Quickly

Peter Wray does my favorite blog post of the last week yesterday. Informative, opinionated, and interesting, which is tough to pull off when the reader knows little about your subject going in. It goes after the PD for a piece on Ohio's public employee pensions that relies quite heavily on out of state conservative think tanks as sources.

The scariest headline of the last week or so was today's blurb about a shooting at the CNN building in Atlanta. People always assume that terrorists are interested in taking out the largest number of civilians, or creating the most spectacular damage. That's why we are always thinking about bridges and football games and the like as the most attractive targets for a 9/11 sequel. Not me. On 9/11, Al Qaeda was trying to send a symbolic message by striking at the heart of the institutions underlying American world domination. There are three such areas, and Al Qaeda struck at the heart of our financial domination by going after the World Trade Center, and our military domination by going after the Pentagon. The third area is cultural domination. In my personal opinion the two most attractive targets within the U.S. at this point would be CNN and Disney. I may be way off base, but I'd be less surprised at an attack in Atlanta or Orlando than I would be in San Francisco or L.A.
So when breaking news on my Google homepage had two dead at CNN's headquarters, I was willing to actually click on a Fox News link. It turned out to be a locally circumscribed tragedy.

I'm still not supporting anybody in the early '08 goings-on, but I've decided on a new position: My support defaults to Bill Richardson until someone convinces me it shouldn't.

Redhorse of Psychobilly Democrat won the BuckeyeStateBracket challenge. Several years back, I switched from using my knowledge of basketball to fill out my brackets to my knowledge of data. I developed a model that does a reasonably good job predicting the scores of post-season college basketball games. Unfortunately, I tweak the outcome every year to give close predictions to the underdog. Big Big mistake this year. I'm sorry that I didn't give the others a better run for their money glory. PBD also discusses my alma mater's new head coach. I agree with his positive assessment.