Write a decent health care bill and dare Olympia Snowe to filibuster it. She won’t.
Archives for 2009
New Car, Caviar, Four Star Daydream, Think Ill Buy Me a Football Team
Rally round the Leader:
I challenge you to think of anyone not named Palin or Limbaugh who would get this kind of full-throated defense from the blogospheric right. Dear Leader wants an NFL team, so the troops must rally.
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Grab That Cash With Both Hands and Make a Stash
Must be nice to be in the high-fidelity first class traveling set:
Major U.S. banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their employees about $140 billion this year — a record high that shows compensation is rebounding despite regulatory scrutiny of Wall Street’s pay culture.
Workers at 23 top investment banks, hedge funds, asset managers and stock and commodities exchanges can expect to earn even more than they did the peak year of 2007, according to an analysis of securities filings for the first half of 2009 and revenue estimates through year-end by The Wall Street Journal.
Total compensation and benefits at the publicly traded firms analyzed by the Journal are on track to increase 20% from last year’s $117 billion — and to top 2007’s $130 billion payout. This year, employees at the companies will earn an estimated $143,400 on average, up almost $2,000 from 2007 levels.
It is kind of funny how acrimonious our current politics is, with everyone yelling and screaming at each other over little shit, when the truth of the matter is politicians don’t run the country at all.
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Something to Look Forward To
This strikes me as a horrible, horrible idea:
For decades, automakers have been on a quest to make cars quieter: an auto that purrs, and glides almost silently in traffic.
They have finally succeeded. Plug-in hybrid and electric cars, it turns out, not only reduce air pollution, they cut noise pollution as well with their whisper-quiet motors. But that has created a different problem. They aren’t noisy enough.
So safety experts, worried that hybrids pose a threat if pedestrians, children and others can’t hear them approaching, want automakers to supply some digitally enhanced vroom. Indeed, just as cellphones have ring tones, “car tones” may not be far behind — an option for owners of electric vehicles to choose the sound their cars emit.
Can you imagine every car going down the road blasting the driver’s music preference as a car tone. Just kill me now.
Gotta love Larison
I’ve been reading a bit of this panel discussion thing about conservatism’s future. It’s mostly an epic wankfest and it’s remarkable how much Larison stands out. I liked this especially:
Conservatism rebels against the concentration of power and wealth, temperamental conservatism teaches that power corrupts, while the movement concentrates in acquiring political gain particularly on national security.
Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Moby Dick:
The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! How cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
I’m sure there are also all kinds of paradoxes in liberalism or progressivism or whatever it is that people like me are supposed to have as a philosophy. And this is why I think it’s a mistake to think that pondering Burke and Hume or their liberal equivalents, whoever that would be, will lead to any kind of clarity.
Good Christ Almighty, Where Do They Find These People?
In the future, the FTC can rest assured I will burn every free book from the Heritage Foundation and Regnery. Considering I felt like going on a three day bender after I read the Party of Death by Ramesh Ponneru, burning the damned things is probably healthier in the long run. If I get a copy of Going Rogue, I might just be driven to shoot smack.
As a side note, it is really hard to argue for good government when you have jackasses like Cleland running around.
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Must See TV
BTW- Frontline returns tonight, and the subject is Afghanistan:
Should be a good one.