When I got to work this morning, the big news on the blogs was this frankly fearmongering ad from Hillary Clinton:

Obama immediately hit back in a speech a few hours later, noting that Clinton had her “red phone moment,” and she chose to vote to let Bush invade Iraq, just like John McCain did. That was a good response, both because it happens to be true and because the news coverage was suddenly more about Obama’s response than Clinton’s ad.

Before I left work in the evening — some eight hours later — Obama’s campaign had already completed a response ad and was preparing to air it in Texas:

Clinton’s people may be good at Rapid Response, but Obama’s campaign specializes in Rapid Response in Internet Time. They really seem to understand new media. Their responses are hard-hitting yet fit into the broader themes of the campaign, and they happen so fast that the original mudsling barely has time to sink into the public’s consciousness.

Obama is running one heck of a campaign. If they can keep this up, McCain is toast in November.

I just peeked at Tucson’s extended forecast on Yahoo and discovered it will be sunny with highs in the 70s to 80s for the next ten days. So much for winter.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not complaining about sunny and 70s. But I enjoy Tucson’s winters, so I get to say that wistfully, dammit.

We’re about to enter another Long Summer. Actually, from my perspective, Tucson’s summer can be broken into five subtly different seasons:

Mar-Apr: Summer 1
May-June: Utter Hell 1
July-Aug: Utter Hell with Thunderstorms
Sept: Utter Hell 2
Oct-Nov: Summer 2
Dec-Feb: Nice

I’ve been meaning to blog Robert Reich’s piece in the NY Times since it ran a week and a freakin’ half ago, and I’m just now getting around to it. Go me.

This may be the most succinct and believable story of the US economy over the last three decades I’ve ever read. Much of the reason so many people are struggling today has its roots in policies enacted that whole time. Hard to believe, but America’s economy has been in decline for as long as I’ve been alive.

Totally Spent

The underlying problem has been building for decades. America’s median hourly wage is barely higher than it was 35 years ago, adjusted for inflation. The income of a man in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a man his age three decades ago. Most of what’s been earned in America since then has gone to the richest 5 percent.

[...]

The problem has been masked for years as middle- and lower-income Americans found ways to live beyond their paychecks. But now they have run out of ways.

The first way was to send more women into paid work. Most women streamed into the work force in the 1970s less because new professional opportunities opened up to them than because they had to prop up family incomes. The percentage of American working mothers with school-age children has almost doubled since 1970 – to more than 70 percent. But there’s a limit to how many mothers can maintain paying jobs.

So Americans turned to a second way of spending beyond their hourly wages. They worked more hours. The typical American now works more each year than he or she did three decades ago. Americans became veritable workaholics, putting in 350 more hours a year than the average European, more even than the notoriously industrious Japanese.

But there’s also a limit to how many hours Americans can put into work, so Americans turned to a third way of spending beyond their wages. They began to borrow. With housing prices rising briskly through the 1990s and even faster from 2002 to 2006, they turned their homes into piggy banks by refinancing home mortgages and taking out home-equity loans. But this third strategy also had a built-in limit. With the bursting of the housing bubble, the piggy banks are closing.

I’m not sure the solutions Reich goes on to detail are the right ones, but I agree with his overall point: either the cost of living has to come down or wages for the bottom 2/3 of the country have to catch up.

Woke up this morning to discover that, last night or this morning, someone took a screwdriver (or something) to the lock on the driver’s side door of my car and tore the hell out of it. The passenger’s side lock is fine, nothing was stolen, and otherwise everything still works. I just can’t unlock the driver’s side anymore.

I can’t figure out whether this was just a stupid teenage prank, or the world’s least competent car thief. Maybe someone with experience with this sort of thing could look and tell the difference.

SF author Steven Brust has written what amounts to professional fanfic: My Own Kind of Freedom, a Firefly novel written without pay or permission, released to the Internet for free under a Creative Commons license.

Considering how hard it is to earn a living as a midlist genre author, I wonder (even as I download the novel) how Brust justifies the time spent writing a novel-length fanfic for no reward. On the other hand, how many Firefly fans — desperate for new, quality stories in that universe — will make this their first Brust novel and eventually drop money on his published work?

New webcomic debuts today: Freakangels by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield. The first panel sells the concept.

Added to the feed.

I expect a 746 million mile pipeline to be built post-haste, so we can really get to the business of filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gases.

Titan Has More Oil Than Earth

Saturn’s smoggy moon Titan has hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, scientists said today.

[...]

Cassini has mapped about 20 percent of Titan’s surface with radar. Several hundred lakes and seas have been observed, with each of several dozen estimated to contain more hydrocarbon liquid than Earth’s oil and gas reserves, according to a NASA statement. The dark dunes that run along the equator contain a volume of organics several hundred times larger than Earth’s coal reserves.

Proven reserves of natural gas on Earth total 130 billion tons, enough to provide 300 times the amount of energy the entire United States uses annually for residential heating, cooling and lighting, according to the release. Dozens of Titan’s lakes individually have the equivalent of at least this much energy in the form of methane and ethane.

Meanwhile, not so much for writing-research purposes as for personal enlightenment, organic molecules have been discovered on a world outside our solar system.

Jon Stewart speaks for me… again:

Oh sure, it SOUNDS innocent enough. From PinkTentacle.com:

JAXA testing space solar power system

For decades, scientists have explored the possibility of using space-based solar cells to power the Earth. Some see orbiting power stations as a clean and stable energy source that promises to slow global warming, while others dismiss the idea as an expensive and impractical solution to the world’s energy problems. While the discussion goes on, researchers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have begun to develop the hardware.

JAXA, which plans to have a Space Solar Power System (SSPS) up and running by 2030, envisions a system consisting of giant solar collectors in geostationary orbit 36,000 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. The satellites convert sunlight into powerful microwave (or laser) beams that are aimed at receiving stations on Earth, where they are converted into electricity.

I’m telling you. ORBITAL DEATH RAY.

For your Super Duper Tsunami Ballot Bowl Tuesday, here are some links that are entirely unrelated to politics. It’s kept me sane today before I head to Drinking Liberally at Nimbus Brewery:

• The Wire‘s David Simon is a wordy bastard. He writes about his relationship with Baltimore in an excellent piece in Baltimore Magazine and about his years as a journalist in this Esquire article.
• Speaking of The Baltimore Sun, they created a Google Maps app with every homicide in 2007 marked and color-coded by cause of death. Helpful hint: if you’re in Bodymore, Murdaland, try not to be a black male.
• Jim Massey is interviewed on Indie Comics Network about Death, Maintenance, Tek Jansen, and dogs.
• After a long buildup, Stewart, Colbert, and O’Brien finally duke it out.
• I didn’t know my style of gaming had a label, but apparently I’m a mid-core gamer. That list makes sense to me, at any rate.