CW wasn’t quite up when Lawrence H. Summers, who was president of Harvard at the time, said that women weren’t making it to the top of fields of math and science because of an intrinsic lack of aptitude. This is exactly the kind of insight into human possibilty that got this guy to where he was, and we were baffled and disappointed by his decision to step down.

so anyway, it looks like the Board of Overseers has picked the new person and uh, jeez guys, we hate to second guess you and everything but hello! You’re picking a woman? Larry Summers is rolling in his metaphorical grave. You fired the poor guy and now you’re not even going to take his advice? What about her intrinsic lack of aptitude? Are we the only ones with any god damn sense? Maybe you got confused because she’s got a dude’s, but look, we have it on good authority Drew Gilpin Faust is a bone fide woman. I mean, what’s going to happen to Harvard for fuck’s sake?

You might have been too busy watching the Top Chef season finale (Spoiler Alert: Ilan won; Marcel pouted) to hear that Al Franken is running for office in 2008. That’s right folks, you can vote for Franken next year. As long as you’re in Minnesota.

CNN reports that Franken has announced his candidacy for a seat in Senate representing his home state. The liberal, O’Reilly-beating comedian-turned-radio-host-turned-politician is running against incumbant Sen. Norm Coleman (R), whose first priority while in Congress is to “get things done for Minnesota.”

That’s going to be a tough platform to beat.

All this comes soon after Franken’s former project, Air America Radio, was bought out of bankruptcy by real estate mogul Stephen Green, founder and chairman of SL Green Realty Corp. No worries of Green being in cahoots with Murdoch, though. Says Minnesota’s KARE 11:

Green is the brother of Mark Green, a longtime New York politician who has also appeared frequently as a guest on Air America Radio.

Sigh of relief.

So no Franken on the squack box anymore, but if all goes well, maybe we can hear him on the Senate floor on C-SPAN.

Watch Franken tread on Scarborough Country:

Read the rest of this entry »

While dogs know instinctually not to shit where they sleep, the Air Force seems to have no such intrinsic logic. Here’s something I saw on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal:

The CIA plans to mount the once-secret, 102-foot-long supersonic plane on a pole at its Langley, Va., headquarters in time for the agency’s 60th anniversary in September. The jet chosen for the mission is a particularly well-preserved specimen that has been at the Minnesota Air Guard Museum, next to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, since 1991

The story is only available online to Subscribers, but it goes like this. The A-12 was acquired and restored through the efforts of James Goodall, a kind of creepy but harmless “plane nut,” who has been enchanted with the jet, precursor to the SR71, since he first saw it 1964. This poor guy really made a titanic effort not only restore and maintain this plane, but obtain it in the first place before it was to be scrapped in 1990.

How shocking that the American military would become involved in a petty, alienating squabble with a group of people that would otherwise take pride in that branch of the military’s achievements. The Air Guard Museum is small, and is staffed entirely by volunteers. They are using the fact that the Museum has no salaried director and is therefore not up to Air Force museum standards to reclaim to plane and gift it to the CIA. There are three other A-12s available in various places around the country, and why the Air Force is determined to take this one back is not clear from the Wall Street Journal article. You’d think that at a time when most people feel the military has its head up its ass, Air Force decision-makers would take a little more care before blundering forth into PR troubles like this one.

A lot of people would be turned off at the Air National Guard Museum in Minnesota; some people would find monumentalizing these various Cold War projects in poor taste. But everyone can relate to a civic labor of love being pissed on by the very institution that gave rise to the undertaking in the first place. And It says something about the state of things when one disfuntional arm of the military would allienate its supporters to honor another, more disfunctional arm.

The population of Libya is about 5 million, and of those five million, over a fifth of them are employed by the state in some capacity or another. Libya bills itself as a sort of Socialist kind of country, so this sort of thing is to be expected in a place that, as far as we can tell, doesn’t have a whole lot going for it other than it isn’t on the American hit list anymore. In a move that kind of reminds us of the time our parents told us we either had to get a real job or move out, the Libyan government plans to cut 400,000 people from it’s payrolls. Burn.

Really though, it’s kind of the opposite of that. Because, you know. These people are getting fired. It’s not clear that there are some other economic sectors that can absorb these workers, or what the deal is with that, but it sort of sounds like Libya is expecting an influx of American capital now that the US gov’t has removed its sanctions of the North African nation, and has a medium term plan to raise the standard of living for all Libyans.

So, I guess what we’re trying to say here is this is the kind of result you get from a rogue nation of evil-doers when you leave them the fuck alone instead of decimating their country.

Just a thought.

• The New York Times is already lost in fantasy about who will replace Hillary in the Senate when her office moves down Pennsylvania Ave. a few blocks. [NYT]
• Not everybody is stoked about High Def. Porn who make porn and the people who watch it, for example. Damn, that shit is stank. [NYT]
• Did you know that Barrack Obama is an Islamofacist terrorist? The Washington Times offers a glimmer of the slime to come. [WaPo]
• Not to worry: Proposed California spanking ban would only effect parents of children. [NYT]
• Paris gets 3 years probation for DUI. That’s totally, like, a really long time to have to drive without being all fucked up. [The Superficial]
• Prisoners outlive people who are not prisoners. Another reason to close GitMo. [ABC]
• Thieves caught after their stolen GPS devices lead police to their home. Duh. [ABC]
• India has a space program. [AJE]
• Tom DeLay pleads for honest and open debate in Washington. Hey Tom, here’s an idea for your blog: shut the fuck up. [TDB]

Our source on this one is the Listening Post blog over at Wired, but they’re saying that Germany is pushing for an international ban on violent video games after some Counter-Strike enthusiast shot up his school. Despite the fact that we spent several hours playing Super Mario World this evening, we think video games are pretty stupid for the most part. Except Civilization. That game is fucking rawk. Though it probably should be banned because it’s more addictive that crack. But the point is this: it’s shocking to us that Germany would strive to do something dumb and reactionary, but that’s what kind of policy-making a ban on violent games would be. People don’t do violent things because they’re into violent games; the opposite is true. A ban on creativity and and free speech ain’t about to cure social ills.