One Union, under [fill in the blank] 
Article 2 of the future European constitution will deal with a statement of European values. According to Thomas Fuller’s report, the constitutional convention is discussing today whether to include a reference to god. I’m sure secular Europe will not include a reference to god. I wonder whether contemporary America would re-confirm the constitutional separation of church and state, given the chance.
Anil Dash has received an extremist manifesto, which he reckons needs a good fisking.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident. They’re already off to a bad start. Leaving aside the fact that this bunch of clowns doesn’t even identify who the ‘we’ is, their entire premise is based on the idea that their opinions are ‘truths’ that are ‘self-evident’. ‘Because I say so’ isn’t sufficient evidence for anything. Typical liberal tactics.”
Brad DeLong is staring open-mouthed at the Bush budget. “Why would any administration deliberately unbalance the long-term finances of the federal government? Why would anybody want to set up a situation in which the taxpayers one and two generations hence will find themselves stuck with an enormous bill? Why set up a situation in which what HHS and SSA tell potential beneficiaries of programs is radically inconsistent with what the White House and Treasury tell taxpayers about tax burdens?”
Matthew Yglesias has a nice rhetorical line: “The last time a Republican has balanced the budget, the president in question was named Ike. The last time a Democratic president balanced the budget was the last time there was a Democratic president.”
The shuttle tragedy prompts Jenny the Librarian to note how our access to information has been utterly transformed.
“After the Challenger explosion in 1986, I read everything I could find about it. I even went so far as to buy and read the US Government’s Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger AccidentÂ… Even then, ‘everything I could find’ wasn’t a drop in the bucket compared to what I’ve been able to read on the internet in just four days. Back in pre-internet 1989, Richard Saul Wurman suggested that there is more information in one daily edition of the New York Times than a 17th-century man knew during his entire lifetime. Tracking what happened to the Columbia just points out to me the difference between 20th-century Jenny and 21st-century Jenny, and it’s only 2003.”