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Atrios has a chart of housing prices going back to 1890. The values are all adjusted for inflation, of course. Take a look, and then tell me: do you think the housing boom of recent years is likely to continue?

Electoral-vote.com is following this year’s Senate races. Democratic prospects for a Senate takeover aren’t looking good right now. I’d really like to blue-ify some of those pink-edged states, but my mission right now is to turn Ohio deep blue.

Republican Mike DeWine has a lot more campaign money than Democrat Sherrod Brown. Click here to contribute to Brown’s campaign.

My youth is long gone, but I’m holding onto my immaturity, by gosh. Just like Lakehead University:

A small Canadian university has sparked controversy with its recruitment drive by using posters and a website mocking US President George W Bush.

Lakehead University in northern Ontario set up www.yaleshmale.com in a bid to attract potential new students.

It shows a picture of Yale graduate Mr Bush with the caption: “Graduating from an Ivy League university doesn’t necessarily mean you’re smart.”

…

“Lakehead is different. We believe the person you become after you graduate is even more important than the person you were when you enrolled.”

…

Student union president Isabelle Poniatowski told Reuters the campaign was low-brow and lacked class.

“It still strikes me as being very repugnant,” she said. “Lakehead has so many positive attributes that you could really sell to people that live down south.”

And what does a university have if it doesn’t have class?

Sure, this recruitment campaign is immature and inappropriate. Here’s to immaturity and inappropriateness.

In the New York Times, Virginia Heffernan tracks down a web guitar wizard:

Eight months ago a mysterious image showed up on YouTube, the video-sharing site that now shows more than 100 million videos a day. A sinewy figure in a swimming-pool-blue T-shirt, his eyes obscured by a beige baseball cap, was playing electric guitar. Sun poured through the window behind him; he played in a yellow haze. The video was called simply “guitar.” A black-and-white title card gave the performer’s name as funtwo.

…

Like a celebrity sex tape or a Virgin Mary sighting, the video drew hordes of seekers with diverse interests and attitudes. Guitar sites, MySpace pages and a Polish video site called Smog linked to it, and viewers thundered to YouTube to watch it. If individual viewings were shipped records, “guitar” would have gone gold almost instantly. Now, with nearly 7.35 million views — and a spot in the site’s 10 most-viewed videos of all time — funtwo’s performance would be platinum many times over. From the perch it’s occupied for months on YouTube’s “most discussed” list, it generates a seemingly endless stream of praise (riveting, sick, better than Hendrix), exegesis, criticism, footnotes, skepticism, anger and awe.

The most basic comment is a question: Who is this guy?

Heffernan tracks down funtwo, a 23-year-old Korean named Jeong-Hyun Lim. On the way, she introduces us to Jerry Chang, who created this guitar arrangement, and takes us into a half-hidden world of spectacular talent, creativity, skill and dedication outside fame’s spotlight.

Online guitar performances seem to carry a modesty clause, in the same way that hip-hop comes with a boast. Many of the guitarists, like Mr. Chang and Mr. Lim, exhibit a kind of anti-showmanship that seems distinctly Asian. They often praise other musicians, denigrate their own skills and talk about how much more they have to practice. Sometimes an element of flat-out abjection even enters into this act, as though the chief reason to play guitar is to be excoriated by others. As Mr. Lim said, “I am always thinking that I’m not that good player and must improve more than now.”

…

Mr. Lim’s fans said they watch his “Canon Rock” video daily, as it inspires them to work hard. When I watch, I feel moved by Mr. Lim’s virtuosity to do as he does: find beauty in the speed and accuracy that the new Internet world demands.

I’m not terribly concerned that our popular culture values swagger and denigrates competence. But I do worry that our political culture does that, too.

My congress-being, Deborah Pryce, is at it again. This is the second campaign flyer she’s sent me at taxpayer expense. This one purports to be a “newsletter” to help her “stay in touch.” Apparently she only wants to stay in touch right around election time.

This is my favorite part of this mailing: Deb is “Spending Taxpayer Dollars Wisely”. I’ll bet she got a really good volume printing rate for this flyer.

Katherine Harris became famous in 2000, when, as Florida’s top election official, she did everything in her power to throw the presidential election to George W. Bush. (Her best efforts weren’t enough, and the Supreme Court had to step in to stop the counting of actual votes cast by actual voters lest Bush fall behind.)

Now she is a member of Congress and a candidate for U.S. Senate. From the Orlando Sentinal:

U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris said this week that the separation of church and state is “a lie,” that God did not intend for the United States to be a “nation of secular laws” and that a failure to elect Christians to political office will allow lawmaking bodies to “legislate sin.”

…

Separating religion and politics is “so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers,” Harris said.

We know it’s not the voters who choose them in Katherine Harris’ world.

“Our rulers” may seem like strange terminology in a democracy, but it just flows off the tongue if you don’t believe in democracy.

Harris isn’t the only right-winger to believe there’s no separation of church and state. Here’s Jan LaRue, Chief Counsel of Concerned Women for America:

Well, you know, the interesting thing is, at the founding of our country, there were state churches. That’s what it’s all about in a country where the people get to rule, and if you’re in a state you don’t like, you get to move to another state.

And Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia:

government — however you want to limit that concept — derives its moral authority from God. It is the “minister of God” with powers to “revenge,” to “execute wrath,” including even wrath by the sword

And Thomas Jefferson:

governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

Wait a second! How’d he get in here?

Via Crooks and Liars: Bruce Schneier on what the terrorists want:

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

…

[O]ur job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show’s viewership.

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn’t make us any safer.

George W. Bush said this week that we’re not leaving Iraq, “so long as I’m the President”. Could this old cartoon (the top one) hold the explanation? Is Iraq payback for something that never happened?

Ah, this is my kind of cell phone.

The phone’s makers warn that the Port-O-Rotary is for entertainment purposes only, and that the audio is not quite as clear as with a modern phone. At $400 for a black phone and $500 for the red version, this is some pricey entertainment.

Or maybe not.

The conservative movement is not monolithic. It has many branches, each with its own ideas of the right way — the far-right way — to run the world.

A Florida school board wants to ban a children’s book about Cuba from its school libraries. The book isn’t harsh enough on the Cuban government. And there’s no better way to fuel the mind of a child than to deny him access to ideas you disagree with.

A coalition of conservative groups is pushing for an FBI to crackdown on in-room adult movies in hotels. Adults, unlike children, can make their own decisions. But sometimes they choose incorrectly, and we have to put a stop to that.

A church in Watertown, New York dismissed a Sunday School teacher who had taught there for 54 years. Why? Because she was female. In a letter, the minister quoted the Bible as saying: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.” Over in Afghanistan, the Taliban are thinking, “This is the kind of American we can work with!”

Wired has the Bush Power-Grab Scorecard with details and status information about extraordinary rendition, torture, detention without trial, and warrantless surveillance.

Another Wired story lists ten privacy screw-ups in the Privacy Debacle Hall of Fame.

Between accidental breaches and deliberate ones, privacy’s been having a tough time lately.

Bob Geiger points out that today is day 1,800 since George W. Bush declared that we would get Osama bin Laden “dead or alive” and day 1,623 since Bush said “You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him” :

[Bush] stood on the rubble of the fallen World Trade Center and declared that the terrorists who attacked us would “hear all of us soon.” A few days later, he invoked imagery of the Old West and, with steely resolve, said that he was committed to getting Osama bin Laden “dead or alive.”

And here we sit, exactly 1,800 days later with a civil war in Iraq, the Taliban still killing American troops in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden very much alive and running free to podcast threats against our country from a Dick Cheney-like undisclosed location.

President Bush seems to have missed one of the central tenets of being a real tough guy: That you’re able to back up your words with action and, once you boast that you’re about to open a can of whoop-ass on someone, that it actually happen.

Right after 9/11, almost every American rallied around the Bush administration. Whatever our differences on other issues, we all wanted the same thing when it came to defeating the terrorists. Bush’s popularity soared because he was the guy who had the job.

I was glad to have Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell in charge. They had already fought a successful war in the mideast, and surely they understood the military, political and cultural forces in the region. In the years since, they had undoubtedly given a lot of thought to what had succeeded and what had failed. I told friends that we could hardly have chosen a better team to deal with this new threat from the mideast.

Boy, I couldn’t have been more wrong. I couldn’t imagine that on September 12, Rumsfeld would try to change the subject from bin Laden and al Qaeda to Iraq. I might have imagined that Karl Rove would try to divide the nation for political gain by exploiting the tragedy that had united us. But I couldn’t imagine that a president who had sworn to protect the nation would agree to that.

Crises will come no matter who is in the White House. It does matter what we do when a crisis comes. Polls still give Bush good marks on terrorism, but that’s really an emotional hangover rather than a rational assessment of this administration’s performance.

Unfortunately, we could hardly have chosen a worse team to confront the challenge of 9/11.

Via Crooks and Liars, Bob Geiger has collected some pretty good political cartoons.

The minute-by-minute coverage of recent events that might, or might not, shed light on a nearly ten-year-old murder case illustrates the news media’s fetish about beautiful dead girls. Actually, since TV news is ratings-driven, the fetish is probably our own.

Over on Daily Kos, there’s a different perspective, and it’s worth a look: some beautiful dead girls who haven’t had the same kind of media and public attention:

We hear a lot about beautiful dead girls in the US media.  Here are some that we haven’t heard about much.  Their smiles haven’t been plastered over the supermarket tabloid press, and they’re not likely to be.  One of the reasons is that they don’t fit the popular stereotype of beautiful-woman-as-helpless-victim.

Last week’s federal court ruling against the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping was a heartening reminder that the U.S. Constitution provides mechanisms against home-grown tyranny. Even when the executive branch claims monarchical powers, even when a rubber-stamp Congress abdicates its own responsibilities, there is an independent judiciary empowered to safeguard the Constitution and our rights. Back in June, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that even in wartime, the president can’t just scrap the concept of due process. The Constitution still lives.

But we mustn’t feel too comfortable about that.

After the Hamdan decision, some in the rubber-stamp Congress offered to legislate new presidential authority to dispense with due process. And, of course, the administration will appeal last week’s ruling. The case will undoubtedly reach the Supreme Court.

In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, only five of the nine Supreme Court justices favored limits on absolute presidential power. (Chief Justice Roberts didn’t participate. He had already ruled on the case in a lower court, coming down in favor of unlimited executive power.) By the time the warrantless wiretap case reaches the Court, Bush may have had a chance to name one or two new justices.

If the Constitution is to survive, we must provide life support. And right now, the best way to do that is to take Congress away from the rubber-stamp Republicans.

If the Republicans hold onto either house by even a single vote, they will declare a decisive mandate for whatever new offenses they wish to inflict on us. They’ll continue to fill the government with incompetents and cronies. They’ll move again to wreck Social Security. While ruinous deficits grow, they will move to exempt the richest Americans from taxation. They will fill the courts with pro-monarchical judges, and none of our rights will be safe.

We must take Congress away from them.

Talking Points Memo says the Lamont vs. Lieberman is a trap:

Rove may be goading Democrats into fighting like hell amongst themselves in Connecticut, but that doesn’t mean we have to take the bait.

…

Lamont v. Lieberman is a carnival sideshow, a titilating and distracting spectacle. Rove is the carnival barker. So ignore the hoopla and keep moving on down the midway, folks. The main event is still to come, and it will be in places like Montana, Missouri, and Ohio. We’ve come too far to get side-tracked now.

I’ve given money to Sherrod Brown’s Senate campaign here in Ohio. There are a lot of races to be won, and it’s time to get serious about winning them.