The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that after three years of declining budget deficits, a slowing economy this year will contribute to an increase in the deficit. Under an assumption that current laws and policies do not change, CBO projects that the budget deficit will rise to 1.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2008 from 1.2 percent in 2007. Enactment of legislation to provide economic stimulus or additional funding for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan could further increase the deficit for this year.

The state of the economy is particularly uncertain at the moment. The pace of economic growth slowed in 2007, and there are strong indications that it will slacken further in 2008. In CBO’s view, the ongoing problems in the housing and financial markets and the high price of oil will curb spending by households and businesses this year and trim the growth of GDP. Although recent data suggest that the probability of a recession in 2008 has increased, CBO does not expect the slowdown in economic growth to be large enough to register as a recession. Economic performance worse than that suggested in CBO’s forecast could significantly decrease projected revenues and increase projected spending. Furthermore, policy changes intended to mitigate the economic slowdown would, by design, tend to increase the budget deficit in the short term.

The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2008 to 2018

It's like SMS.

Bottled water has a huge environmental footprint, the critics now say. It takes immense amounts of raw material and energy to make all those plastic bottles. At the other, postconsumer end of the product life cycle, hundreds of millions of empty plastic bottles end up in landfills, in an era when it is increasingly difficult to find new waste-disposal sites.

And for what? There is no real benefit, the naysayers argue. Bottled water is less stringently regulated than tap water. Tests over the past several decades have shown that bottled water is about as good as tap water; some samples test worse, with contaminants that exceed Safe Drinking Water Act standards. Better taste? When blindfolded, taste testers can't typically tell which sample is from a bottle and which is from the tap.

Customers pay maybe a thousand times as much as they would pay for the same amount of water from the tap. They get little or no benefit for the extra expense, while society as a whole incurs the environmental costs. No wonder we are seeing something of a backlash.

...

We need to encourage technological innovations that provide us with adequate amounts of material goods while dumping lower levels of hazardous materials into our environment. For that, we will need a new, more vibrant, more adamant kind of environmental activism. That will happen, in turn, only if Americans reject the mirage of inverted quarantine, reject the seductive but false idea that there are purely individual solutions to our collective problems.

The Dangerous Delusions of 'Inverted Quarantine'

The vault opens; treasures await within.

Each year for hundreds of thousands of American women there is a wide gulf between what the law forbids and what they feel they must do. The author of this article, whose credentials are trusted by the Atlantic, is a college graduate in her forty-sixth year, the mother of three children, living with her husband and family in one of the many commuter communities in the East.

The Atlantic Online | August 1965 | One Woman's Abortion | Mrs. X

The Bush administration is beginning its last year in office by quietly scaling back its foreign policy ambitions as it struggles with new obstacles and rapidly dwindling influence.

The upshot is that the Bush administration is going to be spending the next year managing crises and tidying up messes until the next president takes over, rather than reaching legacy milestones, as officials recently had hoped.

Contrast this with George Friedman's expectations about the last year under Bush:

George W. Bush is not up for re-election, and there is no would-be successor from the administration in the race; this frees up all of the administration’s bandwidth for whatever activities it wishes. Additionally, Bush’s unpopularity means that each of the White House’s domestic initiatives essentially will be dead on arrival in Congress. All of the Bush administration’s energy will instead be focused on foreign affairs, since such activities do not require public or congressional approval. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, 2008 will see the United States acting with the most energy and purpose it has had since the months directly after the 9/11 attack.

I guess the LA Times is that conventional wisdom he's talking about.

Bush officials narrow foreign horizons

Scantily clad prostitutes are being pushed out of their neon display windows by fashion mannequins in a battle for control of the busiest red-light district in Europe.

“If you come to this area, you know what you are coming for – and it is not fashion,” Jan Broers, the owner of an hotel and eight prostitute windows, said. “... there are some crazy people in the Government who think they can take control of the whole thing, not only the prostitutes but also the coffee shops.”

The city council claims that the famed Dutch permissiveness, which also turns a blind eye to cannabis being sold in coffee shops, is being exploited by organised crime.

Prostitutes are pushed out to provide a window for fashionistas

Red-baiting is a dangerous tactic in a country where even in the late 1980s the Communist party still boasted around 800,000 loyal members. They included a number of Hungary’s now shrillest super-patriots. But then, as the saying goes: “We are a small country; we only have one mob”.

Budapest diary: Open secrets | Economist

“Trying to guess General Petraeus’s next assignment is the most popular parlor game in the Pentagon these days,” Mr. Morrell said.

Pentagon Weighs Top Iraq General as NATO Chief

Union 1812 shows that the fate of the American Experiment was not decided at the end of the American Revolution; instead, the ambiguous confederacy needed to be sewn together by the Herculean efforts of men like James Madison, who gave the nation it’s backbone in the U.S. constitution, and the strength and determination of the early presidents. Even then, it took a second war with Britain to galvanize the people and truly forge the more perfect union familiar to modern readers.

While the book mainly focuses on the War of 1812, author A.J. Langguth spends ample time on the formation of the Constitution. As he details the measures undertaken my Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and their fellow Federalists who argued for a strong central government, it becomes apparent that this was the decisive moment in determining what the United States would become.

One of the most amusing lessons to be learned from Union 1812 is that although American society may make great strides in certain respects, in the end, human nature is virtually immutable. The political campaigns of the time were marked with mudslinging and vicious partisan assaults. The press was cultivated and manipulated by shrewd politicians looking for an edge. Even Thomas Jefferson’s hands were dirtied in such activities; he provided a do-nothing job in the State Department to a man named Philip Morin Freneau in an effort to fund the man’s newspaper, the National Gazette, with the sole pursuit of haranguing the Republican Jefferson’s Federalist political enemies. Freneau’s criticisms of Hamilton and Adams weren’t erudite deconstructions of their political ideals. Instead, he took Hamilton to task for his “long nose,” and Adams for his “breath of belly.”

Union 1812: The Americans Who Fought the Second War of Independence

It has now been more than ten years since Congress enacted section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. During that time courts have held that CDA 230 grants interactive online services of all types, including blogs, forums, and listservs, broad immunity from tort liability so long as the information at issue is provided by a third party. Relatively few court decisions, however, have analyzed the scope of this immunity in the context of “mixed content” that is created jointly by the operator of the interactive service and a third party through significant editing of content or shaping of content by submission forms and drop-downs. Accordingly, this is an area that we will be watching carefully and reporting on in the future.

So what are the practical things you can take away from this discussion? Here are five:

1. If you passively host third-party content, you will be fully protected against defamation and defamation-like claims under CDA 230.
2. If you exercise traditional editorial functions over user submitted content, such as deciding whether to publish, remove, or edit material, you will not lose your immunity unless your edits materially alter the meaning of the content.
3. If you pre-screen objectionable content or correct, edit, or remove content, you will not lose your immunity.
4. If you encourage or pay third-parties to create or submit content, you will not lose your immunity.
5. If you use drop-down forms or multiple-choice questionnaires, you should be cautious of allowing users to submit information through these forms that might be deemed illegal.

Primer on Immunity — and Liability — for Third-Party Content Under Section 230 of Communications Decency Act

I believe in aristocracy ... — if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke. I give no examples — it is risky to do that — but the reader may as well consider whether this is the type of person he would like to meet and to be, and whether (going further with me) he would prefer that this type should not be an ascetic one. I am against asceticism myself. I am with the old Scotsman who wanted less chastity and more delicacy. I do not feel that my aristocrats are a real aristocracy if they thwart their bodies, since bodies are the instruments through which we register and enjoy the world. Still, I do not insist. This is not a major point. It is clearly possible to be sensitive, considerate and plucky and yet be an ascetic too, and if anyone possesses the first three qualities I will let him in! On they go — an invincible army, yet not a victorious one. The aristocrats, the elect, the chosen, the Best People — all the words that describe them are false, and all attempts to organize them fail. Again and again Authority, seeing their value, has tried to net them and to utilize them as the Egyptian Priesthood or the Christian Church or the Chinese Civil Service or the Group Movement, or some other worthy stunt. But they slip through the net and are gone; when the door is shut, they are no longer in the room; their temple, as one of them remarked, is the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and their kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide-open world.

-- Edward Morgan Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, “What I Believe” (1951)

Forster’s Aristocracy