Numbers

4868

Tomorrow is ‘tax day.’ If, like the President or Vice President, your 2003 income was $700,000 or $800,000, it is a day to celebrate your tax savings.

There are a lot of tough questions to ask about the war, but one great thing about it – at least for the rich – is that it’s free. And then some.

It’s not too late to fund your Roth IRA for 2003 – or even to set one up. You have one more day. Hie on down to your local bank.

It’s also not too late to file Form 4868 for an automatic tax-day extension to August 16. Let it never be said this site failed to provide you with an excuse to procrastinate.

13N6705

Bob Fyfe: ‘After reading your comment yesterday, I wondered how difficult it would be to order your Thinkpad part away from IBM. I found this website within a few seconds using a Google search on 13N6705. The company is Advanced Computer Services. And although I know nothing about them, it turns out that they have the part in stock, it’s only $175 (to IBM’s $280), they don’t charge sales tax outside of Ohio (you’d have to take care of that yourself with your state), and ground shipping is $8-12 depending on your location (other options are available).’

☞ Now, why didn’t I think of that? Googling a part number – for anything, by any manufacturer – very often snaps it right up onto your screen, sometimes at an advantageous price. (Here‘s another place I could have found it, a site apparently dedicated to ThinkPads.)

Alan Questell found it for $154 here on eBay. ‘But scroll down the page,’ he advises, ‘because you need to buy it as a 2nd hard drive. I’d suggest the 60GB Travelstar for a little more money…it’s faster (7200 rpm vs. 5400). By the way, most laptops now use 2.5 inch drives, so the actual hard drives are interchangeable; it’s the caddy (that you slide into the computer) that’s different. You can find those separately on eBay and put it together yourself or just find someone who’s selling the whole unit.’

This was the number of mistakes President Bush was able to think of at his press conference last night when asked to name the worst one he had made during his presidency. He did acknowledge that he must have made some – he was not trying to say he had not – just that, under this pressure, and not having covered the question in rehearsal, he couldn’t come up with one on the spur of the moment.

One can agree with much of what the President said about Iraq (or not) and still feel we might have done this – if we truly had to do it – better. Did we have to go into Iraq more or less timed for the mid-term election, because of an ‘imminent threat?’ No. Did we have to go in without adequate plans and resources? No. Might we have done far more after the January 7, 2001 briefing – long before the famous August 6 PDB – at which the President- and Vice-President elect were told that there was a man named Osama Bin Laden who represented a ‘tremendous’ and ‘immediate’ threat to the United States? Yes!

If you had been 13 days from assuming responsibility for the safety of your nation, and been told in the key, formal, about-to-hand-off-power, pre-Inaugural briefing by the head of the CIA, that your country faced a “tremendous,” “immediate” threat, would you have ignored it and focused, instead, on tax cuts and star wars missile defense and plans to invade Iraq? (Could this have qualified as that elusive mistake the President was trying in vain to conjure up last night?)

My point is that you don’t have to favor abandoning Iraq to favor ‘1’ as the number of terms you would like to employ this man as your President.