While there wasn't much in the way of accumulation, it did make the roads slick, which meant on two separate occasions yesterday the road conditions required me to put the trusty F150 into 4WD. The F150 gets poor enough fuel economy when it's in 2WD, but it really gets bad in 4WD. At $2.75 per gallon, the last thing I want to do is have the fuel economy drop below the already not-so-great gas level.
At least Easter started bright and sunny!
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BeezleBub and Twirl Girl are on vacation this week. BeezleBub is working at the farm all week, helping Farmer Andy and his missus get everything ready to open the farm stand next weekend. Twirl Girl is in Maine, visiting family.It's going to be quiet around here this week.
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Don Surber proves that Paul Krugman is not an economist, Nobel prize in Economics, and degrees from Yale and MIT notwithstanding.For an economist he fails to see that medical patients are consumers. After all they 'consume' medical services and the goods that go with them. The services and goods must be paid for, one way or the other.
As Surber explains:
Indeed.
His argument that patients are not consumers is so foolish that he cannot wage it for more than two paragraphs before contradicting himself.
If there are prices to control then there is a product or service being purchased by a consumer and he should stop the charade.
(H/T Instapundit)
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Arthur Brooks tells us why Americans choose opportunity over “fairness” every time.The one truism in life is that life is not fair. That hasn't stopped President Obama from trying to make it so, even if his definition of fair is to lower everyone to the lowest common denominator, that being poverty. He still hasn't learned that an egalitarian society is always an impoverished society, and more often than not, a totalitarian one as well. He, and the progressives like him, are always striving for equality of outcome. That is a disastrous goal.
Better that there be equality of opportunity. Then it's up to the individual to choose whether or not to make the best of it. But Obama and the others prefer to believe that we are neither smart enough or wise enough to make that decision for ourselves, therefore they have to make it for us. The problem is they are neither smart enough or wise enough to make those decisions either. But that won't stop them from trying.
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Bogie has some slo-mo video that is “just full of cute.” Some of the follow on videos are just as much fun.***********
One thing President Obama said recently that I can agree with: There's nothing we can do to drop gas prices any time soon.With the major oil companies getting ready to report their quarterly earnings (and profits), we should expect the MSM and every conspiracy theorists to cry foul once those figures are released.
I expect to hear the phrase “obscene profits” again and again. (I don't know how a 6% profit margin can be considered obscene as it's lower than most other commercial businesses.) The oil companies do not control the price of crude oil, the one thing over which they have no control. Oil is bought and sold on the open market and two things affect the price: supply and perceived threats to that supply.
At the moment supply really isn't an issue, even with Libya's production off-line during its civil war. Instead it is the perceived threat of unrest in the rest of the Middle East that might affect the supply in the future.
It doesn't help that our president is against us developing our own sources of oil in the US, which certainly would have an effect on gas prices here.
Also check out Viking Pundit's links on the subject matter.
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Think the premise in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged could never happen in real life? Think again.Apparently the fix is in with the National Labor Relations Board, with Big Labor getting a ruling from them that demands Boeing move production of the 787 Dreamliner from its new non-union plant in South Carolina to a union-controlled plant in Washington State.
How the hell can the government tell a commercial business where it has to site its production plants, particularly if that move will cost the company billions in increased costs and leave it open to union extortion? The Charleston, South Carolina plant is nearly complete, so what is it supposed to do if the government forces it to move?
It's one thing if the company had a contract with the union stating the aircraft would be built in one of its Washington plants, but then moved it. Instead the company shelved plans to expand capacity near its existing facilities. It had no agreement with the unions to build the Dreamliner in Washington State. It's another thing if Boeing laid off workers in its Washington facilities, but it hasn't. In fact, its added over 2000 new employees to its Puget Sound plant.
It doesn't help that one of the members on the NLRB is a former union
Is this a payoff by the Obama Administration for support by the labor unions? It certainly appears that way, particularly if Boeing is in fact forced to move the plant.
I see a legal challenge coming, one that will likely reach the Supreme Court.
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Bruce Kesler gives us a functional analysis of President Obama's foreign policies.In other words, FAIL.
In short, in functional analysis, President Obama really acts to lessen the power of the US and its exertion and to increase the power and exertions of those opposed to the US and its allies. The rationalizations he has inculcated from his leftist past try to publicly justify this in evasions and euphemisms. Indeed, he may not consciously want the defeat of the West and victories by its foes. But that is the result and it is all rooted in his leftist world view.
Those, of whatever political orientation, who avoid calling him out as, functionally, the foe of Western values and US national interests are doing their listeners a serious harm by reducing the justified wholesale rejection of President Obama’s foreign policies. Worse, they mask the cause and its rejection, allowing it to reappear among others and further harm the US, its values and its allies.
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It seems the good folks in the UK have learned a lesson we're still trying to teach the Democrats in this country: Welfare handouts aren't fair.The average Brit is sick and tired of those gaming the system. Those same gamers are ably supported by the so-called poverty lobby, which is doing its best to make sure the tax money still flows to those who need it, whether they really do or not.
Within the UK, as here in the past, many of those receiving welfare benefits have come to see them as something they were owed. They hold those supporting them in contempt, seeing them as nothing but wage earners to be exploited.
Like a mythical traveller seeking truth, a think tank has asked a profound question: what is fairness? And lo, the people have answered with (almost) one voice: what “fair” means is that those who are deserving shall receive, and those who are not shall be – well, not exactly cast out, but certainly not entitled to everything that’s going.
--snip--
After all these years of being morally blackmailed by the poverty lobby, harried by socialist ideologues and shouted at by self-serving public sector axe-grinders, the people are not cowed. Even after being bludgeoned by the BBC thought monitors and browbeaten by Left-liberal media academics with the soft Marxist view of a “fair” society – from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs – they have not bought it. They do not believe that if people are poor, it is necessarily society’s fault, and therefore society’s duty to deal with the consequences.
Welfare reform in the US during the Clinton Administration was based upon breaking the generational dependence upon government handouts, excising the able-bodied from the welfare roles and supporting the truly needy. And so the average Brit sees it now. Is it any wonder they are demanding changes in the welfare system as it exists now?