It’s currently written to use gnome but it should be easily modifiable for other DEs and WMs.

Grab the initial release tarball here.