We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
I think the sales trick would be to give them some fresh new target for the hatred. Maybe the infidel Eskimos? Or maybe those crazy Aussie Aborigines who don't give a dang about Mohammed (pbuh)?
But hey, what's with that little mustache? Is that to look more Moslem or something? Good grief. That seems strange.
Although her father encouraged her to sing only gospel music, Cora and her siblings would sneak out back with their homemade instruments and play the blues. With one brother accompanying on a guitar made out of bailing wire and nails and one brother on a fife made out of a corncob, she began on the path to blues woman.
Orphaned at 11, Koko -- a nickname she earned because of an early love of chocolate -- at age 18 moved to Chicago with her soon-to-be-husband, the late Robert "Pops" Taylor, in search for work.
Setting up house on the South Side, Koko found work as a cleaning woman for a wealthy family living in the city's northern suburbs. At night and on weekends, she and her husband frequented Chicago's clubs, where many the artists heard on the radio performed.
"I started going to these local clubs, me and my husband, and everybody got to know us," Taylor said. "And then the guys would start letting me sit in, you know, come up on the bandstand and do a tune."
My only question is why it isn't in the Medical School, where such things could actually be seriously studied. After all, I have never met a gay or whatever person who really wanted to be like that if given the choice.
Acting like a jerk: US one of the largest Moslim countries? That's plain stupid, worthy of "all 57 states" or Dan Quail. When will the MSM discover that there's less horsepower under that shiny hood? More at Surber
My biggest concern with Government Run health care is that the government will run it and run you. That is, your life will be controlled from cradle to grave. You will eat a certain way…or else. You will do certain things…or else. And the government will have every motivation to force you down a path.
Ultimately, this is a civil liberties issue. Some people say that not having health care for all is shameful in such a wealthy country. Shameful is the notion of a bureaucrat deciding whether you live or die based on the metrics of a chart. That’s shameful. And that would be our future. It is a future I don’t want to see.
Just look at the big government, totalitarian groups that are for this mess. It should give you an idea of what you’d have to look forward to in the future.
This recession more mild that 1982. All my kids have jobs, including my youngest soon-to-be HS grad who has a summer acting job in NYC - and my dau-in-law-to-be just nailed a good one in NYC too. That makes 3 working in NYC. Good on them. All young folks need to spend some time there, I believe.
A European election? WTH? Who will vote? Who has any affinity with the "European Commission"?
Wilkinson: Repubs still the party of Nixon. Truth to that. A very good Pres, overall - if not the most likeable fellow. Too bad he didn't have the cojones to say "We screwed up."
55% of Americans want to abolish affirmative action, while 36% support it. Given the great strides minorities have made in the last 45 years under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, most people believe it is time to take the training wheels off.
I would suspect that these would naturalize well, given the right damp, acidic and sunny location. (The cultivated blueberrys do not seem to naturalize.) In fact, I have a spot that might work well for them, but whether the soil there is acidic enough I do not know.
Come to think of it, if it were just right for them, they would probably be there already.
A fellow former Marine who knows the family forwarded this to me. For those, few, who don't know what Semper Fi means, it's the shortened version of Semper Fidelis - always faithful. (I've removed the name of the recruiter; any Marine would do this for another.)
My dad Angelo was in the hospital in Tacoma, Washington. A former Marine and veteran of the Korean War, he was having his third knee replacement surgery. A long and very painful operation was going to be made even worse because dad was going through it alone. There was no one to hold his hand, no familiar soft voices to reassure him. His wife was ill and unable to accompany him or even visit during his weeklong stay. My sisters and brother lived in California, and I lived even farther away, in Indiana. There wasn't even anyone to drive him to the hospital, so he had arrived that morning by cab.
The thought of my dad lying there alone was more than I could stand. But what could I do from here?
I picked up the phone and called information for the Puyallup,Washington, Marine Corps recruiting station, where I joined the Marines ten years before. I thought that, if I could talk to a Marine and explain the situation, maybe one of them would visit my dad.
I called the number. A man answered the phone and in a very confident voice said, "United States Marines, Sergeant XXXX. May I help you?"
Feeling just as certain, I replied, "Sergeant XXXX, you may find this request a little strange, but this is why I am calling." I proceeded to tell him who I was and that my father was also a former Marine and 100 percent disabled from the Korean War. I explained that he was in the hospital, alone, without anyone to visit and asked if Sergeant XXXX would please go and see him.
Without hesitation, he answered, "Absolutely."
Then I asked, "If I send flowers to the recruiting station, would you deliver them to my dad when you go to the hospital?"
"Ma'am, I will be happy to take the flowers to your dad. I'll give you my address. You send them, and I will make sure that he receives them," he replied.
The next morning, I sent the flowers to Sergeant XXXX's office just as we had planned. I went to work and, that evening, I returned home and phoned my dad to inquire about his surprise visitor.
If you have ever talked with a small child after that child has just seen Santa Claus, you will understand the glee I heard in my dad's voice. "I was just waking up when I thought I saw two Marines in their dress blue uniforms standing at the foot of my bed," he told me excitedly. "I thought I had died and gone to Heaven. But they were really there!"
I began to laugh, partly at his excitement, but also because he didn't even mention his operation. He felt so honored; two Marines he had never met took time out to visit an old Marine like him. He told me again and again how sharp they looked and how all the nurses thought he was so important.
"But how did you ever get them to do that"? he asked me.
"It was easy. We're all Marines, Dad, past and present. It's the bond."
After hanging up with my dad, I called Sergeant XXXX to thank him for visiting my dad. And to thank him for the extra things he did to make it special: wearing his dress blue uniform, bringing another Marine along. He even took a digital camera with him. He had pictures taken of the two Marines with my dad right beside his bed. That evening, he emailed them to me so I could see for myself that my dad was not alone and that he was going to be okay.
As for the flowers, they hardly mattered, but I was glad for the opportunity to express my feelings. The card read: "Daddy, I didn't want just anyone bringing you flowers, so I sent the World's Finest.
Persons flourish in community. A community is not an “aggregate of individuals,” but rather the special form of association through which individuals, in and through relations to others and to God, become persons. In becoming a person one recognizes that other human beings are, like oneself, created in God’s image. “The Imago Dei,” Rawls declares, is “that which in man makes him capable of entering into community by virtue of likeness to God, who is in Himself community, being the Triune God.”
Faith, sin, and grace, Rawls maintains, revolve around personality and community. Faith is “the inner state of a person who is properly integrated and related to community.” Sin is the destruction and repudiation of community. It receives expression in egotism, or pride, self-love, and vanity; egoism, or exclusive attention to the satisfaction of natural desire; and despair, or the nihilistic escape from the world. Grace is “the activity on God’s part which seeks to restore the person to community.” It overcomes sin and accomplishes conversion. Since ethics is bound up with community and personality, and community and personality are bound up with God, “there can be no separation between religion and ethics.”
Poor Bird Dog. He's not very sophisticated. He's settled for a second-rate bizarre Swiss instrument to annoy his neighbors with. Well, I can't sit idly by and let some Swisstafarian bang on a dented wok and let it be passed off as cutting edge Swiss weirdness. The guy's positively buttoned down compared to Eliana Burki and her swingin' alpenhorn.
She's wearing a miniskirt and has lips like quadriceps. What's not to like?
The "hang" is a very ancient Swiss drum-like instrument which looks like a wok with dings - similar to a modern steel drum. Swiss mythology tells that the idea was born of children playing with kitchen pots and pans. Here is Liron Man playing one:
The Maggie's Farm fun-loving and amoral fact-checking and bookkeeping staff invite you to play the ancient traditional New England festive Springtime game called Name That Tractor:
The thing that absolutely drives me up the wall about the argument that California's biggest problem is a process problem -- the two-thirds rule to adopt budgets and raises taxes -- instead of an inability to live within its means is that the process argument implies that California has been governed in a starve-the-beast mode. In other words, that minority Republicans in the Legislature have managed to keep taxes absurdly and unrealistically low.
Instead, the truth, of course, is that California has the highest gas and sales tax; the highest- or second-highest income tax; and the highest corporate tax rates in the West. Our property taxes are about average nationally, thanks to Prop. 13.
How can anyone look at this picture and make the starve-the-beast argument? How come no one ever points this out on the news pages of the L.A. Times or Sac Bee?
It's not a tendentious, impossible-to-document claim. It's a simple fact: Whatever the barriers are to higher taxes, California has still indisputably ended up with high taxes.
Salon’s “Dear Abbey” for hilariously confused and clueless lefties who ask questions of Glenallen Walken about conservatism - “Dear Wingnut” - is one of the most entertaining things about that publication. The childlike and simple minded questions asked by liberals of the author (and the comment threads his column generates) remind me of a kid asking his dad, “Why is the sky blue?” or maybe “How many stars are there, daddy?”
led me to Salon's Dear Wingnut site. "Walken" is pretty good, matter-of-fact, and deserves - and no doubt gets - attention there. Give him a look.
President Obama says that if his health care program doesn’t pass Congress by this summer, it’s dead.It’s dead already among Americans, but that hasn’t yet penetrated the heavily Democrat Congress or the liberal majority of boosters among the major media, seemingly determined to proctologically ram it in.
·50% more Americans say reducing the federal deficit is more important than a new health care scheme;
·Just 25% are willing to change their current coverage;
·29% say a government-run health system would be better than now;
·77% are opposed to taxing employer-provided health insurance;
·19% believe a new health care scheme will lead to lower costs.
In poll after poll, basically, those favoring the Obamacare schemes are those at the leftmost wing of the Democrat Party.Probably progeny of former snake oil purchasers.
You know what is ironic about the Bogle piece? It's that I spend all day every day working for the public sector coming up with really smart ideas to save states and local governments money to lower tax rates, fix their deficits, find ways that they can actually afford their capital plans and if they can't - we tell them that. We don't convince them to do fancy structures they don't understand (although they don't understand much) and we don't wait until we are paid to offer advice or analysis either. Half my time is spent working on unsolicited stuff. You know what usually happens? They pick a worse firm and a not as good a proposal because of probably some political or golf relationship or pay-to-play scheme, and they end up wasting taxpayer money. Some smart govt people get it and do the right thing, but not many. One thing I have learned over my years in fixed income is that 99% of the people in government are idiots.
Punctuation marks originated from notations used to mark pauses for breath in oral recitations, but 17-to-19th-century grammarians tied them ever more tightly to grammar. There remains a minority position that language pedants call “elocutionary” - that punctuation is properly viewed as markers of speech cadence and intonation. Top-flight copy editors know this: the best one I ever worked with was a syntactic punctuationist on her own hook who noted that I’m an elocutionary punctuationist and then copy-edited in my preferred style rather than hers. (That, my friends, is real professionalism.)
I think our blog punctuation style is elocutionary.
Ranked across nations. I was surprised by these numbers until I realized that they were the %s that chose "10", so those who chose 9-7 aren't included. Thus I am not sure what to make of the chart.
Many of those lunches look darn good, but the crap the American kids seem to want looks disgusting. Anyway, if I ate lunches like these I'd be asleep for two hours afterwards. An apple is about all I can handle if I have things to do.
Photo is a school lunch in China. Looks good to me - especially that fried fish.
"The financial-services sector subtracts value from society," he said, comparing it with gambling, law, and government as entities that simply move money around and extract a bit for themselves.
The US produces 90% of the new medicines in the world. The absence of price controls on drugs makes that possible, and the rest of the world benefits from the work done in our research labs.
It's not easy being a drug company. Most research hits dead ends; the government has endless hurdles, litigation can drive you into bankruptcy - and everybody wants the stuff for free.
For our hard-earned billions, what do we get from GM? Bupkus. Even Nader thinks it's nuts. And the kid they put in charge has no biz experience, when what is called for is an expert analyst of distressed manufacturing assets.
Samuelson on The Obama Infatuation. Of course the press hasn't reported on their own sexual fantasies. Why would they report on them when they can simply enact them with virtual oral and anal sexual activities?
That's the stupidest thing I have heard of yet today - so dumb it makes my hair hurt, as Imus would say. So dumb I won't even waste any virtual ink to bother to explain why.
Never a place to be outdone in the PC department, Harvard begins a 
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A fellow former Marine who knows the family forwarded this to me. For those, few, who don't know what Semper Fi means, it's the shortened version of Semper Fidelis - always faithful. (I've removed the name of the recruiter; any Marine would do this for another.)
Persons flourish in community. A community is not an “aggregate of individuals,” but rather the special form of association through which individuals, in and through relations to others and to God, become persons. In becoming a person one recognizes that other human beings are, like oneself, created in God’s image. “The 
President Obama says that if his health care program doesn’t pass Congress by this summer, it’s dead.
Photo of cute toes from Theo -
Althouse posting at Insty