Quick Hits

After last night's post, I was looking forward to a nice, relaxing day today. I don't know why it was a surprise to me, but no such luck. I woke up this morning to waste water backed up in the toilet bowl and the bathtub; it had overflowed the toilet a bit, but not enough to keep the water from drying out (but not the "waste" part of it, though). It was exceptionally cold in Chicago today, though, and plumbers already had their hands full with broken boilers and burst pipes. The best I could do was get the plumber to call again tomorrow morning to see what appointments might be available. But last night's post whined enough, so that'll be enough of that. Here are some quick hits, instead.

• As an illustration of how cold it was in Chicago today, the park district closed down some of its skating rinks to keep people off the ice and out of the air. The official high yesterday was five degrees, but it only did that well because the temperature rose a bit shortly before midnight.

• Matt Yglesias had an exciting day today. On Friday, he wrote a post that was less than complimentary of the Third Way organization. Although he opened the post claiming that this was a "neat organization," he later admitted that "their domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit." The post didn't get a lot of attention, but someone at Third Way was unhappy. That person contacted the Center for American Progress, which hosts Yglesias's blog, and made a complaint. Jennifer Palmieri, CAP's acting CEO, wrote a post in response reminding us all that Yglesias doesn't speak for CAP, and as a matter of fact, CAP has a nice working relationship with Third Way. The comments section went wild--there are 661 comments there as I write this. There was a lot of discussion around the blogs, too. Was Matt being censored? Was this just a way to get Matt to be more careful about whom he criticized? It looked like Palmieri had hijacked the blog, but then it turned out that Matt posted Palmieri's post himself and didn't have a big problem with it. By the time that came out, however, the perception of a chilling effect had already lingered, whether Matt felt it or not. This may not have a long-term effect, but CAP's reputation (for itself and for its Think Progress blog) has been tarnished for the moment, at least.

• Recently I've been getting a number of hits by people searching for "Tammy Souza" because I mentioned her once in a post. She used to be a weather forecaster on the local Fox affiliate, but she left recently. Apparently the people searching for her are having a hard time finding information. Their first problem (and why they come here) is that they're misspelling her name (as I did, myself). If you google "Tammie Souza," you'll find that she's now chief meteorologist at WTSP, the CBS affiliate in Tampa.