Sign of the times

Neighbor comes over to borrow a Kindle charger. She is on the last 70 pages of a Robert Ludlum thriller and the Kindle battery dies on her. She forgot to pack the charger.
Sorry, I tell her, I don't have a Kindle and neither does my son.

Some Spending Cuts we should all agree to

1. Shut down the TSA. All they do is hassle passengers and molest small children. They have never caught a terrorist. It is passengers who keep airliners un hijacked. After 9/11 passengers know that it is death to permit hijackers to take control of an aircraft. They have taken decisive action (once involving a fire axe applied to a perp's head) several times since then.
2. Shut down BATFE. Before they started facilitating guns to Mexican drug lords, they brought us Ruby Ridge and the Waco tragedy.
3. Cut funding for CIA. They predicted that Saddam had nukes (weapons of mass destruction). They failed to predict the breakup of the the Soviet Union. They didn't have any agents inside Saddam's Iraq. They still work out of embassies. They claimed that Iran stopped building nukes. They attempted to destabilize the Bush Administration. With a record like that who in their right mind would believe any intelligence they furnish? Besides the NSA codebreakers and the recon satellites furnish the real intelligence.

Chicken is a high stakes game

And that is what Obama is playing on the debt ceiling. He wants a tax hike. The Republicans want spending cuts. Obama thinks the Republicans will cave if he stands tough. The House Republicans are thinking the same. Head on collision anyone?
When a top level meeting at the White House breaks up after only 90 minutes, they are not doing serious bargaining.

Media Matters vs the NRA

Long discussion of "media mattters"(a liberal anti fox news website). The liberal member of the panel kept comparing media matters to the NRA.
Not a good comparison. The NRA represents some 2 million dues paying members. Media matters represents a dozen or so lefty bloggers.

Windows 7 takes a step backward toward DOS

Back in the bad old days when a program locked up, you could reboot (control-alt-delete) or cycle power to regain control. Windows NT, ancestor of today's windows fixed that. Control-alt-delete brought up Task Manager which allowed you to select the errant program with the mouse and shut it down.
Windows 7 seems to have broken this handy feature. Task Manager still come up, but the mouse doesn't work, which makes it nearly impossible to do anything useful with Task Manager.
"Nearly" means there are some keyboard short cuts that allow the user to do mouse things with keystrokes but few people remember what those short cuts are. I surely don't.

Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE)

Obama thinks Detroit can achieve 52 mile per gallon. In fact they are making regulations right now that will require 52 mpg in a few years. The only way to do this for real is to stop making pickup trucks, SUV's, full size sedans, and minivans, and make nothing but tiny four seat econoboxes. In the real world, the only way to increase gas mileage is make the car lighter and the engine smaller. So get ready for a lot of plastic, less sound deadening, and little tiny engines that have to wind up to 10,000 rpm just to pull up a steep driveway. And wait for the turbo to spool up before you get much power.
If you have a family to move and a house to maintain, your only hope is to find a used minivan surviving from the 2010's and restore it.

A balanced budget amendment

The Congress critters are talking this up. But does it really do anything? A balanced budget occurs when authorized spending is less than estimated revenues. An ancient method of "balancing" a budget is simply to estimate more revenue. Presto, chango, look we have a balanced budget, on paper.
Then there is the "off-budget" scam. Like the post office. USPS is really a government operation, but since it was "privatized" it doesn't show up on the federal budget. Lots of other things could be moved off budget too.
And then there is the emergency escape hatch. In times of dire emergency it will be OK to go in the red. And somehow every year has a dire emergency, and therefore we can spend more than we take in for "just that year".
Polls show that 72% of voters are in favor of a balanced budget amendment. But the same polls show that only 30% of voters are in favor of a balanced budget amendment if it cut their benefits or raised their taxes.
Translation, the voters are in favor of reduced spending, but they don't want to talk about bad things like cuts and tax hikes. Understandable.
Politicians can curry favor with voter by talking about balanced budget amendments rather than bad things like cuts and tax hikes.
We will go down the same drain the Greeks are going down if politicians won't talk about cuts and tax hikes.