Hara-kiri at Winged Foot

Much has been, and will be, made of Phil Mickelson's implosion on #18 in yesterday's US Open final round. But the guy you really have to feel sad about is Colin Montgomerie. He plays great all week, except for one bad stretch of holes at the beginning of Saturday -- then blows it all with one ill-advised change of club while standing out in the 18th fairway, waiting for the green to clear. All he has to do is make one passable iron shot from a perfect lie in the fairway, and a career's worth of frustration is expunged. But no....

Urb's Blog

Net Neutrality -- will Congress never learn?

The debate over proposed "Net neutrality" legislation is another example of a situation where Congress should sit on its backside and let market forces handle it. Will they never learn that they don't know how to regulate technology industries? Time after time, Congress enacts well-meaning legislation that ends up having unintended consequences, and a few years down the road, a whole series of "regulatory reform" negotiations have to take place, to undo the damage the original regulations did, and get back to letting the market operate.

In the case of "two-tiered" charges for Internet content, I say let providers charge higher rates for bandwidth hogs, if they want. If customers don't like it, there are a lot of ISPs out there, and people can switch.

Once again, Congress, don't touch it -- you'll just break it.

Urb's Blog

Urbie the card-carrying member

Of the ACLU, that is. What?, I hear you asking. Has the Urbster lost his marbles and actually joined an organization he once derided as the American Criminal Lovers' Union? Yes, it's true -- that I've joined, that is; not that I've lost my marbles.

That's because in recent years, I have become increasingly alarmed and/or disgusted with the way the Federal government has slowly turned its back on our history and the Constitution. The last straw, or straws, came in the form of the Bush Administration's warrantless-wiretap and IP-snooping schemes, which will do nothing to stop terrorism while doing a lot to give King George the ability to gain information on us that he has no business gaining.

The ACLU has just filed a lawsuit that hopes to end the NSA's warrantless-wiretap program. The administration, of course, claims that the suit is a grave threat to national security. Well, I say the Bush Administration is a far bigger threat to national security.

So last night, I surfed over to ACLU.org and signed up for a year's membership. I'm not entirely on-board with everything the ACLU stands for -- in particular, I do not agree that illegal searches and seizures should result in criminals getting off the hook.

I'm currently doing an internship at a law firm that does a lot of criminal defense work -- and the party line is that when a drug mule gets pulled over with 100 pounds of weed in the trunk, it's considered a "victory" if the mule gets off scot-free because the cops pulled him over for the wrong reason. I do not agree with this philosophy -- I think if the cops pulled the mule over for the wrong reason, that should be grounds for a second legal proceeding to punish the cop, as is the case in some countries (Canada?), while the criminal should still be punished.

But I digress. The ACLU is putting its money where its mouth is and standing up to the Bush Administration. This alone is enough reason to put philosophical differences aside and join up.

Urb's Blog

Kulick makes the show

Today was the final day of the Professional Bowlers' Association Tour Trials -- the PBA's tour qualifying tournament -- and in what should be, but is unfortunately not likely to be, front-page news on every sports section in the country, a woman was among the 10 bowlers earning full-time exempt status for next season's tour schedule. The bowler in question, Kelly Kulick of Union, NJ, won the 2003 US Women's Open and was a rising star on the PWBA women's tour before it folded that year.

I used to be a big fan of the PWBA, when they were televised every week. The PBA tour is dominated by power players who have the strength and technique to put a million revolutions on the ball, hook it out of the house, and bludgeon the pins into submission. With today's equipment, men's bowling has become such a power game that it doesn't make a very good spectator sport, as far as I'm concerned. The women, by contrast, are mostly finesse players, who play a game that bears more resemblance to that of mortals like me, except that they're a lot better at it. Kelly Kulick, however, has the versatility to play whatever game the lane conditions require -- she can go fairly straight up the boards, or she can stand left and crank it with the big boys. As for whether she can compete on the PBA tour week in and week out, well, we'll find out next season. I wouldn't bet against her!

Urb's Blog

The Baddest of Them All?

Yesterday's Quinnipiac University poll showing that respondents rate George W. Bush the worst President since 1945 raises some interesting questions. Here at Kafalas.com Central, we've pondered the question of who was worse: Bush or Jimmy Carter. Personally, I'd say those two are head and shoulders above (or below) the rest, in terms of bad Presidents in my lifetime. As for who was actually worse, though, that's a tough one.

Carter was most notable for stagflation, unemployment, and in the foreign policy arena, the Panama Canal treaty and the Iran hostage rescue attempt (which my dad dubbed the Jimmy Carter Desert Classic). His smarmy speeches about the "national malaise" afflicting the country -- the main symptom of which being his unpopularity -- exemplified how incompetent and out-of-touch he was. Although I was a youngster at the time, I formed an opinion, which I still hold, that his actions in office were more blatantly political than those of any other President -- he was not concerned with doing the right thing so much as with appearing to do the right thing, in order to cultivate voters. However, even in this regard, he was completely inept, as was revealed when he got clobbered in the 1980 election.

The Quinnipiac poll lists Clinton as the third-worst, behind Nixon. This is most likely the result of the bluenoses who rate him a bad President because of what happened under his desk in the Oval Office. As far as I'm concerned, that had nothing to do with his performance as President -- and since my income tripled while he was in office, what more need be said?

But it's pretty clear that GWB has been the worst we've seen. That was readily apparent since before he even took office -- clearly lacking the qualifications, he was anointed as the GOP candidate well before any actual voters had a chance to register their opinions at the ballot box. On-the-job training was supposed to make up for his inexperience -- but as we've seen, it didn't work very well. Basically, there isn't a single success story since he took office. Obviously, Iraq is the big disaster -- the whole world sympathized with us after 9/11, and he's managed to turn it right around to where everyone hates us, and justifiably so. (There's a curious parallel with his father's remarkable feat of losing the 1992 election only a little over a year after having enormous popularity in the wake of the first Gulf war.)

On the domestic front, maybe the economy has had a lukewarm recovery over the past year or two -- but that's not his doing; it has a lot more to do with the private sector doing what it does best -- innovating and creating jobs on its own.

Meanwhile, the administration treats the Constitution like "just a piece of paper," with its blatant attacks on the privacy of you and me. Have you heard the latest one? Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI director Robert Mueller met with representatives of several ISPs last week to demand that they record their customers' Web-surfing activity and keep those records for two years. The idea, they say, is that somehow, a record of which Web sites were visited from which IP addresses would help them track Al-Qaeda.

The Bush administration has come up with some howlers in recent weeks, but this is the best one yet. Just exactly how do they think they're going to get useful information out of these records? Do they think terrorists use the same IP addresses they were using two years ago? Their Web sites change on an hourly basis -- and, if they're as smart as I assume they are, they don't have static IP addresses, either.

The other explanation for this initiative is that it would help track the spread of child pornography. As I've noted before, the Bush Administration's prurient obsession with child pornography is troubling, to say the least -- why they spend so much time thinking about it is anyone's guess. But in any case, using it as an excuse to attempt such a massive invasion of privacy is inexcusable.

All in all, it's hard to disagree with the results of the Quinnipiac poll -- at least as far as the booby prize is concerned.

Urb's Blog