Charge of the Credit Card Republicans: Knifing The Baby (Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite to Stupid via Brad deLong)

"Even their Wall Street faifthful are wondering what the hell is up with the "borrow and spend" Republicans and their deficit

"It's already time to think beyond this year and next about how to take down long-term deficits that could become disastrous," said Allen Sinai, president of Decision Economics Inc., who has strongly supported the president's tax cuts. "It would be good for the economy for the administration to at least signal they will do something."

The Congressional Budget Office will release new budget forecasts Tuesday that will put next year's red ink near $500 billion. Sinai's own forecast put the figure even higher, as high as $535 billion. Absent any serious change in policy, private sector economists say deficits will remain in that range through the decade, then escalate sharply with the retirement of the baby-boom generation.

"To imagine that 2 years ago the argument was what exactly we should do about the increasing budget surplus. President Clinton said we shoud pay down the debt and save social security. The Bushes felt we were better off cutting checks to the Ken Lays of the world."

    

Cute little game: AWEXOME CROSS 98!!
    

Why I Hate Bill Gates: Back in 1991, I asked Microsoft to prevent virus attacks - and it refused! (I, Cringely)

"Last week, I mentioned a friend who back in 1991 asked Microsoft to make some structural changes in Windows to avoid problems just such as this. Readers asked me specifically what Microsoft could have done, but didn't do. Here is the answer.

"To answer your reader’s question," says my buddy, who was once one of Microsoft's larger customers, "one of the basic functions of an operating system is to run programs. There is a RUN API and the command line interpreter is simply an interface to the RUN API. Many viruses are sent through e-mail because it is easy to access the RUN API from an e-mail attachment. Our first suggestion was within e-mail to restrict the ability to run applications and interact with the e-mail system (post office, address book, etc). Only the e-mail client should be able to interact with the e-mail system. Only programs that have registered and authenticated user IDs [ought to be able to] independently interact with the e-mail system. There should be a way to manage and control the RUN API's control by e-mail attachments.”