Software is too expensive to build cheaply...

The New York Times has a really interesting article on the faith-based presidency entitled Without a Doubt. It covers a lot of the concerns, particularly within the Republican party, that people have about Bush's willingness to ignore inconvenient facts.

As this video makes abundantly clear, e-voting is simple... as long as you want to vote for Dubya.

On a more serious note, Slashdot covered some real problems with the e-voting machines in Florida recently.

Interesting article in the New York Times on how GW Bush is looking to reshape the American tax break.

Bush is proposing a 2.5 trillion dollar budget. Supposedly, this manages the following:

• it is the "president's most austere budget to date"
• it pushes the US federal budget deficit to "a record $427 billion", and "is the third straight year the Bush administration will have set, in dollar terms, a deficit high."

It seems that the tradition of the National Party leader selling out the party's constituents whenever it conflicts with Liberal Party policy is alive and well.

A National Party think tank came up with the stunningly obvious idea of using T3 proceeds to pay for bush broadband rollouts". But John Anderson has nixed the idea - apparently he thinks the private sector can do it better.

I'm sick of reading articles like this one in the NY Times about how the Schiavo case was about the "right to live" vs the "right to die". This, frankly, is BS. What this fight was about is the extent that power of attorney goes.

Saw this as a comment on Russel Beattie's blog: dozens of buses flooded out in New Orleans.

This is just bloody ridiculous. There's probably close to a hundred buses there. Why weren't they used in the pre-hurricane evacuation? Why weren't they moved to higher ground if they weren't used in the evacuation? Those buses represent 10,000 people per round trip who could have been taken out.

Frankly, the US government (both state and federal) obviously have no ability to cope with disaster planning.

To quote the New York Times

This week's census report showed that income inequality was near all-time highs in 2004, with 50.1 percent of income going to the top 20 percent of households. And additional census data obtained by the Economic Policy Institute show that only the top 5 percent of households experienced real income gains in 2004. Incomes for the other 95 percent of households were flat or falling.

An off-hand statement in the editorial of The Australian today went like this:

Even after the threshold changes in the May budget, the top 5 per cent of taxpayers are going to be paying a quarter of Australia's net income tax

(Look in the section about Peter Costello)

Sigh... how could anyone make a living by killing pension plans? I mean, really.

Well, once again Peter Costello has failed to deliver any significant tax reform. Why? Well, read on.

Today our Prime Minister made an important step in Australian history, by apologising to indigenous Australians for past injustices. However, I think the focus on the so-called Stolen Generation was wrong.