Sunday was a beautiful day so we headed out on the bike trail towards Woodinville. I finally got to try Armadillo BBQ who’s smell has been tempting me for so long on my bike rides home. I was very impressed. Definitely a better pit stop then Red Hook.

The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.”

It is embarrassing that Clinton is digging this low to get votes.

Yet for all of the good ideas Mrs. Clinton has proposed, there still seems to be something missing from her agenda. It feels like less than the sum of its parts. It lacks some of the elegance of the Obama approach.

I also advocate socialism – not Soviet-style, but more in line with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’ vision. The oil industry should be nationalized, and money spent on weapons used to murder civilians in Iraqistan would be better used to fund free medical care.

The writer had some problems with the starting salary Gates mentioned but that was fairly debunked in the comments. (Bill was including the cost of benefits.) His main theory was that Gates was making up the labor shortage as a way to import more cheap foreign workers. Keeping down the wages for all software developers. He of course ignores the fact that many of these foreign workers have just received graduate degrees from fine American intuitions.

Immigration is a complex subject and it’s hard to find a source of information that does not have an agenda behind it. It seems too easy to me to blame this all on the foreign guys down the hall. Interest in math and science is dropping, there is a shortage of talent, and I think the reasons go deeper then just the pay.

Mr. Geffen said the Clintons lie “with such ease, it’s troubling” and that the Clinton political operation “is going to be very unpleasant and unattractive and effective.” Mr. Geffen called Mr. Clinton a “reckless guy” who had not changed in the last six years, and suggested that Mrs. Clinton was too scripted.

Clinton’s camp responded by calling on Obama to return all $1.3 million raised.

“While Senator Obama was denouncing slash-and-burn politics yesterday, his campaign’s finance chair was viciously and personally attacking Senator Clinton and her husband,” Howard Wolfson, the Clinton campaign communications director, said in a statement.

Obama?

Bill Burton, a spokesman for Mr. Obama, responded with a statement less than an hour and a half later, saying it was “ironic that the Clintons had no problem with David Geffen” when he was “raising them $18 million and sleeping at their invitation in the Lincoln Bedroom.”

I remember the Lincoln Bedroom! I wonder if Laura remodeled?
How about McCain, what has he been up to?

Although McCain had once lavished praise on the vice president, he said in an interview in his Senate office: “The president listened too much to the Vice President . . . Of course, the president bears the ultimate responsibility, but he was very badly served by both the Vice President and, most of all, the Secretary of Defense.”
McCain added: “Rumsfeld will go down in history, along with McNamara, as one of the worst secretaries of defense in history.”

It’s not nice to hit people while they are down. I’m not sure how McCain gets away with criticizing the President while still being such a vocal supporter of the war.

Even as they exploit the newest technologies, the Libby trial bloggers are a throwback to a journalistic style of decades ago, when many reporters made no pretense of political neutrality. Compared with the sober, neutral drudges of the establishment press, the bloggers are class clowns and crusaders, satirists and scolds.

Class clowns? That is harsh. Now I can’t imagine anything more boring then live blogging a trial, so I headed over to firedoglake and checked out “Libby Live“. Here is just a piece of the nail biting journalism you are missing:

3:26

Something happened funny. The whole court room was laughing.

Walton: Good afternoon, Happy Valentine’s Day.

One of the jurors is saying something, but it’s not celar what. Everyone seems to have a smily face on. One of the jurors was reading a poem, apparently.

Walton: Thank you very much, you’ve been a very attentive jury and everyone appreciates it.

Cline: We’d like to read a stipulation.

…

Obama has been catching some slack from the bloggers recently for dissing DailyKos with this quote:

“One good test as to whether folks are doing interesting work is, Can they surprise me?” he tells me. “And increasingly, when I read Daily Kos, it doesn’t surprise me. It’s all just exactly what I would expect.”

I couldn’t agree more.