Army Post Road

     I don’t know what this portends for the rest of the day but I have another post about beer.
     In the Volokh Conspiracy post I linked to below they link to the Beer Advocate. Excellent website. They have a great review of some new spring seasonal brews.
     Don’t forget to Respect Beer.

Professor Greg Mankiw related the following quote from the Adam Smith Institute on his blog:

“Need” now means wanting someone else’s money. “Greed” means wanting to keep your own. “Compassion” is when a politician arranges the transfer.

Joseph Sorboran

     Iowa House Republican Leader, Christopher Rants, posted a memorandum from the Iowa Right to Work Coalition on his website, www.rants.us, Thursday outlining a very strong case as to why Iowa should continue to be a Right-To-Work state, without any negotiating fees or agency fees. I excerpted a chunk below.

* Unions voluntarily chose to represent non-members.

Unions fought for, and received, the authority to be the exclusive representation for a bargaining unit. They knew at that time that this would include some non-union members – yet they still advocated for this power. Now they are complaining that they are “forced” to represent non-union members, calling them “free-loaders” for receiving services and benefits that they never asked for in the first place.

     Yet another example of organized labor, and the American left as a whole, trying to have it both ways and get away with it.

     Michael Arrington from TechCrunch has an entry entitled Somebody Needs To Stop This about how a bankruptcy court in California is making public all the confidential records of a now-defunct Silicon Valley law firm that represented some of the most infamous names of the Dot.Com boom. All of the companies records, all of them will be made public in some fashion. Clients can choose to “opt-out” of the deal and only have their records available at the National Archives on a limited basis. Everyone else, everyone who either chooses to “opt-in” or fails to indicate a choice, will have all of their records made fully available to the public via a University of Maryland and National Archives program.
     How on Earth does any judge anywhere in the country see this as a permissible exception to the attorney-client privilege? Why are all these records, by default, going to go on display unless these clients act to shield them? Why are privileged documents crucial to the historical record of the Dot.Com Era? Since the thing that marked the era the most distinctively was the new technology it spawned and the financial upheaval it launched, all of which are either preserved for posterity by public products or public records, why do we need to wrench judicial procedure and rules for this project?

     On a positive bit, support is growing for out-going Congressman Jim Leach to become the new United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Realistically, that support has grown from a lighter’s spark to burning tinder. I, however, don’t think the Congressman’s health is up to such a task.

     I have Internet access today because we have a four-day weekend from work so I’ took the opportunity to go to one of the coffee shops in Junction City and use their wireless Internet. I’ve been here since about 1100 this morning so I’m making all the use of it I can. Earlier, I ran into the admin NCO for U of I’s ROTC Battalion. It was really cool and random, he just happened to’ve walked into this coffee shop with a female on his lunch break. I haven’t seen the guy in 2 years. Even in a 1.5 million man total Army, it’s still a small Army. We talked about how one of the guys who was in my class in ROTC is going to be stationed here once he finishes OBC.
     Part of the suffering that has been the cause of much tearing of clothes and gnashing of teeth concerning our living quarters has been solved: I have satelite TV now. Thank Heaven.
     Also, the really big, really good news it that I finally got promoted a week ago.
     That’s all for now. I should probably leave the coffee shop since I’ve been here for three hours or so. I’ll probably come back Sunday sometime.

     This evening was neat. We went to dinner at Buffalo Wild (go figure, it was a Tuesday, when do we do that?) and then after that we went to Java Joe’s for coffee and that’s when the departure from the typical happened. As we found out, Java Joe’s has a Poetry Slam on the third Tuesday of every month which tonight happened to be. The four of us (my parents and Keely, who also happened to be the party at dinner) sat and listened to the first round (it was a three-round competition) and then they departed. I stayed and listened to another round. It was a very good thing. I hadn’t done anything like that for a while, other than listening to NPR occasionally when I’m driving. In middle school and the first part of high school I really enjoyed poetry so it was nice to go back to that for a little while. Plus there were a few cute girls there (too young for sure though).

     Beau Elliot, a column writer for the Daily Iowan, and I have never seen eye-to-eye. I’ve pilloried him and some of his columns in letters-to-the-editor in the DI and likewise he’s mocked me (and Steve) in his column. Never, ever, would I have thought I’d be quoting him and recommending people read his column but today that day has happened. The best line from his column today is when he said, “It’s as if the UI policymakers walked up to the Exxon Valdez oil spill with a coffee mug, scooped out a cupful of gunk, and said, ‘There - problem solved.’” Read the rest of his column on the UI’s idiotic policy decision to ban smoking within 25′ of any door of a university building.

     Oh yeah, the flood of posts I promised two weeks ago never happened. I got distracted.

     Ok folks, be ready for a deluge of posts tomorrow. Plenty stored up over the last two weeks of not being able to do anything besides government work and check the news and sports.

     Yes, I’m still posting. My Internet was down for a few days and then I was out of town and have been busy, busy, busy.
     My birthday came and went last week. I met my parents and sisters in Kansas City and we hung out there for two days. It was nice. Short, but the Sox beat the Royals when we went to the game on Monday night.
     Right now I’m sitting at the CQ desk since Dustin and I stretched the cable Internet out to the desk.

     As a soldier, and a supporter of the President, I don’t think you really understand how encouraging it is to hear your president say, “shit”. “See the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over,” President Bush said to Prime Minister Blair. Right on Mr. President, right on.