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.
Average pay for Chicago teachers is $76,000 for 9 months' work with many vacations, not including benefits and defined-benefit pensions. Student performance is terrible, with only 15% of grade school students reading at grade level. In other words, it's not working. If this were a competitive business, it would be out of business but it is a government monopoly, controlled by a wealthy and powerful union.
1. The highest-paid public school teacher in Illinois is a physical education teacher making $191,124 per year (I'm assuming this is a 9-month teaching "year").2. Six of the top 12 highest-paid high school teachers in Illinois teach physical education, each making $170,000 or more. 3. Six state employees teaching driver education make $150,000 or more. 4. Six high school teachers make more than the Illinois Governor's salary of $177,500.5. 14,048 Illinois high school teachers made salaries of $100,000 or more in 2010, which is up 13% over last year.
Welcome to those of you arriving from Instapundit and my thanks to Glenn for the helpful link. My original post on this gruesome subject is here and the Save-Our-Doc donation page is here.
And welcome to Maggie's Farm, the oldest and bestest eclectic site in the sphereoblogs. It's the only site in town where you'll see a penetrating look into the human psyche by a renown psychiatrist, an exposé of the rotten core we call our educational system, a warning about the latest nasty computer virus, all followed by an endearing piece titled 'Chipmunk of the Week'. Quality eclecticity, all the way.
As far as who the hell I am, I was blogging ten years before the word was invented and had a page of the latest hot web links up a decade before Instapundit launched. Details here. As I said to Ed Driscoll today, relics like me should be preserved. As for some of my recent posts, if you like music, check this out. If you like horses, check this out. The genetics post Ed once referred to as "epic" is here, and my home site is here.
As for the rest of you lugs (and lugesses), I'm still tentatively scheduled for the 24th, but I might push it back a bit. The problem with the entire medical field is that it's full of 'ifs'. If the operation goes routinely, I might have enough money. If the post-operative costs are normal, I might have enough money. If the drugs are still available (a number of post-operative cancer drugs have recently become harder to find because of — you guessed it — government over-regulation by the FDA), I might have enough money.
It's the not-ifs that are worrying me.
The good news is that a subsidiary of the company I normally do the web work for hired me to do a big project for them (Ever put an Excel database online? It's not a pretty site.) so that'll keep me busy for a while. It should be worth about $800, but the pisser is that I won't get it for almost two months.
I also dusted off my plumbing tools the other day and made $350 replacing a water heater and two faucets. I modestly admit I haven't lost my touch. I had those puppies replaced in no time flat.
And, of course, no Big C update would be complete without including one of the many, many (many) happy-go-lucky, cheer-me-up cartoons and pics my two best friends have sent me since this all began. I'm sure lucky to have such support!
A pal took this pic of the USS Saratoga in Newport, RI last weekend. Some people want to use her for a new Naval museum, but Naval museums aren't really profitable. Even the Intrepid loses money.
With its sales weak, its share price crashing, and its business model still a mess, some analysts already are predicting that GM will return to bankruptcy — but not until after the election.
And I don't mean large in a Chris Christie kinda way, I mean large in a spit-in-the-face-of-the-law, let's-incite-anarchy kinda way. That kinda large.
I've never gone to Coyote's site on a regular basis. Coyotes are, to be perfectly frank, scavengers. And a pretty scruffy lot, to boot. As such, I also tend to view his writing as 'scruffy'.
Such is the power of word association.
Well, Bird Dog bravely linked to this scalawag the other day, so I held my breath (coyotes live in filth, I needn't remind you) and checked it out. I enjoyed the article, but it seemed like there was something 'off' about it. I read a few more posts and continued having this strange feeling that all wasn't right in the world of coyote scruffiness.
Then I discovered the raw, naked truth: A blatant admission to the world that he had spit in the face of Truth, Justice and The American Way by preaching outright anarchy against the government!
Automatic weapons, you ask? Incendiary bombs? Molotov Cocktails?
No!
I am proudly holding the government-mandated flow restrictor I just removed from my most recent shower head purchase.
Pic: Artist's concept of the crime in progress
After calling the FBI, DHS, EPA and OSHA (just for good measure) about this self-admitted nihilist, I felt it my duty to warn you, the Maggie's Valued Reader™, about this 'gateway crime' — where the pusher draws you into his web of sin with a 'simple' crime — only to have you later trapped into doing his bidding when it comes time to rob that armored car guarded by six ex-Army commandos with Uzis and you end up dying a horrific, painful, bloody death — and all because you visited Coyote's blog.
I also thought I might elaborate on his post, so that you may further know exactly what to watch out for while steering clear of gateway crimes such as this. I have a little perspective on the whole water-rationing thing because I was a sub-contractor when California went through an official 8-year drought back in the 80's. Then the weather cycle flipped back around and 'flood control' was at the top of everybody's list.
Such were the whims and vagaries of weather, back in the days before global warming, back when nature still had a say.
Today, as Mort Zuckerman accurately contended in a Friday evening Wall Street Journal op-ed, “we are experiencing, in effect, a modern-day depression,” where “dependent millions” relying on food stamps and swelling the disability rolls “are the invisible counterparts of the soup kitchens and bread lines of the 1930s.”
Hinderaker suggests that it might be the increase in the dependency culture. I wonder whether it's just because Obama's brand is cool, and Romney's is square. I doubt that the country has suddenly swerved Left.
BTW, I think Obama's DNC speech was entirely on purpose. That speech worked before, so why change anything? If it ain't busted, don't fix it.
...this is America’s best and brightest — or, at any rate, most expensively credentialed. Sandra Fluke has been blessed with a quarter-million dollars of elite education, and, on the evidence of Wednesday night, is entirely incapable of making a coherent argument. She has enjoyed the leisurely decade-long varsity once reserved for the minor sons of Mitteleuropean grand dukes, and she has concluded that the most urgent need facing the Brokest Nation in History is for someone else to pay for the contraception of 30-year-old children. She says the choice facing America is whether to be “a country where we mean it when we talk about personal freedom, or one where that freedom doesn’t apply to our bodies and our voices” — and, even as the words fall leaden from her lips, she doesn’t seem to comprehend that Catholic institutions think their “voices” ought to have freedom, too, or that Obamacare seizes jurisdiction over “our bodies” and has 16,000 new IRS agents ready to fine us for not making arrangements for “our” pancreases and “our” bladders that meet the approval of the commissars. Sexual liberty, even as every other liberty withers, is all that matters: A middle-school girl is free to get an abortion without parental consent, but if she puts a lemonade stand on her lawn she’ll be fined. What a bleak and reductive concept of “personal freedom.”
There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn't what you love if you're American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values. Democrats and Republicans don't see all this the same way, and that's fine—that's what national politics is, the working out of this dispute in one direction or another every few years. But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.
The fight over including a single mention of God in the platform—that was extreme. The original removal of the single mention by the platform committee—extreme. The huge "No!" vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration's own stand on Jerusalem—that wasn't liberal, it was extreme. Comparing the Republicans to Nazis—extreme. The almost complete absence of a call to help education by facing down the powers that throw our least defended children under the school bus—this was extreme, not mainstream.
The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception...
It is un-American to love government. In America, government is to be viewed as a necessary evil.
In 1890, rail was the dominant form of land transport. Now, it's a niche market and the passenger component is, alas, subsidy-dependent. I love trains, but (subsidized) highways, cars, trucks and airplanes won the battle for the future.
When I read the other day that food stamps are being used to buy pop tarts, cookies, honey buns, candy bars, corn dogs, taffy, and cheesecake, it finally clicked: liberal economic and social policies reward stoners.
...the same self-righteous progressive error—of the sense that the Republicans are offering radical individualism and a cold and selfish you’re-on-your-own philosophy of government. And to this extent it was answered by a very revealing display of the left’s tendency to collapse all of society—all that stands between the individual and the state—into the state. Different speakers this week took this up in different ways (starting with the opening video in which one of the speakers said that government is the only thing we all belong to), and Obama’s way was to say that his party’s alternative to the every man for himself philosophy of the Right is an idea of citizenship. “We believe in citizenship,” he said, “a word at the very heart of our founding, at the very essence of our democracy.” It’s an odd claim, as the word “citizenship” doesn’t appear in any founding document (and to the extent that “citizen” does it describes a legal resident, and never seems to be assigned much significance)...
February 2010 was the ripping point of the Obama presidency. The only way the president could be a Hegelian Great Man of History — a doer of world-historical, taxpayer-subsidized deeds — was by sacrificing the ideals of unity and conciliation that had gotten him elected in the first place. For his transformative agenda was curiously unsuited to the times: Instead of confessing himself “childlike to the genius of his age,” he seemed to think he was living in 1933. He was blind to the fact that in 2010 not even a statesman of FDR’s gifts could have forged a consensus in favor of a centrally planned, state-run behemoth like Obamacare.
Win or lose, he is toast until he can get out of the White House and begin to make some serious bucks on the golf lecture circuit.
Nearly 65 years after Israel’s creation, two Palestinian societies emerge, new study shows - 60 percent of Israeli Arabs say they would not allow their daughter to marry a Palestinian from the West Bank
Dems certainly do know how to get rich in politics. Hillary has made $30 million of her own - a tidy sum for a "life dedicated to public service." Bill, I heard, has made about triple that.
Deep thinker Alec Baldwin thinks Obama would be 17 points up in the polls if he were white. I think he'd be 17 points down if he were white. His skin tone is a large part of his appeal, I believe.
Mia Love On Obama: “I Think He’s Stripping Away the American Dream & the America As We Know It”
VDH: The New Reactionaries - The causes of poverty, the effects of liberal policies — such things are undiscussable. One quote:
If today an observer were to state that the number of children one chooses to have should be in part predicated on the income one reasonably expects to make (I think that is why so-called yuppies often choose to have two rather than five children), then he would be branded illiberal or worse — despite the fact that societies have accepted that premise for centuries, and the middle classes implicitly follow such common calculations. Thanks to today’s government help, the illegal immigrant from Oaxaca might eventually achieve rough parity with the American-born middle class if he were to have two children; however, with five it is impossible.
... the PhD is not being hired for anything other than part-time teaching; the JD is reduced to the law library gofer; the freshly minted MD is the equivalent of a salaried, high-paid nurse; the credentialed high-school teacher is subbing; the engineer is a draftsman; the carpenter is cobbling together home repair mini-jobs. The new plum job? Landing one of those federal or state regulatorships, inspectorships, or clerkships, which are paid for with borrowed money, produce little, and grow as those they audit and fine shrink.
In other words, we are seeing the proverbial chickens coming home to roost in an economy that has run up $16 trillion in debt, regulated its way into paralysis, hounded the private sector, and demonized profit-making.
It's time for a new approach. I hope the youngsters will realize that before the talents of an entire generation are wasted, and hope for the future (besides a hope for free birth control) is destroyed by hopey-changey.
I'd prefer a more intimate, less insistent, rapid, and more modulated delivery, but Marco delivers the basic conservative message as only the kids of immigrants can do. He will mellow and ripen with age. (He is welcome to email me for advice!).
My other problem with his fine speech is equating power and/or money with the American Dream. There are over 300 million American dreams, no two of them identical. Freedom from the state, and opportunity with real risk and the possibility of real personal satisfaction with the shaping of unique lives, is what matters. The chance to follow your own heart and mind, bearing in mind that it might not work out and everybody might need a Plan B and a Plan C.
Only immigrants and the kids of new immigrants can remind us of how entitled and decadent we have had become.
Today is a holiday in the US, one in which we celebrate the antiquated, retrogressive (but once-necessary) union movement with beaches, beer, barbecuing, and fun. My celebratory efforts entail tennis in the morning and kayaking in the afternoon. How about you?
The left has died as an intellectual force worth taking seriously. Its mission belongs to another time. It is reduced to fighting for political power alone, and its weapons are what we recently called “the politics of personal destruction.” It’s the only way they can hope to win. None of us should be surprised when the leftists accuse the righties of pushing old women off of cliffs, or murdering cancer-afflicted employees, or waging war on women, and so forth. They have to destroy their opponents one by one. They no longer have a “movement” of any significance.
That’s what happens when you become an anachronism. For me, the greatest line of the week was Ryan’s, the one about the fading Obama poster on the wall of an unemployed young American.
Once upon a time, the left was able to lay claim to intellectual and moral superiority, and to look at the conservatives with imperious disdain. No more.
The magic formula in which the wealth produced by the market economy is redistributed by the state – from those who produce it to those whom the government believes deserve it – has gone bust. The crash of 2008 exposed a devastating truth that went much deeper than the discovery of a generation of delinquent bankers, or a transitory property bubble. It has become apparent to anyone with a grip on economic reality that free markets simply cannot produce enough wealth to support the sort of universal entitlement programmes which the populations of democratic countries have been led to expect. The fantasy may be sustained for a while by the relentless production of phoney money to fund benefits and job-creation projects, until the economy is turned into a meaningless internal recycling mechanism in the style of the old Soviet Union.
I forget where I found today's photo so I can't credit the finder, but 
A pal took this pic of the USS Saratoga in Newport, RI last weekend. Some people want to use her for
Pic: Artist's concept of the crime in progress
The Town-Gown Connection - 
Clint Eastwood talks #ECOTUS
Is 
This must be what Bill Clinton meant by referring to Obama as "an amateur." Woodward on how
VDH: 
Chart via 
DOJ Accuses San Diego Public