Obama takes South Carolina by a landslide, with 77% reporting he's got 54% to Clinton's 27%.
Edwards the Kingmaker is sitting at 19%.

Interview with Muhammad Yunus (Excerpts)
Managing Director, Grameen Bank
January 23, 2008

This interview was conducted and originally published by www.BigThink.com. View the full interview here.

Capitalism’s Strengths and Weaknesses

What are the special problems facing organic farmers affected by the 2007 flooding?

What are their numbers?

Did the floods affect their certification?

What is the best way to contact these farmers?

Months before the dryer had started frying everything, the new washer was acting up. It was making funny noises besides swish-swash-do-the-wash-proom-Prooom-proom-Prooom...

Ever pro-active, Trish called for service. I happened to be home when the Maytag repairman came a-knockin'.

He pried the thing open and checked it out. Then he turned it on to give it a whirl. After about five or ten minutes he figured it out.

"It's your transmission," he said.

You could've knocked me over with a feather. He couldn't have stunned me more if he'd said, "It's your alternator and your cataclysmic conversion." What do I know from washer workings? Lotta Nada, Mama.

Instead, he said, "I'll have to order the parts and come back." But it was all covered by the warranty.

Sometime shortly after, Trish brought home something that had caught her eye at the Oly Food co-op.

Instead of powdered or liquid laundry detergent, she had a box of Soap Nuts. I'm supposed to put a few of these nuts in a little drawstring bag and throw it in with the wash.

No problem.

Oh, I'm supposed to take the bag OUT of the wash BEFORE it goes into the dryer. Because otherwise they won't last that long. How long are they supposed to last? I can't tell. The box says 2-3 loads in cold water.

I keep my cd clips on my computer and use real player or songbird to shuffle songs and this morning, the shuffle function brought up Bobby Dylan's wonderful old tune suggesting that the times were changing.  This song, the Youngbloods song Get Together, some Crosby Stills and Nash, lots of Grateful Dead, these songs were playing all around me a few decades ago.  So many seem naive today, and Bobby's sense that change was coming certainly feels naive today as this country wages war that are so reminiscent of the Vietnam War that was the backdrop for the musical soundtrack of my youth, but be that as it may be, I still want to believe that Bobby has this figured right. 

Here are the lyrics, courtesy of www.bobdylan.com: 

We've talked about this (how much privacy should citizens working as government agents surrender) before on OlyBlog.

Seattle Times: Bill aims to protect privacy of police officers:

House Bill 2490 would exempt from disclosure personal information about a commissioned police officer or his or her family members. That would include home addresses, phone numbers, property and tax records and dates of birth.

Evidently the bill is in response to a local incident in 2001.

In 2001, a Mill Creek man posted the names, addresses, birth dates and Social Security numbers of Kirkland police officers online. He claimed his purpose was to let people know that police and their families "are locatable and accountable at a much more personal level than ever before."

There's opposition to the bill based on the fear that this would protect officers from any public scrutiny. Here's another thing to consider with the bill:

To withhold information covered by the bill, Nixon said, the state would have to create a database of every police officer and his or her family members — an expensive undertaking.

I'm not quite sure what the cost would be, but those who would support the bill and an increase in privacy protection for law enforcement officers should be worried about the government keeping a database. We've seen in Europe and in the United States incidents where computers and drives were either lost or stolen which contained information primed for identity fraud.

I couldn't find a link to any article, but about a year ago the DoD lost a computer containing the Social Security numbers (I don't remember every detail, but I want to say more than Social Security numbers were lost) of about 30 million current and former members of the Armed Forces.