Out of the mouths of babes

Watching "Meeting the Press" this morning. E.J. Dionne says "There aren't many leftists in the United States."
Riiight.

Felt tip

I'm watching one of those woodworking shows on NHPTV, you know the kind where a museum quality flawless colonial highboy is knocked out in a 45 minute show.
He is using a FELT TIP pen to mark his cuts. I never do that, felt tip ink doesn't come off. It sinks into the wood and stays there. Forever.
Use a pencil, pencil marks rub off no sweat.

Super Pac

Super PAC, faster than the 24 hour news cycle, able to leap hostile MSM with a single bound. And just born this year. So this is what "campaign finance reform" has brought us to?
Obama and the dems blame it all on the Supremes and the Citizen's United case two years ago. Obama was so bummed out about Citizen's United that he bad mouthed the Supremes in a State of the Union speech with all nine Supremes sitting in the audience, in uniform. Which pissed them all off. Obama must have been really bummed out that day. It's considered stupid and hazardous to your health to go around antagonizing people at the top of the food chain.
Citizen's United was about a small citizen's group with an axe to grind, they made a hard hitting (not to say partisan) movie pushing their issue. And the Federal Election Commission forbade them from showing it. Claimed it was illegal electioneering. Citizen's United felt it was a plain issue of free speach, and they sued. Took it to the Supreme Court and won. And the Supremes said free speech means anyone, citizens, companies, unions, churches, you name it, can spend as much as they like to support any candidate or any issue they like. First Amendment, free speech.
This blew 50 years of "campaign financing reform" out the window. "Campaign Finance Reform", darling of good government groups and liberals, means rules limiting the amount of money political candidates can raise. All of a sudden, the Supremes say that limits are unconstitutional.
This resulted in today's comical situation. Ordinary PAC's and candidates are still subject to all sorts of rules, like no contributions greater than $2500 (chickenfeed). But Super PACs can do anything they want, just so long as they are "independent" of any candidate. Which leads to the comedy routine where Romney says "By law, I have no control over my Super Pac, and there fore I cannot tell them to stop trashing Newt Gingrich."
Elections would be cleaner and less comical without the Super PACs. Just repeal all the "campaign finance reform" laws and replace them with a single simple law that merely requires candidates to report who gave them how much. We voters can figure it out from there.
All the money would flow to the candidates, who have a certain sense of decency, and would not do things like the Swiftboat campaign that did so much damage to John Kerry. Or all those negative ads on Newt. It would be better if the candidates were responsible for their campaign ads.

Hackers slow the F-35 program

F-35, USAF's newest fighter, is in a limbo between the R&D phase and the "approved-for-mass-production" phase. Small numbers of the aircraft have been built and flown. They have passed some their acceptance tests. Schedule has been slipping, and costs rising.
According to Aviation Week, enemy hackers have broken into contractor's computers and downloaded plans, specs, software, and listened in to on-line video conferences between F-35 project managers. Ouch.
Apparently F-35 avionics software is being rewritten and antennaes are being redesigned after the original designs were compromised by hackers.
Let's hear for Windows and video conferencing.

Words of the Weasel Part 26

Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft. MMRCA for short. We used to call them fighters. The Indian Air Force used this choice bit of jargon to refer to the French Rafale fighters it is going to buy. Rafale has won a lengthy competition, beating out Eurofighter's Tornado, Saab's Gripen, and Boeing's F/A18.
The Indian's don't have fighter pilots, they have MMRCA pilots.
Right.

Ice, thickness there of

Back in the day, my mother was VERY firm about ice. The lake had to be frozen four inches thick, as measured by whacking a hole in it, before we were allowed to skate on it. Four inches was it, no skating until the lake froze four inches thick.
On the radio today, some happy safety freak was claiming the ice ought to be SIX inches thick before walking on it.
So what happened? Has the rise of childhood obesity required and extra two inches of ice to keep fat kids from falling thru the ice? Have the safety freaks chickened out again?

Greece, a Mexican Standoff

You gotta hand it to the Greeks, they got chutzpah. They are so broke that nobody will loan them any more money. They borrowed so much that the lenders don't dare cut the Greeks off, 'cause if they do, all those Greek bonds the lenders hold will dry up and blow away, leaving the lenders as broke as the Greeks. There was a saying "Borrow one dollar and the bank owns you, borrow a million dollars and you own t he bank."
Greece has a E20 billion bond repayment coming up next month. They don't have the cash to pay it off. So the rest of Europe (Germany mostly) is talking about a Greek handout to let the Greeks make their March repayment. But the Europeans want the Greeks to shape up before handing them another E130 billion. The Greeks don't want to shape up, they have riots in the streets every time shape up (cutting back on pensions, salaries, civil servants) is mentioned.
So far, the Greeks have won a significant concession. Greece will only have to redeem it's bonds for what the owner paid for them, not at face value. Needless to say, a lot of folks have been bailing out of Greek bonds by selling them for cheap and taking a loss. The buyers are hoping for a windfall when bonds they bought for some small fraction of face value get redeemed for face value. This latest deal says "Oh no you don't." Beware of Greeks at the negotiating table. The spirit of Odysseus lives on.
Clearly some of the confusion in the Greek bond wheeling and dealing has to do with speculators who want to get rich quick.
The Economist never talks about these messy details, but the Wall St Journal does.