It’s day old news regarding Portland’s eBay foul up, but it looks like a group of water bureau employees placed the winning bid on the now canceled auction for the two $400,000 resevoir covers. The question now is whether or not the employees placed the bids on their work time.

Alas, Russ Meyer is dead. The AP is slightly more upbeat about his ouevre than MSNBC. Me, I mostly just wanted to use the headline.

Transcript of Jon Stewart’s appearence on the O’Reilly Factor, here. (First noticed on Wonkette.) Does exactly what it says on the box. Includes stunning revelations about guests’ snack provisions.

According to O’Reilly, 87% of people who watch the Daily Show are intoxicated. I don’t think there’s necessarily any causation there, though. I find it more credible to believe that 87% of people are intoxicated by 11 PM. It’s certainly the case in my neighborhood.

We all know that Canada’s socialized medical system is slowly killng the nation, both the republic and its citizens, but Marginal Revolution points to one man’s unique solution to his problem. Proving once again that markets cannot be controlled totally. And, I agree with Tabarrock, because the doctor isn’t getting any money, this is completely ethical. Viva pareto improvements!

The ASUO voter registration drive is twice described as “non-partisan” in this article. But the headline tells another, slightly more believable story.

Oh the sad life of an ODE freelancer. In this year’s Back To The Books, Meghann M. Cuniff gives us valuable insight about campus publications.

Insight #1) Any publication that receives funding through the incidental fee is required to publish a certain number of issues, depending on the amount of money allocated by the ASUO Student Senate.

Problem is, that’s not actually true. The number of issues that must be published is determined by each organizations Mission and Goals statement and there isn’t a correllation between funding and number of issues.

Anyway, be sure to catch money quotes from our boy T-graf, they come someplace after a few muddled transitions.

Steve Duin’s column in the Sunday Oregonian is about the Portland Water Bureau selling some unused equipment on eBay in order to cut their losses. Among the items were two polyethylene resevoir covers worth $400,000 dollars and $27,000 in pipes. When the winning bids came in much lower than expected, the Water Bureau, unlike any good eBay member, canceled the auctions.

Radley Balko – still the sixth thing that comes up when you Google “dan atkinson oregon”, incidentally – has a nice bouquet of anti-MADD zingers. (Link via Instapundit. Keep an eye out for former OC editors in comment section.) One dissonant note from the WSJ story he links to:

…The Andersons weighed those risks [associated to underage drinking] carefully before agreeing to host what became known around their community as a “key party” for Gregg, their youngest son.

Good for the Andersons. However, would it be possible for them and their community to call these events something other than “key parties”? It’s making me flash back to The Ice Storm.

It’s a title that needed to be claimed: Little Green Footballs Watch Watch Watch.

Is the election over yet? Who lost? Whoever it was, I’m glad it was them.

Direct your attention to this story by OC alum Ben Brown. Then direct your attention to the fifteenth comment down below. Note where it was posted from. Then go about your day, perhaps whistling a happy tune. Unless you’re in Taiwan, in which case I’d recommend that you move.

I wasn’t going to link to this. It’s far too easy, and more importantly, it’s yet another shout-out to Volokh. But seriously, follow the link. It’s wonderful. I don’t think I’ve seen him do a number on someone like this since that one historian fellow who wanted to compare taxation to slavery.

[In fact, to complete the perfect lazy blog-posting trifecta for me, it’s on Hit & Run as well. Sanchez comments:

…while I’ve always taken exception to the conservative notion that “gay marriage” is an oxymoron, I suspect there’s a decent case to be made that “sadomasochistic marriage” is redundant.]

Over at Blog, Blog has a nice write-up of his recent trip to Tokyo. It’s really quite entertaining, and you should read it. Plus, it has about the best tribute a man could ask for on the Internet.

Thanks, Blog, you’ve made my blackened little pit of a heart that much less cold.

Must be election season.

My own feelings on the presidential election are more or less irrelevant, but I will break cover to announce that this is absolutely my favorite scandal yet. I had thought to automatically exclude anything involving Vietnam (and, by extension, Cambodia) from the list of honor, but the presence of words like “kern”, “em”, “ligature” and “Selectric”, and the overall aggressive geekiness of the topic have forced me to reconsider.

The Plastic thread is delightful. So are the many discussions over at Free Republic. (As a bonus – as if one were needed! – comment 47 in the Freeper link is apparently the one that got the whole thing started. So if the memos were a deliberately incompetent forgery planted by the RNC, that would be their whistleblower. Ah, I love this stuff.)

On the whole, this guy has the most persuasive take on the technical aspects. But you have to hope this one plays and plays. “Kern”. “Ligature”. It’s as though Neal Stephenson finally got to script one of these things, instead of people like James Carville and Karl Rove.

We’re apparently getting bunches, MT blacklist is pretty helpful, but for some reason some comment emails are not reaching me, so I’ve been manually deleting and banning ips. Also, I’ve added all of the entries from Jane Galt’s blacklist to ours. I’m hoping this takes care of the damn problem, because it sure is annoying. Especially now that it’s started to be a problem on the mainpage.

I was talking with my Dad earlier about the upcoming election, and it’s interesting to discover that the ol’ man is even more cynical about the way government works than I am. However, he did raise one very intersting point: Kerry’s constant carping that things in Iraq are being done wrong is not an indictment of Bush so much as a slight to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, the Generals in the theatre, and the commanders in the field.

Dad’s point being that it isn’t the President who does all of the logistics for a war. Sure, he has final say, but most of the planning is done by the high-level military commanders. So, to say that the war is being administered wrongly is to attack the capability of those actually doing most of the planning, not the President. This is not a very smart thing for a man who wants the Presidency to do. Kerry would, of course, appoint a new Secretary of Defense, but the folks over at the DoD and the Joint Chiefs will be the same. Would those folks really work well with a man who’s spent the election cycle questioning their abilities? Just a thought.