Catching up with the web...

Geoffrey Colvin whacks the nail through the wood on this one: Bush vs. Kerry: Who's Stupider on Jobs?  "George Bush and John Kerry are apparently competing to see who can be stupider on the hot-button issue of factory jobs...  The simple truth, which no presidential candidate can utter, is that America doesn't have too few manufacturing jobs.  It has too many."  Just wait until we get competing proposals for manufacturing subsidies.  It's a race to the bottom, and we lose.

Stephen Den Beste has the truth.  If you don't believe me, ask him :)  Great stuff.

He linked Dick Morris in the New York Post: How to buy a French veto.  More truth.

The European Union added 10 more countries.  "The EU began with six member states: Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.  Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom joined in 1973, Greece in 1981, Spain and Portugal in 1986, and Austria, Finland and Sweden in 1995.  The newest members are Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia."  The EU website has a lot of background.  Eight of the ten new member countries were formerly communist.  Perhaps someday the muslim countries presently so hostile to the U.S. will undergo a similar transformation.  We can hope...  (Adam Curry points out the EU website embarassingly reports "364 days left until Enlargement".  Maybe that's the next enlargement :)

This is good news: NASA: Robotic repair of Hubble 'promising'.  "NASA is now taking a closer look at two or three robotic options for extending Hubble's service life and possibly even outfitting the telescope with one or more new instruments.  NASA engineers will pick the most promising robotic option by June, he said, and then spend the rest of the summer examining it in greater detail."  Excellent.

This is really cool; Cult of Mac links this story in The Morning News which pairs art from the New York Metropolitan museum with corresponding music.  The story has links to the art and the music (as iTunes music store previews, no less).

Ottmar Liebert comments on singles vs. albums.  "I believe that a song has to be able to stand on its own, but is part of a whole cycle. Think of a song as a single poem in a book of poems."  I think it would be very interesting to match Ottmar's music with visual art.

Have you seen this cello?  Joz on blogging.la notes this rare Stradivarius cello was stolen from L.A. Philharmonic principal cellist Peter Stumpf.  It is worth $3.5M, but how could a thief ever hope to sell it?

Friends of the Parasol have an online petition to save the Parasol restaurant, a kitsch 1960s throwback located in Seal Beach, California.  I've eaten there; it's pretty cool.  Save it!  [ via Mark Frauenfelder ]

By now you've been inundated with news about Google's IPO filing, so there's not much I can add.  John Battelle posted a nice analysis of the filing and the attendant "owner's manual" from Sergey Brin and Larry Page.  Mitch Kapor wrote some insightful observations, too.  You already know what I think - a great company, not a great stock.

Wired wonders Will RSS Readers Clog the Web?  Will they?  No.  Nice to see RSS syndication getting such mainstream publicity, however.  If people are worrying about it becoming too popular, it must be catching on :)

I really missed Matt Webb of Interconnected while he was recovering from a server disaster, and I'm glad he's back.  Check out this post about packing.  Who else would write this?  Delightful.  A source of unique memetic variation, to be sure :)

Finally - and I am not making this up - Barbara Walters is hosting a reality show where the winner gets a baby.  And psychic Uri Geller is suing based on a patent he owns.  He must have seen this coming, I sure didn't.  Wow.