I've checked the stats — this obscure website gets five visits on a record day. But it's still technically public, and this is as much of a soapbox as I need.
So here's my announcement: I'm giving up cigarettes, starting today.
Enough of that awful shit.
The enthusiasm with which you are following this story does not begin to match its importance.
President Bush doesn't bother with vetoes; he simply declares his intention not to enforce anything he dislikes. Charlie Savage at The Globe reported recently that Mr. Bush had issued more than 750 "presidential signing statements" declaring he wouldn't do what the laws required. Perhaps the most infamous was the one in which he stated that he did not really feel bound by the Congressional ban on the torture of prisoners.
In this area, as in so many others, Mr. Bush has decided not to take the open, forthright constitutional path. He signed some of the laws in question with great fanfare, then quietly registered his intention to ignore them. He placed his imperial vision of the presidency over the will of America's elected lawmakers.
This is a rather more serious problem than present coverage would suggest.
Valerie Plame Wilson, the Central Intelligence Agency covert officer whose name was publicly disclosed three years ago, is shopping a book proposal among a small group of publishers, according to two people familiar with the project.
Both people were granted anonymity because their publishing companies have signed nondisclosure agreements about the content of the proposal.
People really have trouble keeping secrets about this woman, don't they?
Matthew Yglesias on why some crazy ideas are crazier than other crazy ideas:
the Book of Mormon seems to me to be an unusually transparent fraud for a religious text. It's supposed to have been written in the ancient New World and yet it contains extended metaphors about sheep and shepherds. This is the sort of thing you would write if you lived in 19th century America, were familiar with the Bible, and wanted to write something along those lines. It's not at all the sort of thing you would write if you lived in pre-Columbus America where there were no sheep. Metaphors aside, there's talk of literal herds of livestock (llamas, perhaps), horses, steel and all manner of other things that didn't exist at that time.
This is a start, although it's still not totally clear how this makes LDS's overall premise more or less crazy than those featuring resurrected god-men or prehistoric space wars.
I have never really had to compete for a job. All three of my high-school employers hired me on the spot. I worked for my university at a job for which I had to interview, but I can't imagine there were many more applicants than openings. I landed an internship on my first try during my junior year because, as I found out later, my new supervisor had a vicious and tiresome (to her colleagues) tendency to burn my predecessors out. I stuck around, though — long enough to weasel a promotion to Real Staffer after she left. Several months after that, she got me a job with her new employer, and I have now been there (here) for almost two years.
In all that time, I have submitted exactly one resume to a stranger (for the internship). In the last week I've tripled my total – so far, to no effect.
I'm hopelessly clueless about the process. I've been working in offices for far too long to be so ignorant, especially now that I've begun to look around for new daytime environs.