Thoughts On A Sunday

Friday's snowfall did little to deter any Weekend Pundit activities, seeing how only 3 inches of the light fluffy stuff fell at The Manse. However, that hasn't meant we've been able to sit on our bottoms doing nothing. With another snowstorm forecast for Tuesday, BeezleBub and I have been trying to clear away the leavings of the storm from two weeks ago (mainly a lot of ice to chop through) to make it easier for us to clear way the upcoming snow.

It doesn't help that Beezlebub headed off to the WP In-Laws for the week, it being the February school vacation week. It will be up to yours truly clean up the aftermath of any snowstorm while he's gone.

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Yesterday was a busy day, including a run to the transfer stat....uh...the dump. I saw a lot of my neighbors there, something which is a bit unusual. But an unusual event meant a lot of us had to make the trip to the regional...er...dump to dispose of our household trash.

On our usual trash pickup day the barrels remained full and the trash bags undisturbed. Instead we were greeted with a letter stating the contractor would no longer be servicing our neighborhood due to ill health.

A little advanced notice would have been nice.

We'll be looking at another contractor to haul our trash, but if the cost exceeds that of making the trip ourselves (it's a $5 fee per trip to dispose of our trash at the dump) we'll continue to make the weekly or bi-weekly dump run rather than pay someone else to do it for us.

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It seems the rhetoric between Hillary and Barack has picked up considerably. I find it interesting Hillary is slamming Barack about Obama campaign flyers that seem to come out of the old Clinton Dirty Tricks Handbook. Maybe she's pissed off because he beat her to the punch.

We must remember that Hillary is not as pure as the driven snow. Both she and Bill have campaigned dirty in the past. All one needs to do is ask Bob Dole about that, having been on the receiving side of Clinton dirty tricks during the 1996 Presidential campaign.

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Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has an eye-opening article about how our court system is in danger of becoming less about enforcing our laws and more about politics.

The judiciary currently is experiencing unprecedented pressure from interest groups to make decisions that are based on politics. In Washington, D.C., we hear a lot about federal judges, and they have a critical role in upholding the Constitution. But having been a state judge and a state legislator, I know that the vast majority of law is state law. Ninety-five percent of litigation takes place in state courts. Many legal issues are primarily decided there, including divorce, property rights, employment law, product liability and medical malpractice.

Political pressure is a big problem in a number of our state courts. More than 89% of state judges go through some form of election process. Many of these elections recently have become full-fledged political battles, fueled by growing sums of money spent by candidates and special-interest groups to attack, defend and counterattack.

The last thing we need is a judiciary for sale to the highest bidder.

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Does the so-called “campus rape crisis” really exist? According to the piece in the LA Times, it is so far overblown as to be ludicrous.

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Our friend Jon Henke tears apart Paul Krugman's claim that poverty in America is on the rise, that it is impossible for people today to work themselves out of poverty, implying another LBJ-esque “War On Poverty” is needed.

Jon points out a few inconvenient truths, such as LBJ's War On Poverty stalled the decline of the poverty rate in America for over 30 years. Only once major welfare reforms were enacted in the late 1990's did the poverty rate continue its interrupted decline.

(H/T Maggie's Farm)

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As the oil business has been waning in Texas, wind energy has been stepping in big time.

Texas now has the largest wind energy generation capacity in the US, blowing past California in that regard. The amount of wind energy capacity in Texas is expected to more than triple over the next few years. A lot of dying oil towns in the state have been revitalized as wind turbines have been built, bring jobs and money back into the local economy.

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Alternative energy is making a resurgence in New Hampshire, with biomass energy becoming a growing business, particularly with the pulp/paper mills in New Hampshire's North Country and Great North Woods shutting down. It's getting so good a mothballed wood-chip generating plant is being renovated and will soon restart. It is expected more plants will be planned and built to replace the closed paper mills...as long as NIMBY and BANANA responses can be kept to a minimum.

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Now this is the kind of affirmative action I can support.

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A big problem from this winter's heavy snowfall has been making itself felt throughout New Hampshire.

The heavy snows collapsed roofs in a number of towns and cities around the state. The amount of snow itself isn't the problem. It's when the snow is followed by rain, causing the snow to become waterlogged and very heavy, the load on the roof exceeds its capability to carry it and down it comes.

We have more snow forecast for Tuesday evening.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the woodpile is getting too small, more snow is on the way, and my supply of ice melt is darn near exhausted.