From Pine View Farm

August, 2013 archive

QOTD 0

Douglas Adams:

If you don’t change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?

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Dry Hole 0

Lake Powell used to be Glen Canyon. I’ve gone rafting down river from it.

A federal Bureau of Reclamation study released Friday says the Colorado River’s worst drought in a century will force reduced water releases from Lake Powell that could affect agriculture, downstream business and hydroelectric power production.

Groups urging conservation warned of drastic water cutbacks and severe economic implications, while state officials and the Central Arizona Project sought to downplay the alarm.

Looks like it’s on the way to once again being just plain old Glen Canyon.

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Families Uncovered 0

The newest thing in the health care industrial complex: Dropping health care coverage for employees’ spouses.

From MarketWatch:

“We’re the last domino,” says Duke Bennett, mayor of Terre Haute, Ind., which is instituting a spousal carve-out for the city’s health plan, effective July 2013, after nearly all major employers in the area dropped spouses.

But when employers drop spouses, they often lose more than just the one individual, when couples choose instead to seek coverage together under the other partner’s employer. Terre Haute, which pays $6 million annually to insure nearly 1,200 people including employees and their family members, received more than 20 new plan members when a local university, bank and county government stopped insuring spouses, according to Bennett. “We have a great plan, so they want to be on ours. All we’re trying to do is level the playing field here,” he says.

It’s almost as if, by stripping folks of health coverage, they are trying to make single-payer inevitable.

Doing so would actually benefit businesses, by spreading the costs more equitably across the population, even as the insurance bonus babies and for-profit hospital czars would scream about losing all those juicy bonuses and country club memberships.

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Wall Street Analysts 0

Bringing a fuller meaning to the term “analyzing Wall Street.”

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The Voter Fraud Fraud 1

Peter St. Onge tells the story of a voter who passed literacy tests, an earlier gut-out-the-vote tactic, to voter ID, the current rage amongst the oligarchs.

Eaton first voted more than seven decades ago, when doing so was a more difficult thing for blacks in the South. How difficult? When she was 18, she recalls, Eaton rode with her mother on her brother’s mule wagon to the county courthouse to register. Before young Rosanell could add her name to the rolls, however, a clerk told her to stand against the wall, look straight ahead, and recite the preamble to the Constitution without missing a word.

When Rosanell did just that, the clerk looked to her mother and said: “She’s a brave little girl.”

Now, Eaton is a plaintiff in a lawsuit, one of two filed this week after Gov. Pat McCrory signed one of the most restrictive voting rights bills in the country. According to the suit, the name on Eaton’s birth certificate doesn’t match the name on her driver’s license or the name on her voter registration card. She will, the lawsuit says, incur substantial time and expense to straighten things out and meet the state’s new requirements.

You see, somewhere along the line, she got married, so the names don’t match up.

Therefore, she must be a voter fraudster. There is no other possible reason.

Anyway, she probably wouldn’t vote for the “right” people, so her rights don’t matter. Q. E. D.

And that is logic in Republican-world.

Read the rest for more Republican logic.

Meanwhile, Sally Kalson points out that this is another case of both sides not (more at the link):

There is no corresponding effort by Democrats to suppress the Republican vote.

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Today’s Gospel, from the Book of Republican Jesus 0

Halford Ryan recites the Republican Beatitudes. Here’s two:

It is easier for a rich man to enter public office than for a poor man ever to enter public office.

Let the rich ask what the commonwealth can do for them; let the poor ask what they can do for the rich.

Consider the rest your memory verses for the week.

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The Fee Hand of the Market 0

Free enterprise, except when it isn’t.

Back in April, the California company’s (Tesla–ed.) request to operate a dealership was denied by the state Department of Motor Vehicles based on a law that prohibits auto manufacturers from being dealers. Since 1998, DMV has made 14 exceptions to the dealer rule for makers of specialty motorcycles, trucks and trailers.

(snip)

Traditional auto dealers applied the emergency brake last year when Tesla initially sought approval for a sales location in Virginia.

The president of the state auto dealers association, Don Hall, said his group doesn’t oppose Tesla, it just wants the company to heed Virginia rules of the road for car buyers’ own good. What would happen, Hall wondered, if Tesla failed and left cars in circulation without the network of service technicians to maintain them, such as those at franchise dealerships?

Because car dealers always think of the customer first.

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The God of Shove 0

Joseph Margulies reflects on the place of religious belief in the Civil Rights Movement and the contradictions between the God of Love and the God of Shove. A nugget:

Likewise, today’s celebration of the civil rights era should not blind us to the reality of the times, when civil rights workers were threatened, beaten and killed by those who understood America’s civil religion in far darker terms. Chambers found himself on the receiving end of this violence; his home, office and car were all firebombed.

America’s civil religion will be with us always, but we must listen to the form it takes. Today, tens of millions of Americans merge an angry God with a chest-thumping nationalism to justify endless misadventures in the war on terror, thereby giving political cover for the apparently limitless expansion of the national security state.

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QOTD 0

Adam Smith:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

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Quadrennial Athletic Marketing Extravaganza Fail 0

If you wonder why I’ve given up on the Olympics (and most other endeavors of the Athletic Industrial Complex except baseball), look no further than this item in Bob Molinaro’s always excellent column in my local rag.

While wrestling and baseball are trying to fight their way back into the Summer Games, pole dancing is making a bid to join the Olympic movement. Speaking of movement, what’s now being called “pole sports” includes a rule that prohibits women competitors from dancing “in an overly erotic manner.” And I suppose fans will be prohibited from bringing $1 bills to the competition.

Afterthought:

Who defines “overly erotic,” Miss Grundy or Miss October?

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Everybody Must Get Fracked 0

Silently.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Video Archive

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Family Values 0

Below the fold, because it autoplays.

But watch it. It’s delicious.

Read more »

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Facebook Frolics 1

Not what it’s cracked up to be, he said oxymoronically:

“On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection,” said University of Michigan social psychologist Ethan Kross, lead author of the article and a faculty associate at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. “But rather than enhance well-being, we found that Facebook use predicts the opposite result—it undermines it.” The researchers concluded as a result of their study, that the more participants used Facebook over the two-week study period, the more their life satisfaction levels declined over time.

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Amateur Hour in the Regency Theatre 0

Follow the money.

Now you see it, now you don’t.

Round and round it goes, where (or when) it stops, nobody knows.

In summer 2011, Virginia first lady Maureen McDonnell purchased roughly $30,000 in Star Scientific, Inc. stock, using money from a loan the company’s chief executive gave her.

Confirmation of the transactions adds another layer to the connections between Jonnie Williams Sr., the Star Scientific executive who has lavished gifts on Gov. Bob McDonnell and his family. Those gifts are now part of state and federal investigations.

Much more at the link.

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The Voter Fraud Fraud 0

Gutting out the vote in North Carolina.

It ain’t pretty.

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Bubble Boys 0

What the Booman said.

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QOTD 0

Reinhold Neibuhr:

Fanatic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure.

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The Voter Fraud Fraud 0

Well, that worked out pretty much as expected.

After Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler (R) compiled a list of 17 people last month suspected of illegally voting in the November presidential election as non-citizens, an investigation Wednesday easily verified their citizenship and cleared all 17 of wrongdoing, Boulder County District Attorney Stan Garnett told the Daily Camera.

There’s no there, there.

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Twits on Twitter 0

High-speed twits.

An 18-year-old accused of killing a bicyclist with his car has had a vehicular manslaughter charge upgraded to murder in part because he boasted about speeding on Twitter, prosecutors said Thursday.

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The Surveillance State 0

Bob Cesca points out something that this morning’s headlines about NSA snooping seem to have overlooked.

I mention this not because I’m a big fan of the vacuum-cleaner style “surveillance” instituted under President George the Worst, but because I am not at all a fan of having the vapors over something that anyone who has been paying attention has known about for a decade:

More importantly, this was an internal audit, which means… oversight!

Oh. You say you haven’t been paying attention . . . . Never mind.

Also, see DD’s Law.

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