My wife’s jealousy is getting ridiculous. The other day she looked at my calendar and wanted to know who May was.

Rodney Dangerfield (1921 – 2004)

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In 1995, a band of 73 freshman Republicans swept into the House of Representatives, with Mr. Gingrich as their speaker. Flush with ideological zeal and determined to get government off the backs of the people, as Ronald Reagan would say, they pushed through a budget resolution that called for eliminating scores of programs and three federal departments.

Their fervor was so politically potent that in 1996, a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, declared, “The era of big government is over.”

Yet government has only grown. The Cato Institute, a libertarian research institution, says overall federal spending has increased twice as fast under Mr. Bush as under Mr. Clinton. At the same time, the federal deficit is projected to hit a record high of $427 billion this year.

These trends seem likely to continue. The White House estimated last week that the cost of prescription drugs for Medicare beneficiaries, originally projected at $400 billion from 2004 to 2013, would, in fact, be $724 billion from 2006 to 2015. Republicans called for scaling back the benefit, but on Friday, Mr. Bush said no and vowed to veto any changes to the Medicare bill.

“The era of big government being over is over,” declared Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow at the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist Democratic research organization. That would certainly seem to be borne out in the record of the Republican revolutionaries, known as the “Class of 1994″ for the year they were elected. Of the 30 who are still in the House of Representatives, 28 hsponsored bills in the last Congress that would have increased government spending overall, according to the National Taxpayers Union, an antitax group.

A German newspaper reporting on the French press, in English. Welcome to the New Europe.

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One French paper says Condoleezza Rice is a demon turned diplomat. Another notes that she dresses just like she negotiates — with suave understatement. A third insists the fires of French-American antipathy need to be doused, not fanned. One day after Condi’s first big speech, French critics both praise the Secretary of State and pick her apart.

Condoleezza Rice is wrong if she thinks one pretty Parisian performance will make up for two years of strain and outright antagonism with Europe. At least that is what France’s three national newspapers seem to be snickering, Wednesday, after the freshly-minted US Secretary of State delivered her first official speech since she took office to a packed Paris house. In the speech, Condi said it was time for Europe and America to put behind past tensions and “open a new chapter in our relationship and our alliance.” Her words were carefully tracked by French commentators, who regularly remind their readers of Condi’s infamously undiplomatic 2003 response to France, Germany and Russia’s refusal to support the war in Iraq. At the time, she said simply, “Forget France, ignore Germany, forgive Moscow.”

And here is the BBC reporting on other European reactions to Rice. Don’t get too excited over accounts of European swooning over Condi’s shoes and piano recitals. This is European diplomacy at it’s finest–making the other side think they’ve made progress when nothing actually happened.

De Tocqueville said: “Democratic peoples scarcely worry about what has been, but they willingly dream of what will be, and in this direction their imagination has no limits.” Indeed, the Americans seem to forget that not long ago, they were trying to foment fractions in the continent, and used Europe as a convenient punching bag during the elections. Now, they see that they won, and all is well and Europe will go along and fall in line behind the great Crusading Cowboy.

The response to this idea is summed up best by an actual European diplomat: “Bush is making this magnanimous gesture in coming to Brussels. Wonderful. But we want Bush to change…It is not right simply to say we will adapt our agenda to theirs.”

American press, take note.

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U.S. officials in postwar Iraq paid a contractor by stuffing $2 million worth of crisp bills into his gunnysack and routinely made cash payments around Baghdad from a pickup truck, a former official with the U.S. occupation government says.

Because the country lacked a functioning banking system, contractors and Iraqi ministry officials were paid with bills taken from a basement vault in one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces that served as headquarters for the Coalition Provisional Authority, former CPA official Frank Willis said.

Officials from the CPA, which ruled Iraq from June 2003 to June 2004, would count the money when it left the vault, but nobody kept track of the cash after that, Willis said.

So that’s how they lost 9 billion…

Let me first tell you that the best way for Iraq to be safe and secure is for Iraqi citizens to be trained to do the job.

And that’s what we’re doing. We’ve got 100,000 trained now, 125,000 by the end of this year, 200,000 by the end of next year. That is the best way. We’ll never succeed in Iraq if the Iraqi citizens do not want to take matters into their own hands to protect themselves.

– President George W. Bush, 9/30/04, first presidential debate

We count in total around 120,000 [Iraqi troops] now, but we’re very aware that there are problems in the quality. One of the big problems is a tendency for soldiers to go AWOL and part of it’s the problem that faces them.

– �Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, January 19, 2005

In reality:

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Training of Iraq’s security forces, crucial to any exit strategy for Britain and the US, is going so badly that the Pentagon has stopped giving figures for the number of combat-ready indigenous troops, The Independent on Sunday has learned.

Instead, only figures for troops “on hand” are issued. The small number of soldiers, national guardsmen and police capable of operating against the country’s bloody insurgency is concealed in an overall total of Iraqis in uniform, which includes raw recruits and police who have gone on duty after as little as three weeks’ training. In some cases they have no weapons, body armour or even documents to show they are in the police.

The resulting confusion over numbers has allowed the US administration to claim that it is half-way to meeting the target of training almost 270,000 Iraqi forces, including around 52,000 troops and 135,000 Iraqi policemen. The reality, according to experts, is that there may be as few as 5,000 troops who could be considered combat ready.

[..]

The sleight of hand over troop numbers provoked a sharp clash during Condoleezza Rice’s Senate confirmation hearings to become Secretary of State. After she quoted Pentagon figures claiming 122,000 Iraqis had been trained, she was told by Democratic Senator Joseph Biden: “Time and again this administration has tried to leave the American people with the impression that Iraq has well over 100,000 fully trained, fully competent military police and personnel. And that is simply not true. We’re months, probably years, away from reaching our target goal.”

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The Bush administration has been flying surveillance drones over Iran for nearly a year to seek evidence of nuclear weapons programs and detect weaknesses in air defenses, according to three U.S. officials with detailed knowledge of the secret effort.

The small, pilotless planes, penetrating Iranian airspace from U.S. military facilities in Iraq, use radar, video, still photography and air filters designed to pick up traces of nuclear activity to gather information that is not accessible by satellites, the officials said. The aerial espionage is standard in military preparations for an eventual air attack and is also employed as a tool for intimidation.

The Iranian government, using Swiss channels in the absence of diplomatic relations with Washington, formally protested the incursions as illegal, according to Iranian, European and U.S. officials, all speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

A U.S. official acknowledged that drones were being used but said the Iranian complaint focused on aircraft overflights by the Pentagon. The United States, the official said, replied with a denial that manned U.S. aircraft had crossed Iran’s borders. The drones were first spotted by dozens of Iranian civilians and set off a national newspaper frenzy in late December over whether the country was being visited by UFOs.

Spanish firemen hose down the blackened Windsor Building, a 32-story skyscraper in the heart of Madrid’s commercial district February 13, 2005. The fire, described as the worst in Madrid’s history, ravaged the building but caused no injuries and the tower stayed upright despite fears of collapse. (Susana Vera/Reuters)

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Researchers at Royal Philips Electronics are developing new “fingerprinting” technology that could automatically identify and block transmission of digital-video files, potentially handing movie studios a new weapon in its war on peer-to-peer networks.

[..]

Video fingerprinting would work much like its musical cousin. In the case of songs, a unique string of data (the “fingerprint”) is associated with each recording. Software that can be installed inside an ISP network monitors files being swapped, checking for matches to e of these fingerprints. If a match is found, the file can be blocked.

The trick is to make that identification process work even if the file is compressed, turned into a different computer file format or otherwise changed slightly. For a song, this means basing the fingerprint on the music’s acoustical properties, rather than on the ones and zeros that make up a given digital file.

The next step would of course be a p2p client with encryption in the file transfer, which would force ISP’s to either do a man-in-the-middel attack on all encrypted traffic (or block all of it), which would royally piss of all banks (and their customers, but it’s the banks that have more political power). Somehow I don’t see a drop in the sales of DVD-Arrrr coming anytime soon.

Three months before the end of the Second World War, a series of five air raids between 13th and 15th February 1945 practically erased the centre of Dresden and extensive areas of the suburbs. At least 25,000 people lost their lives.
The culturally and historically so valuable city centre was buried under 18 million cubic metres of rubble. Under indescribably arduous conditions, the remaining inhabitants of Dresden spared no effort in their attempts to restore the vital functions of the mortally afflicted city.
On 8th May 1945, the Soviet army occupied Dresden.