Gee, I wonder why:
Washington, D.C., February 23, 2009--Sales of Ayn Rand's “Atlas Shrugged” have almost tripled over the first seven weeks of this year compared with sales for the same period in 2008. This continues a strong trend after bookstore sales reached an all-time annual high in 2008 of about 200,000 copies sold.
Reason magazine online has a Personal Stimulus Generator, which you can fill out and thus stake your very own claim for some of the trillions of dollars soon to flow from Washington. I filled it out, and here's the result. If you don't want to read the whole thing (nobody in Congress has, after all), here's my part that was added:
wireless and broadband deployment grant programs
If you've been the victim of a violent crime, this isn't exactly the kind of mistake you want to happen:
More than 3,600 crime victims across Indiana mistakenly received messages Thursday telling them that the person who committed the crime against them would be released from the Department of Correction.
The man has 14 gold medals -- more than any other Olympian in history -- and he feels compelled to apologize to the U.S. Olympic Committee gnats who are "disappointed" in such behavior from a "role model"?
Michael Phelpts apologized for "regrettable" behavior and "bad judgment" after a photo of him smoking a marijuana pipe surfaced in British tabloid News of the World.
While we've been busy arguing over whether George W. Bush's policies have or have not kept America safe, it turns out that Berkeley, Calif., is the nation's true instrument of peace:
Berkeley's public library will face a showdown with the city's Peace and Justice Commission tonight over whether a service contract for the book check-out system violates the city's nuclear-free ordinance.
Any politician who tries to govern by public opinion poll is an idiot. Even assuming the polls are accurate, which can be a dangerous thing to do, people often don't know what they want, or they want contradictory things, or they want one thing one day and something else the next. Consider this Indiana University poll about public education:
Wonkette takes on Maureen Dowd, and it's no contest:
To Maureen Dowd, the problem is not that Senate seats have been traded back and forth between the same four or five families for the past hundred years, it's that Caroline Kennedy hasn't gotten one yet.
Majel Barrett Roddenberry, once called "The First Lady of Star Trek" by the Chicago Tribune, has died. She played various roles in the original series, but you probably know her voice if you've caught an epidode of any of them:
Roddenberry had another distinction: Beginning with the original series, she supplied the coolly detached voice of the USS Enterprise's computer -- something she did on the various "Star Trek" series.
The Indiana Department of Workforce Development has released its list of the Hot 50 jobs in Indiana and, believe it or not, "newspaper journalist" did not make it. Probably something to do with the criteria:
To be selected for the list, a job had to be ranked in the top 200 in terms of both total growth (the numeric count of new jobs) and percent growth from 2006 to 2016, and the percent growth had to be above the statewide average of 9.9%.
Those of us not of the Left -- we who inhabit the Center to the Right -- are suffering in varying degrees of discomfort these days. Somebody who is Not One Of Us will take over the White House, and we don't know how much he'll Change our world, just that we are definitely going to be yanked out of our Comfort zones. But even many who did vote for Obama seem to be unhappy, too. Does it turn out that Obama is not One Of Them, either?
