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Cheers, people of good ideas and commentary. Today is a monumentous news day, apparently. Or maybe all the big stuff happened while we were away on break. Either way, it's densely packed today.
Give me a thought about the following, please - The Men's Story Project, which looks to be something like what the Vagina Monologues are for women. I think it's a good idea to get guys talking with each other about topics they wouldn't normally talk about. Which would mean that there's at least a sliver of possible good to this article on Jezebel from someone claiming that being wedded to the idea that men should seek consent before treating women in a sexual manner is something American men and women get wrong. The editors caught hell for publishing that opinion on a place that at least claims to be feminist, especially with the reality that the article writer is apparently okay with sexual assault and puts women in the position of having to constantly fend off attacks and smile while she does it.
Much like stories of how actors with vision can overcome being unable to see all that well, and how we need to be able to cast people as good actors, regardless of whether they are disabled or not, and to not make someone's disability the point of the episode whenever they appear.
Additionally, if you use a library, pressure your elected officials to make sure that they stay adequately funded for staff, materials, and resources, because politicians will react to a concerted mob telling them what people get out of the library, instead of beleiving the hype that libraries are dead and will be replaced by digital media.
Furthermore, recognize that when censors come looking, they're often concerned more about form than function - some writers will let the censors strip out the rude language if they can publish the ideas behind them. Not to say those censors shouldn't be fought and stopped (especially because school censors seem to follow that track to perfection), but that sometimes the author picks which battles they want to fight. Fight for them. If you like, demand that all would-be censors must suggest a book to replace their target that will get the same idea across, in all the subversive glory of the original.
And then, of course, always be watchful for the possibilities of silent censorship, like having all the criticisms of one particular candidate shuffled off to the minor leagues on Google Blog Search, instead of staying in the bigs on Google News.
The Dead Pool claims Margaret T. Burroughs, founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History, at 95 years of age.
And finally, The Dead Pool acting company casts Leslie Nielsen, aged 84, in its newest production, Janus, having need of someone who could play both the dramatic and the comedic roles effortlessly. For those who want to understand why, we suggest Forbidden Planet, the Poseidon Adventure, and the Police Squad series (including the three movies made of it, all under the title The Naked Gun).
International news begins with the fabled, dreaded, and anticipated release of 250,000 diplomatic cables from Wikileaks. Only a few have come out right now, but there are more promised. Based on what's been released, there are already calls for WikiLeaks to be prosecuted and denigrated for their actions, regardless of the information they have released. As for the information itself, several threads and possibilities appear about the work of diplomacy, some of it serious, some of it not, and most likely, anything you can get to outside ot the main site itself will be heavily redacted or not present based on the U.S. government's hysteria about how this release will affect National Security. What you do get to see is how much other Arab nations in the Middle East think a nuclear-anything Iran is a bad idea, opinions from the United States about the absence of democracy in Russia, and a few other things reported on, like the apparently busty nurse that Qadafi likes to have by him.
The Guardian offers a Flash-based map and interface to the cables.
Elsewhere, without an arms reduction treaty and an agreement on defense, Russia has moved missiles closer to NATO countries. Huh. Imagine that. Now we have both sides pointing weapons at each other. Aren't we supposed to be getting along?
Oh, and North Korea is moving missiles toward their border with South Korea. Tensions, tensions, everywhere, and not a relief in sight. At least not while fingers are being pointed about who's to blame for letting this situation happen, instead of glassing/crushing North Korea early on in their ambitions, and even now plotters opine about how best to take down the North, whether through economic warfare or through deliberately showing force and escalation in hopes of breaking the North through arms race bankruptcy.
In domestic news, the major news item dropped today is the final report released from the Department of Defense Working Group on the repeal of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy [PDF]. The working group indicated that most branches of service didn't believe that the sexual orientation of a fellow soldier would have any significant negative impact on their work as soldiers, their trust in the chain, and their socialization with others. After the release, the President reiterated his call for the Senate to move on the bill that would formally repeal the law. Unfortunately, the response from several Seantors, led by Senator McCain, appears to be the equivalent of the middle finger and the First Law of Motion Excuse.
Torture apologist John Yoo compared torture to driving the speed limit in an attempt to make it seem more palatable and that there was more wiggle room about its use than one might have otherwise thought.
A joke article from The Onion found its way to the Fox Nation crew, but was scrubbed of its satire but for a tiny link at the bottom saying to go back to The Onion for the full story. The lack of signposting meant that many took it seriously, and responded appropriately. Deliberate failure, or assumption that everyone knows The Onion? We report, you decide.
More seriously, the relentless destruction of the social safety net is turning many doctors away from Medicare patients and to privately-insured patients, because the Medicare reimbursement rates aren't enough now and will get less over time. Well, in our new and shiny world where everyone has to carry private insurance, I'm sure that won't be a problem any more, right? Of course, we could just be making decisions that would allow for good reimbursement rates...and not saddle doctors with extravagant student loans, either...and you can take a look at finding ways to make the cost of medicine less expensive as well, whether it's in reducing the need for "defensive medicine" or in upping non-private research funding so that inexpensive generics come to market as fast or faster than the name-brands.
The Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department has a number for you - the cost of operating Air Force One, the plane that houses the President and selected staff on his trips, in the current administration is approximately $182,000 USD per hour. This is a number. A statistic. What sort of opinion columns will be penned about this, and how many of them will call it a waste of taxpayer money to shuttle the President abroad and around so much because they think the President is insufficiently jingoistic and ineffective in his dealings with foreign entities?
A different set of numbers, this time - The CBO crunches policy proposals and find that unemployment insurance extensions are awesome for stimulating the economy. Tax cuts for the rich? Not so much [PDF]. In mere infographic form, Maddow Blog excerpts the relevant graphic. Not that such information will stop the cries of SOCIALISM! against anyone who wants to stimulate the economy by getting people back to work at a wage that will sustain them or that think unemployment insurance extensions are good for the people and the economy. Both Republican leaders signaled their intent to not help anyone not already rich one whit in an op-ed today, while claiming the people elected them to do serious work on the economy and the debt. Their second point is right, so their first admission that they're not serious about any of it should sound like nails on a chalkboard to the voters.
The Media Bias department looks a bit askance at the way Fox News frames the tension between international events and domestic priorities as a zero-sum game, believing that any attention given to international affairs takes away from attention given to domestic affairs. This particular President said that his office has to be able to juggle more than one thing at a time. This zero-sum framing reinforces the myth that the President is actually a dictator that can fiat his way to solutions anytime he wishes, as if he didn't have to deal with an opposition determined to prevent him from doing anything that appears good, much less doing actual good, and his own party that runs and hides when it sees any sort of shadow anywhere.
For in-depth study, the Media Bias department also offers you a case study: The FBI arrested a teenager in Oregon on terrorism charges after he attempted to detonate a fake bomb. Now, in the report, there are mentions of something that should make you suspicious. Namely, the plot came about thanks to material support from the undercover agents that contacted the teen and offered their assistance. Exclusively so, at least according to the documents we have. Which means that the FBI turned a teenager into a terrorist and then arrested him so they could make a big show of arresting a terrorist. Fear, fear, terror, terror, Scary Muslims, give the government more of your freedoms. Be afraid and stop questioning.
Which leads to our last item, present by Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics - 44 percent of those surveyed by Rassmussen believe the government is no longer operating within its constitutional limits, and they're almost all part of the class that is not connected to Washington nor operates within its orbit. Those people think they're doing just fine and legally. Refer back to the first item of this section for answers about that. Also, depending on which issues you're talking about, more or less people believe the government is operating within boundaries, that the Supreme Court uses the Constitution for making decisions (and whether they should use that primarily or not), and how intrusive the government is to people.
Technology - the tremendous data-storage potential of living organisms to start, first through conversion of data to a base-4, and then doing what compression programs have done for a long time - find the redundant strains and remove them (usually providing a pointer in one place to say "wherever you find this, substitute this when we expand").
As video games lost a layer of abstraction, the controller and buttons, the line between "game" and "performance" and "art" blurs, according to this writer, who is only now coming on board with that everyone else has realized for decades - as the technology got better, the storytelling improved, and the interfaces improved, too. Really, all of this is with the intent of having a better experience. It's already art, and it has been for years. It's just now that the art snobs are beginning to agree.
Additionally, looking into the Stuxnet worm as the first of the next generation of malicious code, as well as the possible exemplar of how warfare over networks will look like in the future.
Fallacy ahoy to start opinions - the conclusion that allowing for marriage-without-the-name same-sex civil-unions in Illinois will inevitably lead to polygamy, based on the assumption that the State will believe that "love" is the only reason to get married and bless any number of people who love each other that want to. While I'd like to see a legalized multiple marriage system, the writers apparently haven't figured out that property, not love, is usually the reason why the State cares about marriage and its equivalencies. Furthermore, if the problem is so many fatherless children, then unless you plan on forcing every dad who fathers a child to be married to the woman he impregnates, you're not actually solving the problem by crusading against civil unions.
Also pulling out from Fallacy Junction, Mr. Hill paints his very best Scary Muslims picture in attacking the Park 51 project's applications for Lower Manhattan Development grants, claiming it would result in federally-funded Islam, which is, of course, The Bloodthirsty Religion of The Terrorists that we should be subjecting to extra profiling because Muslims Are Terrorists. He might have had a shot at his First Amendment claim, had he pretended that there wasn't a community center integral to the project, which would qualify it for the HUD-funded dollars. I suspect he knows that the claim by itself would not have withstood scrutiny, so he tacks on the additional Scary Muslims bit to make sure you don't actually exercise your rational brain.
Making the trifecta is Ms. Willis' insistence that SOCIALISM! is on the move again because the government wishes to spread the cost of bringing more power sources into the national grid across the whole nation. So places that don't actually use those things will have to pay to put them in. Y'know, like how everyone pays money to finance the highway system, the air traffic control systems, and other bits of infrastructure even if they never drive, fly, or otherwise use them. That's common goods, and they have to be managed well or they turn tragic in a hurry.
Staying on the theme, Ms. Malkin proclaims that American Ingenuity is the bestest thing ever, unlike those mean ol' statists in the government right now, and that we should celebrate all those self-starters that use their own money without any government interference to build products that make them gazillions of dollars and make life easier. Mr. Stossel says the November Holiday should be taken as an object lesson in how communalism and socialism fail, and that only the Free Marker (A.P.T.I.N.) produces prosperity. Cheers to them, entrepreneurs and free-marketers alike, and cheers to all the inventors at DARPA, for without government funding and purpose, would probably have never developed the network we now call the Internet, allowing me to read these columns and make commentary. How about some Tang?
Ms. Hill complains about GM's prosperity, because the United Auto Workers have a significant share of GM stock and are doing quite well along with GM. Still stinging over the way the government structured GM's bankruptcy, she feels that the investors who put money into the company should have been prioritized over the workers who actually run the plants, keep production going, and have pensions with the company when GM recapitalized. In a similar anti-union idea, Mr. Fund warns us of the spectre of a unionized TSA, where bad screeners won't be able to e fired and changes to procedure have to be cleared through union bosses before they can happen, plus the unspoken threat of screeenrs on strike leading to terror attacks. It's like Mr. Fund thinks that unions dictate what screening procedures are, instead of the Department of Homeland (in)Security.
Trust us, we'd all be happier if the TSA got a clue and focused their efforts on what actually works, instead of making everyone suffer indignity. But unions aren't responsible for the pat-downs that have everyone hopping mad about the TSA. Ms. Liebau does a better job of pointing out the problem of the disproportionate response to the perceived threat, although she wants the image and projection from the Obama Administration about the Scary Terrorists to ramp up to the level where gropes make sense and potential terrorists are treated as military combatants with no rights, instead of taking a rational step back and saying, "Hey, let's not be conquered by fear. Instead, keep calm and carry on."
The WSJ welcomes Al Gore to the ethanol-skeptic side, believing that now that they have the spokesman on their side, ethanol subsidies will soon be gone and we can get back to burning our purest gasoline, which will make our friends in the oil industries very happy. They do at least acknowledge that it wasn't a complete repudiation, just that the subsidies for the first generation of production may not have been a good idea. Maybe Mr. Gore and others will take that out to a logical conclusion and decide that the subsidies for oil and gas companies aren't a good idea either and yank those. The response to that is apparently "Of course not. Oil and gas are useful products and deserve massive profits through subsidization. Your ethanol doesn't."
Such an opinion could be set against or concurrent with Ms. Wente's opinion that envrionmentalism will be able to start doing good again, now that they're no longer fixated on carbon dioxide. Well, maybe they will - they'll still be fighting the same companies and governments, though, just on different issues related to their drilling, exploration, and pollution.
Mr. Trussel suggests that through the machinations of the private sector and the Republican party, the health care reform could be caught in a pincer where employees are dropped from coverage, but the exchanges that are supposed to pick them up are never formed due to opposition intransigence. And who is to blame for all of this potential? The Obama Administration, for passign the law without having all the rules already set up so that employers would know what was happening and plan their costs accordingly, and for leaving it up to agencies to write the rules, which only sows confusion and discord. No blame to the employers or to the Republicans or anyone else who might have weakened, sabotaged, or otherwise twisted the law or used their positions to impose threats and win themselves exceptions.
Mr. Smith returns to a familiar well, that the President is not only a nanny-statist, but so self-absorbed that he doesn't see the world outside nor care what they think, because he's right. The kind of bubble of egocentrism that induces fantasies of a presidential adviser specifically dedicated to the task of telling him what Real America thinks. (Incidentally, I can't figure out how such a person would be put into office, as just about every method of getting him there makes him or her vulnerable to manipulation and unable to speak the truth).
Getting out of opinions, though, we have Michelle Bachmann saying she'd like to have a discussion with MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann, if given the choice to be stranded on a desert isle with one of him or the two other prominent hosts of MSNBC, Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews. Sort of a damning with faint praise thing there, I think. Much like how for the November Holiday, a paper chooses to run the account of how the persecuted found themselves assisted by the people who were already there when they arrived, a favor they would repay to them not in assistance and harmony, despite seeing the virtues of their religion shown to them, but in warfare and bloodshed. We're supposed to be happy for the help and ignore what followed, despite the clear indications that the newcomers saw their benefactors as inferior savages. That way, even someone who arrives later can feel good about the messages of that particular holiday, or it can be used as a plug for people to join the religion that the people who engaged in the bloodbath usually belonged to.
Finally, A woman has claimed ownership of the sun and wishes to charge everyone that uses solar power in some manner.
"Juno was mad,
He knew he'd been had,
so he shot at the sun with a gun, [ha]
shot at the sun with a gun, [ha]
shot at his wily one [and] only friend..."
Give me a thought about the following, please - The Men's Story Project, which looks to be something like what the Vagina Monologues are for women. I think it's a good idea to get guys talking with each other about topics they wouldn't normally talk about. Which would mean that there's at least a sliver of possible good to this article on Jezebel from someone claiming that being wedded to the idea that men should seek consent before treating women in a sexual manner is something American men and women get wrong. The editors caught hell for publishing that opinion on a place that at least claims to be feminist, especially with the reality that the article writer is apparently okay with sexual assault and puts women in the position of having to constantly fend off attacks and smile while she does it.
Much like stories of how actors with vision can overcome being unable to see all that well, and how we need to be able to cast people as good actors, regardless of whether they are disabled or not, and to not make someone's disability the point of the episode whenever they appear.
Additionally, if you use a library, pressure your elected officials to make sure that they stay adequately funded for staff, materials, and resources, because politicians will react to a concerted mob telling them what people get out of the library, instead of beleiving the hype that libraries are dead and will be replaced by digital media.
Furthermore, recognize that when censors come looking, they're often concerned more about form than function - some writers will let the censors strip out the rude language if they can publish the ideas behind them. Not to say those censors shouldn't be fought and stopped (especially because school censors seem to follow that track to perfection), but that sometimes the author picks which battles they want to fight. Fight for them. If you like, demand that all would-be censors must suggest a book to replace their target that will get the same idea across, in all the subversive glory of the original.
And then, of course, always be watchful for the possibilities of silent censorship, like having all the criticisms of one particular candidate shuffled off to the minor leagues on Google Blog Search, instead of staying in the bigs on Google News.
The Dead Pool claims Margaret T. Burroughs, founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History, at 95 years of age.
And finally, The Dead Pool acting company casts Leslie Nielsen, aged 84, in its newest production, Janus, having need of someone who could play both the dramatic and the comedic roles effortlessly. For those who want to understand why, we suggest Forbidden Planet, the Poseidon Adventure, and the Police Squad series (including the three movies made of it, all under the title The Naked Gun).
International news begins with the fabled, dreaded, and anticipated release of 250,000 diplomatic cables from Wikileaks. Only a few have come out right now, but there are more promised. Based on what's been released, there are already calls for WikiLeaks to be prosecuted and denigrated for their actions, regardless of the information they have released. As for the information itself, several threads and possibilities appear about the work of diplomacy, some of it serious, some of it not, and most likely, anything you can get to outside ot the main site itself will be heavily redacted or not present based on the U.S. government's hysteria about how this release will affect National Security. What you do get to see is how much other Arab nations in the Middle East think a nuclear-anything Iran is a bad idea, opinions from the United States about the absence of democracy in Russia, and a few other things reported on, like the apparently busty nurse that Qadafi likes to have by him.
The Guardian offers a Flash-based map and interface to the cables.
Elsewhere, without an arms reduction treaty and an agreement on defense, Russia has moved missiles closer to NATO countries. Huh. Imagine that. Now we have both sides pointing weapons at each other. Aren't we supposed to be getting along?
Oh, and North Korea is moving missiles toward their border with South Korea. Tensions, tensions, everywhere, and not a relief in sight. At least not while fingers are being pointed about who's to blame for letting this situation happen, instead of glassing/crushing North Korea early on in their ambitions, and even now plotters opine about how best to take down the North, whether through economic warfare or through deliberately showing force and escalation in hopes of breaking the North through arms race bankruptcy.
In domestic news, the major news item dropped today is the final report released from the Department of Defense Working Group on the repeal of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy [PDF]. The working group indicated that most branches of service didn't believe that the sexual orientation of a fellow soldier would have any significant negative impact on their work as soldiers, their trust in the chain, and their socialization with others. After the release, the President reiterated his call for the Senate to move on the bill that would formally repeal the law. Unfortunately, the response from several Seantors, led by Senator McCain, appears to be the equivalent of the middle finger and the First Law of Motion Excuse.
Torture apologist John Yoo compared torture to driving the speed limit in an attempt to make it seem more palatable and that there was more wiggle room about its use than one might have otherwise thought.
A joke article from The Onion found its way to the Fox Nation crew, but was scrubbed of its satire but for a tiny link at the bottom saying to go back to The Onion for the full story. The lack of signposting meant that many took it seriously, and responded appropriately. Deliberate failure, or assumption that everyone knows The Onion? We report, you decide.
More seriously, the relentless destruction of the social safety net is turning many doctors away from Medicare patients and to privately-insured patients, because the Medicare reimbursement rates aren't enough now and will get less over time. Well, in our new and shiny world where everyone has to carry private insurance, I'm sure that won't be a problem any more, right? Of course, we could just be making decisions that would allow for good reimbursement rates...and not saddle doctors with extravagant student loans, either...and you can take a look at finding ways to make the cost of medicine less expensive as well, whether it's in reducing the need for "defensive medicine" or in upping non-private research funding so that inexpensive generics come to market as fast or faster than the name-brands.
The Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department has a number for you - the cost of operating Air Force One, the plane that houses the President and selected staff on his trips, in the current administration is approximately $182,000 USD per hour. This is a number. A statistic. What sort of opinion columns will be penned about this, and how many of them will call it a waste of taxpayer money to shuttle the President abroad and around so much because they think the President is insufficiently jingoistic and ineffective in his dealings with foreign entities?
A different set of numbers, this time - The CBO crunches policy proposals and find that unemployment insurance extensions are awesome for stimulating the economy. Tax cuts for the rich? Not so much [PDF]. In mere infographic form, Maddow Blog excerpts the relevant graphic. Not that such information will stop the cries of SOCIALISM! against anyone who wants to stimulate the economy by getting people back to work at a wage that will sustain them or that think unemployment insurance extensions are good for the people and the economy. Both Republican leaders signaled their intent to not help anyone not already rich one whit in an op-ed today, while claiming the people elected them to do serious work on the economy and the debt. Their second point is right, so their first admission that they're not serious about any of it should sound like nails on a chalkboard to the voters.
The Media Bias department looks a bit askance at the way Fox News frames the tension between international events and domestic priorities as a zero-sum game, believing that any attention given to international affairs takes away from attention given to domestic affairs. This particular President said that his office has to be able to juggle more than one thing at a time. This zero-sum framing reinforces the myth that the President is actually a dictator that can fiat his way to solutions anytime he wishes, as if he didn't have to deal with an opposition determined to prevent him from doing anything that appears good, much less doing actual good, and his own party that runs and hides when it sees any sort of shadow anywhere.
For in-depth study, the Media Bias department also offers you a case study: The FBI arrested a teenager in Oregon on terrorism charges after he attempted to detonate a fake bomb. Now, in the report, there are mentions of something that should make you suspicious. Namely, the plot came about thanks to material support from the undercover agents that contacted the teen and offered their assistance. Exclusively so, at least according to the documents we have. Which means that the FBI turned a teenager into a terrorist and then arrested him so they could make a big show of arresting a terrorist. Fear, fear, terror, terror, Scary Muslims, give the government more of your freedoms. Be afraid and stop questioning.
Which leads to our last item, present by Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics - 44 percent of those surveyed by Rassmussen believe the government is no longer operating within its constitutional limits, and they're almost all part of the class that is not connected to Washington nor operates within its orbit. Those people think they're doing just fine and legally. Refer back to the first item of this section for answers about that. Also, depending on which issues you're talking about, more or less people believe the government is operating within boundaries, that the Supreme Court uses the Constitution for making decisions (and whether they should use that primarily or not), and how intrusive the government is to people.
Technology - the tremendous data-storage potential of living organisms to start, first through conversion of data to a base-4, and then doing what compression programs have done for a long time - find the redundant strains and remove them (usually providing a pointer in one place to say "wherever you find this, substitute this when we expand").
As video games lost a layer of abstraction, the controller and buttons, the line between "game" and "performance" and "art" blurs, according to this writer, who is only now coming on board with that everyone else has realized for decades - as the technology got better, the storytelling improved, and the interfaces improved, too. Really, all of this is with the intent of having a better experience. It's already art, and it has been for years. It's just now that the art snobs are beginning to agree.
Additionally, looking into the Stuxnet worm as the first of the next generation of malicious code, as well as the possible exemplar of how warfare over networks will look like in the future.
Fallacy ahoy to start opinions - the conclusion that allowing for marriage-without-the-name same-sex civil-unions in Illinois will inevitably lead to polygamy, based on the assumption that the State will believe that "love" is the only reason to get married and bless any number of people who love each other that want to. While I'd like to see a legalized multiple marriage system, the writers apparently haven't figured out that property, not love, is usually the reason why the State cares about marriage and its equivalencies. Furthermore, if the problem is so many fatherless children, then unless you plan on forcing every dad who fathers a child to be married to the woman he impregnates, you're not actually solving the problem by crusading against civil unions.
Also pulling out from Fallacy Junction, Mr. Hill paints his very best Scary Muslims picture in attacking the Park 51 project's applications for Lower Manhattan Development grants, claiming it would result in federally-funded Islam, which is, of course, The Bloodthirsty Religion of The Terrorists that we should be subjecting to extra profiling because Muslims Are Terrorists. He might have had a shot at his First Amendment claim, had he pretended that there wasn't a community center integral to the project, which would qualify it for the HUD-funded dollars. I suspect he knows that the claim by itself would not have withstood scrutiny, so he tacks on the additional Scary Muslims bit to make sure you don't actually exercise your rational brain.
Making the trifecta is Ms. Willis' insistence that SOCIALISM! is on the move again because the government wishes to spread the cost of bringing more power sources into the national grid across the whole nation. So places that don't actually use those things will have to pay to put them in. Y'know, like how everyone pays money to finance the highway system, the air traffic control systems, and other bits of infrastructure even if they never drive, fly, or otherwise use them. That's common goods, and they have to be managed well or they turn tragic in a hurry.
Staying on the theme, Ms. Malkin proclaims that American Ingenuity is the bestest thing ever, unlike those mean ol' statists in the government right now, and that we should celebrate all those self-starters that use their own money without any government interference to build products that make them gazillions of dollars and make life easier. Mr. Stossel says the November Holiday should be taken as an object lesson in how communalism and socialism fail, and that only the Free Marker (A.P.T.I.N.) produces prosperity. Cheers to them, entrepreneurs and free-marketers alike, and cheers to all the inventors at DARPA, for without government funding and purpose, would probably have never developed the network we now call the Internet, allowing me to read these columns and make commentary. How about some Tang?
Ms. Hill complains about GM's prosperity, because the United Auto Workers have a significant share of GM stock and are doing quite well along with GM. Still stinging over the way the government structured GM's bankruptcy, she feels that the investors who put money into the company should have been prioritized over the workers who actually run the plants, keep production going, and have pensions with the company when GM recapitalized. In a similar anti-union idea, Mr. Fund warns us of the spectre of a unionized TSA, where bad screeners won't be able to e fired and changes to procedure have to be cleared through union bosses before they can happen, plus the unspoken threat of screeenrs on strike leading to terror attacks. It's like Mr. Fund thinks that unions dictate what screening procedures are, instead of the Department of Homeland (in)Security.
Trust us, we'd all be happier if the TSA got a clue and focused their efforts on what actually works, instead of making everyone suffer indignity. But unions aren't responsible for the pat-downs that have everyone hopping mad about the TSA. Ms. Liebau does a better job of pointing out the problem of the disproportionate response to the perceived threat, although she wants the image and projection from the Obama Administration about the Scary Terrorists to ramp up to the level where gropes make sense and potential terrorists are treated as military combatants with no rights, instead of taking a rational step back and saying, "Hey, let's not be conquered by fear. Instead, keep calm and carry on."
The WSJ welcomes Al Gore to the ethanol-skeptic side, believing that now that they have the spokesman on their side, ethanol subsidies will soon be gone and we can get back to burning our purest gasoline, which will make our friends in the oil industries very happy. They do at least acknowledge that it wasn't a complete repudiation, just that the subsidies for the first generation of production may not have been a good idea. Maybe Mr. Gore and others will take that out to a logical conclusion and decide that the subsidies for oil and gas companies aren't a good idea either and yank those. The response to that is apparently "Of course not. Oil and gas are useful products and deserve massive profits through subsidization. Your ethanol doesn't."
Such an opinion could be set against or concurrent with Ms. Wente's opinion that envrionmentalism will be able to start doing good again, now that they're no longer fixated on carbon dioxide. Well, maybe they will - they'll still be fighting the same companies and governments, though, just on different issues related to their drilling, exploration, and pollution.
Mr. Trussel suggests that through the machinations of the private sector and the Republican party, the health care reform could be caught in a pincer where employees are dropped from coverage, but the exchanges that are supposed to pick them up are never formed due to opposition intransigence. And who is to blame for all of this potential? The Obama Administration, for passign the law without having all the rules already set up so that employers would know what was happening and plan their costs accordingly, and for leaving it up to agencies to write the rules, which only sows confusion and discord. No blame to the employers or to the Republicans or anyone else who might have weakened, sabotaged, or otherwise twisted the law or used their positions to impose threats and win themselves exceptions.
Mr. Smith returns to a familiar well, that the President is not only a nanny-statist, but so self-absorbed that he doesn't see the world outside nor care what they think, because he's right. The kind of bubble of egocentrism that induces fantasies of a presidential adviser specifically dedicated to the task of telling him what Real America thinks. (Incidentally, I can't figure out how such a person would be put into office, as just about every method of getting him there makes him or her vulnerable to manipulation and unable to speak the truth).
Getting out of opinions, though, we have Michelle Bachmann saying she'd like to have a discussion with MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann, if given the choice to be stranded on a desert isle with one of him or the two other prominent hosts of MSNBC, Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews. Sort of a damning with faint praise thing there, I think. Much like how for the November Holiday, a paper chooses to run the account of how the persecuted found themselves assisted by the people who were already there when they arrived, a favor they would repay to them not in assistance and harmony, despite seeing the virtues of their religion shown to them, but in warfare and bloodshed. We're supposed to be happy for the help and ignore what followed, despite the clear indications that the newcomers saw their benefactors as inferior savages. That way, even someone who arrives later can feel good about the messages of that particular holiday, or it can be used as a plug for people to join the religion that the people who engaged in the bloodbath usually belonged to.
Finally, A woman has claimed ownership of the sun and wishes to charge everyone that uses solar power in some manner.
"Juno was mad,
He knew he'd been had,
so he shot at the sun with a gun, [ha]
shot at the sun with a gun, [ha]
shot at his wily one [and] only friend..."
