Rusted Sky

U.S. Debt $668,621 Per Household - The Atlantic Business Channel

No that's not a typo: that's the statistic according to USA Today. The folks over there have done some really great work this week with another interesting interactive chart attached to an article about the nation's debt. If they keep this up, I'll have to stop considering it a useless free newspaper I step over when leaving a hotel room. The numbers it reports are staggering.

Well, I'll be sleeping well tonight after reading this...

J.

Might be a bit hard to find one to work on, though...

Product: NASA Apollo 11 Owners Workshop Manual

But if a Saturn 5's a bit too big for your garage, how about a Lancaster?

And if THAT is too big - how about the owner's workshop manual for a Spitfire?

Hmm. They've even got a shop manual for this, this, which can lead to this, this, this, and this.

Useful. Wonder if they sell 'em stateside?

J.

Got into an online exchange with a leftist, doing the usual US guilt trip stuff. When pointed out how the US has been a force of GOOD in the world, he put up the following question.

"How would you advise those nations that view the US as a bully to act?"

I took a while to come up with a reply, because I didn't particularly want to offend his (or her) sensibilities. In fact, in order to avoid mental trauma I even left out a considerable amount of what I think we should do when nukes are involved. But I thought you might be interested in my thinking on it all - so here it is in unexpurgated glory.

Bullies usually look on any impositions of order by 'outsiders' to be horribly unfair. Have you noticed that?

Now, I'm not a terribly nice person. I'm a pretty mild, turn the other cheek sort of guy in my personal life which probably explains why I'm so bloody-minded when it comes to this. And I spent 23 years in the AF, sitting on various targets, so I appreciate FULLY what nuclear weapons can do.

But I've watched the diplomatic dance for the last 30+ years, I've seen us make mistakes and other countries mess up - so you want to know what I'd do at this point? Bear in mind I've seen a lot of stuff that DIDN'T work the way it was thought, so I'm not terribly patient with diplomatic initiatives and all that.

Personally, if I had the authority I'd like tell the countries who view the US as a bully to pull their heads out of their asses and play nice with the other kiddies, otherwise when they try a grab for land then they'll not just be shoved back to the border, but lose AT LEAST as much territory as they were trying to grab. No diplomatic niceities, no ambiguious verbiage, no threats of sanctions. Just a simple, clear promise that there will be consequences for their actions. They're adults, they know what their actions could cost them - so there's no reason for them to complain when it happens. If we've got to be the world cop - we ain't gonna write a ticket, we're going to bust heads and bust 'em hard.

That's for the uniformed, more or less 'formal' combatants, by the way. Are you sending 'freedom fighters' over to destabilize another country? Google Earth ain't your friend, and neither is the night. Your training camps will be destroyed, your fighters won't go to Club Gitmo. As non-uniformed combatants, they'll be asked ONCE for all the info they're willing to spill. They'll even be asked nicely. With a cup of tea. But if there's the typical bluster and "I'd rather die than tell you anything!" - they'll be obliged, and quickly. I figure that after a few get shot the word will get around. Surrender, and you'll be treated well in exchange for information. Be captured, and you'll be treated well in exchange for information. Stall - and you'll be dead.

But hey - it's not waterboarding, right? So it's okay.

The chain of responsibility will be followed - each level on the way. If it goes all the way to a national leader - then that leader needs to go. Along with his cronies. (Think of what happened to Nicolae Ceauşescu when he was deposed and decapitated.)

If one country throws a nuke at another country - then they get 10 of Hanford and Oak Ridge's finest in return, 100 KT airbursts over their major MILITARY centers. First one will be right over wherever they were constructing nukes, too. (These will likely be in proximity to their population centers - sucks to be them in that case. They may start the fight, but we'll finish it.) If there aren't enough military centers, then we'll go after dams and power plants. There WILL be deductions from that number for the head of every leader who orchestrated or coordinated or approved of the use of the nuke. I figure 10 heads would be sufficient to save one city. In the case of Iran, the first head would need to be Ahmadinejad, then Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and just keep on going down the line in their Parliment. Give the people of Iran 48 hours to deliver, and extra points for neatly tied nooses.

AND whoever's stupid enough to do this will get no rebuilding money from us - if anything, there's going to be reparations taken to rebuild the victim the likes of which haven't been seen since Germany lost WW1.

I'd want it made clear and unambiguious that using a nuke on another country would be the equivalent of cutting their own metaphorical throat. Call it 'National Suicide by Cop' if you like - but after someone lights off a nuke isn't the time to play nice with sanctions and UN scolding. It's time to bust heads to make sure it NEVER happens again.

AND I'd limit the CIA to information gathering ONLY. No manipulation of governments, no funding of 'insurgents', no 'assisting' .

It'd be a 'Pax Americana', all right - with teeth. So the new motto for US being the world cop would be "Don't start nothin' - won't BE nothin'."

But I'm not very diplomatic. Or nice.

And if other countries get together and complain - then we'll give THEM the badge and tell 'em "You didn't like what we did? Then you take over. Don't call us if you hit something you can't handle.."

The bad thing is that once you get PAST the UN, there's nobody ELSE OUT THERE! It's the US, then the UN - and then... nothin'.

We have, unfortunately, become the World Cop. And I can't say I like it... but what choice do we have? If we don't keep the law, then you'll see land grabs and low-level fighting again.

So - we may be disliked. That's tough - but what else is new? You know who they'll be calling if needed - and while the UN may be on the phone list, we're on speeddial.

J.

Rift With Germany Is Next on Diplomatic Agenda | Gainesville.com | The Gainesville Sun | Gainesville, FL

DRESDEN, Germany - After mending fences with the Muslim world in Cairo on Thursday, President Obama might want to keep his diplomatic tools handy for his stopover here, to repair his increasingly strained relationship with Chancellor Angela Merkel.

A rift has quietly opened up between Germany and the United States, marked by official statements of harmony and private grumbling. It is not an outright crisis in relations, but there are underlying tensions and disagreements on matters ranging from the global economic crisis to the future of inmates held at Guantánamo Bay.

And he's already started ignoring France.

Barack and Michelle Obama decline dinner with the Sarkozys - Times Online

The Obamas turn up in Paris this evening, but have declined a dinner invitation from the couple next door: the Sarkozys.
President Obama's reluctance to spend more than minimum time with the French leader on his visit for the D-Day anniversary has come as an embarrassment to the Elysée Palace.

America's First Family will not be dining with President Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni, even though they are staying at the residence of the US Ambassador, yards from the Elysée apartments where the Sarkozys spend their weekends.

Must be more of that magical Obama 'diplomatic expertise' in action. Ignore your friends, grovel to enemies. Yeah, that'll work real well long term...

J.

Dynamist Blog: Medicare First!

Think about this for a moment. Medicare is a huge, single-payer, government-run program. It ought to provide the perfect environment for experimentation. If more-efficient government management can slash health-care costs by addressing all these problems, why not start with Medicare? Let's see what "better management" looks like applied to Medicare before we roll it out to the rest of the country.

This is not a completely cynical suggestion. Medicare is, for instance, a logical place to start to design better electronic records systems and the incentives to use them. But you do have to wonder why a report that claims that Medicare is wasting 30 percent of its spending thinks it's making a case for making the rest of the health care system more like Medicare.

J.

Let's throw billions at GM, and watch it fail.

SPACE.com -- Lawmakers Slash $670 Million From NASA Budget Request

Guess there's not much of a union presence at NASA. Too bad, that - if there were then they'd have a larger budget.

What would we get if we threw $25 billion a year at NASA for the next couple of decades? That's miniscule compared to the stuff being thrown out - and more likely to have a long-term result.

But I guess it's all a matter of priorities. Obama's got the wheel - we're just along for the ride.

J.

Canada frosts the most widespread in recent memory | Green Business | Reuters

WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) - The multiple frosts that have blanketed Western Canada in the last week are the most widespread in the top canola-growing province of Saskatchewan in at least five years, the Canola Council of Canada said on Tuesday.

Two overnight frosts last week have already resulted in some Saskatchewan farmers reseeding their canola, a Canadian variant of rapeseed, said Jim Bessel, senior agronomy specialist in the province for the industry group Canola Council.

Other farmers are waiting to see growth signs that would suggest their canola plants have survived the frost, which lasted for up to five hours at a stretch. That new growth is slow to appear with generally cool temperatures holding crop development behind schedule.

Record cold shudders through Western Australia - Where's my Global Warming Dude? By Global Freeze

The recent wild weather over Western Australia has brought some record breaking temperatures, with the effects being felt right across the state.

On Thursday a cold front moved through southern districts bringing rain and strong winds, up to gale force in places. However, the coldest air was sat behind a following front that reached the southwest coast late last night. The result has been dramatic drop in temperatures, today's maximums have suffered in particular.

Albany Airport, after recording 23 degrees yesterday only managed 11 degrees today, making it the coldest May day since 1976. Pemberton reached 10 degrees today, half of yesterday's maximum and the coldest May day since 1957. The cold has shocked WA to its bones as places as far afield as the Gascoyne felt the chill.

J.

YouTube - Just a Coupla Lab Mice Sittin' Around Talkin' / How to Talk Like Pinky And The Brain. Sort of.

Enjoy!

J.

If it weren't so counterproductive.

My Way News - No smoking: Historic vote could bring new limits

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Senate struck a historic blow against smoking in America Thursday, voting overwhelmingly to give regulators new power to limit nicotine in the cigarettes that kill nearly a half-million people a year, to drastically curtail ads that glorify tobacco and to ban flavored products aimed at spreading the habit to young people.

So... what are they going to tax next?

You ever get the feeling we've got too many politicians with too much time on their hands?

J.

REPORT: Kuwaiti Oil Minister says OPEC won't increase production until prices hit $100/barrel

America might get most of its oil from Canada, but the moves that OPEC makes still reverberate here. Thus, a statement by the Kuwaiti Oil Minister Sheikh Ahmed al-Abdullah al-Sabah to reporters yesterday probably won't help decrease domestic gasoline prices any time soon. OPEC's al-Sabah said that the organization will not consider increasing production until the price of a barrel of oil reaches $100.

Currently, the price is around $70 a barrel – up almost 60% this year, but way, way down compared to the highs of 2008. Oh, and when the $100 price per barrel threshold is reached, only then will OPEC "maybe" consider putting more supply into the market. OPEC sees the recent rise in prices as the result of investors looking for good places to put their money, not because demand for the product is rising. Over the long term, many expect for prices to easily surpass $100 a barrel once again.

$100+ barrel oil. Man - that's sure going to help the economy recover, won't it?

J.

Trashing food scraps? This city will fine you - Environment- msnbc.com

SAN FRANCISCO - Trash collectors in San Francisco will soon be doing more than just gathering garbage: They'll be keeping an eye out for people who toss food scraps out with their rubbish.

San Francisco this week passed a mandatory composting law that is believed to be the strictest such ordinance in the nation. Residents will be required to have three color-coded trash bins, including one for recycling, one for trash and a new one for compost — everything from banana peels to coffee grounds.

How long before some bright idiot in SF figures out that old folks take up way too much in the way of resources, and people of a certain age and health level need to be 'recycled' before that point?

And they wonder why the tax base in CA is dwindling...

J.

Crops under stress as temperatures fall - Telegraph

For the second time in little over a year, it looks as though the world may be heading for a serious food crisis, thanks to our old friend "climate change". In many parts of the world recently the weather has not been too brilliant for farmers. After a fearsomely cold winter, June brought heavy snowfall across large parts of western Canada and the northern states of the American Midwest. In Manitoba last week, it was -4C. North Dakota had its first June snow for 60 years.

Yeah, and unicorns will start grazing on the White House lawn.

We're going to spend billions, if not trillions, pursuing the AGW fantasy. And it's not going to do one bit of good.

J.

DRUDGE REPORT: ABC TURNS PROGRAMMING OVER TO OBAMA 2009ｮ

ABC TURNS PROGRAMMING OVER TO OBAMA; NEWS TO BE ANCHORED FROM INSIDE WHITE HOUSE
Tue Jun 16 2009 08:45:10 ET

On the night of June 24, the media and government become one, when ABC turns its programming over to President Obama and White House officials to push government run health care -- a move that has ignited an ethical firestorm!

Highlights on the agenda:

ABCNEWS anchor Charlie Gibson will deliver WORLD NEWS from the Blue Room of the White House.

The network plans a primetime special -- 'Prescription for America' -- originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on the debate.

We're already trillions in debt, with more coming daily - and the best idea Obama can come up with is to take on MORE debt and obligations?

I'm thinking he really hasn't a clue when it comes to economics - OR reality. You can't make things perfect for everyone in the country - the best you can do is clear the way so they can get what they want at what they consider an affordable price.

But from everything I've seen on the medical proposals, you're going to get worse care at a higher cost. This might tickle the fancies of the folks who believe 'fairness' is paramount over everything else - but when it comes down to 'reality', I realized a long time ago that 'fairness' above a grade-school level usually ends up with everyone worse off.

How long did it take for the Roman empire to fall?

J.

io9 - First Look At Ronald D. Moore's Reality TV Space Quest - Virtuality

A reality show, set on a spaceship. Well, it ought to be different.

J.

io9 - First Look At Ronald D. Moore's Reality TV Space Quest - Virtuality

A reality show, set on a spaceship. Well, it ought to be different.

J.

Obama Proposes New Agency to Police Lenders, Protect Consumers - Political News - FOXNews.com

WASHINGTON -- Setting up a certain fight with big business, President Obama is proposing a new regulatory agency to police lenders and protect consumers in credit, savings and other banking transactions .

The consumer agency and a newly empowered Federal Reserve will be two of the central elements of a broad overhaul of the financial regulatory system that the president will announce on Wednesday, officials said.

But wait - it gets worse.

Sources: Senate Health Overhaul Costs Hit $1.6 Trillion - Political News - FOXNews.com

Jolted by cost estimates as high as $1.6 trillion, Senate Democrats agreed Tuesday to scale back planned subsidies for the uninsured and sought concessions totaling hundreds of billions of dollars from private industry to defray the cost of sweeping health care legislation.

At the same time, key Democrats disagreed openly among themselves over a proposed tax on health insurance benefits to pay for expanding coverage to the uninsured.

Now if they'd just act like they believe it.

J.

There's too many other sites like Gateway Pundit that have been covering what's going on there.

But what the heck, I'll put in my 2 cents worth...

Simply? It's a mess. You've got two candidates fighting it out - literally. Ahmadinejad's no prize at all - but the other guy's record's pretty iffy also. Either way, the real control resides in the mullahs over there - whoever ends up as President will still be their mouthpiece.

And I wonder when the Iranian people are going to realize that?

Now - some are criticising Obama on his lack of a forceful response... but I'm thinking he's taking the right tack on this. They don't need distractions at this point, and anything he'd come out with would be seen as (a) the public policy stance for the US and (b) something for the current regime in Iran to rally the people against, and (c) a real break from his usual rabid avoidance of making any hard decisions.

It'll be interesting to see how it all shakes out and who ends up in charge. Frankly, I wouldn't mind seeing the people deciding the mullahs would make decent hemp-supported streetlight decorations, for those jokers have been nothing but bad news for Iran for the last three decades.

J.

YouTube - World's Shortest Slasher Flick

Oddly enough - it's a commercial!

J.

My Way News - Democrats to push through banking overhaul quickly

WASHINGTON (AP) - Democratic leaders have committed to enacting by the end of the year the biggest regulatory revision to the U.S. financial system since the 1930s - an undertaking so ambitious it has some lawmakers worried about missteps.

"We have to evaluate it, weigh it, slow it down and make sure we do it right," said Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee. "Because if we don't, we will pay dearly."

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was expected to outline the administration's plan on Thursday before the Senate panel and the House Financial Services Committee.

It makes me wonder just what the hell they're playing at. Do they see the economy as a shiny toy they can disassemble, throw the parts in a bucket, and rebuild later if the whim strikes? Or something they can just chop chunks off of and expect things to work better?

They need to stop meddling with it, give it a chance to stabilize and, if need be, heal. But you know the thing that really scares me about this article?

The proposal was well-received among Democrats on Capitol Hill, who said it would prevent another round of bank bailouts and protect consumers from predatory lending practices.

"We regard this as very pro-market," said Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., who chairs the House Financial Services Committee. "Unless you have investors that are well-protected, you don't have a market."

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd said there would be "some debate," but "I think we're all seeking the same results."

That Barney Frank thinks this is a good idea pretty much guarantees it isn't. I hope it fails.

But did you ever notice the irony of having government pass laws creating a bureaucracy that's going to be doing something it already had a system in place to do?

J.

Obama's Doctor Knocks ObamaCare - Forbes.com

David Scheiner, an internist based in the Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park, has a diverse practice of lower-income adults from the nearby housing projects mixed with famous patients like U.S. Sen. Carol Mosely Braun, the late writer Studs Terkel and, most notably, President Barack Obama.

Scheiner, 71, was Obama's doctor from 1987 until he entered the White House; he vouched for the then-candidate's "excellent health" in a letter last year. He's still an enthusiastic Obama supporter, but he worries about whether the health care legislation currently making its way through Congress will actually do any good, particularly for doctors like himself who practice general medicine. "I'm not sure he really understands what we face in primary care," Scheiner says.

We've elected a king - or someone who would be king if he could. I imagine things will get worse before they get better.

J.

You may have oticed the coverage is getting a trifle sparse. That's because of (a) a communications blackout and (b) the expulsion of darn near all Western journalists and (c) a clampdown on internet activity (which I realize is a subset of (a), but what the heck.

If you're looking for info - TehranBureau.com (TehranBureau) on Twitter is still updating. Also, their main site has a good bit of information. Plus, phone lines still work - which means faxes are still possible, so check out the IranFax sites on occasion.

Plus, Ace of Spades has updates. Things are a real mess over there - but just because there's no news doesn't mean nothing is happening...

J.

Obama Walks Back Promise On Keeping Your Private Insurance » The Foundry

Less than 24 hours after Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner questioned the veracity of President Obama’s persistent claim that, under his health care proposals, “if you like your insurance package you can keep it”, the White House has begun to walk the President’s claim back. Turns out he didn’t really mean it.

According to the Associated Press, “White House officials suggest the president’s rhetoric shouldn’t be taken literally: What Obama really means is that government isn’t about to barge in and force people to change insurance.”

How’s that for change you can believe in?

Depending on how the public plan is designed in Congress, millions of Americans would lose their existing coverage. By opening the public plan to all employees and using Medicare rates, the Lewin Group, a nationally prominent econometrics firm, has said that the public plan could result in 119.1 million Americans being transitioned out of private coverage, including employer based coverage, into a public plan. With employers making the key decision, millions of Americans could lose their private coverage, regardless of their personal preferences in this matter.

Hope the change isn't going to be something we can't live with, hope we'll be able to roll things back in the '10 and '12 elections. Because the way things have been going, it's going to be difficult to recover.

J.

At one time, the future was seen as a glowing place, enabled by natural scientific progress. But since the '60s, I think, there's been an institutional distrust of honest science by our political elite - to the point where the conclusions are reached and then the 'science' is found that supports it. Over at Historic parallels in our time: the killing of cattle -vs- carbon - Watts Up With That?, the parallel is drawn with the voluntary slaughter of all the animals the Xhosa depended on for sustenance, and the destruction of all their stocks of grain, and the destruction of the tools they needed for agriculture, at the behest of a 15 year old girl's dream.

Needless to say, the herds of cattle, supplies of food and tools that were supposed to magically appear once all the animals were slaughtered never appeared. The population dropped from 105k to 26k, with between 45-50k dead and the rest moving elsewhere.

Western civilization now stands on the brink of repeating the experience of the Xhosa. Since the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, Europe and North America have enjoyed the greatest prosperity ever known on earth. Life expectancy has doubled. In a little more than two hundred years, every objective measure of human welfare has increased more than in all of previous human history.

But Western Civilization is coasting on an impetus provided by our ancestors. There is scarcely anyone alive in Europe or America today who believes in the superiority of Western society. Guilt and shame hang around our necks like millstones, dragging our emasculated culture to the verge of self-immolation. Whatever faults the British Empire-builders may have had, they were certain of themselves.

Our forefathers built a technological civilization based on energy provided by carbon-based fossil fuels. Without the inexpensive and reliable energy provided by coal, oil, and gas, our civilization would quickly collapse. The prophets of global warming now want us to do precisely that.

Like the prophet Mhlakaza, Al Gore promises that if we stop using carbon-based energy, new energy technologies will magically appear. The laws of physics and chemistry will be repealed by political will power. We will achieve prosperity by destroying the very means by which prosperity is created.

But it's like comparing a hand flashlight with a couple of AA batteries to a 1kw halogen bulb. You're NOT going to get the same amont of light out of the two.

And then you even see the 'green' alternatives blocked by the 'well meaning' eco-luddites - in solar power plants being cancelled because they'll change the local microclimates. Shade, after all, is something to be avoided in the desert!

And the ones pushing hardest for this stuff are the ones least affected. You can't really persuade me that Pelosi, Reid and Feinstein are ever going to be seriously bothered by any of the 'policies' they support - so aside from the elitism and the feeling of power that's shoving what we DON'T want (higher gas prices, higher energy prices, higher prices for darn near everything) what do THEY get out of it?

Do they realize what they're bringing down on everyone else?

Do they even care?

J.

You ever really look at the numbers on health care? Sure, there's the ancedotal - folks with no insurance losing everything when hit with massive medical bills... but realistically how many are affected like that? You don't get a sense of the numbers - instead, you get a sense of urgency to cover everyone without exception.

And it doesn't make sense.

Kudlow's Money Politic$ on National Review Online

It looks like President Obama’s big-bang health-care reform is going down to defeat. This is good. But my question is why do we need it at all? According to a recent ABC News/USA Today/Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 89 percent of Americans are satisfied with their health care. That could mean up to 250 million people are happy. So why is it that we need Obama’s big-bang health-care overhaul in the first place?

There’s more. According the U.S. Census Bureau, we don’t have 47 million folks who are truly uninsured. When you take college kids plus those earning $75,000 or more who chose not to sign up, that removes roughly 20 million people. Then take out about 10 million more who are not U.S. citizens, and 11 million who are eligible for SCHIP and Medicaid but have not signed up for some reason.

So that really leaves only 10 million to 15 million people who are truly long-term uninsured.

That works out to - if the upper bound of 15 million is met - about $106k over ten years to insure the people who are uninsured, unless I'm dropping a digit or two. Call it $10k/yr, just to round things neatly.

A quick search online gives rates running from about $200/month to $700 a month, depending on coverage. Or, less than $10k/year.

Wouldn't it be a lot cheaper to just give those 15 million a health credit card? Or, if they're already using EFT for state benefits, to let them use their welfare card for medical also?

Hey, I like to spend money as well as the next guy (especially when faced with lots'o'stuff as at MicroCenter) but I do like to get decent value for the money... and let me tell ya, having the government handle things ain't the way to go...

So tell me again why we must create a massive new health bureaucracy?

J.

Realistically, that's what it's amounting to.

Obama implores Senate to pass climate bill - Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON – Hours after the House passed landmark legislation meant to curb greenhouse gas emissions and create an energy-efficient economy, President Barack Obama on Saturday urged senators to show courage and follow suit.

The sharply debated bill's fate is unclear in the Senate, and Obama used his weekly radio and Internet address to ratchet up pressure on the 100-seat chamber.

"My call to every senator, as well as to every American, is this," he said. "We cannot be afraid of the future. And we must not be prisoners of the past. Don't believe the misinformation out there that suggests there is somehow a contradiction between investing in clean energy and economic growth."

The Club for Growth has 15 reasons to be against this.

1. An extra 'tax' on energy of about $3000/yr/family. Don't know about you, but I'd rather use that money on something else.

2. Makes the recession worse, costing millions of jobs and devasting the economy.

3. In some years, the national energy tax will cost about 2.5 million jobs.

4. Rural areas get screwed, money will go to CA, WA, and NJ. Big surprise, eh?

5. Emissions reductions (remember, the real cause of all this?) won't be reduced... if the rest of the world doesn't sign on. And China won't.

6. Spain's tried this. 2.2 jobs were destroyed for every 1 'green' job created, and 9 out of 10 of THOSE were temporary.

There's others - but the real reason that this is so beloved -

"Bloated Bureaucracy: The bill establishes a myriad of new federal agencies intertwined between at least 21established agencies with the mission of reallocating trillions of taxpayer dollars in a supposedly fair and efficient manor. According the U.S Chamber of Commerce (PDF), the bill will impose 397 new federal regulations that require traditional agency rulemakings."

And the reason - to help curb 'global warming' seems to be kind of moot at this point. (Never mind the fact that the science is far from settled, and we may be in for global COOLING for the next decade or more, due to a low-output period from the sun...) All this bill does is shuffle money around to a point where it can be skimmed out of the system, and then in ten years when nothing's been done, the economy's cratered, and energy prices are through the roof, the 'progressives' (a name which seems to be completely contrary to their actual results) will insist that MORE sacrifices need to be made, that MORE must be demanded from the 'rich' - which will probably be anyone who is actually still employed by that point.

Hope for change, baby. That's about all we're going to have left.

Obama's got a grand vision for the US. More and more it seems like he wants a pretty corpse in a coffin, something he can point at and go "Doesn't it look healthy?" while not even paying attention to the fact it's no longer alive and kicking...

The Associated Press: $50M in stimulus will help fish farmers buy feed

OSAGE BEACH, Mo. (AP) — The United States is about to spend $50 million in stimulus money on fish food to help fish farmers who have been struggling since feed prices jumped 50 percent last year.

The money could provide algae to nourish clam and oyster larvae along the Pacific coast, fill the bellies of tilapia in Arizona and feed catfish, trout and gamefish in the Midwest and South. (Note the 'could' there?)

Supporters say many fish farms are in already poor areas. They say the money will help keep the farms going and preserve jobs in areas hard hit by the recession and lacking other industries.

Much of the money is likely to end up in Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas — the nation's largest catfish producers. Catfish accounts for one-third of the nation's $1.4 billion aquaculture industry.

Sigh.

We've got some real winners in Washington these days, don't we?

J.

Soak the Rich, Lose the Rich - WSJ.com

With states facing nearly $100 billion in combined budget deficits this year, we're seeing more governors than ever proposing the Barack Obama solution to balancing the budget: Soak the rich. Lawmakers in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Oregon want to raise income tax rates on the top 1% or 2% or 5% of their citizens. New Illinois Gov. Patrick Quinn wants a 50% increase in the income tax rate on the wealthy because this is the "fair" way to close his state's gaping deficit.

Oddly enough - the rich are vanishing also. You see, they're not fixed resources like a coal mine or an oil well - they're living, mobile, and have the resources to pack up and bug out when conditions get unfavorable.

I don't think it's much of a coincidence that California, New Jersey, and New York are all losing people, (pardon, losing productive people...) while the economic state in Illinois and Delaware could best be described as 'iffy'.

Well, we'll see - but I think that the states that do this will end up losing more than they're gaining. Perhaps they ought to try cutting back the expenses instead of 'soaking the rich' for a quick buck.

J.