Politics
30 hours long talkathon at the US Senate, eh? The entire thing sounds, well, childish. Here’s an interesting tidbit…
Because Senate rules require agreement from both sides to quickly confirm a nominee, the GOP cannot force a confirmation vote as long as a Democrat is present on the floor to object.
But if they fall asleep or stop paying attention, the GOP will immediately confirm the nominees….
Doesn’t that sound just like little kids fighting with each other? “Is Not! Is Too! Is Not! Is Too! Is Not times infinity!” Ah well, ’tis politics. By the way, no matter how much I try, I just can’t get into Canadian politics… it’s just… well, boring. Apparently Dalton’s complaining about debt and is scaling back his promises (as expected), a left wing guy became mayor of Toronto on a platform of “I will not build that bridge”, Chretien is doing his politician about to retire thing trying to pass funny bills left and right, and Paul Martin’s running around doing stuff… and I shrug my shoulders.
While we’re on the subject of politics, South Korea seems to be just going up in smokes - militant unions are swinging metal pipes and throwing molotov cocktails at the police while bunch of striking union members at a shipyard are refusing to bury couple of dead guys (one guy committed suicide, I don’t know how the second one died) who’s been dead for about a month, so there’s a guy up at a large crane surrounded by dry ice and a guy down at the pits in a refrigeration van. The union at Nestle went on a strike demanding say in company’s management, so Nestle HQ got pissed off and are shutting down all the factories… Bah, it doesn’t make any sense to me, but then again, I’m a conservative, pro big-company, small government type of guy. Then I read about kids commiting suicide because low entrance exam grade, president trying to veto a special prosecution bill that aims look at corruption in his own inner group, not to mention entire North Korea thing.
Reading up on these things makes me want to backpack around Korea. 
Bah, if only the POSTECH thing went through…
And last thing - for over a year, Bush put on a protective tariffs around steel products. Now that they’ve been ruled illegal by WTO, Bush can either bite the bullet and get rid of tariffs (and lose whole chunk of votes in states that depend on steel mill jobs) or continue the tariffs (and get retaliation tariffs from EU, Japan, China, Korea, and piss off a lot of company who use the said steel in US). It’s an interesting mix of politics (remember, election is coming up fast) and economics. This will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Oh yeah, and I’ll be nice and warm in Corpus Christi, Texas during Christmas break 
Maybe I’ll buy my camera there.