In lieu of a “Top 10 of 2003″ list, I went through the first few months of my archives and picked out what I think are the best posts from the hit-and-miss early days of this site.

George Bush, defender of women’s rights
God is on whose side?
The new “monkey” trials
The six commandments?
Jefferson would have hated “The 700 Club”
Judge “proves” link between Iraq and al-Qaeda?
The Lord made me do it.
How much is hard work worth?
Why these tax cuts suck
Lucky Duckies
Got To Get You Into My Life
Frankenfoods
The Corky Defense
This wouldn’t have happened if Gore was president
He wants an amendment?
Who’s your daddy?
Scientific proof that conservatives are nuts
Bush on Global Warming

Happy New Year, Everybody!

With a few days left in the contest, I want to thank everyone for your support of “Brother, Can You Spare A Job?”. As a “thank you” for all of you who went through the trouble of trying to vote for our ad, we’ve worked with the Internet Archive to host a higher quality version of the commercial complete with credits. You can view the upgraded version by clicking on the picture below :

It looks like the movie page still doesn’t have a link up. Until then, you can access the short directly by clicking here.

And while I’m on the subject of “Bush in 30 Seconds”, I hope this doesn’t come off as petty, but am I the only one that thinks 95% of those ads are complete crap? I’ve seen some really great ones, but for the most part, the ads tend to fall into one or more of the following formulas :

Man/Woman yells at the camera

“How will we explain it to the children?”

The “You wouldn’t take this kind of crap from your friends/family/work/etc.”

“Even children know it’s wrong to lie”

Home video of a guy running around in a Bush Mask

Game show parody

Filmmaker interviews friends and family on the street

Faux-quiz with obvious answers (QUESTION : “Who’s the biggest liar ever?”)

…and the absolute worst….

parodies of nursery rhymes or other popular sayings (ex. “I pledge allegiance, to Halliburton, and the Corporate States of America….”)

I wish I had saved the URLs for the really good ones I’ve seen. I searched around on google for some good ads, but I couldn’t find any of the ones I really liked. I did find some pretty good ones here, here, and here. If you saved any links for the ads that you loved or hated, please post them in the comments.

1) Which of the following 90’s “alternative” band presidential endorsements is real?

The Gin Blossoms / Wesley Clark

Counting Crows / John Kerry

Hootie and the Blowfish / John Edwards

Better Than Ezra / Dick Gephardt

Arrested Development / Al Sharpton

The Spin Doctors / Dennis Kucinich

Linda Perry (of Four Non-Blondes) / Carol Moseley-Braun

Toad the Wet Sprocket / Howard Dean

Soul Asylum / Joe Lieberman

Click here for the answer.

2) Who’s the only person who really gives a shit about this endorsement?

Click here for the answer.

Am I the only one who doesn’t find this news to be very comforting?

Attorney General John Ashcroft on Tuesday recused himself from the politically sensitive investigation of who leaked the name of a CIA operative. The Justice Department quickly named a special prosecutor to take over the investigation.

The announcement was made by James Comey, the department’s new No. 2 official, at the Justice Department. The U.S. attorney in Chicago, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, will take over the investigation and report to Comey.

“He has the power and authority to make whatever prosecutorial judgment he needs,” Comey said.
. . .
“The attorney general in an abundance of caution believed that his recusal was appropriate based on the totality of the circumstances and the facts and evidence developed at this stage of the investigation,” Comey said. “I agree with that judgment.”
. . .
Investigators want to know who leaked the name of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA officer, to syndicated columnist Robert Novak in July. Plame is married to former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, who has said he believes his wife’s identity was disclosed to discredit his assertions that the Bush administration exaggerated Iraq’s nuclear capabilities to build the case for war.

The leaker could be charged with a felony if identified.

The FBI has interviewed more than three dozen Bush administration officials, including political adviser Karl Rove and press secretary Scott McClellan.

Now the centrist in me wants to say “Wow! This is great news! Now that Ashcroft has recused himself, maybe we can get some real answers in this investigation!”. Unfortunately, this news has caught me on a bad day and I’m in conspiracy theorist mode.

Why did it take six months for Ashcroft to recuse himself? Shouldn’t he have figured out after a few days whether or not there might be potential conflicts of interest here? I can’t shake the image of Jeb Bush recusing himself from the Florida recount in 2000. I can’t back it up or anything, but I keep thinking this is just the Bush Administration’s way of setting us up for sweeping this whole affair under the rug.

Brace yourselves everybody. This is completely retarded :

Anitria Akins of Atlanta had always wanted a Lexus, and now she’ll always have one. She named her 9-year-old daughter A’lexus after the popular car.

“There were so many ‘Alexises’ out there, and I wanted something different,” says Akins, a U.S. Postal Service supervisor. “I thought about naming her just ‘Lexus,’ but I wanted something that started with an A.”

Plenty of other people have been having the same idea. In 2000, there were 1,263 girls named Alexus whose parents registered them for Social Security numbers. There were also 553 girls named Lexus, Lexxus, Lexis or Lexxis.

They’re part of a growing trend toward naming children after products — brand-name babies.

There are kids named after cars: Corvette, Acura, Camry, Celica, Infiniti. Little designers: Armani, Dior and Halston. Alcohol brand names abound: Courvoisier and Hennessy could be coming soon to a preschool near you, joining Killian and Guinness and Ronrico.
. . .
Children now about 3 years old are named Delta, Avis, Disney, Ikea, Evian, Hyatt, Breck and Delmonte.

There’s a little boy in Texas named ESPN. Connie Brown of Atlanta has a granddaughter in Washington, D.C., named Cambria, after a brand of wine. It’s also a type of kitchen countertop, she notes.

I guess this is all part of the “bling-bling”-ization of our culture. I really don’t have much more to add other than to say I don’t think I’d be able to have a meaningful conversation with anyone who is so goddamn stupid that they would name their kid after a brand of whiskey.

I just realized that I have some bandwidth I can burn before the end of the year, so I’ve got a Christmas present for you all. Just for kicks, I’m gonna make a mix CD for you guys. Keep your eyes on the site tomorrow, because I’m only gonna keep it up for an hour or so.

Well, according to USA Today, Dean is definitely going to lose to Bush next November. After all, numbers never lie:

President Bush is ending his third year in office with 63% job approval, the highest rating of any president since Lyndon Johnson, who finished 1963 with a 74% rating a month after John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

Johnson went on to win the 1964 election 10 months later in a landslide over Republican Barry Goldwater.

With the exception of Jimmy Carter, every president since Franklin Roosevelt who ended his third year in office with job approval above 50% won the re-election he sought. Presidential job-approval polling began with Roosevelt.

Richard Nixon, who was at 50% at the end of his third year, also won. Carter was at 54% when the year ended.

Polling analysts and presidential scholars agree that it is too early to consider Bush a sure winner next year, despite his showing now. Things can change:

? Bush’s father was at 50% approval at the end of 1991, and he lost to Bill Clinton. A sour economy and a perception that he was at a loss to fix it helped do him in.

? Jimmy Carter ended 1979 with 54% approval and was defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980. Carter’s response to the Iranian hostage crisis, which was seen as weak, and a senate primary challenge by Sen. Edward Kennedy eroded confidence in his leadership.

I’d trust Miss Cleo’s predictions about the future as much as I would any political pollster. While it’s “fun” to use polling numbers to play fortune teller with political races, there are three big problems with these kinds of predictions.

The first is that the sample size for this is much too small to make accurate predictions. If the presidential approval ratings only date back to Roosevelt’s first term, then were only looking at eighteen total elections as our sample. But before you crunch the numbers, you have to remove the five elections that didn’t involve an incumbent (52, 60, 68, 88, 00). Then there were also three instances in which the incumbent wasn’t actually elected to the job he was trying to regain (48, 64, 76). When you remove all that, you’ve got a situation in which two of the ten elections in which an incumbent was seeking to remain president didn’t succeed. While you can spin this to say that Bush has an 80% chance of beating his challenger, there really isn’t enough data to make that determination.

Secondly, the article doesn’t give any information about the nature of the polls. Are the numbers they’re comparing coming from the same organization using the exact same methods over the last 70+ years? If not, any differences (no matter how subtle) could have an enormous impact on the poll results. Even if they were the same methods, the two out of ten that lost above were the only two incumbents that lost. While you can make the argument that Truman and Johnson’s failures to seek renomination were due to their polling numbers, there are no examples of an incumbent with low polling numbers seeking re-election and losing. The Carter and Bush Sr. losses mentioned in the article are aberrations to a trend that they never prove in the first place.

Finally, it’s not like these things happen in a vacuum. Presidential approval ratings are so hazy, that you can barely use them to make judgments about present performance, much less use them to predict the future. Why don’t they make the correlation that the only two exceptions to the rule were when the incumbent was seeking reelection with a crappy economy? That seems a lot more tangible than any anonymous surveys of registered voters too polite to hang up the phone on an annoying pollster.

In the end, it’s all just a numerology game that’s as silly as a sports fan’s obsession with statistics. So-and-so athlete has never missed a field-goal during a game with a full moon. Incumbents who poll over 50% a year prior to the election (usually) get reelected. Blah, blah, blah…

Why has it taken more than two years for this to happen?

US officials announced that any foreign airliner entering US airspace could be required to have armed police on board.

“We are asking international air carriers to take the protective action as part of our ongoing effort to make air travel safe for Americans and visitors alike,” Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said in a statement.

The announcement came after US officials said intercepted intelligence indicated that al-Qaeda may try to hijack foreign airliners for a repeat of the September 11, 2001 attacks in which 3,000 died.

Isn’t this the kind of thing they should have ordered on September 12th?

You’d think that after the devastation of the 9/11 attacks, the government’s biggest priority would be to put all their effort into making sure a similar attack didn’t happen again. If I were in charge, my efforts would include making sure there are locks on every cockpit door, increased security in airports, an armed guard on every plane, bomb screening for every person and bag that goes on airplanes, etc. While some of these have been done, the rest have been dismissed for being too expensive or too difficult to implement. But apparently they didn’t have much trouble finding money to wage a war over nuclear weapons that didn’t exist, bailing out the airline and insurance industries, and tax cuts for people who don’t need them.

When I first started moved into my current apartment, my mailbox would regularly be filled with letters for the previous occupant. After the first few times leaving the mail out for the mailman to pick back up, I realized that whoever lived here before didn’t leave a forwarding address. So that’s when I started opening the mail instead. This week, I’ve received two Christmas cards from Iran.

I couldn’t begin to tell you what the hell is written in these cards, but it hasn’t stopped me from poring over every little detail of them. The first card was printed on handmade brown paper with a gold leaf embossed on the front. The second card was printed in English and there’s a short note written in a foreign language (Arabic, I think). The note on the inside is dated 7/12 and the postmark is from 11/12.

When they first arrived, I was surprised that there were people who celebrated Christmas over there. Since the only thing I know about Iran is what I’ve gathered from the media, I guess I kinda figured they were all fundamentalist Muslims who want to kill me. For all the talk about religion (and lack thereof) that I put on this site, I feel slightly hypocritical that I somehow feel closer (in a sense) to Iran now that I know there are people there who celebrate “our” holiday.

Since the news of Thursday’s earthquake, I can’t shake the thought that the people who wrote these cards might be dead. It’s even more troubling that the earthquake which leveled an Iranian city was virtually identical to one that I felt just the other day. Our earthquake only killed two people, but Iran is looking at up to 40,000 casualties.

I know it’s easy to forget about tragedies that happen “over there”, especially when they happen to “the enemy”, but I hope everyone can keep this in mind over the holiday season and realize just how fortunate we all are. We may not know anybody affected by this, but the people of Iran are looking at a loss of life ten times as great as the one we experienced on 9/11. Unlike us however, the only culprit they can blame is a fate that puts them in an area prone to earthquakes with an economy too poor to prepare for them.

Well, now’s the time of year that everyone is making their Top 10 lists looking back on 2003. I’m kinda thinking I should try to do one too, but I can’t come up with any ideas. I was going to make a “Top 10 ‘Top 10′ Lists”, but that’s kinda cheesy. I was also thinking of breaking out of the clich? of listing ten items by listing 9 or 11 instead, but that’s even more cheesy. Humans have been using a ten-based number system for thousands of years, so it’s probably a little late to be fighting that battle.

So what should I write about? Religion? Politics? You guys have any suggestions?

Also, I’m still soliciting slogan suggestions. If you have any more ideas, you can post them here. I’ll probably replace the “Fair and Balanced” with a random selection around the first of the year.