Email etiquette

If you type in all caps, you are screaming at me.

If you don't take the time to punctuate with any semblance of effort, you are saying you have more important things to do than communicate with me.

If I ask two questions and you only answer one, I know you didn't take time to read my email, and probably should be skeptical of the one answer you did give.

If I copy someone on an email to you but you only reply back to me, it looks like you're hiding something (or, again, aren't paying attention).

Email's great and email's fast, but email also says a lot about how you value me.

I've never wanted to be in a Mamet play more

Stumbled on this in today's Political Diary from the Wall Street Journal:

"I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind. As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.... [Now I] question my hatred for 'the Corporations' -- the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live. And I began to question my distrust of the 'Bad, Bad Military' of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world.... I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism"

-- Playwright David Mamet, writing in the Village Voice on why he is no longer a
"brain-dead liberal."

That. Is. Awesome.

Impressive reporting

CNN's article on the resignation of Elliott Spitzer, the Democratic governor New York (can we call him "former governor" yet?) fails to mention his party affiliation. It makes a reference to the party affiliation of the Lt. Governor's mother's party affiliation, but you have to read the sidebar of the article to learn that "The first-term governor had been considered a rising star in the Democratic Party."

That's it. Nothing in the article proper. And this isn't a blurb, either - it's nearly 1,000 words long.

It's impressive. Really. Quite a feat. Way to rise above partisanship, CNN!

(note: the article will be continually updated throughout the day, so at some point the above post may become out of date if they fix the article. Currently, though, everything above is fact.)

Conservative blood

The Economist has a great quote in this week's edition:

"A disappearing species is good for fund-raising; blood on your hands is not."

The article's about the culling of endangered species in Africa. It made me think of the Grand Old Party, though, and how it is getting significantly outraised by the Dems. Could it be because they've sacrificed the party's conservative principles in the name of keeping power? 

Look where that's getting ready to get you....

On the DC streets

I just walked by Trent Lott on F Street in DC. I nodded and he nodded and we went on our ways. He was all by himself - that's what happens when you leave the Senate behind.