It should have been called “BidenCare”!

It should have been called “BidenCare”!  The Powerline folks did it again.  Make sure you full-screen it so you can read the subtitles...

Ah, the English and the French...

Ah, the English and the French...  Via reader Simi L.:

True story reported by an English guy who was stopped and asked to give a breathalyzer test...

The English guy lives near Le Bugue in the Dordogne and at the time he was stopped he was as pissed as a fart (in American English, that means “drunk as hell”).

The gendarme signals to him to wind down the window then asks him if he has been drinking, and with slurring speech the English guy replies; “Yes, this morning I was at my (hic) daughter's wedding, and as I don't like church much I went to the cafe opposite and had several beers.  Then during the wedding banquet I seem to remember downing three great bottles of wine (hic) a corbieres, a Minervois and (hic) a Faugeres.  Then to finish off during the celebrations and (hic) during the evening, me and my mate downed two bottles of Johnny Walker's black label.”

Getting impatient the gendarme warns him: “Do you understand I'm a policeman and have stopped you for an alcohol test?”

The Englishman with a grin on his face replies:  “Do you understand that I'm English, like my car, and that my wife is sitting in the other seat, at the steering wheel?”

Saturn from above...

Saturn from above...  In this gorgeous composite of 12 smaller Cassini photos, by Gordan Ugurkovic.  You can download a 4000 x 3200 resolution version, and there are many more of his Cassini photos here...

Megan needs Prozac...

Megan McArdle needs Prozac.  Me, too, after reading her post.  We're out of tricks, out of money, out of time.

The drums of doom beat ever closer...

The ascent of Marxism...

The ascent of Marxism...  Sarah Hoyt in a fascinating post: The Fifty Shades of Marx.  Here's one example, about the concept of “value”.  Marx said that the value of any thing is determined by how much labor was put into it.  That's an idea most progressives would find true, or at least attractive.  The economists notion of value is much different: a thing is worth exactly what someone is willing to pay for it.  Someone who believes the former would govern or judge differently than someone who believes the latter.

Now multiply that by 50 or so “big” Marxist ideas, and you get (wait for it!) modern America.

Ugh.

Kludgeocracy?

Kludgeocracy?  Interesting quote by Steve Teles, in National Affairs.  Here he's writing about the tendency of our Congress to produce incredibly complex legislation:

Every veto point functions more like a toll booth, with the toll-taker able to extract a price in exchange for his willingness to allow legislation to keep moving.

This also jumped out at me:

The easiest way to satisfy both halves of the American political mind is to create programs that hide the hand of government, whether it is through tax preferences, regulation, or litigation, rather than operating through the more transparent means of direct taxing and spending.

The article is full of interesting observations and insights – go read the whole thing...

A week's groceries...

A week's groceries – what they look like in a bunch of different countries.  The Ecuadoran family at right is one example (they sure eat a lot of bananas!).  Some of those piles of groceries look much tastier than others, but they're all interesting. 

Via friend, former colleague, reader, and Idaho mogul-of-everything Doug S. – who we'll be getting together with in November, when work forces him to hold his nose and visit Southern California once again...

Cats and dogs...

Cats and dogs ... and dog beds.  Via my lovely bride...

That about sums it up...

That about sums it up...  Via Peter Robinson, writing on Ricochet, this passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned:

He tried to imagine himself in Congress rooting around in the litter of that incredible pigsty with the narrow and porcine brows he saw pictured sometimes in the rotogravure sections of the Sunday newspapers, those glorified proletarians babbling blandly to the nation the ideas of high school seniors! Little men with copy-book ambitions who by mediocrity had thought to emerge from mediocrity into the lusterless and unromantic heaven of a government by the people -- and the best, the dozen shrewd men at the top, egotistic and cynical, were content to lead this choir of white ties and wire collar-buttons in a discordant and amazing hymn, compounded of a vague confusion between wealth as a reward of virtue and wealth as a proof of vice, and continued cheers for God, the Constitution, and the Rocky Mountains!

How are you feeling about Congress?  Did the shenanigans of the past couple of weeks make you glow with pride?

I thought not.

I didn't know “California” was a verb!

I didn't know “California” was a verb!  Though we did notice, years ago, that in Idaho folks would talk about the “Californication” of certain areas.  Anyway, it looks like the election for governor of Virginia is getting a little more interesting...

ObamaCare: an insult to glitches...

ObamaCare: an insult to glitches...  From this morning's Wall Street Journal, an article with this lede:

The White House set low expectations for the Affordable Care Act's October 1 debut, so anything remotely competent should have seemed like a success. But three weeks on, the catastrophe that is Healthcare.gov and the 36 insurance exchanges run by the federal government is an insult to the "glitches" President Obama said were inevitable.

I keep reading stories about the remarkably low enrollment rates on ObamaCare sites.   Delaware has just one person who made it through.  Several states have none at all.  The best results are just a few thousand people for an entire state.  These are utterly pathetic results for such a major effort, and far, far worse than many commercial insurance sites routinely achieve.

Maybe the damned thing will just implode on its own.  That seems more likely than the political process making a dent in it...

Puns in business names...

Puns in business names – with the photos to prove it.  Guaranteed groans...

Light blogging alert...

Light blogging alert...  I'm feeling a bit out of it this morning, after being up very late last night and getting just a few hours sleep.  What kept us up was a “cat emergency” – Jahar, our Savannah cat, ate a piece of ribbon.  We only know this because he vomited up a short piece of it.  We had no idea how much he had (or had not) eaten, and we knew that long, stringy things can be very dangerous when they get into the intestines, so...off we went, down to the emergency vet in La Mesa.

Bottom line: so far as we can tell, he's fine.  But the poor guy (who is terribly stressed by any kind of travel) went through hell last night, and we spent 5 hours waiting for the diagnostics and consultations to get done.  X-rays and an ultrasound exam found nothing to worry about – but then, it's just lucky when they do.  It's still entirely possible he has an undetected length of ribbon in him, so we have to watch closely for a few days to make sure his digestive tract is all working correctly.  Jahar is isolated in our bedroom so we track everything going in and coming out...