This is one of my favorite milestones. Thanks to the analemma, tonight's sunset (4:20 pm) is the earliest of the year in Chicago. Of course, the sunrise still gets later every day until January 4th. At least tomorrow we'll have just a smidge more evening light than we'll have today.

The Stanford law professor is focusing on corruption as a way of combating creeping copyrights:

Mr Lessig has concentrated for a decade on copyright law and its interaction with the internet. So he left some people feeling confused earlier this year when he announced a new focus for his campaigning efforts: tackling corruption. Not everyone understood that this change in academic and activist emphasis is more of a shift in strategy than in substance.

For years Mr Lessig has presented legal arguments against excessive copyright extensions. But he says lawmakers are so in thrall to big-media lobbyists that they do not even realise that counter-arguments to copyright extensions exist. Even though Britain's Gowers Review, published in 2005, argues against such extensions, and eminent economists such as the late Milton Friedman have declared the importance of copyright limits to be a “no brainer”, Mr Lessig says legislators are clueless about “an issue that any rational policymaker has no problem understanding.” Swayed by campaign contributions from vested interests—such as film studios, music companies and book publishers—America's Congress has lengthened copyright terms 11 times in the past four decades, he observes.

Princeton economist (and New York Times columnist) Paul Krugman thinks Tresury's subprime plan won't do much:

[W]e're almost surely looking at less than $10 billion in losses avoided. Meanwhile, estimates of subprime losses to investors are currently running in the $300 -$400 billion range. So the back of my envelope suggests that this plan is a drop in the bucket.

When we woke up this morning the temperature was -16°C. Did Parker care? He did not:

This one from the Washington Post. Unlike the one I mentioned from WQAD, WaPo's limits you by party, and to the top 5 in each.

I came up all Edwards again, mostly because of his positions on health care.

No sooner had our first snowfall melted when we started to get our second one:

Via my dad, an interesting tool to help pick your primary-election candidate from the NBC affilliate in the Quad Cities.

This leash used to be longer. I wonder what could have happened:

The first snow of the season has begun in Chicago. Yippee.

For those of you keeping score at home, it was last this cold in Chicago (-7°C) on March 8th.

It builds character, doesn't it?