Saddam Hussein’s trial will be televised.

My laptop is back!!!

Hopefully it has a new, functioning hard drive inside. We shall see.

UPDATE: It’s working! I’m in the process of reinstalling everything now. Woohoo!

President Bush today used the recess-appointment loophole to make John Bolton ambassador to the United Nations — at least until January 2007 — without Senate approval.

Ted Kennedy calls this “a devious maneuver that evades the constitutional requirement of Senate consent.” He undoubtedly felt the same way about Bill Clinton’s 140 recess appointments, not to mention his brother’s recess appointment of Thurgood Marshall to the 2nd Circuit in 1961.

Casey Zak, my future brother-in-law and the University of Rochester’s newest Ph.D. finance student, has a blog! It’s at www.caseyzak.com.

It’s a young blog, so you can easily scroll through all of his posts on the homepage, but if you’re too lazy for that :), I would recommend two posts in particular: this one, giving an overview of how his life is going at the moment (chestnuts are involved), and this one, providing a refreshingly sane counterpoint to Loony Left ravings about a “maximum wage” for CEOs. Excerpt:

For starters, let’s assume (wrongly) that the CEO salary cap would have no secondary effects. Why would the extra cash flow generated from the CEO pay cut necessarily wind up in the hands of employees? Unless there were a change in the relative bargaining power of a company’s labor force, I would argue that the vast majority of the additional cash flow would go to the company’s investors. Thus, income would chiefly be transferred from the CEO to the stockholding community, which is an unintended effect. If the end goal is to increase worker wages, Cohen would be better served by trying to improve the bargaining power of labor in this country.

This is not the only area where a CEO salary cap would have unwanted results. By targeting CEO’s and not investors, Cohen would effectively destroy an important mechanism of class mobility. While it’s true that a CEO could live comfortably on $1,000,000 / year, he will never be able to amass enough wealth on such a salary to have the social impact of someone born into a large fortune (IE, Paris Hilton). The CEO position is part of the American dream that a smart, hardworking person with a grasp of the business world should be able to obtain real wealth. Placing a cap on CEO compensation would change the CEO from an ascendant member of the wealthy class to a glorified butler who manages affairs for the wealthy. It would make the class divisions in this country even more impregnable, which is not Cohen’s intention.

I might not be getting a Ph.D. in finance, but even so, that sounds right to me.

Anyway, yeah, check out Casey’s blog — and don’t miss the photos of his apartment.

Well, okay, he’s rooting for one Trojan in particular. Call him the “Irish Bengal”… :)

Looks like Chris and Patrick are having a good time over in London:

LOL!! And they’re not the only ones. Click here and scroll down.

There is intelligence suggesting another London terror plot may be in the works. The city is on high alert, of course.

The astronauts on the Space Shuttle Discovery may need to do an unprecedented spacewalk repair to shore up some dangling strips of fabric.

Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd has died. Crown Prince Abdullah, who has been effectively running the country since Fahd’s stroke a decade ago, is now officially the king. (Here are the Wikipedia pages on Fahd and Abdullah.)