What can make me feel even better, post three-day no-holds-barred weekend? How about falling snow? Buckets of it. I awoke this morning to some light flurries. By the time I made it outside it was coming down harder and sticking. Therefore, I decided to walk to work to enjoy the newly whitened district. It was amazing. After Helena and I parted ways, I walked the rest of the way to work as the snow grew harder. There I was, shiny briefcase in hand, a new warm scarf around my neck, top surfaces deluged in snow like some sort of human frosted flake. Even now, as I'm staring outside my window things seem somewhat lighter, almost as if whatever I have to do today is secondary to the frozen concotion being brewed outside in my absence. Man, I feel great.

Imagine a long vacation, in the middle of which you're sitting on a becah under a blue sky. An entire day goes by and you move only to go into the waves or to roll over. As the sun begins to drop below the horizon, the air grows slightly colder but your ray-drenched skin remains warm. Without even trying, you hold onto that feeling even as night descends and you find yourself elsewhere. That day of sloth stays with you, even as you drive back, even as you drag yourself up in the morning. It can be recalled with a simple smell, a subtle glance or the hue of the sky reflected in an office building.

I haven't taken a real vacation in over two years. It paid off, financially, in the end. It wasn't the best psychological decision, to be sure. Why the long intro? Well, I made it up to New York City this weekend, for a rare spot of R&R. I didn't actually have any expectations, which made the ensuing experience all the more rewarding when I turned out to have a great time. In a nutshell, I sampled several cuisines, met several interesting people, caught a show, visited a couple of museums, enjoyed a party, had some great conversations and hit the NYC nightlife at a variety of different locations. All in sub-freezing temperatures. All with witty companions, who managed to stay upbeat despite any stray monkey wrenches thrown in our path.

Few things make me feel quite so good as spontaneously adapting to odd situations, whether it be a closed restaurant, museum, or subway line. We managed to avoid getting in the wrong metro car, paying too much money for a small exhibit (well, some of us, anyway), found parking a block away from our desired destination on two separate occasions and upgraded our seats on-the-fly in the theatre after the fortuitous egress of half the balcony section a scant ten minutes into 'Chicago'. (An excellent musical I'd recommend to anyone!) If there were any negatives, the largest would probably be the height the bar will reside at the next time I'm invited back. But high expectations are good, no?

Which brings me back, full circle, to the intro. Much like my fictional day at the beach, I still feel really good, for no rational reason, hours after my absence from fun. I hope I feel this good tomorrow. For some reason my regular routine seems somewhat ruttish in comparison: I get up, work, do something silly in the afternoon and have dinner shortly thereafter. If it's a weekend, I might try to hang out with some friends. Perhaps the superiority of this weekend was simply a good mix of activities. I've now seen Jesus as a Mongol, enjoyed a mango-yogurt beverage (a lassi? perhaps?) from southern India, and decided that if I ever run a Moroccan themed lounge, I'd keep the music lower and the service quicker. Then again, maybe it was the mixed company, rather than activities. Sometimes it's nice to just get out of town and find a new locale to enjoy, new people to converse with. It's amazing how many times one can go out and hit a happy hour only to talk about the same old problems in shiny new boxes. It's nice to change up the topic, even if it means merely rotating from one person to another. Everyone likes to talk about themselves, right? Hell, this blog itself is like some sort of weird writer's crutch allowing me to voice opinions that I'd otherwise let silently lapse or bore someone to tears with at a social event.

The curious matter of this medium though, is that it's not really a personal or a public matter. Unlike a diary, I'm not going to list lots of names and provide specific times and places. I'm not going to share innermost secrets (how tiresome, eh?) or merely add my voice to an already loud chorus of people with too much time on their hands. Instead, I try to find some middle ground, some area where my personal experiences are indicative of larger trends, some original thoughts not already echoed by a million other monkeys with keyboards. I'm not searching for Shakespeare or the poor roman poets he ripped off: I'm just trying to let some steam off without picking sides. It would be easy, to be sure, to simply let loose on everyone and everything. I could name names, say what I really felt about certain people and policies, in much the way I do about our current administration.

Being a self-confessed hypocrite, I have no problem squaring my desire to talk about people I know behind their backs and yet display reluctance to do so online. Why the logical disconnect? There isn't any: I don't like evidence to link my opinions to myself. If I talk about someone behind their back, I don't expect it to get around. (And let's not kid ourselves, I hardly ever hold my opinions back, but in the end, all personal criticisms are slightly petty in nature, right?) But should someone I know peruse this page and read a point of view straight from the horse's mouth, it would be a little more inappropriate. I prefer the Jamesian method of talking around and around about a problem, especially with people who are not the subject, but rather close friends. If I hate the way T. does something, and T. is friends with S., U. and V., I'll simply talk to S., U. & V. and express my opinion. If they choose to pass it along in a discreet manner, so be it.

This has very little to do with my weekend. It feels cathartic, though. There are never enough people with enough time and enough space to have tons of really good conversations. Instead, we have to squeeze them into the available moments we have, even if those occur as infrequently as...well, let's just say that they're more infrequent than they used to be.

But that's going to change. This weekend was fun, and reminded me that I have things pretty good. I'm basically happy. But I'm not content. Contentment is for suckers. I hope I stay happy and grateful forever, but god help me if I ever become content. Things can always get better, in my mind, or I'm not aiming high enough. So if I had a good weekend this weekend, that's great, but next weekend should be better. If it's not, I'm not trying hard enough. Everything's overcomeable with enough effort.

Anyway, thanks for the chance to have a fantastic three days. Those involved rocked.

So after I was clued into this by atrios, I went to google and ran a quick+dirty search on google for astroturf. What is astroturf? It's simple: someone writes a letter to the editor extolling a particular viewpoint. In this particular case, it was the President's decision to cut the dividend tax for investors. Next, said letter is sent all over the world to newspapers, only the name and address are changed to reflect a person living within the delivery range of the paper in question. Small papers (with little time to do internet fact-checking) are perfect targets. Altering a word or two between revisions will also stymie basic searches, although too much modification defeats the primary purpose of Astroturf: to reiterate talking points ad nauseum across the nation. It's kind of like getting a free advertisement in every paper's opinion section. But let's get back to the facts.

If you go to google and search for the phrase Bush is demonstrating genuine leadership, you'll get a number of hits, even if the entire statement is within quotes. This should be the first sign that something's fishy. Having such a length sentence in quotes still return multiple hits is a red flag that something has been copied. I found this one at the Boston Globe:

WHEN IT COMES to the economy, President Bush has demonstrating genuine leadership. The growth package he has proposed takes us in the right direction by accelerating the successful tax cuts of 2001, providing marriage penalty relief, and providing incentives for individuals and small businesses to save and invest.

Contrary to the class warfare rhetoric attacking Bush's plan, the proposal helps everyone who pays taxes and especially the middle class. This year alone, 92 million taxpayers will receive an immediate tax cut averaging $1,083 - and 46 million married couples will get back an average of $1,714. That's not pocket change for a family struggling through uncertain economic times. Combined with the president's new initiatives to help the unemployed, this plan gets people back to work and helps every sector of our economy.

STEPHANIE JOHNSON

Milton

Silly, but it gets the point across. Here's a sentiment from Honolulu:

When it comes to the economy, President Bush is demonstrating genuine leadership. His economic growth package will take us in the right direction by accelerating the successful tax cuts of 2001, providing marriage penalty relief, and incentives for individuals and small businesses to save and invest.

The president's plan helps everyone who pays taxes -- especially the middle class. This year alone, 92 million taxpayers will receive an immediate tax cut averaging $1,083 -- and 46 million married couples will get back an average of $1,714.

That's not pocket change for a family struggling through uncertain economic times. Combined with the president's new initiatives to help the unemployed, this plan gets people back to work and helps every sector of our economy.

Dirk M. Maurins
Hawaii Kai

Odd that two people so far apart would use such similar language, right? When you begin to add up the numbers though, the technique is truly frightening. Most internet-centric devices to muster support have always relied upon the power to rally thousands to a cause with a simple mouse click or keyboard button. Want to flood the USDA with complaints about a particular policy? Just blog about it and the masses will oblige. Despite the unruly nature of such a technique, at the back of it all is a democratic freedom where everyone gets a voice. Astroturf is the opposite: it is the move of a few people (using technology for a bad purpose) to pretend to be thousands, to pretend to be voicing a "popular" sentiment through deception. Fortunately, the same technology that allows someone to fire off a thousand e-mails to a thousand newspapers also allows us to track them, and, if possible, nail them to rights. So I e-mailed the Globe about the issue, and they informed me that they're looking into it. I'll keep the fans updated.

Okay, you may not think it is, but SVG 1.1 becoming a W3C Recommendation is actually important. This marks the beginning of the end for Flash, as far as I'm concerned. Why? Because the new specs will be adopted into cell-phones, and adoption by major cell-phone players will force browsers to incorporate SVG into mini-browsers (for Pocket PC, Palm, Blackberry, etc.) which will then force the major browsers to embed SVG support. The end result? Free, open, text-based vector graphics for all. Which is a very good thing. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, just disregard it.

As usual the weathermen were totally wrong. The snow was very light, and easily melted with the massive amounts of salt on the road. I remember that the goal of weather prediction was stymied by advances in chaos theory, preventing the sort of long term weather prognostication that many believed was possible even in the 1970s. However, that problem always revolved around long term trends, like a week or more. The inability to predict the correct amount of snowfall or even the duration of the storm (it was predicted to start in the afternoon but didn't begin until well after dark) is odd, given the increase in sensors scattered around the region.

Much like the inability to accurately predict the weather, the odd logic in our president's head is explained somewhat today in a piece by Michael Kinsley. It's like explaining a snowstorm after the fact: it's easy to do so in hindsight (though Kinsley, as usual, does it better than most) but there's no way to predict the next one. Unless that next one involves invading Iraq.

In preparation for the upcoming snowstorm here in the district, I switched the default style to my personal favorite, white and modified it slightly. Tell me what you think! I'm still waiting for a restaurant review from one of the triumvirate, but I suppose she'll come through sooner or later. And as far as that storm is concerned, it probably won't happen at all. The weathermen tend to be pretty bad down here at predicting snowfall. Everything else they're quite good at but for some reason snow always gets them mixed up.

I remember with longing the days of surpluses as far as the eye could see and the looming baby-boomer-induced deficits far off. Now, though, things have changed. As Glenn Hubbard himself can attest, rising deficits cause an increase in long-term interest rates, which drag the economy down. So why the continued craziness when we may still be in a recession?. It makes no sense. At this rate, once war breaks out, the markets will sink further, which could cause another financial meltdown, which could increase the size of the hole we're already in. The current ten-year prediction forecasts, even from the Administration, predict that we'll be in the red for the entire decade. That means an ever growing national debt. Way to go guys!

Despite being sick yesterday, I did a great deal of work from home. As usual, the triumvirate didn't step in to help me out. No matter. I should have a restaurant review up tomorrow after this evening, and perhaps some more political stuff today. But first, the good news! From the piece:

PRINCETON, NJ -- For the first time since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, George W. Bush's approval rating has dropped below the 60% level, now showing 58% of Americans who approve and 37% who disapprove of the way he is handling his job as president. In a Gallup Poll conducted just days before the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush's approval rating reached the lowest of his presidency, with 51% approving and 39% disapproving. After the terrorist attacks, his approval skyrocketed, reaching a record 90% in mid-September 2001. It has gradually declined since then, dropping below 80% for the first time in early March 2002, and dropping below 70% for the first time the following July. By December of last year, it was below the 65% level.

Check out the whole article and look at the economic data as well. It just goes to show you that the administration can't pull the wool over everyone's eyes forever. A great quote culled from Maureen Dowd today:

Craig Patterson, a 45-year-old ironworker in St. Louis worried about dwindling construction jobs, summed it up for USA Today: "I trust Bush with my daughter, but I trust Clinton with my job."

This easily displaces a quote last week in CQ when the House Appropriations Committee Democratic Staff Director, Scott Lilly, was asked about the tax cut's impact on funding of the "No Child Left Behind" education law of 2001. His response? "There's probably going to be some children left behind." Classic.