Copyright

Or, why downloading should be legal. Copyright is so important that the US Constitution has a special clause about it.
"To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"

Subsequent acts of Congress and judicial decisions have broadened this clause significantly. Copyright now is applied to music, even though music is neither a science nor a useful art. Art it is, but it isn't a useful art. Beautiful, pleasant, desirable, but not useful in the 18th century meaning of the word.

An act of Congress could end the current hassling of young folk by the record labels, by simply saying that recorded music is in the public domain at all times. The record companies would scream and cry and threaten to hold their breath, but they have been loosing sales for years. The musicians would support themselves off concert tickets, which is what they do now anyway, royalties from the record labels being few and far between. Enormous numbers of young folk would be overjoyed. A really clever Republican party would take up this issue. Young people vote in much greater numbers than the record labels do.

Blago vs the prosecutors

Looks like Blago wins. The prosecutor ought be fired. If you bring a high profile case, it better be a sound one. First mistake was to charge Blago with 24 different offenses. Nobody has the time to commit that many crimes. Blago, unlikable as he is, may have done a couple of things, like offer Obama's old senate seat to the highest bidder, but he didn't have the time, or the smarts, to commit 24 separate offenses. Then, the one charge the jury convicted on, isn't really a crime in my book. Lying to police may be an undesirable character trait, but he wasn't under oath, and any fool knows that anything you say to the cops will be used against you in court. So, nobody in their right mind is going to tell the cops "I did it". Plus, in this case, the jury doesn't think Blago did it, so Blago wasn't lying when it told the cops he didn't do it.
Wanta bet the government tries again? Despite the constitutional prohibition of double jeopardy. " Nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb,"

Barney Frank wants to replace Fannie and Freddie

This off the Fox News crawl. I'm agin it. Frannie Mae and Freddie Mac are largely responsible for causing Great Depression 2.0. They should be disbanded, and their management prosecuted.
Barney claims the new organization would subsidize the housing market. I say we should stop subsidies to housing. Housing doesn't need subsidy, other wise known as giving taxpayer money to builders, realtors, home owners, and banks.
Home mortgages are attractive investments just as they are. The loan is secured by real property which the lender can seize if the borrow doesn't make his payments. The collateral is fixed and immobile, the lender cannot drive it out of state. The borrower is highly motivated to keep up the payments, if only to avoid harsh criticism by his spouse when the the couple is evicted.
If the lender makes a realistic appraisal of the property value, and insists that the borrower put up 10 or 20 percent of the value in cash, and the borrower isn't spending more than 25% of his income on payments, the loan is highly likely to get repaid. They used to say "safe as houses" to describe a secure investment. Banks can do very well loaning on mortgages at 6 percent and paying depositors 3 percent, keeping the spread between loan rates and depositors interest rates.
Home mortgages used to work that way. First house I ever bought, back in the '70s the bank loan officer interviewed me and the wife, and then went to the property and appraised it himself. No mortgage broker and the bank loaned its own money, not Fannie's, and held the note til we sold the house.

Environmental Impact Statements on new wells

In an effort to slow down oil drilling, the Obama administration will require a full environmental impact statement to be filed for each new well drilled. Work cannot start until the paperwork is finished. Of course we all know what the environmental impact of an oil well blowout is, it's horrendous. Ixtoc I, and BP have made that abundantly clear. We don't need paperwork to inform us of that. But if we make the paperwork burden heavy enough maybe those pesky oil companies will stop drilling. We can all freeze to death in the dark rather than risk an oil spill.

How to loose WWII

The Germans lost by frittering away their industrial capacity building too many different types of weapons. Both Heinz Guderian and Albert Speer complained about this in their post war memoirs. I have a lovely coffee table book of the German air force listing every aircraft they developed. During WWII the germans developed 143 different warplanes, of which a whopping big 58 went into production. The other 85 designs went no farther than prototypes.
In contrast, the highly organized US Army Air Force numbered all it's designs. Over all of WWII, USAAF sponsored a mere 67 designs, of which only 14 went into production. Estimating that the less organized US Navy, which did not number it's designs, added perhaps another 50% to both numbers, we have maybe 100 American designs, with a mere 21 going into production. In short, the Americans out produced the Germans by concentrating on building a few, but superior, types of aircraft.
Plain old capitalism was more effective at marshaling the nation's industrial power than National Socialism was.

NPR discovers yet another problem.

Listening to NPR on the clock radio this morning. They did a long piece on the need for new regulations of chemicals. They never did get around to discussing the problem[s] with chemicals, but they had a solution. Companies would be required to submit massive paperwork on every chemical made or used. Poorly educated bureaucrats would be given authority to ban just about anything they pleased, when ever they pleased.
Sounds like another bit of economic stimulus :-)

Swett Equity

Watching Katrina Swett, Democratic candidate for US house on channel 9. She just said "Give the middle class a $150 tax rebate and they will go out and spend it".
That happens not to be the case. Middle class citizens are frightened of losing their jobs. Give 'em $150 and they will save it or pay down bills with it. They ain't gonna buy anything except groceries until they feel secure in their jobs.