For out of towners, newbies, and normal people who do not obsess with local miasma, let me explain the 800 Broad building is a new Gold Leed standard office building being built "by right" by Bob Young.  The Falls Church Post Office will be re-located to the first floor of the building, which will also have a small cafe.  The city government is leasing space in the building (it currently leases two off site buildings for about $53,000/yr due to space limitations, and will consolidate those offices into the new space for roughly the same amount).  The School Board Central Offices will also be in the building.  The building itself is adjacent to the playground of St. James Catholic School. 

My two cents:  holy cow.  The 800 Broad building is striking in several respects, but the exterior design going up now is a real statement.  Bob is a developer and and city activist who loves our community.  Bob is not your average developer.  He is wicked smart.  Very political.  He understands the essence of our city better or as well as anyone else I know. 

Anyway.  I think it is a brilliant piece of public art.  Walking all around it I began to see how the purple flowers and etched vines fit with location so close to the school playground, and how it plays against type for a municipal office space.  No communist-style brick bunker element to it at all.  It is an evocative design which manages to say something about the unique spirit of our community.  It is still being completed, but it is already a traffic stopper landmark in our community. 

But design is like painting your grandmother's living room.  Subject to taste and opinion. 

So what say the masses?

Just a quick reminder that the NoVA Regional Farm Team meeting is Sunday, December 7 at 1:30pm at the Broadway 502 West Broad Street (entrance on Lee Street) in Falls Church. RSVP to Leslie Byrne.

"We had John McCain and Mike Huckabee and Gov. Romney and Rudy Giuliani, but Sarah Palin came in on the last day, did a fly-around and, man, she was dynamite.  We packed the houses everywhere we went. And it really did allow us to peak and get our base fired up"

If you want to know what’s happening in the world, then Memorandum will tell you – at least in a couple of areas. It’s an automated news clipping service, known in the trade as a “news aggregator”. It provides headlines and short texts updated every few minutes, with links to the original sites, much like Google News.

Memeorandum is based on the idea of “memes” or ideas that spread across the web (along with a pun on memorandum). Someone publishes an interesting story, other people find it, discuss it, and link to it. That’s how the web works. Small stories come and go quickly, while big ones generate lots of comment and dominate the page for hours.

The developer, Gabe Rivera, says it’s all done in software. He provides a list of publications as “seeds,” but the software still finds stories on sites he’s never heard of. It’s just a question of following links, and then trying to assess the contents. The algorithms are, obviously, secret.

Google also follows links and assesses content, but Memeorandum is embarrassingly better than Google News. Google reckons that the more coverage a story gets, the more important it is. Unfortunately, broad coverage takes a long time to develop, so Google News can run hours or even a day behind Memeorandum. This is fine for casual consumers, but if you’re a news junkie – or a journalist – it’s hopeless.

In the mornings, I usually end up checking Memeorandum before I go through email, and I check back several times during the day. It’s also pretty cool when something I’ve written gets a secondary link on the site.

If you aren’t checking it out every day, you ought to.

• Old Media Meets New Media
• The End Of The Blogroll
• More Updates To The Blogroll
• Is That All ?
• Getting The News Wrong

To understand how the building earned the unofficial title of The Anatomy of a Congressional Boondoggle, it is necessary to go back four years, to Nov. 30, 2004, when The Washington Post published a story on a report from the Congressional Accountability Office.

The report found that construction of the center “could cost as much as $558.6 million before it is completed in 2006, which would represent a $185 million price increase and a nearly two-year delay in the opening date since work began.”

In a report made a year earlier, the GAO also noted that Congress was partly to blame for the overruns because “lawmakers had frequently changed the center’s design - adding security measures and office space, for example - while failing to adequately track the associated costs.”

(…)

When the overruns were again revised a year later, in 2004, Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., seemed to talk about everything but congressional involvement in the increased budget: “I just think it looks like it’s gotten out of control from the architect’s standpoint.” In fact, Congress had passed an omnibus spending measure calling for the replacement of the architect’s chief operating officer and directing the GAO to see if the architect’s duties could be better performed by private contractors.

Three years later, Kingston had accepted Congress as part of the problem. “Members [of Congress] delegated this project to their staffs - there was no adult supervision,” Kingston told Time magazine in 2007. “And the whole thing is an example of wants vs. needs. Do we really need three more auditoriums in Washington? The largest cafeteria in Washington? A tunnel that links the CVC gift shop to the Library of Congress’ gift shop?”

Completely unnecessary, much larger than it needs to be, and way over budget.

Sounds like Congress has memorialized itself perfectly.

H/T: The Liberty Papers

• The Legacy Of George W. Bush
• Bill Clinton: The $ 109 Million Welfare King
• Thank You President Bush
• Not A Very Good Start
• Bush Criticizes Congress On Spending

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now, I’m a fan of Jack White.  I’m a fan of gender bending.  I’m a fan of Jolene - an amazing song.  And yet that struck me as an utter disaster.   Not even close to touching Dolly’s original:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Louisiana ranked least healthiest state

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Louisiana has displaced Mississippi as the unhealthiest U.S. state and other Southern states were close rivals due to high obesity and smoking rates in new rankings that deemed Vermont the healthiest.

The overall health of Americans remained static for a fourth year, according to an annual report issued on Wednesday assessing a series of measures also including binge drinking, health insurance coverage, air pollution, infectious disease rates, crime levels and immunization coverage.

Many Southern states were clustered near the bottom of the rankings. The region has some of the highest rates of obesity, which contributes to heart disease, stroke, diabetes and some types of cancer, as well as high rates of smoking, which causes cancer, lung disease, heart disease and other problems.

One in five Louisianians lacked health insurance, while 31 percent were obese. It also suffers from high child poverty, infant mortality, premature death rate and cancer deaths, according to the report.

“We’ve just not made any improvement in the overall healthiness of the nation,” said Dr. Reed Tuckson of UnitedHealth Group Inc, the largest U.S. health insurer, and the private United Health Foundation.

The foundation, American Public Health Association and the Partnership for Prevention advocacy group put together the 19th annual state-by-state rankings.

It was the second straight year that Vermont topped the rankings. It was followed by Hawaii, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Utah, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Idaho and Maine.

Louisiana fell from 49th to 50th, replacing Mississippi. Rounding out the bottom 10 were South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Nevada and Georgia.

California, the most populous state, ranked 24th and New York 25th.

Vermont, with the second smallest population of any state, had the third-highest public health spending and an obesity rate of 22 percent, four points below the national average.

It also had low child poverty and violent crime, a large number of doctors per capita and good high school graduation rates.

Hawaii had similarly low obesity, the highest public health spending, little air pollution, low rates of uninsured people, a low rate of preventable hospitalizations and low rates of death from cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Mississippi led the nation in obesity at 33 percent of the population, while Colorado was lowest at 19 percent.

President-elect Barack Obama and leading lawmakers want to engineer a major reform of U.S. health care, which leaves 45.7 million people without coverage while costing more than any other national health system.

The United States trails many other industrialized nations in infant mortality, life expectancy, mortality for treatable conditions and overall health care system performance.

(Editing by Alan Elsner)

http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE4B276H20081203

3: Rank of Barack Obama in Yahoo’s top searches for 2008, ranking him behind Britney Spears and WWE wrestling.

Yes, Britney Spears is that powerful.

In fact, looking at what search terms drive the most traffic to Extreme Mortman, guess which ranks at the top?

Yes — it’s combinations of Britney, Spears, and Britney Spears.

So thank you Britney Spears.  The over 1.8 million unique monthly visitors to Extreme Mortman so far this year owe you much.

Yes we can!

WASHINGTON (CNN) — A national poll suggests that six in 10 Americans oppose using taxpayer money to help the ailing major U.S. auto companies.

Sixty-one percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey out Wednesday are dead set against the federal government providing billions of dollars in assistance the the auto makers, with 36 percent favoring such a bailout.

The poll, conducted Monday and Tuesday, also indicates that a majority of Americans, 53 percent, don’t think government assistance for the auto makers will help the U.S. economy.

“Only 15 percent say that they would be immediately affected if the auto companies went bankrupt,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said. “Seven in 10 say that a bailout would be unfair to American taxpayers.”

In early November, polls indicated that nearly half the public supported federal assistance to the big auto makers when this issue first came before Congress.

But evidence in surveys from other organizations suggests that the poor performance by executives from GM, Ford and Chrysler at congressional hearings, and the admission that they had taken private jets to get there, resulted in a steep drop in support for government assistance to automakers.

Judged on the merits alone, the bailout proposal is a bad idea. The Detroit Big Three have seemingly ensured it’s failure through their own stupid arrogance.

• Rasmussen: Most Americans Oppose An Auto Bailout
• The Detroit Money Pit
• Voters Remain Overwhelmingly Against Bailout Plan
• Next In Line For A Bailout ? The Auto Industry
• Bob Barr On The Freddie/Fannie Bailout

While Andy McCarthy and Pam Atlas will probably keep the faith, the rest of you out there should probably just come to grips with the facts- Obama is a citizen, Obama won the election, Obama is picking his cabinet, and Obama will be the next President. There is not going to be some sort of magical discovery that proves he is not a citizen and the lunatics were right all along.

He won. He is an American. Get over it.

Somehow, I doubt that they will, even though the substance of their arguments are without any more for the reasons I discussed here, here, here, and here.

Update: Matt Lews at Townhall has similar thoughts:

I am of the opinion that anyone advancing the notion that Obama is not a citizen, and thus not qualified to become president, is actually undermining the conservative cause.  Sadly, this ridiculous “conspiracy theory” will only serve to undermine the legitimate attacks on Obama, by casting us all in the role of zealots.

All indications are that Obama was born in the state of Hawaii.  His mother was clearly an American citizen.  In many regards, Obama has more of a claim to be eligible for the presidency than did Barry Goldwater (born in the “Arizona territory”), George Romney (born in Mexico), or John McCain (born in the Panama Canal Zone)…

There are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticize Obama, but dwelling on this ridiculous notion will only serve to undermine them.

Unfortunately, rational arguments such as those Lewis advances will be lost on the largely irrational tin-foil hat crowd that is advancing this nonsense.

• Federal Judge Tosses Obama Citizenship Lawsuit
• New York Times Raises Questions About McCain’s Eligibility
• Lawsuit Filed Challenging McCain’s Eligibility For The White House
• Quote Of The Day
• The Obama Citizenship Lawsuits: Much Ado About Nothing

It is, ahem, a date of some significance in my life - the 30th anniversary of my 29th birthday. And largely because of Facebook, it’s been memorable - I heard from friends all over the country.

Not sure I’m going to become an obsessive Facebook reader. But this was pretty great.

Do you think the U.S. should have a single-payer health care system? What are your ideas for getting us out of this recession? Want to give the new administration your ideas on poverty, education, energy, Iraq, or anything else?

Click on VOTE NOW to support single payer health care. Once on the site you can post comments on that issue or go to other issues that you care deeply about.

We finally have a President who will listen. Are you talking?

In the mood to celebrate President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration at a D.C. bar? For four days in January, they’ll be open 24 hours a day.

Under emergency legislation approved by the D.C. Council yesterday, any District establishment with a liquor license, including restaurants and nightclubs, will be allowed to serve alcohol until 5 a.m. — three hours later than usual — and serve food round-the-clock from Jan. 17 until the morning after Obama’s swearing-in on Jan. 20.

The bill, an idea of the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington, was introduced by council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), who represents the nightlife-heavy neighborhoods of Adams Morgan and Mount Pleasant.

The council approved the bill, 9 to 4, with Graham voting against it after the measure, which originally excluded nightclubs at Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s request, was revised on the dais to include them. Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), Carol Schwartz (R-At Large) and Muriel Bowser (D-Ward 4) also voted against the bill.

With large crowds expected to come to Washington for the inauguration, the city must be able to meet their entertainment demands, Graham had said while introducing the measure. But Mendelson, chairman of the council’s Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary, countered, warning of increased crime, violence and drunken driving.

“I know a lot of people are excited about the inauguration, and I share that excitement,” Mendelson said. “But there are very few people I know of out partying at 5 in the morning or 4 in the morning who aren’t getting drunk. I think there are going to be consequences to that from a public safety and public order point of view. It’s not a good policy to be supporting.”

Cheri Jacobs at The Hill isn’t pleased at all:

In what will undoubtedly go down in history as the stupidest and most dangerous move by the D.C. City Council, bars in the nation’s capital will extend “last call” from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. during the Obama inauguration.

Why now? Why for this president-elect? Likely the dollar signs in the eyes of owners of local watering holes have pushed the lawmakers over the edge into this area of irresponsibility. The likelihood of alcohol-related injuries and deaths will skyrocket, arrests for public drunkenness and disorderliness will increase, and the potential for tragedy to mar Barack Obama’s celebration will be heightened.

History, meanwhile, suggests that mixing alcohol with Presidential Inaugurations isn’t necessarily a good idea:

Andrew Jackson ran for president in 1828 as a rough war hero and a man of the people. And when he first took office in 1829, the inauguration festivities were appropriately unruly.

Enormous crowds gathered at the Capitol building as Jackson, surrounded by supporters, walked to the ceremony. There was a fear of people being injured in the crush, and a ship’s cable was stretched across the Capitol steps to keep the crowd back.

As the ceremony concluded, the exuberant crowd did rush Jackson, and he had to be protected by marshals and rushed into the safety of the Capitol building.

Later that day a public reception was held at the Executive Mansion (now called the White House), and the celebration got raucous. Jackson supporters, fueled by pails of liquor, packed rooms on the first floor of the mansion. Furniture was broken, china was smashed. Men with muddy boots stood on damask furniture, hoping to get a glimpse of the new president.

Jackson himself managed to escape and flee back to his temporary quarters at a Washington hotel. And when the crowd got so large that it was feared the Executive Mansion might actually collapse, liquor was supplied out on the lawn. The crowds rushed outside, relieving some of the stress on the mansion’s groaning floorboards.

Exuberant crowds. Alcohol. I’m picturing cars flipped over and set on fire, how about you ?

• Inauguration Madness Update
• The D.C. Voting Rights Crybabies Are Back
• Because You Need To Be Drunk To Vote For John McCain
• Is Washington Ready For The Biggest Inauguration Day In History
• And So It Begins

H/T: QandO

• Welcome Back
• Get Your Post-Graduate Degree Here
• The Sad Aftermath Of Obama’s Victory
• Another Reason To Celebrate The Collapse Of Communism
• Saturday Night In Washington