Unsorted Stuff

First of all, I'd like to wish the folks at Blogger/Pyra/Google success with the new WYSIWYG blog editor. I think it sucks, but it should enable people even less qualified than me to publish their spurious opinions via a blog.
 
Now, on to a couple of news items.
 
I see that Allawi is going to get tough on terrorists. Which terrorists? USA Today reported earlier in the week that 2% of people being held in Iraqi jails and prisons were foreigners.
 
Allawi learned his lessons from the MI6 and the CIA very well. He's establishing a "security service" to deal with the "terrorists." One must keep in mind that Allawi was the teller of the infamous "45 minutes" claim.
 
Of course we don't know how much real support Allawi has amongst the Iraqi populace. Time will tell.
 
Relatedly, the unconflicted U.S. government is scolding the Filipino government for pulling troops out to spare a man's life. The U.S. NEVER negotiates with terrorists.
 
See: 1983 Beirut, Lebanon when another faux cowboy in White House, we did much the same...Nevermind, you're supposed to forget about that.
 
The other thing that caught my otherwise sleep deprived attention this morning was that Martha got 5 months in the joint, and another 5 months of "home detention." I'm sure she'll somehow make it through the 5 months confined to her stately Connecticut manor.
 
Now, we have to look at Kenneth "Kenny Boy" Lay. If Martha gets 10 months for making what - $20K? - Kenny Boy should get an "Arabian Crew Cut" if convicted :) (yes, I just made that up)
 
This WYSIWYG editor is a real step backwards. *sigh*

Success!!

The blog now renders acceptably well in IE at 800 x 600.

I think I'm done messing with the CSS for a while - okay, maybe a tweak here and there - but that's all.

Once I fill the blog up with topical stuff over the next week or so, I'll be engaging in a link swap drive.

I do have one really interesting item for you(at least I found it interesting). Karen Kwiatkowski was interviewed by Philip Dru back in May. You can D/L and listen to the interview by clicking on → this link ←. Neocon strategy explained by someone that was right there listening. There is a lot of material covered. It's almost an hour and a half, and well worth your time. In my humble opinion. It's a 10MB D/L. If you'd rather listen to the interview in streaming audio, here's a dial-up friendly 16k stream.

Die Wirtschaft

Sorry about my use of German for the entry title(The economy) but I'm reading Marx. I'm concurrently reading Keynes so I'm more than a little confused about economic theory at present :)

No worries though, as real world economics are vibrant and many faceted things that seem bent on confounding theories and rendering equations useless..or else we're all being mislead. Nah. That could never happen.

The state of the U.S. economy seems to be wiltering under the summer heat.

The labor market is loosening, producer prices slipped unexpectedly in June, and the housing market - which has been the bulwark of economic strength all throughout the last four years - is cooling as sure as interest rates are rising.

All told, the stimulus from the Bush tax cuts appear only in the rear-view mirror. The various talking heads that were raving about Bush's economic plan were directly benefitting from it.

For those of you using IE at a resolution of 800 x 600, help is on the way. I have a couple of days to reapply the old template and it'll be right as rain.

Back on Thursday

I have been on a data recovery crusade..I lost the working template to pure bs - that is, that template that works in the utterly useless IE browser at 800 x 600.

So, I'm using a linked stylesheet to reconstruct the template...essentially reverse engineering the blog template via a stylesheet.

If I could spend a few uninterrutpted hours on the template, I'd have it done. Unfortunately, Thursday July 15 is the soonest I'll be able to work on it.