Misc Commentary For Oct 6, 2006

— Maybe this guy should have gone in a different direction with his legal strategy:

“A Chicago man apologized for spreading his feces around a courtroom during his trial on drug charges.”

— This is sort of a good news, bad news story:

The federal budget deficit estimate for the fiscal year just completed has dropped to $250 billion, congressional estimators said Friday, as the economy continued to fuel impressive tax revenues.

The Congressional Budget Office’s latest estimate is $10 billion below CBO predictions issued in August and well below a July White House prediction of $296 billion.

The improving deficit picture — Bush predicted a $423 billion deficit in his February budget — has been driven by better-than-expected tax receipts, especially from corporate profits, CBO said.

On the one hand, because tax cuts have driven up government revenues (Thank you for explaining how that works, Laffer Curve), the deficit is much smaller than expected. On the other hand, it’s still 250 billion. On the upside, at least we’re going in the right direction. That should count for something

— You know, I see a lot of bloggers raving about the predictive power of Tradesports, which allows betting on political races. While it is interesting to occasionally take a look at how the money is coming down on particular political outcomes, I have yet to see any evidence that the Tradesports numbers represent anything more than just the run-of-the-mill conventional wisdom. Since that’s the case, I don’t think it merits these, “ooohs and aaahs,” some people seem to give every time the numbers move a few points in a particular direction.

— Over at The Corner, Byron York says, “There seems to be a general feeling that the Foley scandal is losing steam today.”

He’s right. The story was being driven for the first few days by new revelations about Foley’s activities and by the possibility that Hastert would resign his leadership position. Now that it has been established that Foley is a perv and that Hastert doesn’t look likely to step down, the story is losing momentum.

— Check out this wacky comment from NewsVeiws in the, “Foley Cybersex With Teen Part Of A Prank?”

“Here is how it works folks; It’s all about ”clickthroughs”. Ad traffic. If bin laden (AND THE REST OF PAKISTAN) spends every waking moment clicking on ad after ad I’d be happy.
I’d be even happier if we ”bring the freedom” to the sunni muslims to kill as many shi’ite muslims as possible.

And we also ”bring the freedom” to the shi’ite muslims to kill as many sunni muslims as possible as well.

We’ve seen this over and over again, THE ONLY SOURCE OF JOY to muslims is the desire to kill non-muslims.

The ULTRA-LIBERALS like John Kerry Hawkins (who actually wants ”speaker nancy pelosi”) and Duhbya who is merely waiting for his (and John Kerry Hawkins) to have ”a fully-vested retirement package”…”

This guy, who has always struck me as a Paleocon, has been posting here for a while and has gotten progressively nuttier. So what do you think? Is he a crank or a parody troll?

— Woah. Is Kos about to step out of the political blogging game?

“An activist who has succeeded in mobilizing so many passionate users might next head for a career inside the political machine. Run for office. Start a PAC. Become a consultant. But no. At what’s arguably the top of his game, Moulitsas says he’s “going offline” next year, taking his obvious knack for building online communities and applying it to that other great American pastime: sports. And once he gets his network of sports blogs ramped up, he’ll turn to building communities in the real world, a chain of giant meeting places “replicating megachurches for the left” – complete with cafés and child care. Moulitsas has shown he can harness people’s enthusiasm, but he says he doesn’t want a leadership role in these “democracy centers.”

PS: Ana Marie Cox AKA as the original Wonkette, doesn’t get a lot of credit for her writing. People have always thought she got where she was because she worked for Nick Denton, is hot, and made a lot of jokes about anal sex. But, I’ve always thought Cox was funny and had a real talent for snark. This biting excerpt from the Kos piece, which you can be sure that few other left-of-center writers would have included, gives you a little taste of what Cox does so well.

“He’s conflicted about the job. “I’m kind of at the top of my game right now,” he says. “But I have no desire to be the face of the Democratic party. I think there are better spokespeople out there.”

Indeed, for someone as written-about as Moulitsas, he’s a lousy frontman. There’s the paranoia and the ranting, of course. And he can seem uninterested in the details. The day after Lamont’s win, Moulitsas came to lunch in a Lamont T-shirt. But he fumbled when a woman walked over to our table, pointed at his shirt, and said, “Can you tell me anything about that guy other than he’s antiwar?” He couldn’t.”

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