Hey, new stuff on the blogroll! Well, semi-new stuff, but I felt like noting it. DonkeyRising is demographer’s Ruy Teixeira’s blog about Democratic strategy. It’s a little rah-rah but insightful and informative. The Decembrist is Mark Schmitt’s blog; he was formerly one of Bill Bradley’s senior aides. Solid stuff from a political insider. The American Street is a new group blog with David Neiwert as a contributor. They need to fix their layout but I’ll read Neiwert’s stuff anywhere. ...

The rules of The Apprentice got a little clearer this week; the project manager has to choose two people each week to go into the final stage with him, and one of the three gets fired. So, OK, Troy didn’t totally blow it last week. On the other hand, now the team is saddled with a total malcontent in Sam for at least a little while longer; I still think you gotta do a better job of balancing the strategy of picking the bad performers and the management difficulty of staying on everyone’s good side. ...

Bob Mould blogs. All hail Bob Mould. Hello, better late than never, or maybe not - you decide. A lot of my friends have been blogging for a while, and I figured it might be about time for me to join the party.

Speaking of the Red Sox, Curt Schilling’s answering questions (original) over on the Sons of Sam Horn. You gotta be a member to post, and you aren’t gonna get to be a member, but the answers are still fascinating. Speaking of Curt Schilling, the Boston Dirt Dogs are running a quote about pitching under pressure from the afore-mentioned thread on the current front page. To illustrate the point, they have a scan of the cover of Grace Under Pressure, a Call of Cthulhu adventure from Pagan Publishing. Strange world.

There is something deeply pleasing about the Cubs hiring Grady Little. Yeah, he’ll help you guys cope with all manner of superstitions. I see he’s not actually going to be coaching much, though.

“Dog! Swine! Come back here with my ray weapon!” (original) From here, via BoingBoing.

Do not mess with Boston political workers during campaigns. See also John Sasso (original), who may well have lost Dukakis the 1988 election when he was forced to leave the campaign; but either way, the first link in this post is good reading.

Inquisitive minds may want to know what NASA’s budget looks like now, since Bush proposes redirecting 11 billion dollars of the budget to a moon mission (original). I’m way into the moon mission; I just wanna know where the money is coming from. I found 2004 budget information here (original). This is not an exhaustive examination of the budget, it’s just a summary based on their request. That said, onward. Hm, this is long — follow the link for the bulk of the discussion and information.

About the belief that we invaded Iraq for the sake of civil rights: Iraq’s Interim Governing Council is in fact regressing on civil rights. Protests ensued (original). Note that this would not be a regression if marriage was a purely religious institution, with civil unions functioning as the political equivalent. However, since the spiritual institution of marriage has legal force, it’s pretty harsh.

Note on the below — “NetNewsWire”: already produces OPML that tags feeds as type “rss”. Reverse compatibility nearly requires others to follow suit; I’m sure NetNewsWire is not the only application that does this. However, the more I think about it, the more I think it’s a good idea to distinguish between multiple feed types. I would like to know if a feed is Atom or RSS before I grab it. Saves time, saves CPU on both ends of the transaction, saves network, and so forth. ...