why is this headline news?

There is NO REASON AT ALL why ANYBODY NOT RELATED to her (or dependent on her for their own income, e.g. manager, songwriter, record label) should give a rats ass if Brittney f'in' Spears has a f'in' breakdown.

None at all.

I'm SO in the don't give a shit zone I can't laugh at myself anymore.

an end to the unholy alliance of academic conservatives and the religious right? not this year...

Red State Rabble: The Once and Future McCain:

Karl Marx famously wrote that "religion is the opium of the people." However, like Kevin Federline, that statement seems hopelessly outdated now. Maybe we should re-write it for the Karl Rove generation: "the religious right is the hillbilly heroin of the Republican party."

Perhaps, as some claimed not so long ago, Republicans really wish they knew how to quit the religious right, but to do that they would have to sacrifice their grand ambitions for political power, and that's something -- as the sad, sorry spectacle of McCain, Giuliani, and Romney wooing the fundamentalists clearly demonstrates -- they'll never do.

interesting feature @ the nytimes site

Instant Dictionary.  Double-click a word and a pop-up (unfortunately, full one rather than an ajax one) shows up with a full definition from the American Heritage Dictionary.  Only works on articles, not the front page.  Don't know if you need an nytimes "free account, blah blah blah" for it to work, as I have one.

military as law enforcement? it's possible now...

Making Martial Law Easier - New York Times:

A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night. So it was with a provision quietly tucked into the enormous defense budget bill at the Bush administration’s behest that makes it easier for a president to override local control of law enforcement and declare martial law.

The provision, signed into law in October, weakens two obscure but important bulwarks of liberty. One is the doctrine that bars military forces, including a federalized National Guard, from engaging in law enforcement. Called posse comitatus, it was enshrined in law after the Civil War to preserve the line between civil government and the military. The other is the Insurrection Act of 1807, which provides the major exemptions to posse comitatus. It essentially limits a president’s use of the military in law enforcement to putting down lawlessness, insurrection and rebellion, where a state is violating federal law or depriving people of constitutional rights.

The newly enacted provisions upset this careful balance. They shift the focus from making sure that federal laws are enforced to restoring public order. Beyond cases of actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or to any “other condition.”

Changes of this magnitude should be made only after a thorough public airing. But these new presidential powers were slipped into the law without hearings or public debate. The president made no mention of the changes when he signed the measure, and neither the White House nor Congress consulted in advance with the nation’s governors.

There is a bipartisan bill, introduced by Senators Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and Christopher Bond, Republican of Missouri, and backed unanimously by the nation’s governors, that would repeal the stealthy revisions. Congress should pass it. If changes of this kind are proposed in the future, they must get a full and open debate.

don't matter to me much - i have to work today.

Washington-Lincoln Day - washingtonpost.com:

Last month the country took off a Monday for an important holiday of fairly recent vintage. The name on that day is King, as it should be. It's not called Civil Rights Leaders' Day. So should the names on this Monday be Washington and Lincoln. Without them, this could have been a very different country from what most of us want it to be. Without our attention to their lives and lessons, we could yet become such a nation.

On the other hand, when the day is marked by a mattress sale, how much honor are we really giving them no matter what the day is named?

i'm thankful for trustworthy friends...

My office mate returned from a 3 week long safari  + a few days in Rome to find that somehow his cats ended up missing.  Given the cold we've been through since he left (he left in January, when it was still above 50 most of the time), if they some how escaped the house he fears the worst.

uh, ok, now how do you merge together the different technologies?

Unless the FTC, SEC, FCC, or DOJ get in the way, Sirius and XMRadio will merge into a single entity.

The Feds have gone against this before, but that was in terms of one acquiring the other, which they insist is not what they're proposing here.

The Feds were also against a merger of Dish & DirectTV a few years back.  One of the problems with how the Feds look at it is that they see the market in question in isolation, not in relation to its ability to compete with similar operations.  In this Dish/DTV case, they fought it on the assumption that the monopoly of one sat tv vendor would be bad.  The reality is that neither company sees each other as competition so much as they are in competition with the local cable companies.  Having to compete with each other for prices and services hurts their ability to keep up with the cable monopoly (and by extension, the degree to which the cable companies are adding services to compete with the phone companies trying to get into the entertainment biz).

So too, sat radio.  XM and Sirius are in competition with each other, no doubt, but they're also in competition with ground-based systems, from traditional radio to internet radio (granted, that won't work in a car), to the new HD radio.  To maintain their independence from the ClearChannel monoglot, they have to be able to remain competitive with them.  Hard to do when they are based on a monthly fee and HD is "free" (as HD is often supported by commercials, just like traditional radio).  Their strongest advantage is that being subscription-based, they can get away without censorship (not that the FCC doesn't want to get greedy and regulate free speech there as well, but they haven't convinced congress of that yet).

Doesn't mean I'm not concerned with the eventual changes in the channel line-ups, nor with the idea that to support the possible 300 channels that would result if all channels stayed on both systems, i'd have to get brand new radios.  then there's the question of what stations would survive the relay that DirectTV does with XM's channels.

In short, its' a lot of change and a lot of uncertainty, and while "Wall Street" may like the idea, given that they look only at the money, the customer base of BOTH systems (well, except those fans of Howard Stern, who know his show will survive) will be very nervous waiting to find out if their fav DJ/channel/show survives the merger.

In addition, this merger does nothing to deter their real common "enemy", the record labels and publishing houses that want to constantly argue with them for higher royalty rates and stronger DRM protections for their new devices that allow for recording streams digitally.