Dineen and I were fortunate enough to attend today's Inauguration of the 43rd U.S. President. It was cold, wet, muddy, and crowded, but we were there for posterity's sake.
The reality is still setting in for me that the Clinton era is over - although the White House cleaning crew probably hasn't finished fumigating yet - and that his scandal-plagued adminsitration is now just a bunch of former Cabinet officials, some with shiny new Presidential pardons, given out as if they were the last batch of White House stationery bearing Clinton's name. The next eight years will be a welcome relief. W
The post below just reminded me - less than 24 hours left. W
One of Bill Clinton's last acts as President: saving his own skin.
I tried to walk a fine line between acting lawfully and testifying falsely, but I now recognize that I did not fully accomplish this goal and that certain of my responses to questions about Ms. Lewinsky were false.
In exchange for that admission, his agreement to a five-year suspension of his license to practice law, and payment of a $25,000 fine, Special Prosecutor Ray closed his investigation. Not since Nixon has an American president left office on such an off note. W
Song of the day: Jesse's Girl by Rick Springfield W
How do you land a role in American Pie 2? Write an essay which contains the following line:
I model now but it makes you dummer.
Right on, Keith - way to keep it real. W
This falls into the "nice work if you can get it" category: I have been charged with researching the entire history of ICANN, the current administration of the Internet, and particularly the various issues surrounding the assignment and administration of ccTLDs. I have a bunch of good background to start with, but who better than you guys to help me out? If you have good links, leads, or gossip, please e-mail me. W
Unfortunately, Shawn will be losing his server access by the end of the month, which means I'll be changing web hosts this week. If you get funky errors over the next few days, that's why.
Thanks, Shawn, for being a great host over the last several months. W
Last week, the Clinton administration fired what will probably be its final shot in its war against SUV's, when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released its "Rollover Ratings," a five-star rating system that claims to estimate the likelihood a particular model vehicle will rollover in a crash. The NHTSA claimed the ratings would allow consumers to "choose a safe vehicle for themselves and their family."
Horsepuckey, in two piles! Pile one: their ratings are no more than guesses, deliberately divorced from any empirical data the government collects on actual occurrence of roll-over in real-life situations. Pile two: when you factor in all types of crashes, large SUV's are the safest vehicles on the road, by far, according to the government's own data. These ratings actually steer consumers away from the safest vehicles on the road.
Any rational person setting out to establish a ratings systems to predict the likelihood of rollover would probably do one of two things: either conduct driving tests, like Consumer Reports did with the Suzuki Samurai, or you might analyze government data on rollover crashes related to individual models. The NHTSA did neither - it based the ratings on its so-called "static stability factor," which measures center of gravity and track width. In other words, they whipped out their rules, gazed at their scales, and guessed.
The auto industry has already complained, to little effect, that these ratings are woefully inaccruate measures of rollover probability:
[GM safety engineer Phillip] Horton said that when GM looked at actual rollover rates in accidents in six states involving the Chevrolet Blazer and GMC Jimmy, it got different results than NHTSA. GM's results would have translated into a three-star rating for the four-wheel-drive Blazer and Jimmy and two stars for the two-wheel-drive versions. "The Blazer is not being accurately characterized," Horton said. [Washington Post article]
However, the government was not deterred by concerns of accuracy or fairness.
What about the interests of public safety? Isn't the government helping consumers by pointing out safety concerns, even if they're not 100% accurate? Not by a long shot. In fact, they actually steer consumers away from safe vehicles towards some of the most dangerous deathtraps on the road.
According to an analysis by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, using the USDOT's numbers, occupants of the smallest passenger cars are almost three times as likely to die as occupants of the heaviest SUV's - 249 deaths per million cars vs. just 90. The four-star Ford Focus is simply a deathtrap compared to the much-safer GMC Jimmy, which only earned one star in the Rollover Ratings. If the government really wanted to better inform consumers about vehicle safety, it wouldn't single out rollovers, but would rate all models based on per-vehicle fatality data which it maintains.
How many families have shunned larger, safer vehicles due to the government's drumbeat on roll-over? How many children have died in the passenger seat of a Kia during a head-on collision due to roll-over fears? How many more lives will be sacrificed at the altar of the government's fuel-economy-at-any-cost agenda? W
Who cares about the Golden Globes? This week, the Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch's Wacky Warning Labels contest picked some doozies. The winner? A warning label on a pair of shin pads: "Shin pads cannot protect any part of the body they do not cover." You gotta check out some of the runners up! W
Two or three years ago, John Ashcroft spoke at a conference my employer sponsored. I had to drive to the Hill, pick him and shuttle him across the river and back in time for him to cast some votes that afternoon. As we crossed the bridge on the return trip, he said we'd make it back in plenty of time because "Mario Andretti" was driving - meaning, of course, me. In the Senate, however, Ashcroft has a hard-driving reputation of his own.
On Tuesday, Feingold lightened a tense opening-day hearing by telling a story about how Ashcroft once gave him and Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.)--one of the chamber's most liberal members--a ride home from the Capitol. 'A kind gesture but a wild, somewhat hair-raising ride,' Feingold described the experience, expressing thanks that Ashcroft had not been nominated for Transportation secretary. The packed chamber cracked up.
So, I'm proud to say that my driving scared even John Ashcroft. [Side note - I made it across the bridge without killing anyone, unlike some of Ashcroft's former colleagues.] W
God bless Ann Coulter for her willingness to strip the bark off anyone who ticks her off:
Republican presidents need to start sending at least one Potemkin nominee to the Senate for confirmation hearings. If there were just one Cabinet nominee willing to sacrifice his appointment for the opportunity to yell back at that adulterous drunk, Sen. Teddy Kennedy might not be so cavalier before launching his premeditated vituperations.
I for one, would love to see Ashcroft utter these words: "Senator Kennedy, I will enforce all the laws... especially the new federal drunk-driving mandate. Can you please step away from the podium and recite the alphabet backwards?" W
Bookmark: Metafilter member random links. W
According to Bill Clinton, minorities think the criminal justice system is unfair.
If you are white, you most likely believe the system is fair. If you belong to a minority group, you most likely feel the opposite. If we want to keep crime coming down, we need to instill trust in our criminal justice system.
Yet, this is the system Clinton and others think should be in charge of enforcing hate crime laws? W