2013 archive
The Rich Are Different from You and Me 0
And aim to keep it that way.
Light Bloggery 0
Family business.
Texas Roads Scholars 0
You’ve heard of MscAdamized roads.
Meet Perryfied roads:
The oversized vehicles and overweight loads used by energy companies has had a devastating impact on many roads, but the state has not appropriated enough money to fix them.
The Texas Department of Transportation began converting more than 80 miles of paved roads to gravel on Monday, according to the Texas Tribune. The speed limit on the new gravel roads will be reduced to 30 mph.
Interregnum Pending? 0
My local rag has had enough of the Regent.
I doubt he will, but it is notable that one of the two most important papers in the state (the other being the Richmond Trash-Disgrace) is fed up.
The Letters to the Editor should be interesting the next few days.
Twits on Twitter, I Saw It on the Internet It Must Be True Dept. 3
At SFGate, Paul Viviano, long-time foreign correspondent, cautions against taking twits as revealed–or revealing–truth.
For the older generation of Middle East correspondents, including me – I covered Egypt periodically for 30 years, half of them at The Chronicle – there was something glaringly amiss with this picture. Cairo isn’t Egypt, not by a long shot, and secular-minded young people with social networking accounts aren’t more than a tiny segment of the national population.
Facebook penetration in North America surpassed 50 percent of the total population in 2011. In Egypt, it stood at 5.6 percent.
Read the rest, and, the next time twits light up the sky, reach for several grains of salt.
Everybody Must Get Fracked 4
I have ridden the train through west Texas several times. Every time I remembered the story of an Englishman trapped on the train with a Texan who kept boasting about the glories of his state, finally winding up with, “Why, you could fit all of lil’ ole England in one tiny corner of Texas!”
As the Englishman looked out the window at the barren, windswept landscape of mesquite and red dirt, he said, “I say, old chap, do the place a world of good, eh, what?”
You ain’t lived until you’ve seen Del Rio.
Via Raw Story.
Facebook Frolics 0
Another guy gets zucked.
Droning On 0
Coming soon to a sky near you, including more than meets the eye.
Dry Hole 0
Lake Powell used to be Glen Canyon. I’ve gone rafting down river from it.
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.
Families Uncovered 0
The newest thing in the health care industrial complex: Dropping health care coverage for employees’ spouses.
From MarketWatch:
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.
Wall Street Analysts 0
Bringing a fuller meaning to the term “analyzing Wall Street.”
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.
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.
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.