@Home Again

This is what the power of the Internet is all about... It's about the ability for my girlfriend's sister to send her a picture of her new haircut... This is the Information Superhighway at its best... But seriously, it's about what you can do now that webcams have gotten so cheap. You can pick up a nice USB color camera for under fifty dollars quite easily, making it possible to send images in seconds. In the old days, the best you could do is use a polaroid camera and Fed Ex. Now you can transmit your image anywhere in the world in seconds for next to nothing...

Oh, and I like the haircut, Karen...

It looks like Jean Carnahan will be appointed if her deceased husband is elected. That's got to put John Ashcroft in a tough place to campaign from, how do you campaign against a widow who just lost her husband of 46 years and her son? How do you campaign against a dead man? If I were Ashcroft, I'd start reading the help wanted ads:

"I think this is very real," said Jennifer Duffy, who tracks Senate races for the Cook Political Report. "The Ashcroft campaign must feel some combination of panic and utter frustration." Democrats keep campaigning in Missouri, she said, distributing 700,000 pieces of literature over the weekend informing voters that they can cast ballots for Mel Carnahan even though he's dead.

In case you missed it, the New York Times endorsed Al Gore for President:

To be blunter, Mr. Bush's entire economic program is built on a stunning combination of social inequity and flawed economic theory. He would spend more than half the $2.2 trillion non-Social Security surplus on a tax cut at a time when the economy does not need that stimulus. Moreover, as Mr. Gore has said repeatedly and truthfully, over 40 percent of the money would go to the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers. Mr. Bush would expand some programs for schools, but he also embraces the Republicans' ideologically driven approach of using vouchers to transfer money from public to private schools. There is nothing compassionate or conservative about blowing the surplus on windfalls for the wealthy instead of investing it in fair tax relief and well-designed social programs.

I personally am for whichever candidate would devote more of the projected surplus to paying down the national debt. That's how Keynesian Economics works, you deficit spend when the economy is poor, then you pay off the deficits when the economy is good. Bush wants to deficit spend when the economy is poor, and give tax cuts when the economy is good. Try this with your own finances for a year, and see how well you do. To use myself as an example, right now, my monthly income exceeds my expenses. I could either buy myself a leather living room set, or pay off my student loans early. Which is the more responsible thing to do? What leap of logic tells you that the same rules don't apply to the national government?

Politicians and pundits like to make a large distinction between spending programs and tax cuts. They're the same thing, really, they're a drain on the federal budget. I personally am in favor of neither at this point, but if we've got to have one of the two, I'll take the social programs...

I'm still @Home. I'm waiting for them to come fix my cable modem. The replacement unit on Friday didn't work either, they think it's a line problem now. I'm trying to stay off of the phone, because they always call before they come out, but I need to use the Internet. I just put a voice mail message on my phone that tells them that I am home, I'm just using the phone line, and to please come out anyway....

And yes, I've checked, DSL is not available to my house....

Update: I'm back at work, but still no cable modem... They tracked down the line problem, replaced some of the hardware, so now I'm getting more lights on the modem, but still no connection. It may or may not be up when I get home, they have to re-synchronize the router information, which they tell me can take a few hours...

Update #2: It works! I started pinging my computer continuously from work, and it now looks like it's live. Now I just have to catch up with the half-day of work I missed...