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.
The air is seeping out of the Great Liberal Hot Air Balloon. American liberals have been hoping, wishing, and praying--okay, maybe not praying--for over a quarter-century for an end to the ghastly interlude of conservative dominance ushered in by Ronald Reagan. Surely it was all a bad dream, a waking nightmare, a bizarre deviation from the preordained path of history.
With the Democratic congressional victories in November 2006, the nightmare seemed to be ending. And in November 2008, with the election of Barack Obama and increased congressional majorities, it seemed to be over. A new era had dawned.
But did it? Maybe we're now experiencing a liberal interlude, not a liberal inflection point. After all, only six months into the new administration, even a talented hot air blower like President Obama, assisted by friendly gusts of wind from the media, is having trouble keeping the liberal blimp afloat.
Taxes. They are going to ask? But will they ask nicely? Related, from Kaus: Tremors of doom for health care. I see no groundswell of support for anything other than "leave us alone."
“War is redneck as hell,” as Sgt. Howison observed one hot morning in Baghdad. Lots of big vehicles, lots of blowing shit up, and with all that lead and high explosive flying around the place, lots of smoking and dipping. Yeah, smoking’s really bad for you, but …
I have little doubt that, had the same allegations been made towards the Bush administration, the story would rate front page headlines every day. But somehow, the following news failed to make the cut at the NY Times, the Boston Globe, as well as the WaPo (although I must say that the WaPo, being among other things a DC paper, has been a great deal better about covering the Walpin case in general). Imagine, if you will, how the following would have been covered by the MSM if the administration in question had been a Republican one; I doubt that Byron York and the Washington Examiner would be the lonely voices letting us know that the Obama administration is stonewalling Congress by refusing to answer pertinent questions and figuring that they can probably get away with it.
And they are getting away with it—at least for now
Six hundred billion doesn't sound like all that much to achieve, or come close to achieving, an important and long-standing goal such as universal health care. But keep in mind that health-care reform is supposed to save money. Its premise is that the current path is unaffordable. In that sense, a "mere" $600 billion extra is total defeat.
Fortune magazine recently reported that the number of U.S. companies in the world’s top 500 fell to the lowest level ever, while more Chinese firms than ever before made the list. Thirty-seven Chinese companies now rank in the top 500, including nine new entries. Meanwhile, the number of U.S. firms has fallen to 140, the lowest total since Fortune began the list in 1995. This is not good.
China also surpassed the U.S. as the world’s biggest automaker in the first half of 2009, with June sales soaring 36.5 percent from a year earlier. The Chinese registered 6.1 million car sales for the first half of the year. That way outpaced American sales, which were only 4.8 million.
And China has no capital-gains tax. It only has a 15-to-20 percent corporate tax. The U.S., on the other hand, is raising its cap-gains tax rate to 20 percent. It’s also increasing its top personal tax rates.
Seems to me that the Chinese govt has been moving towards an Authoritarian Capitalism, like Singapore. It works. Sucks, but works.
It is a common mistake of intellectuals to confuse IQ with common sense and verbal fluency with leadership qualities. They are simply unable to comprehend that academic success does not necessarily translate into a firm grasp on reality; the knack for endlessly bloviating on an abstruse subject does not automatically imply administrative ability; an academic degree is not a substitute for practical experience; and a professors' lounge is not a corporate boardroom.
Nobody would deny that the members of Obama's circle of economic advisors are indeed academically adept, well-spoken men and women. But have any of them ever run a lemonade stand, much less a bona fide business? Have they ever met a payroll? Do they know what it means to toss and turn in bed, worrying over the coming rise in vendor prices? They may have academic theories and marshal vast amounts of data, but have little practical knowledge of how things work in the real world.
So what do they bring to the administration other than long resumes and fearsome reputations as intellectual polemicists? All these brilliant academics have been brought on board for the sole purpose of lending an intellectual veneer to Obama's political schemes and validate his power grab. Hence the pitiful sight of these noted intellectuals being trotted out to the microphones to bleat pathetically in defense of the administration's agenda.
...few people other than news junkies have noticed how extraordinary Barack Obama's agenda is. Perhaps a number will help: 35%. That is the aggregate percentage of United States GDP produced by the three industries that the Democrats hope to restructure from the top down: Health care (17% of GDP), energy (9.8% of GDP), and financial services (8% of GDP). Think about that. Without even considering the transformational impact of proposed anti-business laws of general application, such as the Orwellian "employee free choice act," the Obama administration wants to redesign 35% of gross domestic product from the center. And he proposes to do it all in a rush this summer, lest the decline in his popularity and that of the Congressional Democrats erodes his power to do so.
Thirty-five percent. Somebody needs to turn that into a bumper sticker.
Autopsy of the Fannie and Freddie debacle: Michelle
The White House is spending millions of your $ for media manipulation. Bush (obviously) did not do that. Perhaps he should have, but I think it would have been beneath his dignity - and his Connecticut Dad would have disapproved. Yankees frown on self-promotion.
Weak on Russia? The O seems to want to be limp-wristed to everybody except to us fellow Americans. Hmmm.
It seems to me that the hundreds of millions now addicted to "celebrity" are like those addicted to a heroin of the soul. Like heroin, "celebrity" must be taken in ever increasing doses to fill a hole in the user's soul. And just like heroin, "celebrity" doesn't fill anything but only increases the emptiness. Which, of course, only increases the need and requires an ever larger dose of the illusion; of the shrieking unquiet voices.
In my view, it's a misdirected striving for connection with God.
This is a massive attempt by government to take more control of the economy, based in shaky science at best, and as Anthony Watts claims, pure dogma. When warmers such as Paul Krugman are reduced to calling scientific skeptics “traitors to the planet”, you know they’ve essentially lost the argument and now have only emotional and populist rhetoric left to defend the indefensible.
...there are only two possible conclusions: One, the stimulus has been the most inept public waste of money in history. Or two, it was a cynical attempt by the Democrats to vastly expand the scope of government during a time of crisis. Or maybe it's both.
One of my partners said yesterday that we are going to call this phase the "extend and pretend" phase in our economy. Which is you extend someone's maturity - because they are going to default - and you pretend that business will come back or that leverage factor is going to come back.
Then we'll enter phase two, which he said is the request to extend or "amend".
Then "send". In other words send the keys.
That is the phases we are in right now. Everyone is trying to buy time, as opposed to dealing with the leverage, they are trying to buy time. Whether you are a banker or a company, they are all trying to buy time. I don't see the leverage coming back, and I don't see the consumption of good and services coming back.
Global temps have crashed since Al Gore's movie (Photo: note health effects of our New England chill on one of our farm workers).
I think my main linking competitor in our square millimeter of the intertube kingdom isn't Insty - it's Larwyn at Doug Ross. He does a very good job, and he seems to have a similar notion of what needs to be put out there.
The health care debate in this country is an old story. It began in 1934 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to include government-funded health care in his "New Deal" as part of his comprehensive Social Security legislation. President Roosevelt was very concerned that the Supreme Court might rule parts of his "New Deal" unconstitutional. He tried to induce Congress to approve increasing the total number of justices on the Supreme Court to fifteen, attempting thereby to circumvent the judiciary and the Constitution by stacking the Court in his favor.
Subsequently, government funded health care has been debated in nearly every session of Congress since 1939.
Obama the student radical. Even the NYT wrote about it. Anchoress. However, we are all foolish in youth, because we haven't bumped into enough reality yet.
In which Nicholas Kristoff proves himself to be a fad-chasing dope (like Thomas Friedman). How much science did Kristoff take in school? Does he really know how to skeptically analyse data - with the math?
Once upon a time, MSM reporters, columnists, and editors mediated our information environment. Authoritative newspapers, such as the New York Times, and newsreaders, like Walter Cronkite, not only determined what the news of the day was but also established the acceptable parameters for discussing the news. The advent of the blogosphere introduced a complication to this structure. Suddenly, true experts in their fields could discuss what they considered to be the news in an unmediated fashion with their readers. One of the more interesting outcomes of such "contamination" of the once pristine MSM narrative was the spreading awareness that reporters, much of the time, are out of their depth talking about most technical subjects and that their biases blind them all too frequently to a full understanding of their subjects. This would be embarrassing and deflating to our MSM sages if they but noticed. Unfortunately, to a large extent, the MSM still determines what qualifies as "news" and continue to exercise their role as information gatekeepers in ways which damage our society.
Tax Day Tea Party: Socialism is slavery. Of course it is. Our slaves were happy, weren't they? Free house, free food, guaranteed job, singing all day and strummin' on the ol' banjo in the evening?
Heading up to Watch Hill (RI) tonite for a few days of boating, fishing, clam-eating, drinking, and skirt-chasing (despite the cold weather, fog, and rain). Hope all have a fine American weekend, wherever you may be on Gaia.
Honduran protesters bash Obama. Rightly so. He was on the wrong side, once again.
Back in 1912, when Woodrow Wilson successfully ran for the presidency, he told his compatriots, "We are in the presence of a new organization of society." Our time marks "a new social stage, a new era of human relationships, a new stagesetting for the drama of life," and "the old political formulas do not fit the present problems: they read now like documents taken out of a forgotten age." What Thomas Jefferson once taught is now, he insisted, quite out of date. It is "what we used to think in the old-fashioned days when life was very simple." Above all else, he hoped to persuade his compatriots to get "beyond the Declaration of Independence." That document "did not mention the questions of our day," he told them. "It is of no consequence to us. It is an eminently practical document, meant for the use of practical men; not a thesis for philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; not a theory of government, but a program of action"--once of use, outdated now.
Hmm. Wilson thought "whips for tyrants" were obsolete?
There's a very simple solution to all this. Mandate that individuals buy catastrophic health care insurance. Subsidize those who can't afford it. Let people save for health care costs using tax-advantagedindividual health care savings accounts. Let people who want to buy more comprehensive policies do so, but using after tax dollars. Let employers who want to provide more comprehensive group plans do so, but using after tax dollars. Then let's see whether the market is really fraught with adverse selection and moral hazard.
The disconnect between the person purchasing and paying for the service and the person receiving the service. This causes the most friction that piss people off (either against their insurance company or the government for not paying for something or limiting their flexibility). But is also tends to drive costs up, as people who are ultimately driving most of the health care choices have zero interest in how much it costs.
"Orwell was right. It was Wells who made it respectable, even before World War I, for liberals in England and America to demean their own native democratic culture in the name of an imagined antidemocratic World State. And it was Wells, with his stature as the prophet of the future, who taught upper-middle-class liberals that they were entitled to govern in the name of social evolution."
Readers know that we proud gun-and-Bible-clinging redneck Northeast Yankees hate it when Chardonnay-sippers who see themselves as our betters try to tell us how to live. We ain't stupid neither - cuz we been government-eddicated! At great expense!
BTW, we do love chevre - to the point that our editor wants to keep some goats. The meat is quite tasty, too. What's the PC term for a she-goat? A goatess? Goatette? Help me out.
George Washington's teeth. They look pretty good to me. I thought he had wooden false teeth. If you had decent teeth in middle age in those days, you were lucky.
Short of writing "get whitey," It's difficult to imagine how Judge Sotomayor could have fouled up the Ricci case any more than she did. Let's count the ways.
We're going to do great damage to the economy without actually reducing greenhouse gases, and we are going to create a massive new entitlement without actually restructuring the health care system. Much more of this and we will be done, and nobody, not even the president, seems to give a rat's ass.
John Carney has been doing a lot of blogging about the role of the CRA in the financial meltdown. That role is overstated by conservatives who are unwilling to admit that markets can have bad outcomes, but it is understated by liberals who are unwilling to admit that regulation, too, can produce hideous unintended consequences.
The CRA did not singlehandedly cause the meltdown. But the relaxation of credit standards that allowed the meltdown did start, as far as I can tell, with the CRA. And perhaps more importantly, the CRA, and the mentality behind the CRA, made regulators extremely unwilling to intervene. Everyone wanted to make credit more widely available to the poor. Well, the poor aren't good lending risks. So if you want to give them access to credit, you need to relax your lending standards. Any attempt to tighten lending standards on the part of the government would have resulted in a massive contraction in the credit available to core Democratic constituencies. Meanwhile, the Republicans were hoping that turning poor people into homeowners would make them more Republican.
From Mankiw in the NYT, who says the gummint could make it's own public option insurance today:
An important question about any public provider of health insurance is whether it would have access to taxpayer funds. If not, the public plan would have to stand on its own financially, as private plans do, covering all expenses with premiums from those who signed up for it.
But if such a plan were desirable and feasible, nothing would stop someone from setting it up right now. In essence, a public plan without taxpayer support would be yet another nonprofit company offering health insurance. The fundamental viability of the enterprise does not depend on whether the employees are called “nonprofit administrators” or “civil servants.”
Helping out California would open a Pandora’s box of policy headaches for the administration. How do you justify helping one state — even if it’s the biggest — when dozens of other state legislatures and governors have managed to make the wrenching budget cuts necessary? Granting special assistance could be seen as rewarding the worst actor – and set a dangerous precedent that might tempt other states to shrug off budget pain in hopes of getting a bailout.
Here's a fun photo caption contest at Wizbang. Should not be hard on him, tho. I love to look at maps too.
The UK continues to be hopelessly insane. Banning welcome mats. Not welcome mats for uncontrolled immigration, though. As we always say, "Grow a couple, and fix your own dang country." The Brits could try one of these mats and see if it passes the nanny's muster:
Michelle O says she wants a "purpose." How about raising your kids, weeding your garden, doing the dishes, helping out your friends, playing some tennis, cleaning the house or - if that's not enough self-importance for a hungry ego, how about a real job in the private sector? Good, productive, difficult work in the private sector is the best thing anyone can do for their country - after military service, that is.
Mr. Pastor, tear down this church. Please. The building sucks and, trust me, God hates it too.
ObamaCare: Not inevitable. But they feel they have to pass something, or they will lose their momentum for their laundry list. Related: Who will run your medical care if the bill passes? (You can be certain it won't be practicing docs - it will be policy wonks and economists - the same geniuses who invented HMOs.) Related:
The primary problem for Democrats is not stakeholders.It’s the general public.They were told “reform” would leave them alone if they liked their coverage — and their premiums would go down too by $2500 per year.But the bills the Democrats in Congress are now writing will increase costs for people with insurance and shift tens of millions of them out of the employer plans they generally like.That’s not the deal they are expecting to be offered, and they aren’t likely to agree to it anytime soon.
Related: If you call everything a crisis, people begin to think the word means "one more issue we ought to think about some time. Viking:
Hysterical hyperbole of the day - Firedoglake: "The gravity of America's health care crisis is the moral equivalent of the 19th Century's bloody conflict over slavery. This is not hyperbole..."
When did the US renounce "Leadership of the Free world"? The Left rarely speaks of freedom, or seems to value freedom, except when it's about abortion "choice." Otherwise, standing up for freedom is evil, un-nuanced cultural imperialism, right?
Self-censorship and the "see no Islam" mindset. Brussels J
Obama is willing to risk some political capital and credibility, but only on domestic pushes for socialism. The world knows he's a single-minded one-trick pony and views anything that occurs outside the headlong drive for socialism as an inconvenient "distraction" that does not need to be solved, but merely bumped off the front page.
The dictators and terrorists know this. Even US allies in socialistic Europe know this. The only people who don't seem to know this are the US media and the American public, which is largely shielded from these realizations by a severe underreportage of such "distractions."
Bird Dog - Spent Friday morning fishing for striped bass with Pops and Mother's cousin. Caught our limit of six fish greater than 28 inches in about five hours. We fished out of Groton (and off Fisher's Island), aboard "The Otter" with Captain Bruce of www.captainbrucesportfishing.com.
The weather turned out fine, with moderate swells and no rain. Limited visibility kept most other boats in port. We trolled surgical hose with sandworms and our largest fish was 26 pounds, caught by Pops. We had three more striped bass, too small to keep and one bluefish, which Pops claims he will make into fishcakes.
With the 25+ pounds of filets, a great time was had by all.
The CDS --the "toxic assets" that AIG (most prominently) committed ritual suicide with --was specifically left unregulated by this guy in the yr 2000 financial reforms, when there were a few hundred million in CDS existent. By 2007, that number was sixty trillion. Denninger makes the case that complex structured assets are deceptive by design.
Waxman-Markey would be a very stupid bill even if it were true that 1) the earth is getting warmer, 2) human activity is mostly responsible for climate changes, and 3) a warmer earth would be a bad thing. Given that all three of these premises are false--we cannot, in fact, control the weather--Waxman-Markey is a suicidal monument to human folly.
Oh, it seems easy at first. The press is kind; the Congress is pliant; the country loves you. You’re a breath of fresh air after the previous administration’s excesses. Your first attempts at big-ticket legislation shoulder their way into law. The opposition party looks easily divided, easily co-opted and deeply out of touch.
But eventually the hard part arrives. For Barack Obama, it may have started last week, courtesy of the abacus-wielding wonks at the Congressional Budget Office.
Dick Morris' new book Catastrophe. Yes, he is a Dem.
Where did the US sit in 2007 (the last year of data in Table 1315)? Somewhat less socialist than the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) average, but well into the mix. In 2007, government spending in the US was 37.4% of GDP, or more than Australia, Ireland, Japan, Slovakia, South Korea and Switzerland. The OECD average was 40.4% and the European average was 46.2%.
In 2007, the federal government spent "only" 20% of GDP (the remaining 17.4% of GDP was spent by state and local governments). According to the Congressional Budget Office, President Obama will spend 28.5% of GDP in 2009. If states and localities have remained roughly constant, government spending is now about 46% of GDP, or almost exactly the European average in 2007.
We are as much in the thick of socialism right now as, say, Germany, Greece and the Netherlands.
But the trends in these figures tell an even more interesting story. Table 1315 lists 28 OECD countries. At some point prior to 2007, 16 of those governments were spending over 50% of GDP. The European average peaked in 1993 at 52.2%. But by 2007, only four governments spent over half of GDP: Hungary, Denmark, Sweden and France. The European average fell from 52.2% to 46.2%.
At one point, Sweden was the top socialist in the OECD states, at 70.9% of GDP. But by 2007, France was in the lead, at just 52.4%. Sweden's government had cut its spending by almost 20% of GDP between 1993 and 2007. That is the size of the entire US federal government as a fraction of GDP!
Because of the deadweight costs of taxation itself, costs that are not included in the propaganda we are increasingly being fed, we might well find that there is in fact, overall, no saving of money.
President George W. Bush concocted the connection between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein to justify the Iraq invasion. Now President Barack Obama is concocting an equally fantastical theory to justify a de facto government takeover of health care.
Ms. Feinberg recalled one 15-year-old boy from Long Island who told her: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’ ”
"World cooling is here to stay and the new round of climate alarmism just announced by UK Government ministers and the Met Office of more extreme weather and warming in coming decades driven by mankind has no merit and is defied by the facts and front-line science”, said Piers as his forecast from three weeks ahead was confirmed for the formation of the first East Pacific typhoon of the season off Mexico.
What most Americans identify as government "welfare" are payments to single mothers, food stamps and (perhaps) Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for the poor. But that's not the half of it. Since 1960, government has changed radically. Then, 52 percent of federal spending went for defense, 26 percent for "payments for individuals" -- the welfare state. By 2008, 61 percent consisted of "payments for individuals," 21 percent for defense.
Social Security and Medicare -- programs for the elderly -- represented the lion's share: $1 trillion in 2008. Most Americans don't consider these programs "welfare," but they are. Benefits are paid mainly by present taxes; there's little "saving" for future benefits; Congress can alter benefits whenever it wants. If that's not welfare, what would be?
Pressures on private and public welfare won't abate.
This is what Tait Trussell of the Acton Institute wrote in an article just last week:
“[I]n just three years from now, Social Security and Medicare will need one out of ten tax dollars, John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis points out. And just 11 years in the future—by 2020—Uncle Sam will need one out of every four income tax dollars to fund these programs for seniors. If we continue with all other government programs in operation today and raise the taxes to pay for Medicare, plus Medicaid—the health program for low-income folks—the Congressional Budget Office estimates a middle-income family by the middle of this century will have to pay two-thirds of its total income in federal taxes.”
This situation defines the term “unsustainable.” Why is not President Obama proposing a “fix” to avert this approaching catastrophe? Curiously enough, not only he is unconcerned, but he seems to think that the unviable entitlements constitute some sort of achievement. This is what he said about them in Chicago:
Presidents have called for health care reform for nearly a century…But while significant individual reforms have been made – such as Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program – efforts at comprehensive reform that covers everyone and brings down costs have largely failed.
The president apparently believes that these failing federal programs already represent reform and that all that is needed now is to create something that would quickly become the mother of all entitlements – governmentally guaranteed universal healthcare.
Americans should really worry when their president fails to recognize the real dilemma we face as a nation: Either we reform entitlements or we let them drag us down the dark pit of insolvency.
They've been lying about the number of people without health care. They've been lying about whether the public is satisfied with health care. They've been lying about every aspect of health care.
They unleashed the slip-and-fall lawyers on the medical system, causing untold higher costs for medical practitioners. They've attacked the health care system relentlessly, driving up costs just like they've attacked the energy industry and the automakers.
And even when they have complete monopolistic control of a system, like the educational system in America, they want more control. It's never enough. They want more money, more regulations. More. They need to "invest". They need to raise taxes. They need to repress. They need to compel.
Because the Statist cannot make the imperfect perfect, even though he says he can. The Statist is more imperfect than anyone else.
Related: Labour is like our Dems: their perennial strategy is to make as many as possible dependent on the government. That way, they hope to have jobs and power forever. Via TimesOnline:
Labour lags behind on almost every indicator, save one: it is still regarded as the party more likely to protect public services. An Guardian/ICM poll last week revealed that 48% of voters think Labour will protect services, whereas 46% think the Conservatives will do the same. Labour has a positive score of 1%, ie, more people believe Labour will protect services than harm them. The Tories have a deficit of 3%.
An architect of new Labour whispers in my ear, and Gordon’s, that people do not yet have full confidence in the Tories. The position of Cameron is much better than that of his party; the opposition’s lead is shallow. “If you do not trust them on the public services,” he says, “it’s a reflection of a deeper distrust that they have not really changed.”
I have tried pointing Americans at the British example to show them what an appalling idea it is to have the state directing any industry, let alone medical care. But alas it is very hard to overcome that special kind of insular American optimism that does not think what happens in another advanced first world nation can teach them anything, because in the USA things will be different.
DON SURBER: Don’t Become West Virginia. “If poverty is so good, then why do we have anti-poverty programs? Using her logic, we should have pro-poverty programs.” Well, that’s pretty much what’s going on right now . . . .
We said we would not make fun of Michelle O's garden, but this is ridiculous. Didn't they just plant the seeds a few weeks ago? I want to know what magic fertilizer they use. Potemkin garden? Or is this a loaves and fishes deal?
Continual Iran updates at Gateway, whence the photo. We wish the best for all of the brave and lovely women in Iran's Lipstick Revolution.
Related: Driscoll notes that great powers always have a dog in the fight, because a posture of evenhanded neutrality always has non-neutral effects.
Related: Ace rightly notes that the O's refusal to stand strong with the protesters can damage future relations with Iran. The man is a pussy, a Prom Queen. The only things he gets tough with are Republicans, FOX news, and our international allies and friends like the Brits and Israel.
Obama himself gave us ample warning of his reckless grandiosity during the 2008 campaign. So we can’t say we weren’t warned. The situation has only gotten worse in the months since his inauguration. And there’s 3.5 years to go. Help!
Related: Medical care plan would not apply to Congress! Via Blue Crab:
From what is known about the tippity-top secret bill at this point, it appears that it is bad enough that Congress will not allow it to apply to themselves or the rest of the Federal government.
That should tell you all you need to know about this bill.
I agree that the "war against drugs" failed. It's been going on since Nixon. All it does is raise the cost of drugs and increase the crime. It's past time to re-think it. It's too bad that drug users generally have little interest in getting over it, but that's reality.
What the late lamented Milton Friedman said about medical care costs. He makes a number of excellent points, including that it is employee insurance that drives the prices up. h/t, Mankiw
The looming middle class tax increases. Even some Dems are waking up, like drunks after a bad binge. They have been drinking on our nickel since January.
The 48' Colin Archer above is for sale, but what we really need up here in the Northeast is an Ark. Almost up to 40 days and 40 nights of cold rain. Nobody is boating much yet. I call all crummy weather "climate change" now. Don't you? Aren't we entitled to nice weather? Why doesn't the government do something about it?
JOHN TIERNEY: U.S. Climate Report Assailed: “The new federal report on climate change gets a withering critique from Roger Pielke Jr., who says that it misrepresents his own research and that it wrongly concludes that climate change is already responsible for an increase in damages from natural disasters.”
Does academia believe that they all think alike because they're smarter than me? I do not think that they are. They just chose different careers. Everybody is a careerist, to some extent.
It is a foregone conclusion that the bill now getting marked up in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP) is not going anywhere.
Note that the economy has seemed to stabilize, more or less, and well under ten percent of the stimulus money has been spent to date. Moving forward, if no further major programs will be put into place, how would you like to spend the rest of that cash?
Seriously.
But Tyler, that cash doesn't exist yet. It's debt. Debt isn't money - it's negative money.
Now they're 
The University of Texas 
Global temps have 
Gaia doesn't give a rat's ass 
Wood tennis racquets 
Enjoyably humorous 
Continual Iran updates at 
