Daily Archives: October 6, 2004

Recent Rental Cars

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I’ve rented a variety of cars recently. Car magazine does a nice job of rating autos using their “Good, Bad & Ugly” approach. Here goes:

  • The Good

    Mazda6. Excellent handling, mileage, four cylinder engine overworked, turning radius not great (reminds me of the soon to be retired Taurus’s poor turning)

    Toyota Camry Machine like, excellent quality, could use some style.

    Nissan Altima Points for some style, decent handling, V-6 reasonably fun

  • The Bad:

    2004 Toyota Avalon Terrible handling… difficult to read dashboard

    2004 Ford Mustang. I assume the 2005 will be much, much better

  • The ugly

    Ford Expedition Hard to see the point, very big, poor mileage, essentially a very expensive pickup truck.

Political Jihad and the American Blog – Jay Rosen

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Jay Rosen takes a useful look at Journalism & Big Media (or MSM – Main Stream Media to some). I like this:

  • The real job of journalism is to help make the public lfe of the nation work well.
  • For journalists, the rise of citizen comment on the Internet should be something to celebrate and learn from.
  • The bias discourse has descended into meaninglessness, which doesn’t meant the press isn’t trapped by its own preconceptions.
  • The survival of Big Media is not critical, the survival of journalism is. There’s a big difference between those two.
  • Bloggers "who care about facts and ideas," and there are many of those, should be wary of the Orwellians on their own side, who are themselves engaged in propaganda– the charge they are most likely to hurl at others.

Interesting Spin on City Tax Hike….

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Judith Davidoff:

City taxes on an average house in Madison would increase $82 under Mayor Dave Cieslewicz’s proposed 2005 executive budget.
That means the owner of an average $205,359 home would contribute about $1,597 to city operations, exclusive of county, MATC or school taxes.
Overall spending under Cieslewicz’s budget would increase 3.6 percent, though the property tax levy is going up 5.4 percent.
Brasser said that was due to the reductions in state aids and other revenue sources, as well as having less in reserves to plug the budget hole.
Last year the city had $4.7 million in reserves from the mayor’s hiring freeze.
“When all other revenue sources don’t keep pace with the inflation in our expenditures, the property tax is what has to make up the difference,” Brasser said.

Ideally, this article would include some history – spending and tax increases over the past decade vis a vis population growth, inflation and city employment, among others. If find this obfuscation disingenuous….
If you have views on this, send them to mayor@cityofmadison.com (keep in mind that our total property tax increase will include school and county increases as well).
UPDATE: Dean Mosiman summarizes the Mayor’s tax increase plans.

(more…)

National ID Card?

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Declan McCullagh:

Rep. David Dreier wants to force all Americans to carry a national ID card around with them. The California Republican is not about to describe his new bill in those terms, but that’s the reality.
Dreier’s legislation would prohibit employers from hiring people unless the job applicants first obtain new federal ID cards with their photograph, Social Security number and an “encrypted electronic strip” with additional information. Any employer who fails to comply faces hefty fines and prison terms of up to five years.
Dreier is smart enough to realize that these federal IDs would be immediately forged, so he takes the next step of linking them to an employment eligibility database that’s queried by card readers whenever the ID is swiped. The employment database is required to include “all such data maintained by the Department of Homeland Security,” combined with what the Social Security Administration has on file.