I dont read Body and Soul very often, even though I'm invariably impressed with the amount of research Jeanne puts into her posts. She writes about why we need to fund the Bush reconstruction of Iraq here, and it's worth a look. As she says "we broke it, we need to fix it."

Ok, so I was wrong about Schwartzenegger winning by a 35-36% share of the vote. Maybe the democrats were wrong to cling to Grey Davis, at the expense of Bustamante. Still, I'm suspicious-- the polls had Arnold at 36% to Bustamante's 26-28% on the Monday before the election, then the Schwartzenegger camp surges ahead with the undecideds(apparently). Or maybe Bustamante was, er, Diebolded...hmm?

And now, a bit of fun:
It seems there's an Anti-Thomas Friedman page run by some guy at Syracuse. I particularly like the glowering graphic of Friedman in a pink suit.

I'll admit I rarely read Mickey Kaus these days, as he has grown to seem more and more reactionary to me in the past 2 years. Nevertheless, this bit about the Calif. recall election, which gets a mention by Eric Alterman, is worthy of note. I think Kaus gets it exactly right when he says:

"The Los Angeles Times' "grope" story is a feather in its cap, in my book, even if it was late. But it doesn't make up for months of generally ponderous, embarrassingly biased and almost willfully misinformed recall coverage."

It's about 630pm in California as I write this, and I suspect Schwartzenegger will win, I'll guess with around 35-36% of the vote, with Bustamante some 6-8 points behind. And the supposedly liberal national media will be crowing about how 35 percent is a "mandate," and talking about how Arnold "rose above" the so-called trash politics of the opposition trying to label him a groper. Forgive me if I'm revolted ahead of time, but I've had a long day.

Non-bloggin' Bart writes:

Last day of training tonight, with real time phones. One will either pass, be asked to retrain, or be terminated. If I fall into the second option, I'll turn them down. Otherwise, I start tomorrow.

Been looking at condos again. There are some older ones across Broadway from Knibbe, Chateaux Dijon, that are reasonably priced for 1/1 units. I just realized I could muster up a hefty down payment after my excessively mentioned fiscal goals are met.

Hugo: I believe the Chateau Dijon condos are where judge john wood was gunned down in the parking lot back in th' late 70's by one of woody harrelson's relatives*. i've forgotten the details, but tracy used to refer to them as the "famous murder condos". Cachet or a bummer? Good luck w training.

*all I could find in a cursory googling was the fbi guy's obit...

Do you know your art?
yet another Guardian quiz...

"Would you let your sister vote for this man?"

With the California recall election looming (and Schwartenegger apparently surging), I thought this would be a good time to link to this interesting article from Salon from earlier this summer...