Angel looks down on you
Originally uploaded by BernalKC.

From her perch atop Bernal Hill.

Clearly I’m not the only one that loves getting up on the hill. Angel is actually starting to show her age on these walks. She doesn’t have quite the energy anymore, and sometimes lags behind. But look at her. She loves it up there!

Downtown panorama from the hill
Originally uploaded by BernalKC.

As long as we’re talking about Bernal wine blogging, why not feature some more local content. Here’s a shot from a day ago on one of those glorious mornings when I’m so glad I have a dog to walk. I lived here for a decade before getting Angel and hardly ever got up on the hill. Now, it’s one of the things I love so much about this place.

Here’s a really good idea being hawked by Kid Oakland. Such a good idea that it’s probably doomed! k / o: Ready Return:

For the majority of wage earners with basic taxes, people who receive standard paychecks from one employer, the State of California already has all the information needed for them to file an accurate return. The principle behind Ready Return is straightforward: instead of making these taxpayers come up with their tax information independently…ie. do the math and paperwork on their own…why not send them the accurate information the government already has? Why not let them file their return right then and there on their home computer? It’s a simple and elegant solution in a zone, taxation, where simple and elegant solutions are hard to come by. More than that, it’s a government program that works for working people.

Check out the full post. He give more links and an analysis of why it faces an uphill battle.

I remember reading a similarly heretical idea in the NYT Business section way back in the early Clinton years. They suggested hiring Intuit to revamp the whole tax filing process. In their incarnation of the idea, they’d merely redo the forms in a way to make the important, relevant questions clearer and more prominent while relegating the obtuse stuff, like the RR retirement BS to some appropriately obscure compartment. This Ready Return idea updates the notion to take advantage of our data mining, total-info-aware Big Brother’s ability to know what they know about us, and make it work for us. Cool idea.

And while we’re at it, why not put the same subversive notion to work to reform Customs and Immigration? Instead of erecting every more Kafkaesque paperwork barriers in the way of immigrants, why not let the private sector turn the agency into a customer-centered service? Why not let DHL run immigration services? Bring state of the art IT to bear to increase the accuracy, timeliness, and utility of the INS databases, while streamlining the process to help immigrants?

This is unepxected. Not only is the author of this blog, Vinography, a Bernal denizen, he’s writing about a fellow Bernal resident who makes wine here. check it out

‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ I said. ‘No. Seriously,’ he replied, and proceeded to tell me all the different places he had put vines into the ground, including a patch not 200 yards from my door in Bernal Heights. ‘I eventually had to move those plants to the Inner Sunset,’ he admitted, after the politics of the Bernal Heights community garden got finicky, ‘But I kept making wine from them along with the guy whose yard they ended up in.’

I bet the finicky garden politics had to do with pest control. But I have no doubt that grapes would do well here.

Take a guess—who said the following? Then chase the link: “Liberals must never abandon their core principles of justice and equality. But union leaders who still see American businesses as the enemy must update that vision.”

Pentagon’s Black Budget Soars to Cold War Heights:

The Department of Defense budget request for 2007 includes about $30.1 billion in classified or ‘black’ spending, according to a new analysis by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

‘In real (inflation-adjusted) terms the $30.1 billion FY 2007 request includes more classified acquisition funding than any other defense budget since FY 1988, near the end of the Cold War, when DoD received $19.7 billion ($29.4 billion in FY 2007 dollars) for these programs,’ wrote author Steven Kosiak.

Another page from the Ingsoc canon, War is Peace

There is a surprising level of support for the nomination of General Hayden for the Director of the CIA among the military and intel experts I read on the web. These are relatively liberal people who you would expect to balk at the militarization of the CIA. Maybe it is statements like these that make people believe he will be plain-spoken, professional, and independent:
Secrecy News: The Hayden Confirmation Hearing:

“‘I do think we overclassify, and I think it’s because we got bad habits,’ said Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the nominee to be the new Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Or take this endorsement from Willian Arkin of the Post: Go, Mike Hayden!:

Let’s hope that the Bush administration comes to rue the day it nominated Hayden to be CIA director.

How many times have we heard a serving Bush administration official actually admit a mistake, criticize a government effort, point to a false direction?

When Gen. Michael V. Hayden called the tenure of Porter Goss at the CIA “amateur hour on the top floor,” or when he criticized a Rumsfeld inspired ad hoc intelligence office set up in the aftermath of 9/11 to “find” Saddam Hussein links to al Qaeda and build the WMD case for Iraq, they were small but rare and delicious moments.

All this praise in spite of his direct role in the NSA wiretaping / imbroglioglio makes me think this guy must be pretty sharp. I’m not the least bit mollified about the domestic spying issue. I guess it’s one thing to disagree on policy matters and another thing to give the man props for his professionalism, integrity, and competence.

Another inisghtful post from Helena Cobban: The elephant in the Iraqi chamber:

It is blindingly clear to me that the fact that Khalilzad felt he had to go into the chamber (and not just as a passive ‘guest’ or ‘observer’) signals a deep failure of Washington’s political project inside Iraq. If you look at those two mechanisms of indirect control of a parliament that I identified above[controlling access to the chamber and bribery], it is clear that the US forces completely control physical access to the Iraqi parliament, which is located inside the ‘Green Zone’. But what the US administrators in Iraq evidently lack is any confidence that the parliamentarians gathered inside the chamber would, if left alone out of Khalilzad’s sight, act at his bidding.

That, despite the huge amounts of money the US has always had available to hand out as bribes to Iraqi political figures!

In Lebanon, throughout the long years of Syria’s overlordship there, financial incentives were a strong feature of parliament’s every-six-years ‘election’ of a president. It was quite a common observation that the Lebanese MPs would be engaging in an elaborate game of financial ‘chicken’, since the price paid for each individual MP’s vote would increase steeply as the Syrians (or in 1982, Israelis) came close to meeting the number needed for the election to succeed– but once that number had been reliably reached, the price would suddenly plummet to zero.

Gosh, playing that game that must have been one of the hardest and most stressful jobs those MPs ever had to do during their very lengthy terms in power…

But in Iraq, despite the huge amount of money the US administrators have available, and the evident current penury of most Iraqis, Khalilzad can’t even be certain he can reliably line up a parliamentary vote in the direction he wants without being physically present inside the chamber?? What is happening here???

So it’s official. Good luck, Leon. Too bad the Warriors already have somebody so similar to him in Ike Diogu, otherwise maybe we’d take him at #9? OK, maybe not that high. But the up side of going later in the 1st round is he’ll end up with a decent team.

heh heh heh…

Matthew Yglesias, subbing for Josh Marshall, has a forceful defense of liberty in this post:

The U.S.S.R., after all, lost the Cold War, not because we beat them in a race to the bottom to improve national security by gutting the principles of our system, but because the principles underlying our system were actually better than the alternative. If you don’t have some faith the American way of life is capable of coping with actual challenges, then what’s the point in defending it?

Well said.

Damn! I had this idea too, and tried talking it up with some of my wine friends a few months back: Cork’d - “The simple way to review and share wine”

Oh well, probably woulda been too late to the party anyway…