Wednesday, April 18, 2007

The Daily Dose

Clown Fish at National Aquarium in Baltimore

The politicization of Monday's tragedy at Virginia Tech has begun. According to Rob Bluey, who blogged the following after hearing it on the radio yesterday morning, Virginia Congressman Jim Moran "said Republican policies made it easy for the shooter to obtain a gun. When the show’s host tried to suggest that the gunman may have been hellbent on killing regardless of the law, Moran turned the conversation back to the GOP, complaining that the United States needs a national registry to track all firearms purchases and more stringent gun-control laws. Moran then blamed Bush and Republicans in Congress for opposing such measures at the behest of the NRA."

The bipartisan fiscal transparency movement, fueled by last year's Coburn-Obama bill, continues apace with S. Res 123, which requires the disclosure, in a searchable format on the Internet, of various information related to earmarks contained in committee-passed bills.

The Bank of America recently began a pilot program extending credit to illegal immigrants in California. At the time, my boss asked me to denounce the program, which I argued institutionalized illegality and made amnesty inevitable. Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward offers the counterview.

Another example of Google's business brilliance: buying—and outbiding Microsoft for—the online advertising firm, DoubleClick. The NYT explains: "Google, for all its outsize reputation, has made most of its money in the online basics: the text-based search engine and small text ads that are like the Yellow Pages of the online advertising. DoubleClick’s strength, by contrast, lies in flashy banner ads and, more recently, video ads that are more like high-end magazine or television ads." Adds one analyst, "Keeping Microsoft away from DoubleClick is worth billions to Google."

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