Just this morning I wrote about choosing a class over a struct to take advantage of inheritance and abstractness. It turns out, I was wrong.

The best governor we've got claims he didn't know the Daily Show interview was a spoof when he sat down:

"It was going to be an interview on contraceptives...that's all I knew about it," Blagojevich, laughingly [sic], told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in a story for Thursday's editions. "I had no idea I was going to be asked if I was 'the gay governor.'"

Interviewer Jason Jones pretended to stumble over Blagojevich's name before calling him "Gov. Smith." He later asked if Blagojevich was "the gay governor."

The Daily Show segment aired earlier this month.

In unrelated news, former Chicago Alderman Edwin Eisendrath is running in next month's Democratic primary against Gov. Smith.

I've encountered a problem familiar to veteran C# developers: whether to use a class or a struct for a particular design. So I'm going to follow my own advice and develop first for elegance and second for execution speed.

Molly Ivins, on congressional reform:

Tom DeLay gets indicted, and all the Republicans can think of is a $20 gift ban. Forget the people talking about "lobby reform." The lobby does not need to be reformed, the Congress needs to be reformed. This is about congressional corruption, and it is not limited to the surface stuff like taking free meals, hotels and trips. This is about corruption that bites deep into the process of making laws in the public interest. The root of the rot is money (surprise!), and the only way to get control of the money is through public campaign financing.

You don't ask the local wolf pack to reform sheep-herding.

Josh Marshall poses this astute question:

Isn't offshoring port management and security sort of like offshoring the shore?

In its efforts to starve the Federal government out of existence, Bush cut $28 million—and 32 jobs—from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Then he mentioned, in his state of the union speech, that we need renewable energy. Forgetting for a moment that the pusher-in-chief suddenly got religion on our addiction to (foreign) oil, it's still kind of embarrassing that he cut our renewable energy budget at the same time. Or, more to the point for these clowns, embarrassing that they got caught doing it.

So the 32 got their jobs back today:

Two weeks ago, the lab workers, including eight researchers, were laid off at the lab because of a $28 million budget shortfall. Then, over the weekend, at the direction of Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, $5 million was transferred back to the lab to get the workers back on the job.

Lab officials are ecstatic about getting the positions back, although they say the remaining $23 million shortfall has forced delays in research subcontracted to universities and companies. Still, it was an untimely issue for the president, who flew to Colorado to push the energy initiatives he announced in his State of the Union address.

Quel faux pas!

The city of Eureka, Nunavut, in way-Northern Canada, has its first sunrise of the year today around 11:30 CT (17:30 UTC). Technically the sun never actually gets above the horizon, but a tiny bit of it will scrape along the southern horizon for about an hour before disappearing until tomorrow.

Eureka is typically the northernmost weather station that sends hourly reports to NOAA, and this time of year it's almost always on the world's coldest places list. For example, at this writing, Eureka is -41°C (-42°F)—but it's a dry cold, so you don't feel it as much.

The 7:00 am (13:00 UTC) temperature at Chicago O'Hare was -22°C (-7°F), the coldest temperature recorded there since 1 February 2004.