- I look forward to the day when I can IM people without needing accounts on AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and Gmail, or do social networking without accounts on Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook, or photo-sharing without accounts on Flickr, Picasa, and Snapfish, etc. That’s why I like email and HTTP. They’re simple, cross-platform, and you don’t have to favor one corporation’s proprietary crap over another to communicate with people.

- I like Bill Richardson just fine, but when I saw him nominated for Commerce Secretary the other day, I was instantly reminded that he was the only Democratic candidate who supported a balanced budget amendment to the constitution. Needless to say, if fiscal hawks like Richardson had their way, we’d be totally fucked right now. Being able to run up deficits during a recession is a very good thing.

- The Kinks finally have a box set (U.K. only) coming out, but the third of six discs ends with their work in 1971. Ooof…that’s a lot of late-period Kinks. For those of you who haven’t figured out how awesome the Kins are yet, you’d be better off just picking up their first eight albums used on Amazon. Or just Village Green and Something Else.

- Although I’m sympathetic to the fact that the Big Three are getting an undue level of scrutiny as compared to the financial sector when asking for bailouts, I’m still not a fan of bailing them out. There’s a lot of great “if we put X restriction in the bailout” ideas floating around, but the same discussions happened on the edges of the $700 bailout discussions too. Bailout-wise, the choice is going to be either a blank check or nothing, which is a shame because I’d rather see the auto industry saved either through a heavily structured bankruptcy package financed out of the $700 billion or nationalizing those industries completely and using their combined manufacturing muscle to (a) try to get a head start on 2009 infrastructure projects or (b) building stuff people want to buy. Of course, either would require a level of imagination and political courage that doesn’t exist in Washington D.C.

- If I start speculating about Bush giving a lame-duck pardon to O.J. Simpson, do you think that will that be enough to get me a guest spot on MSNBC or CNN?

- The economy’s in the shitter, but at least we’re still burning through money on missile defense tests. I hope they’re spending as many resources on “nuclear device smuggled in an unchecked shipping container” tests, since that’s a lot more likely to happen.