Hillary Clinton:
...the tax cuts may have helped you... we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.
Sick. Then there's this neat story recounted by James Lileks (via IP) followed up with a pretty bald-faced line from a Kerry supporter (scroll down to "A minor political note"):
Her final selling point: Kerry would roll back the tax cuts.
[If Kerry raises] my taxes... I won’t hire anyone, and they won’t hire anyone, rent anything, buy anything. You see?
“Well, it’s a philosophical difference,” she sniffed... “I think the money should have gone straight to those people instead of trickling down.” Those last two words were said with an edge.
“But then I wouldn’t have hired them,” I said. “I wouldn’t have new steps. And they wouldn’t have done anything to get the money.”
“Well, what did you do?” she snapped.
“What do you mean?”
“Why should the government have given you the money in the first place?”
“They didn’t give it to me. They just took less of my money.”
That was the last straw. Now she was angry. And the truth came out:
“Well, why is it your money? I think it should be their money.”
The scary thing is that this type of thought isn't unusual among the left. A few weeks ago around the time before Reagan's funeral I heard for the first time that liberals call the 80's the "decade of greed", I suppose because the top marginal rate was lowered drastically (which helped spur the economy onto like a 20 year period of explosive economic growth -- but that's completely beside the point at the moment). I understand now that this thinking isn't uncommon. I have a liberal friend who has explicitly said she thinks people who want to keep their own money instead of having it taken by the government are "greedy". It blows my mind.
This is great. A regular expression that allows you to check if text is valid UTF-8. Via Sam Ruby.
I'd previously used a function I found in the PHP manual and reproduced here. I like the regular expression better for aesthetic reasons, because it appears more straightforward (and therefore it's easier to verify its correctness), and because it's easier to port to any language you need. It's possibly even faster than the other code. I'll reproduce it here in case that page ever goes away:
$field =~
m/^(
[\09\0A\0D\x20-\x7E] # ASCII
| [\xC2-\xDF][\x80-\xBF] # non-overlong 2-byte
| \xE0[\xA0-\xBF][\x80-\xBF] # excluding overlongs
| [\xE1-\xEC\xEE\xEF][\x80-\xBF]{2} # straight 3-byte
| \xED[\x80-\x9F][\x80-\xBF] # excluding surrogates
| \xF0[\x90-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]{2} # planes 1-3
| [\xF1-\xF3][\x80-\xBF]{3} # planes 4-15
| \xF4[\x80-\x8F][\x80-\xBF]{2} # plane 16
)*$/x;
Excellent.
Update: Making that a non-capturing group would probably be better.
Hans Nowak has been doing more work on Wax, his higher-level wrapper for wxPython. I think I'm going to check it out soon.
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
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