EPA Celebrates ‘Children Health Month,’ Encourages Recruiting Students for ‘Energy Patrols’ at School | CNSNews.com

Since earth is nice and brown, I'd suggest having patrol t-shirts made up in that color.

Or perhaps they need cassocks and collars?

Obama: "We don’t need to build more highways out in the suburbs."

But a bullet train in the middle of rural California is a nifty idea!!

Now, who could have guessed this?

Matt Damon's Anti-Fracking Movie Financed by Oil-Rich Arab Nation

I just sent this to a friend on Facebook, after she said she almost defriended me over my political posts

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I love how liberals are so quick to get mad at anyone on the other side of the aisle. Very few conservatives would have such a visceral and angry response at anything that a liberal would post. Most conservatives do not even contemplate eliminating liberals as friends simply because of their political persuasion.

As for what Romney said, he essentially and completely echoed what the Obama campaign has also said. The Obama campaign spent a great deal of money putting together the "Julia" campaign, showing how much everyone can depend on the government, and celebrating that as the goal of Obama's presidency. Obama sold that dependency as a good thing. In the ad was a woman who could easily have stood on her own, without government handouts--whether it is 9$ per month birth control or education loans which have had the massive side-effect of driving up tuitions to the point where you *have* to take out massive loans to get through college. Stepping through Obama's glorious vision:

3 years old: Head Start has proven in studies to be useless (except as babysitting); students in Head Start show no advantage within a year or two of starting school. We spend close to 10 billion on this useless program every year. So much for using science as a basis for public policy. The science and research on this is clear: Head Start may be a nice sentiment, but it is, in reality, useless.

17 years old: Race to the Top institutes a national curriculum (in violation of at least two federal laws, by the way,) which will inevitably (in my opinion) lead to lowest possible standards--the adaptation of the Common Core actually forced California and Massachusetts to *lower* their standards. As a government and political initiative, the Common Core will be written by the most politically powerful constituents. I'll give you a hint: that won't be parents and students.

18 years old: As for Pell grants, I saw a statistic just yesterday that estimated that only about 40% of recipients actually get a degree—The Pell grant program costs about 30-40 billion a year. Again, nice sentiment, bad in reality.

22 years old: Many colleges, faced with the massive increases in coverage demanded by Obamacare are eliminating their insurance requirements and cancelling their previously-offered policies, as the costs have risen (North Carolina said the costs to the students would rise 51%, from $920 for 2 semesters pre-Obamacare to $1410 post-Obamacare). Most college kids only need catastrophic coverage—such as that which would have covered "Julia's" surgery. Instead, Obamacare has demanded that even 19 year olds get comprehensive, first-dollar heath "insurance", and that they be charged at the "community rate"—in other words, they will be charged massively more than it costs to actually pay for their health care, in order for them—mostly still un- or under-employed young adults—to contribute to the health costs of older, usually wealthier people.

23 years old: I have no objection to equal pay for equal work, but the Ledbetter act wasn't actually addressing that. It was addressing the issue of how much time could elapse between the offence and a lawsuit. As for women being paid less, that's old thinking. In urban areas today, young women are out-earning their male counterparts. When you control for education, for job choices, and for time spent in the workforce, women are paid about the same as men. On the other hand, men receive fewer college degrees, fewer Master degrees, and fewer PhD's than women, and men are more likely to be in jail. Men are often discussed in the media these days as "unnecessary" to modern society, and half the commercials on TV use the stupid-guy idea to sell products. Who is in need of protection these days?

25 years old: Federal student loans are being likened to indentured servitude, as 50+ year olds find themselves still paying off their loans. Many students are snookered into taking out massive loans with little hope of actually being able to repay them. The balance between college costs and the benefits are increasingly tipping against college. Much of this is directly caused by the availability of student loans. Colleges hook students with promises of a brilliant future, don't bother to spell out the costs and the fact that student loans are not dismissible in bankruptcy court, and pocket massive amounts of money—essentially directly from the government. As long as the government pays, and the student doesn't see the true cost for years, the schools can go on hiking up their tuitions year after year after year. Luckily, more students are becoming aware that they are being defrauded and are looking at low-cost alternatives or forgoing college—and more often grad school. Law school applications tanked this year.

27 years old: Birth control costs $9 a month, and if shared with your partner, this goes down to $4.50. As for preventative care, as a young women, right out of college, these costs would be minimal, and should be paid by everyone who can afford them out of pocket. Why send your money off to an insurance company, who then take their cut, just to send it back to the health provider. Much more efficient—and it should be cheaper—to pay the provider directly. (There is no such thing as a free lunch, what you pay in premiums pays your bills.)

31 years old: Part of the decision to have a child is making sure you understand the costs. If you can't afford to have the kid, you shouldn't have it in the first place. This I know from personal experience. I would love, love, love to have a kid, but I have never even been close to being able to afford one.

37 years old: Over the last several decades spending on education has skyrocketed. There has been no increase *AT ALL* in actual student outcomes. Money does not equal results. Increasingly, education money is going to pay the pensions of retired teachers, and not into educating kids. Out here in Los Angeles, LAUSD has been on a building binge, putting up lots of spanking new, beautiful schools—the problem is: enrollment is actually dropping rapidly, and the old schools are half-empty. Literally billions of dollars is being spent on schools we don't need. Throwing money at education has never actually improved anything.

42 years old: The SBA should be abolished! If you have a good business idea, private money would be very happy to invest in it—putting their own money on the line. The SBA goes in when private money passes—in other words, when the investment is a less-good idea. Since they are only gambling with our money, and not their own, the SBA doesn't care if they are making bad investments.

65 years old: Medicare has been around for decades, and prescription drug coverage was George W's program. As for Medicare, it should—like all other government programs—be means tested. The wealthy should not take one penny away from anyone with less money than themselves, *ever*.

67 years old: The majority of young adults are more likely to believe in UFO's than in Social Security, and they are right to do so. Social Security is already spending more money than it takes in, and in a couple years, there will only be two workers paying for each Social Security recipient—there is no trust fund, no lock box, that money was spent long ago. If the system is not dramatically changed—and, again, means tested—it will not exist when we are ready to retire. You can not continue to spend more than you have and expect to keep it up. What can't go on forever, won't.

That's the "Life of Julia" and the Democrats vision for America—willing dependency at every step, instead of independent agency.

The fundamental problem Republicans have been dealing with for years--as have Democrats, only from the other side--is what to do when the clients of government outnumber the people who pay the bills. This is disastrous. When people who pay the bills are outnumbered and outvoted by people who spend the money, deficits and a Greek-style crashed economy is inevitable--it may take time to build up to the crash, but the crash will *always* happen. (I believe we are only a handful of years away from that very crash.) This has always been inherent in any democratic system, and has been warned about by political thinkers for centuries, if not millennia.

To point out that fact is not heinous. To ignore that fact is.

Demoralized as Hell, The poll the media isn't talking about edition » Datechguy's Blog

I especially like one of the charts at the bottom, which shows how much Obama is leading in various polls, charted against the Democratic party sample in the same poll. So a poll that had Obama up by 3, with a Dem advantage of +5 would appear at the point (5, 3) on the chart. Obviously, there's a strong correlation between Dem advantage and Obama advantage. With Rasmussen's party breakdown now running 37.6% / 33.3% / 29.2% (R/D/I)  that's a big deal, and makes a lot of the polls highly suspect.

Obama has millions of fake Twitter followers

I disagree with their criteria for "fake":

"Fake accounts tend to follow a lot of people but have few followers," said Rob Waller, a founder of StatusPeople. "We then combine that with a few other metrics to confirm the account is fake."

I think a lot of people sign on to Twitter for the sole reason of checking out posts by politicians, stars, musicians, etc. They aren't there to speak themselves, just to read what is being posted by others. This is especially true of politicians--where people want to see what they're saying, but aren't the politician's "friend" and will not be "liked" in return. I can easily see my 80+ year old dad signing on to Twitter for the sole reason of reading a politicians' or campaigns' feeds; but he would never write a tweet of his own, would never gather a single follower, and never go looking at anyone else's feed either.

This criteria is like saying most blog readers are bogus, because they don't have blogs themselves--there is a difference between making and consuming content. You can consume, without being a producer.

Thomas Sowell thinks we discuss sports more rationally than politics:

Sports Versus Politics

I think there is a very simple reason for this: When talking about sports, we talk about sports; when talking about politics, we talk about how people are talking about politics.

By this I mean, most political reporting is about what the two sides are saying (usually about those bastards on the other side,) and not about what they are actually proposing or have already enacted. This drives me crazy. Most reports follow a format sort of like this: Republicans say that the Democrats have raided Medicare to pay for Obamacare, Democrats say that the Republicans would gut Medicare. Missing, of course, is an actual analysis of the Republican proposals, or an evaluation of the Democratic ones. I often find myself mentally screaming that I don't care what they say, or how clever their turn of phrase was, or how good/bad their political strategy is. I want to know what are they actually doing! But the reporters never get around to such little things as that.

This is just an example from the current debate, but this happens daily, year after year. Reporters are so fixated on the game, on the horse race, on the easy reporting; that they never bother to tell people what is actually going on.

The cynic would say, they don't tell you; because they're liberals; and because, if you were to strip party identification off all of the proposals, people would usually pick the conservative ones. Better not to talk about the underlying proposals then; much better to show how mean and nasty the verbal mudslinging has gotten.

(The punctuation on the second to last sentence is seriously tricky. I'm not sure I got it right, but it took me a while just to come up with that. The proper use of semicolons is a dying art.)

Which party is more cynical? | Power Line

Mirengoff has trouble explaining McCain's pick of Palin. I think my first reaction to it, and how I explained it to my sister--who had never heard of Palin--was probably right: she was picked because she didn't have an abortion.

An incarcerated 43-year-old Milwaukee man is suspected of using a van he drove as part of a work-release program to help commit at least four burglaries of Mequon businesses on North Port Washington Road in June and July.
 
Man, on work release, accused of using jail van to commit Mequon burglaries

The Olympic tickets fiasco: Bring on the touts | The Economist

Why is it so bad to resell tickets at the price the market will bear? Because low-income people will be priced out of the market, and only the wealthy will be able to attend. So, faced with a choice between filling the stands with people who could afford expensive tickets, and having empty stands, the Olympic organizers opted for the latter.

To a leftist, it is better that we all live in poverty than for the wealthy to have any advantage. All can be equal, but only if we are equally poor.

A Creative Borrowing Boom: Poway Not Alone in High-Interest Financing - Voice of San Diego: Education

Lake Oswego Biz Owner Gets Slapped for Anti Obama Sign

Any chance this is the same Kevin Kerwin I knew as a kid? 

Vitucci's gets a write-up in the J/S:

Raising the bar - JSOnline

President Obama is popular in Washington DC:

The president is most popular in Washington DC, where his job approval rating is an astonishing 83 percent.

Wow, that's high. Still, I'm not surprised. Having returned very recently from DC, I can tell you it's a boom town. The empty storefronts you see in the towns I've lived in over the past few years are not present in DC. On the contrary, everywhere there is a feeling that businesses are doing very well. It's a heady atmosphere of wealth and growing prosperity. On street corners everywhere you can see signs advertising newly constructed homes. I think that if the rest of the nation saw how Washington is living large while the rest of the country is hurting, people would be appalled.

PJ Media » The Three Great Scams of Our Time

Quote of the day:

I have been following the ascent of Barack Obama from early in the Democratic primaries—when he surfed on a wave of clichés, bromides, plagiarisms, gaffes, promises, and outright fabrications to the nomination—up to the present moment when he began to be exposed as arguably the most disingenuous and destructive president in the history of the United States. I found it hard to believe that he had succeeded in conning the majority of his countrymen (and much of the West). True, he enjoyed the material assistance of the consensus media in what was both a massive cover-up of his dubious formative and intellectual influences and an equally massive promotional campaign. Nonetheless, how a largely unvetted nonentity with a winning manner could so effectively beguile even a dumbed-down electorate is nothing short of grotesque.

Redshirting: Holding kids back from kindergarten - CBS News

"60 Minutes" did a piece on Kindergarten redshirting. In it, they clearly illustrated the big elephant in the corner, but never overtly mentioned it: every single example they cited was of a boy being held back--not one girl.

It's very dry here in Madison:

Seriously dry conditions have developed over southern Wisconsin during June. Several stations in the south central sections of the state reported the driest June on record. Madison received only 0.31 inches of rain, breaking a 117-year record. This amount was only 7 percent of normal June rainfall. Beaver Dam (0.33 in), Ft. Atkinson (0.42 in) and Watertown (0.50 in) also experienced their lowest June rainfall totals.

I don't remember seeing anything like it. Our lawn is yellow and it crunches when I walk on it. There are tall ugly weeds popping up in the middle of lawns all over town. Our garden is doing ok. We have to water twice a day, but on the plus side the garden weeds have been easy to keep down. I hope it will end soon.

I find this story "Swiss institute finds polonium in Arafat's effects" highly unlikely:

Traces of the poisonous element polonium have been found in the belongings of late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, a Swiss institute said on Wednesday, and a television report said his widow had demanded his body be exhumed for further tests.

Arafat died at a hospital in France in 2004, after a sudden illness which baffled doctors. Many Palestinians have long suspected he was poisoned.

Darcy Christen, spokesman for the Institut de Radiophysique in Lausanne, Switzerland, told Reuters on Tuesday it had found "surprisingly" high levels of polonium-210 in Arafat's belongings.

The half life of Polonium-110 is 138.4 days.  Which means that between the day he died (Arafat died on 11/11/04) and January 1, 2012, there would have been 18.5 half-lives. Which means that for every million atoms of Polonium that might have been on Arafat's belongings when he died, only 2.5 particles would have still existed at the start of the year. I don't know the lag-time between the tests and the announcement, but if they tested it after the first of June, that would have dropped to 1.2 particles per million.

Needle, meet haystack.