Thoughts On A Sunday

At least the bikers attending the first weekend of Bike Week 2009 got good weather for half the weekend. Today it's nothing but rain and clouds. The bulk of the attendees won't be arriving until next Thursday and Friday, when the weather is expected to be better than it is today and will be tomorrow.

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BeezleBub is gearing himself up for making the switch from going to school to working at the farm for the summer. Yesterday he was coated from head to toe with dirt and mud and never seemed happier. Today he'll be spending all day in one of the greenhouses setting up trays of seedlings for weekly planting.

While not his favorite chore, I think he'll be more than pleased to be doing that today.

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One thing I've noticed about President Obama's socialist agenda when it comes to all kinds of programs and spending: haste. He's been trying to ramrod through all kinds of major changes and expansions of government programs as quickly as he can. It leaves little time for thoughtful review and debate, meaning he can hide the 'ugly' side of his programs until it's too late. I believe he also realizes that if he doesn't get these changes through quickly he'll be unable to do so after the 2010 elections because he expects his Democratic majority in one or both chambers of Congress to decline or disappear.

Now that voters are finally waking up to the fact that many of them voted for the image Obama was portraying rather than the man, they're finding he isn't the guy they thought they were voting for. Even some in the media are starting to realize that while he creates great sound bites, he really says nothing. He's very good at talking about generalities and appearing to make promises, but once someone starts looking closely at what he says they realize he's promised nothing other than to take us one step closer into an unsustainable socialist future.

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Physicist Freeman Dyson takes on the AGW faithful, questioning the climate models they're using to 'prove' their claims, calling them flawed, incomplete, and deceptive.

We know that plants do react very strongly to enhanced carbon dioxide. At Oak Ridge, they did lots of experiments with enhanced carbon dioxide and it has a drastic effect on plants because it is the main food source for the plants... So if you change the carbon dioxide drastically by a factor of two, the whole behavior of the plant is different. Anyway, that’s so typical of the things they ignore. They are totally missing the biological side, which is probably more than half of the real system.

You'd think climate models would include this kind of mitigating factor, wouldn't you? But it appears many of the models totally ignore it. How then can they possibly claim their models are anywhere near accurate? What else are they leaving out that has a major effect on the models?

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Like many other states in the nation, New Hampshire is having problems balancing its budget. Yet despite claims to the contrary by the Legislature, the problem is not a shortfall in revenues but a problem with overspending. Both the Democratic-majority NH House and Senate and the wishy-washy do-nothing governor say there's no more spending to cut, even though the biennial budget is approximately 8% larger than the previous budget! (Tax-and-Spenders like to say a budget has been cut if a proposed 10% increase has been reduced to 5%, which is disingenuous at best. The budget is still increasing.) The previous budget increased spending 17.5%, but didn't have the revenues to cover the expenditures, leaving a $400 million deficit. Again it wasn't a problem with a shortfall in revenue, but overspending.

It isn't that tax revenues have fallen off drastically. It's that spending has increased dramatically. Yet the legislature has chosen to ignore that and is moving ahead with spending the taxpayers in our state can't afford. Unfortunately the same appears to be true in other states as well.

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We've heard of umpires ejecting managers or players during a baseball game, but never ejecting the entire crowd in the stands.

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At least Iran's fraudulent presidential election wasn't nearly as clownish as the late Saddam's final election. The mullah's made sure Ahmadinejad won only by a 2-1 margin, and not a 99-1 'margin' like Saddam. Now if the mullah's had said 51-49 margin, it would be likely there wouldn't be nearly as many protests or riots...unless that's exactly what they wanted in order to root out the 'troublemakers'.

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Shamelessly stolen from Bruce, who stole it from ItalianBoston.

Click on image to biggify

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I've been advocating high-speed optical fiber based Internet/phone/video service for years. Now others have picked up the cry for “fast service, now!” It would do more for helping the economy turn around than anything President Obama has proposed.

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Dick Morris says the recession now belongs entirely to Obama.

As it becomes clearer that the deficit caused by spending has landed us in a new economic crisis, entirely of Obama’s own making, his popularity and job performance are likely to drop as well.

The old recession — that the public says was caused by Bush — shows signs of winding down. But the new recession and/or inflation — triggered by Obama’s massive deficits — is just now coming upon us.

He won't be able to blame the multi-trillion dollar annual deficits on Bush. They're his alone, despite what he might claim.

(H/T Maggie's Farm)

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Glenn Reynolds has a round up and commentary on Obama's plan to for health care 'reform'. The consensus is that he should first fix Medicare before creating yet another bloated government bureaucracy designed to delay or deny health care to American citizens.

As one commenter put it “The great thing about government health care is...you can start denying coverage for demographics that don't vote for you.”

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I'm not sure how it happened, but we've added yet another feline member to the WP family. Bagheera's going to have a fit.

Our latest addition was found abandoned in a foreclosed home, left with no food or water. She wasn't the only animal abandoned as there were also two dogs and two horses left to fend for themselves.

How do people do this to their animals?

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The next round of Tea Parties are starting, with one here in New Hampshire scheduled for June 24th in front of the State House in Concord. This time the protests are aimed at profligate spending by the state legislature and the governor's unwillingness to use his veto pen. The state budget will have increased almost 25% in four years, well above the rate of inflation and population increase, should the proposed budget pass unaltered.

A number of Tea Parties are also planned across the nation for July 4th, an auspicious date.

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Are the bad old days of “urban renewal” coming back? According to the Telegraph in London, those days may have indeed returned to the US.

(H/T GraniteGrok)

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where 300,000 bikers are converging, the weather is wet, and where we hope to get some boating in during the week.