I’m gonna party like it’s my birthday!

I usually buy myself some absurd expensive bleeding edge piece of technology for my birthday (like the Linux in a Qube©? Or Misubishi’s first 65” HDTV that my friends called Becky II) but this year — being a landmark birthday, 35 — I threw a party for me and friends at the Round Rock Express ball park (known as the Dell Diamond). Check out the leather couches and bowl of Shiner.

Take this quiz to see if you can tell the difference between CGI pictures and “in-camera” photographs.

CAGW released their 2005 pigbook listing last year’s pork projects that were slipped into bills.

Once again, Congress porked out at record levels. For fiscal 2005, appropriators stuffed 13,997 projects into the 13 appropriations bills, an increase of 31 percent over last year’s total of 10,656. In the last two years, the total number of projects has increased by 49.5 percent. The cost of these projects in fiscal 2005 was $27.3 billion, or 19 percent more than last year’s total of $22.9 billion. In fact, the total cost of pork has increased by 21 percent since fiscal 2003. Total pork identified by CAGW since 1991 adds up to $212 billion.

Just knowing that Rick Santorum is behind a bill sheds a negative light on it for my sensabilites anyway, throw in EFF’s derision and the apparent corporate welfare and I have to speak out aginst The National Weather Services Duties Act.

The National Weather Service (NWS), a taxpayer-funded agency, monitors thousands of weather stations around America in order to predict hurricanes, sunshine, and every meteorological event in between. In addition to the raw data that it assembles, NWS has recently started offering more user-friendly info to the public via the Internet. So why has Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) introduced a bill that would restrict the kind of information that NWS can freely share?

The National Weather Services Duties Act (S.786) would ban NWS from “competing” with private entities by making it unlawful for the agency to publish user-friendly weather data and barring NWS experts from speaking one-on-one to news agencies. Why? Because Senator Santorum believes that companies like AccuWeather would make more money if they didn’t have to compete with “free.” That’s right – he believes you should pay twice for your weather information in order to line the pockets of the private weather industry, which already benefits from repackaging the data that tax-funded agencies like NWS give away. That’s not only unfair, it’s a bad precedent for our national information resources. Help stop S.786 by sending a letter to your Senators today!