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Recent Comments
- In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Afternoon Edition) : The Other McCain on Hey, longtime pw readers…
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I still think this warrants a thorough going over.
Well, I dropped by here which is a pretty strong indication that I’m fuckin’ off the whole morning. Not that there’s anything wrong with it.
I have to go to work. I should have done that yesterday but I didn’t so I have to today.
mother always said, “do what you love.” that’s why i intend to spend the balance of the afternoon giving myself a blowjob.
I’m going to make a sacrifice to Ba’al this afternoon …
…
sure, it’ll *look* like I’m barbequeing some steaks and drinking beer to my Christianist neighbors, but me and Ba’al will know.
/
Get off that couch!
My husband will MAKE you work!
To pay your TAXES!
Remember me?
Yeah … it’s all fun and games until you die and then – BAM!!!! I’m all in your grill, laughing boy.
Well earned Sir. Then again, posting on a certain crusty critter on Friday afternoons buys tonnes of goodwill with those who understand the full context of the site…
Well, it’s freezing and cloudy here in Michigan, so no yard work. I was working on some home schooling prep for the week, but I think I’m going to head to the gym for a bit.
Umm, Patterico deigned to acknowledge your last post on the DPUD thread, Jeff.
…badly.
As usual.
I was just getting my ipod ready and damn if the thing isn’t now a $130 lump of nothing. First it said the data were corrupted, and when it tried to fix as recommended by itunes, the iPod went completely non-responsive. I’m wondering why people think these things are so great.
that happened to a friend of mine when he did the latest update … when he wakes up I will check what he did to fix
Okay, I was wrong about the stupid iPod. I was feeling very ripped off. Anyway, I just had to reset it by holding down the center button and the menu button. Now I feel very whiny.
I’m not an expert on these little lumps by any means.
oh, well, cranky-d if you could also figure out why my itunes has 26 more songs than ever make it on to my ipod that would be greaaaaat. It’s been doing that ever since I moved the library to a different hard drive and it doesn’t say why (you know sometimes it’s all “I can’t find that song” but it’s not doing that now) anyhoo, I figure it’s not worth spending much time on 26 things out of 11000ish. but I still wonder.
anyhoo, I’m kinda resting what with no rehearsal today so it will be catching up on reading and TV. and doing laundry.
I’m going to take a nap and then start my garden seeds (still too early to plant outdoors here, but it’s time to get them going indoors).
If the solution for an iPod problem cannot be found via google, I cannot help you. I would not be surprised if you had to reset the darn thing from scratch, and refill all the songs. Not worth it.
This spending spree by Team Obama and the Democrats is insane, unsustainable, and could (not exaggerating) cripple this country. A little bit of Kenysan infrastructure improvement on legitimate road, airport, bridges and other useful transportation projects (not wasteful light rail) would not have shortened the recession, but would have been a long term investiment and paid off in the long run. National defense spending on upgrading our military would also have been a good idea. What is going on with a vast expansion of domestic pork and entitlement expansion is government going on a Vegas binge.
So suggesting Rush and Jeff are the problem is a distraction we do not need, while he would like to elevate himself in his own mind, Patterico is not even the problem other than he seems more intent on slandering/libeling Jeff’s intent than calling Obama out.
The GOP is the only game in town to champion classical liberal principals (and it lost its way and gave up being the party of ideas for a time). It needs to get back to that. And of course it has to be inclusive of everyone it can get. That is all true. But it also has to be clear what it is not, and it is not Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emanuel, Harry Reid, John Murtha, or Barack Obama. And it needs to say so and call them every time on their lying bullshit when they say it.
Such analyses are none to simply and certainly nothing to take for granted. The injection of the term “investment” (to describe ever greater government expenditures) into the political conversation was done for a rhetorical advantage, so on those grounds alone is worth a sharp scrutiny, I think.
sorry, “none too simply done”, I should have said.
Sdferr, the best strategy would be reduce taxes and spending, but unfortunately it is very difficult to do that politically so the second best is reduce entitlements, reduce taxes and spend a bit more on infrastructure. The two areas where government intervention is warranted is national transporation and national defense.
My question though Joe is less about the particulars of government spending (since in general terms, to me anyway, such spending will always be a question of actual instances and dollars, or questions of practical import known when they arise) than it is a question about the rhetorical use of the term “investment” in the context of government spending, when there isn’t any question of the government “going out of business” when it makes poor “investment” decisions which do not return the necessary capital to keep the “concern” afloat. Government isn’t a business (at least here it isn’t), it wasn’t stood up to make returns to its own capital, as if there could be such a thing in the context of the United States Constitution. That’s all.
Sdferr, you are correct. I do not disagree. But when we making government spending decisions like national defense, the interstate highway system, the Coast Guard, even NASA, as some examples, because when done correctly they help foster business and private investments. And it is fair to call that type of spending an investiment in the future (even if it is not the same a private investment).
But government will often screw things up more rather than fix problems. Some good intentions gone very wrong, like the Department of Agriculture, got into trouble when they focused on the wrong kind of pork production.
I believe that Bill Clinton referred to taxes you paid as your investments. Never heard about ROI however.
A humble and possibly flawed observation:
The private sector financial/mortgage/banking cream thought that the end of their world was nigh about ten years ago. The only call they missed was where/when the cliff actually was, and that finally happened last spring. Congress mandated a suicidal shift in business practices with the CRA. Business immediately began working to shift the ultimate impact of the regulation – first and foremost an exponential growth of bad loans, which was compounded by the advent of derivatives and debt bundling of what could only be bad debt.
Business made a profit. Congressmen got greasier than a five year old at a county fair. Friends of congress got posts as regulators. And the three decades of Kabuki resulted in Fannie and Freddie being the designated receiver of all the bad paper.
Except that not even the Federal Government could make the numbers disappear this time.
I propose that the activity of the Obama administration and the congress reflects exactly the same attitude as displayed by business, but with a difference. Business did what it had to do to survive as individuals. The Government isn’t interested in surviving. They are moving on from what they regard as unwarranted restriction on their power.
Their entitlement to rule.
2010. Let us not let that year be the last elections of this grand experiment.
It’s not about winning any more. It’s about surviving.
Oh, and I’m cleaning the breakfast and serving bars in the kitchen. Also watching it snow outside.
Happy Sunday!
The entire purpose of Government though Joe, the reason to have any Government at all, ever, nevermind spending particulars, is to so order the lives men share together as to create the conditions for the well being of those same people. Laws create non-arbitrary circumstance upon which we may depend in order that we can plan ahead, conclude agreements and contracts and hope to have them enforced, seek non-retributive justice where needed, defend and protect the commonweal, etc. It all seems a bit redundant then to place an additional “investment” requirement on top of that underlaying structure, don’t you think?
Keep in mind that “infrastructure” cannot be stretched to include the bulk of the spending in the proposed budget – like for subsidizing in – house political shoulder strikers like ACORN,finally removing any pretense that Americorps is anything less than a youth indoctrination tool, or any of the hundreds of billions of feather bedding, influence buying, and graft that is the defining aspect of our (ha) representatives.
Not stretched by any reasonable person, at least. Media and activist types… they are just fine with it.
Yep, TmjUtah, infrastructure is another one of those rhetorically “smart” terms (hand waving in most cases, in other words) introduced to gull the gullible. And boy howdy, was they gulled.
As I please? Okay. Grocery shopping, cooking for the week, housecleaning. The usual Sunday.
Laundry day was yesterday, as was clothes shopping and taking the laptop in for repair. When the weather gets warmer cleaning/maintaing the grounds.
It is amazing how empty this bar got as soon as MSU won.
Not complaining, though; just observing.
I should have added “going to the bar to watch the game” as part of what I was doing.
Please, it’s like the balk rule, actual economics no longer exist.
I’m going to go hit and kick the heavy bag, them maybe go for a weighted walk.
Always relaxes me, this pursuit of doing things that don’t really relax me.
I’m surfing wedding venues for #1 daughter. :-)
Congrats, Darleen! Have fun with that!
I’m on the other side of the planet for one more week, so it’s Monday.
Boo.
Pursuant to my #29 up there…
I exist in a stream of consciousness. This seriously effects my ability to communicate key points.
What I meant to say about the business professionals re: thinking the end was near was this: They had to know the practices in place were wholly artificial and that there would be a reckoning. Think back on Washington punditry during the first weeks of the Lewinsky scandal. Perjury, violation of workplace regulations, lying to the nation on live TV. Shucks, I started watching Chris Matthews for the first time right around then. He was all into how serious and grave the situation was.
Then it became clear that the congress had no interest in criminal acts, moral turpitude, or dishonesty in the executive and the script became “it’s only about sex and those damned prude Republicans”…
But the business people in total compliance and with the blessings of the regulators and boards paid themselves larger and larger bonuses, generated greater and greater rafts of bad debts as the basis for yet more loans, and then braced for a reckoning, sooner rather than later.
The politicos, on the other hand, have a much clearer grasp of what the polity will probably do in a crisis AS LONG AS THE POLITY DOESN’T FEEL THE PAIN on an individual basis.
That’s what this budget is all about. Trillions in pork, gutting of the ’94 welfare reform, billions of dollars dolloped out randomly to insulate individual congressmen from the threat of electoral friction. Lost your job? Feh. Uncle O! is there to provide a gentle landing. It’s like a vacation that you can’t quite include room service or travel… but you don’t have to work.
People like Reid and Pelosi wouldn’t be allowed inside better homes even a short generation ago. Now they are the leading statesmen of the greatest nation on earth.
The new best and brightest knew this was coming. They planned on it. Now they are working for all they are worth to make sure they get the most they can out of the crisis.
Well, we’ll see about that.
Well, let’s see. I was making a (completely optional) face frame for some shelves I installed at work, and one of the pieces of wood split. :(
Then I finished my taxes.
Congrats, Darleen!
I went to the gym. Somebody made the weights heavier and the treadmill faster than what they say.
It’s not April first and I’m not amused.
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