The presidential power grab

The Boston Globe has a fascinating article on what Bush’s refusal to veto bills really means:

Bush is the first president in modern history who has never vetoed a bill, giving Congress no chance to override his judgments. Instead, he has signed every bill that reached his desk, often inviting the legislation’s sponsors to signing ceremonies at which he lavishes praise upon their work.

Then, after the media and the lawmakers have left the White House, Bush quietly files ”signing statements” — official documents in which a president lays out his legal interpretation of a bill for the federal bureaucracy to follow when implementing the new law. The statements are recorded in the federal register.

In his signing statements, Bush has repeatedly asserted that the Constitution gives him the right to ignore numerous sections of the bills — sometimes including provisions that were the subject of negotiations with Congress in order to get lawmakers to pass the bill. He has appended such statements to more than one of every 10 bills he has signed.

”He agrees to a compromise with members of Congress, and all of them are there for a public bill-signing ceremony, but then he takes back those compromises — and more often than not, without the Congress or the press or the public knowing what has happened,” said Christopher Kelley, a Miami University of Ohio political science professor who studies executive power.

So what do all those signing statements do? Well, they give him an excuse to ignore the laws:

President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

how to think about security

Security is all about tradeoffs. Bruce Schneier has five steps you need to take when making a security-related decision:

  1. What problem does the security measure solve?
  2. How well does the security measure solve the problem?
  3. What other security problems does the measure cause?
  4. What are the costs of the security measure?
  5. Given the answers to steps two through four, is the security measure worth the costs?

How did Stephen Colbert get away with it?

Such a brilliant performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner:

But, listen, let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works: the president makes decisions. He’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ’em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know – fiction!

Because really, what incentive do these people have to answer your questions, after all? I mean, nothing satisfies you. Everybody asks for personnel changes. So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write, “Oh, they’re just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!

pave save the internet

MoveOn is organizing a net neutrality awareness campaign. Sign the petition to the US Congress asking for meaningful and enforceable network neutrality:

I signed this petition, along with 250,000 others so far. This petiton will be delivered to Congress before the House of Representatives votes next week. When you sign, you’ll be kept informed of the next steps we can take to keep the heat on Congress.

Snopes.com, which monitors various causes that circulate on the Internet, explained:

Simply put, network neutrality means that no web site’s traffic has precedence over any other’s…Whether a user searches for recipes using Google, reads an article on snopes.com, or looks at a friend’s MySpace profile, all of that data is treated equally and delivered from the originating web site to the user’s web browser with the same priority. In recent months, however, some of the telephone and cable companies that control the telecommunications networks over which Internet data flows have floated the idea of creating the electronic equivalent of a paid carpool lane.

If companies like AT&T have their way, Web sites ranging from Google to eBay to iTunes either pay protection money to get into the “fast lane” or risk opening slowly on your computer. We can’t let the Internet—this incredible medium which has been such a revolutionary force for democratic participation, economic innovation, and free speech—become captive to large corporations.

Politicians don’t think we are paying attention to this issue. Together, we do care about preserving the free and open Internet.

the magic growing text box

Here’s a text box that grows as you type to hold just the right amount of text:

<textarea name="foo" rows="1" cols="20" onkeypress="resizeme(this);"></textarea>

<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
// <![CDATA[
function resizeme(t) {
	var characterCount = t.value.length;

	// assuming proportional font
	var columnCount = Math.floor(t.cols * 1.25);
	var height = t.rows;
	var newHeight = 1 + Math.floor(characterCount/columnCount);

	if (newHeight != height) {
		t.rows = newHeight;
	}
}
// ]]>
</script>

Here it is in action:

top 20 CDs of 2005

  1. Luke Doucet/Broken (and other rogue states)
  2. Kyler England/Live Wire
  3. Jason Mraz/MR. A-Z
  4. Sylvie Lewis/Tangos & Tantrums
  5. Libbie Schrader/Taking the Fall
  6. Samantha Murphy/Somewhere Between Starving & Stardom
  7. Josh Rouse/Nashville
  8. Pocket Dwellers/PD-Atrics
  9. Erin McKeown/We Will Become Like Birds
  10. Sarah Harmer/I’m a Mountain
  11. Kathleen Edwards/Back to Me
  12. Emm Gryner/The Great Lakes
  13. Great Big Sea/The Hard and The Easy
  14. Adrianne/Down To This
  15. Charlotte Martin/Darkest Hour
  16. Anya Marina/Miss Halfway
  17. Tristan Prettyman/twentythree
  18. Krister Axel/Permanent Friday Night
  19. Peter Bradley Adams/EP
  20. Dave’s True Story/Nature

fixing the airlines

Sites like Expedia, Yahoo Travel and Travelocity all have one thing in common: they suck. Actually, they probably all use SABRE, too.

It’s very hard to use these sites to compare trips with multiple airports; refining your results is hard, too. Maybe the UI is bad on purpose — they want you to give up and just buy the more expensive flight.

And why not? They’re travel agents; they make money on ticket sales. There’s hardly an incentive to be objective.

Three new players are filling the void. The first is SideStep, which my friend Samantha told me about. With SideStep, you can easily exclude flights out of your price range, favourite airlines or agreeable departure times. The UI is really slick, and it’s very responsive.

Someone at BarCamp Austin mentioned Kayak, which does much the same thing.

What looks even more interesting is FlySpy, which TechCrunch highlighted in February. FlySpy takes this to a whole new level, letting you track pricing trends and figuring out just when is the right time to buy. You can play with the alpha now, and see what it’s like to fly out of Minneapolis.

Lastly, if you ever want to find out which airlines and flight numbers will take you from A to B, check out SkyGuide.

(keywords: airline airfare flight price cheap)