Momchil Velikov's glibc port to NetBSD is apparently working well now; Debian GNU/NetBSD will benefit greatly from this work. Note that the FreeBSD port is using FreeBSD's libc instead of GNU libc, just to make things more interesting; even so, a lot of cross-pollination between the two ports is happening.

Quoth Colby Cosh:

...how exactly is the U.S. going to adopt a single-payer national health care system "like Canada's"? The United States is missing an essential component of the Canadian system--namely, a large neighbour to the south with a working economy and a market-based health system.

The funny thing about all of this is that if health care was actually overpriced in America, as some politicians allege, it would get cheaper due to market forces because people would defer surgery, leading to doctors geting hit in the pocketbook and lowering their prices. (The presence of an insurance oligopoly doesn't affect this basic equation; doctors don't get paid if people don't use them.)

Adam Cohen, by way of The Volokh Conspiracy and Radley Balko, has a bone to pick with Ken Starr:

Mr. Starr was particularly exercised about liberals' being result-oriented, abandoning their principles to reach the outcomes they favor. But he would have made a more compelling case if he had not proceeded to abandon his — and the Federalist Society's — own oft-repeated commitment to judicial restraint to praise the Supreme Court for striking down the Gun-Free School Zones Act and the Violence Against Women Act in a burst of conservative activism.

I think Cohen is confusing "judicial restraint" with something very different: an interest in taking the constitution at its word. Both of these decisions dealt with the ever-increasing scope of Congress' powers the Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 3) that basically gave the federal government a blank check to do anything it wanted, so long as some (often tangential) connection with "interstate commerce" could be made.

The original purpose of this line of reasoning was to justify laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1963 that extended non-discrimination requirements into public accomodations to stamp-out segregation. However laudible the goal, the court's reasoning in upholding these statutes opened the door for virtually any federal law to be justifiable.

In retrospect, the courts could have more narrowly tailored the rulings under the 14th Amendment's "privileges or immunities" and equal protection clauses, along with existing common law, to avoid this outcome; however, the Warren Court often seemed more worried about the policies it could set from the bench than the precedents its decisions would set elsewhere in the law. The end result: the Gun-Free School Zones Act and the Violence Against Women Act, neither of which did anything but federalize crimes that are already illegal in every state of the union.

Libertarians (big-L and small-L) are often accused of wanting a "weaker" federal government. Certainly we support a reduced role for the federal government, and in particular a Congress that stays within its enumerated powers. A limited federal government would allow more freedom for citizens and, at the same time, be able to concentrate on problems that the states cannot solve on their own. The rush to federalize every conceivable crime, from smoking pot to murder, accomplishes neither of those goals.

I've added an RSS feed to the site; it's probably compatible with most 0.9x tools, although it's actually built on RSS 2.0.

FWIW, RSS 1.0 seems a bit overboard on the "XML as a solution to all problems" dimension, but I'll implement it if anyone cares.

Tim Blair lets us all know that British authorities have fined a pub's owners because some of its patrons were caught dancing.

I haven't the faintest clue what this means, but there's a Footloose joke in here somewhere just begging to be told.

If you're in the market for a wireless base station, check out this deal from Amazon.com: a Netgear MR814 for $99 with $50 in mail-in rebates.