World’s smallest violin

A newsletter from The Wall Street Journal brought this item to NewMexiKen’s attention.

According to a report in the Seattle Times:

Roughly 40,000 poor people have been dropped from the Oregon Health Plan this year because of their failure to make monthly premium payments, some as low as $6 a month…

Advocates for the poor say the premiums are too expensive for some people and the government may have overestimated the ability of people to mail a check.

“It’s an enormous barrier,” said Ellen Pinney, director of the Oregon Health Action Committee. “Let alone the $6, there is the whole issue of writing a check or getting a money order, putting it in an envelope with a stamp and putting it in the mail to this place in Portland that must receive it by the due date.”

Now NewMexiKen truly hates to agree with the Journal on anything — and everyone in this country should have adequate health care as a matter of course — but yapping that people aren’t able to make a payment by mail leaves me non-plussed.

Tornado fighters

Dave Barry posted an item earlier today:

WE SEE NO REASON WHY THIS WOULD NOT WORK
An idea whose time has come: Tornado Fighters.

Better yet are his readers suggestions —

A more practical approach would be to set up decoy trailer parks in uninhabited areas to lure the tornadoes away from populated areas.
— Ernie Gudath”

An even MORE practical approach would be to set up decoy trailer parks on Capitol Hill.
— Mike DeCleene

Hmm

Brian Allen, Director of Corporate Security at Time Warner Cable, speaking before a Tennessee legislative committee as reported by HobbsOnline A.M.:

Prefacing the next statement by saying “This isn’t why we’re here, but,” [Allen] mentioned hypothetical situations where a kiddie-porn addict would pull into the driveway of a Wi-Fi user, download a bunch of pictures, and drive away, leaving the law-abiding citizen to wait for the SWAT team to descend on him. He also said that terrorists could stand outside Wi-Fi user’s homes with laptops and coordinate their attacks over the Internet without being traced.

Ministry of truth

According to a report on Democracy Now and several other sources, the “White House Alters Website To Block Google Archives”

Meanwhile it has been revealed that the White House has manipulated its web site to prevent Internet search engines including Google from archiving portions of the White House website related to Iraq. Over the past few months the White House has come under criticism for altering archived pages as the situation in Iraq worsens. In the most widely noted case the White House altered the headline for its coverage of his speech aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. The web page originally read “President Bush announces combat operations in Iraq have ended.” But several months later the text “combat operations” was changed to “major combat operations” as it became evident that the fighting in Iraq had not ended.

This is probably a violation of the Presidential Records Act among other things.

Geomagnetic storm

Easterbrook

Geomagnetic effects of the storm may cause your cell phone to fritz today, and it might be prudent to back up electronic files more often than usual. I won’t be the least surprised if, when the storm hits, computers at the Office of Management and Budget go haywire; the malfunctioning machines immediately declare that the United States has a $500 billion budget surplus; technicians then say that the computers cannot possibly be repaired until after the November 2004 presidential election.

A Growing Number of Video Viewers Watch From Crib

Article from The New York Times on the infant video immersion.

Half an hour before bedtime, John Hill-Edgar is in his blue bouncy chair, watching the “Baby Bach” DVD, riveted by the sound of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” and the pictures of a toy train, a baby, a bubble-blowing toy bear.

He is just 7 months old, too young to talk, but like many other American babies, he has been watching videos from the “Baby Einstein” series almost since birth.

Thanks to Veronica.

What really matters

David Frum’s Diary on National Review Online

Without disputing Charles’ main theory, his challenge makes for an interesting parlor game. So here’s my list, in no particular order, of 10 things from 1950 to 2000 that will still matter two hundred years hence:

1. A. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
2. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao.
3. The paintings of Jackson Pollock.
4. The Godfather I & II
5. C. Milosz, The Captive Mind.
6. West Side Story.
7. M. Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
8. The collected “I Love Lucy.”
9. VS Naipaul, A Bend in the River.
10. Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA.

Also (and in honor of Virginia Postrel) almost the entire corpus of mid-century decorative arts: the Concorde jet, the UN building, and the 1959 Cadillac Coup de Ville.

NewMexiKen would be glad to post your list.

Democrats & Terrorism

Byron York on Democrats & Terrorism on National Review Online

Citing a poll conducted by Democratic strategist Stanley Greenberg:

The survey focused on Democrats who take part in the nominating process in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. And, Iraq aside, what it found was that Democrats, at least those who are most active in politics, simply don’t care about terrorism.

Just don’t care.

In one question, pollsters read a list of a dozen topics — education, taxes, big government, the environment, Social Security and Medicare, crime and illegal drugs, moral values, health care, the economy and jobs, fighting terrorism, homeland security, and the situation in Iraq — and asked, “Which concern worries you the most?”

In Iowa, one percent of those polled — one percent! — said they worried about fighting terrorism. It was dead last on the list.

Two percent said they worried about homeland security — next to last.

In New Hampshire, two percent worried about fighting terrorism and two percent worried about homeland security. In South Carolina — somewhat surprisingly because of its military heritage — the results were the same.

Of course, as other commentators have pointed out, rating something as less worrisome than other things doesn’t mean you “just don’t care.” It is the National Review.

October 29, 1858

According to the History Channel, the first store in what was to become Denver opened on this date in 1858. “Denver and its first store were created to serve the miners working the placer gold deposits discovered a year before at the confluence of Cheery Creek and the South Platte River.”