David Lee's List: Daily News

• Ridiculous. Instruments and vocals are completely different. The former are much more sensitive. Of course, there will be some situations in which even vocal performance will require pre-recording; just not as often. - David Lee on 2009-01-25

• repealed a Reagan-era policy that prohibited foreign nongovernmental family-planning groups from receiving U.S. funds if they provided abortions or even lobbied for abortion rights in their country
• a time traditionally reserved for the release of information an Administration would like to bury

• more powerful in the reading than it was in the hearing
• parataxis, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the placing of propositions or clauses one after the other without indicating . . . the relation of co-ordination or subordination between them.”
• hypotaxis, the marking of relations between propositions and clause by connectives that point backward or forward
• the prose of Obama’s inauguration is surely more paratactic than hypotactic
• Penguin Books is getting out a “keepsake” edition of the speech, which will be presented along with writings by Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

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• On Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Flubber Hall of Fame when he administered the presidential oath of office apparently without notes.
• re-administered the oath Wednesday evening
• 35-word passage
• blowback from Chief Justice Roberts’s habit of grammatical niggling
• Captain Kirk made a grammatical error
• Dolly Parton should not have declared
• chairman of the usage panel of The American Heritage Dictionary

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• State and federal gasoline taxes should be abolished. Local governments should tax gasoline only to the extent necessary to pay for roads when user charges are not feasible.
• The case for policies designed to discourage oil consumption is nearly as threadbare as the case for increasing the gasoline tax

• Obama had made rejuvenating diplomacy a centerpiece of his campaign, and he has named a serious and strong-willed team whose members, as much as anything, hate to fail.

• By finalizing midnight regulations at the beginning of November, the Bush Administration ensured that most of the rules would be in effect before Obama took the oath of office on Jan. 20 — in some cases, just before.