Negative Railroad

I was a subscriber to the daily Christian Science Monitor. After a couple of trials, I judged their reporting to be from a neutral viewpoint. Religion appeared in every issue, but did not color the news. The coverage, although U.S.-centered was truly global. And the lighter features were usually interesting (they had great, brief film reviews).

My full-time subscription began around the time the world was preparing to invade Iraq in 2003. I let it lapse after a couple of years because I wasn’t finding the time to read all the coverage they packed into a daily paper. I still followed the website regularly (it’s offered in NRR’s news rack).

As righties and lefties argue about the merits of “drill, baby, drill”, the domestic energy industry has quietly been drilling here, now. For natural gas:

production hit a new record level in 2009, breaking the previous record set in 2008. The 2.2% increase in 2009 follows increases of 4.4% in 2008, 4.8% in 2007, and 0.33% in 2006, bringing last year's production to a level 12.2% above the output in 2006.

This surge in domestic natural gas production over the last three years has enabled the United States to overtake Russia as the world's No. 1 producer of natural gas, and is all due to advanced drilling methods now being used to drill for gas through a type of rock known as shale.

I’ve been watching a replay of last Friday’s health care forum. Lefty Senator Jay Rockefeller has been blathering about evil insurers cancelling coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. Separate from debating the truth of the characterization, is this really a big problem?

I figure the Failed Obama Administration™’s own website, HealthReform.gov, should provide data well-suited to support a perspective that this practice, called “recission”, is a widespread horror:

A recent Congressional investigation into this practice found nearly 20,000 rescissions from three large insurers over five years, saving them $300 million in medical claims – $300 million that instead had to come out of the pockets of people who thought they were insured, or became bad debt for health care providers.

(please click image—nothing bad will should happen)

Maxed Out Mama, who always looks deep into the data, sees cause for optimism:

If one tried, one could make a case that the economy will continue decent growth in 2010, or one could make the case that the economy would subside once more in the later part of 2010. There are indications both ways. Usually, that is an encouraging sign.

I won't try to make any case. In my view this is somewhat fragile and the final trajectory for 2010 depends most on government policy and fuel prices (which will control a lot about spending power).

Income tax withholdings (WIET) are up compared to this period last year. But, last year was horrible. It appears Main Street is no longer collapsing. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that Main Street is still in a fragile condition:

Assistant Village Idiot considers himself to have a skeptical nature:

Progressives, freethinkers, 60's liberals, granolas, and alternative medicine adherents think they agree with me on this skeptical approach, seeing themselves as the ones willing to challenge received wisdom. (There is overlap among those groups, but folks usually tend to specialise in one skepticism.)

With two recent murderous crazies in the news, expect each to be linked to Tea Partiers, conservatives and/or anything lefty culture finds disturbing. It will become part of the informal codespeak of lefties around the country. Never mind the facts, as anyone who opposes the lefty narrative and leftoid agenda is, by definition, exactly the kind of nutjob who would fly an airplane into a building.

Since reason and verifiable fact do not matter much in the Age of Obama, I enter this as counter evidence about who the real criminals in the U.S. voted for:

Our Mylar Mayor’s plan for $50,000 water spewers is bumping against budget realities:

The plan for the controversial $50,000 fountains would be pared from 10 fountains to six under a staff recommendation that's up for debate Monday by a City Council committee. That's after the city has made turtle-like progress in moving ahead with the program, for which Rybak proposed earmarking money back in 2007.

…

In his State of the Union address last night, the current President repeated his vision for a “clean-energy economy” as a cornerstone to creating jobs. This time, Obama included something that many argue is not clean energy:

But to create more of these clean-energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives, and that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.

Neo-neocon didn’t have the stomach to watch last night’s State of the Union address. I endured the whole thing. Setting aside the particulars of the implicitly contradictory wish list Barry set forth, I think the current President is cracking up.

He has lost his slickness, even with the teleprompter. His demeanor struck me as similar to the Seinfeld character George Costanza when caught in his own web of lies. Barry would make a joking jab, then smile a bit too big, as if he was looking for approval. His speaking style, when not in full campaign mode, is full of odd pauses. Last night, what was odd became awkward.

So much will be said about Scott Brown’s victory, I’ll wait for both the conventional wisdom and the actual truths to become clear before making any grand declarations of my own.

But, I love Rush Limbaugh’s first reaction:

This one's for you, Mary Jo.

Let’s hope the Maine ladies find some integrity and sustain the filibuster against Unicorn Care.

If you want to help someone, then just shut up, do it, and spare the press release.

Quoted from: Vox Day

In my speculations about breaking the 60-vote Senate majority, I suggested Sarah Palin may offer some stealth support to Republican underdog Scott Brown. If she’s helping, it is so stealthy that nobody has noticed. But even by her absence, Palin is a factor in the Massachusettes Senate race:

While pseudo-intellectual elites are wringing their hands about globalistical warmening threatening to drown worthless places like Tuvalu, the actual climate is freezing people off Peruvian mountaintops:

For alpaca farmer Ignacio Beneto Huamani and his young family, life in the Peruvian Andes, at almost 4,700m above sea level, has always been a struggle against the elements. His village of Pichccahuasi, in Peru's Huancavelica region, is little more than a collection of small thatched shelters and herds of alpaca surrounded by beautiful, yet bleakly inhospitable, mountain terrain.

Citizens in the U.S. are supposed to be protected from the government interfering with peaceable assemblies. We’re also supposed to be able to petition our government for redress. But a crafty landlord can use property law to nullify those principles:

The Jefferson Area Tea Party has been officially banned from the area around Congressman Tom Perriello’s office. The landlord of the building where Perriello’s office is located, Lisa Murphy, has convince the local officials that recent protests outside the office is negatively affecting the other tenants in the building.