Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

Wisconsin Republicans remove the spending measures from public sector collective bargaining rights bill and pass it without Democrats. You watch. Democrats who failed to show up and do their job will be hailed as heroes and the Republicans who carried out the campaign promises that got them elected (how often does that happen?) will be pilloried as villains. For Republicans and Democrats, the Republicans are taking power from the Democrat coalition, so it's a shift in power in favor of Republicans. That's why Republicans love this and Democrats hate it. But from the point of view of the people, this is a reduction in power of both government and unions, both of which are good things. Even better, it looks like the Republicans will get little of their own looting done for the next couple of years. This is a great thing. The Republicans should have done this at the very beginning. If they had, Democrats wouldn't have left the state. There would have been no reason. Instead they did it the hard way and looked like jerks because of it.

""I think it's a very, very sad day for public workers," said Chris Heller, Appleton West High School math teacher and negotiations chairman for the Appleton Education Association, who has been an educator for 25 years. "I'm a professional educator, yet they want to silence my voice in how I educate.""

What a crock. The demagogues know how to work it. It's amazing how badly Republicans have handled this.

"“This is a disaster for Republicans,” he said in the Arena. “Wisconsin has unleashed the progressive version of the tea party.”A Tuesday Rasmussen Reports found that about 39 percent of likely voters in Wisconsin support weakening collective bargaining rights for public workers, while 57 percent are opposed."

Even when they're actually doing something good for taxpayers, which is almost never, they manage to screw it up.

ECONOMY:

Pension funds own almost no gold. If they decide to buy, the price will skyrocket even higher than current estimates account for.

TAX AND SPEND:

Senate rejects tiny spending cuts as too draconian.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Potential crash this summer when QE2 ends.

"The basic idea is this: The Fed has been dumping roughly $4 billion of thin-air money into the US markets each trading day since November 2010. The markets, all of them, are higher than they would be without this money. $4 billion per trading day is an enormous amount of money. It's gigantic by historical standards. As soon as the QE program ends, the markets will have to subsist on a lot less money and liquidity, and the result is almost perfectly predictable."

The bust always comes when the easy credit dries up.

EDUCATION:

If you thought government schools were bad before, just look at this:

"The Department of Education estimates the percentage of schools not meeting yearly targets for their students' proficiency in in math and reading could jump from 37 to 82 percent as states raise standards in attempts to satisfy the law's mandates.The 2002 law requires states to set targets aimed at having all students proficient in math and reading by 2014, a standard now viewed as wildly unrealistic."

That would be funny, but it makes me want to throw up. If we ended all government funding of schools today, all students would be proficient in math and reading by next year. But the government agents claim the expectations are broken, not the system.

HEALTH CARE:

Company adding extract that increases metabolism to burning calories to dessert. This is going to backfire, assuming it really is being done in hopes it will help people lose weight. People will eat more desserts and get fatter faster. It's more likely this is just a marketing ploy to sell more fattening food.

Diet and exercise changes to reverse type-II diabetes.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Virginia Court of Appeals sides with prosecutor against UVA in case to determine if Mann illegitimately used taxpayer funds.

Solar cycle 24 starting to show some much belated activity.

POLICE STATE:

Maryland judge dismisses wiretapping charges against man who videotaped his traffic stop. The good guys won one.

WAR:

Pat Buchanan makes a superb case for refusing war with Libya.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Saudi police fire into democracy protesters. It's hard to imagine that they fired regular bullets with only one injury reported.

MISC:

Using economic externalities as an excuse for government intervention.

Records show Lincoln tried to set up colony for freed slaves so America would be whites only.

"It claims, among other things, that in 1862 Lincoln urged a White House audience of "free blacks" to leave the US and settle in Central America. He told them: "For the sake of your race, you should sacrifice something of your present comfort for the purpose of being as grand in that respect as the white people." He went on to say that those who envisioned a permanent life in the US were being "selfish" and he promoted Central America as an ideal location "especially because of the similarity of climate with your native land – thus being suited to your physical condition".Lincoln's views about colonisation are well known to historians, even if they don't make it into most schoolbooks. Lincoln even referred to colonisation in the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, his September 1862 warning to the South that he would free all slaves in southern territory if the rebellion continued.
Unlike some others, Lincoln always promoted voluntary, rather than enforced, colonisation. But historians differ on whether or not he moved away from the concept after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863.
The new book suggests Lincoln continued to support colonisation, engaging in secret diplomacy with the British to establish a colony in British Honduras. Among the records found at Kew is an 1863 order from Lincoln granting a British agent permission to recruit volunteers for a colony."

No matter the motives of others, Lincoln did not fight the Civil War over slavery.

Farming in the central plains has depleted a non-replenishable aquifer, leading to farms drying up. Uh-oh.

Users give social network companies permission to mine their data. The problem is that patents prevent other companies from competing on privacy issues.