What do you think about...

...voting by mail? A commissioner on the Postal Rate Commission argues, in the NYT, that voting by mail could, effectively, solve all of the problems and eradicate the anomalies in today's voting systems.

I'm inclined to agree.

Cool music site

I highly recommend checking out Amie Street (pronounced like "Amy"). The site's raison d'être:

Amie Street is charting the future course of music retail because we price music right–all songs start free and rise in price the more they are purchased–and because we have created a social network that facilitates music discovery. Our dynamic prices allow fans to buy music without breaking their banks and they serve as a useful tool for finding great music. We believe that people will support independent artists and buy their music when the community determines the price. On Amie Street every member matters, every purchase impacts. We know music is social. The process of music discovery is stunted by traditional digital music retail sites because they are not social (or fun). Music discovery is best catalyzed by communication between people; we reward fans for recommending songs to each other by giving them credit to buy more music. Whether you spend two minutes or two hours on our site you are connected to a world of music lovers.We want all artists on Amie Street to be successful, to get their music heard and to make money, and we believe that our unique marketplace will accomplish this goal to a degree never achieved before. We endorse our artists by giving them 70% of song sales and never taking ownership of their creative work.Amie Street is where bands and fans run the show. Move to Amie Street, music lives here.

I've already created a playlist of the seven songs made downloadable by Lush Progress, which you can see (and hit "play" on) at the top right of the page.

As a result, the "SD Primer" post containing the nine-track Dan sampler has been relegated to another spot.

Jack McCoy sent me an e-mail!

Today, I received a message in my Gmailbox "from" Sam Waterston urging me to join him in the fight for an end to the partisan bickering in Washington. His e-mail included a link to a testimonial video in which he idealistically argues:

The system is broken, and a third force in the middle is essential to fix it...Through Unity08, for the first time in American history, we are going to throw out the backroom deals and, yes, change politics forever. [my emphasis added]

I'm 100% for ridding ourselves of "politics as usual," but I hope the man who voiced Lincoln in the epic Ken Burns documentary, The Civil War, is not tilting too much at windmills.

Weird coincidence: As I finished adding links above, the shuffling Windows Media Player was playing "Everybody's Got The Right" from Assassins and "John Wilkes Booth" (as played by Jack Bristow, er, Victor Garber) sang his part:

Everybody's
Got the right
To be happy.
Say, "Enough!"
It's not as tough
As it seems.

Don't be scared
You won't prevail,
Everybody's
Free to fail,
No one can be put in jail
For their dreams.

For more of my ramblings re: presidential deaths, see this post.

Thanks to Michaela on deviantART for the cool SW portrait.

Liberals and libertarians, Episode II

In today's (12.4.06) WaPo, Sebastian Mallaby has an interesting column discussing an apparent schism in the GOP between "traditional conservatives" and small-"L" libertarians, and that the latter are, more and more, siding with the Dems. The column points to an essay in this week's New Republic (available here for subscribers [of which I am not one] and here for non-subscribers [thanks, Cato]). Thought-provoking stuff for those of us who don't prescribe to either of the behemoths that make up our deleterious political duopoly.

One thing I found humorous about the article was the subhead: "A Progressive Manifesto: Ayn Rand meets Howard Dean." I'd pay money to watch those two get together over lox and bagels.