Note to Congressional Republicans

You gotta pass the Obamacare replacement act.  If you don't, your party is toast in 2018.  We voters have been watching Congressional Republicans fail to do squat after winning the house in 2012 and the Senate in 2014.  Republicans funded all of Obambi's socialist schemes, they approved his appointments (TWO Supreme court justices!), they failed to pass departmental appropriation bills, and they stood still while Obambi issued outrageous executive orders. 
   Which convinced many of us that the Republicans have back trouble, namely a big yellow stripe.  Lack of stones.  Or, they are just RINO's.  The electorate is made up of 40% Democrats, 40% Republicans and the remainder 20% Independents who will vote for either party depending upon how well they like them.  The Independents voted for Trump this time 'cause the alternate was worse, but there is little love between Trump and the independents. If the Republicans cannot get their act together to pass something, anything, then the Independents won't vote Republican next time.  Bye bye Congressional majorities, bye bye White House in 2020. 
    Time will tell.  Do Republicans have any guts?  Or are they just RINO's in league with the Democrats?

Hard power vs Soft power

The MSM is trashing the Trump budget for cutting money for the State Dept and foreign aid.  The implication is that State Dept cookie pushers somehow increase the power and influence of the United States.  Not true.  State Dept personnel draw their salaries.  Few of them actually do anything constructive.  US power and influence comes from our robust economy, Hollywood, pop music, superb universities, the internet, our inventors and entrepreneurs, our amusing and vibrant domestic politics, our rock solid currency, our ideals as set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and the warm and generous welcome we offer to foreign immigrants and tourists.   These things, and some others I have missed,  create US soft power.  The State Dept has little to do with it. 
   We pay some 15000 bureaucrats at State to handle relations with less than 200 countries worldwide.  That is some 85 bureaucrats per country.  That's far too many.  All they have to do is take care of US citizens in trouble abroad, operate an embassy, and do some straight forward legal intelligence gathering.  I think State could manage with a lot fewer useless mouths.
   Foreign aid is harder to assess.  Clearly a few Yankee dollars passed to the right person can accomplish wonders overseas.  Just how many dollars, and who we give them to, are matters of pure judgement.  Loyal and experienced US diplomats can get the balance right, some of the time, perhaps even more often than not.  We should leave the foreign aid debate to the very few people, like Henry Kissinger, who really know what's going on. 

There was NO Mrs Bilbo Baggins.

Tolkien even mentioned this in the trilogy itself.  "Bilbo and Frodo as bachelors were very exceptional."  I'm reading an Op-Ed in the Wall St Journal, a book review of "Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve" by Ben Blatt.  It's about what can be done with computers to count up every word an author uses, and the patience to wade thru the resulting mountains of histograms.  Apparently they were able to resolve who wrote which of the Federalist Papers by looking at the frequency of the word "whilst" versus that of "while".  Hamilton always wrote "while" where Madison always wrote "whilst.  Good interesting stuff but I would never have the patience to sort all this out.
   Then the reviewer mentions that Tolkien used "he" 1900 times and the word "she" just once when he refers to Mrs. Bilbo Baggins.  The first part I can believe, Tolkien's protagonists were all guys, no chicks in the fellowship of the ring.  But Mrs Bilbo Baggins?  No way, Bilbo never married,  Frodo was NOT Bilbo's son, he was a nephew. 
   Talk about blowing your credibility in one short sentence. 

The vanishing supermarket chicken

Used to be, the butcher's shelf in the supermarket would have plenty of whole chickens, fryers, broilers, and roasters.  Must be some kinda plague killed them all off.  Now a days all the market has are chicken thighs (second joint) drumsticks, breasts (skinless and boneless) and chicken fingers (breasts sliced thin).  The whole bird seems to be extinct.  Must be global warming...
   Wonder why.  There is less labor to prepare a whole chicken, than to prepare a whole chicken and then butcher it up into parts and wrap it.  Is there customer demand for chicken parts over whole chickens?  If so why?  With a whole chicken all you have to do is pop it in the oven for 20 minutes to the pound and out it comes and looks festive and tastes good.  No great culinary skills here.  Serve it forth with a few side dishes and you have a party grade feast.  I guess people just send out for pizza now rather than cooking. 

Free Enterprise and CAFE

The modern US economy manages to supply a humongous variety of products to us citizens.  Groceries, auto parts, gasoline, new cars, clothing, housing, toys, smart phones, building materials, books, computer games, new movies, freeways, air travel, you name it, the US economy provides it. And provides the right amount.  When something is in short supply, the price goes up, which encourages more supply.  When we have too much of something, the price drops, and people stop making it and turn to other products.  Works beautifully and we produce just the right amount of  a zillion different things. 
   The old line Soviets didn't believe in the free market.  They set up a central planning bureau in Moscow to issue production quotas to all Soviet producers.  Central planning never got it right. Sometimes the producers could not produce as much as Central Planning demanded.  Many times Central Planning demanded more than the market could absorb. Result was constant shortages and surpluses. Clearly the free market worked better than the Soviet command economy.
   So then we invented the Corporate Average Fuel Economy program.  Auto makers are required by law to manufacture a fleet of cars that meet crazy fuel economy targets (54.5 mpg last time I looked) So they manufacture a vast number of tiny econoboxes that nobody will buy, but they get credit for on the fuel economy average, so that can produce the vehicles that customers will actually buy, mostly pickups and SUV's.  The greenies believe that virtue comes from reducing gasoline consumption no matter what.
   Me, I think people ought to be able to buy the car they want to buy.  If it uses a bit more fuel than the greenies approve of, too bad.  The frackers have increased US fuel production enormously, to the point that we will be independent of middle east oil producers in a few years. You want an SUV to haul your family around? Go for it.  It's free country, or at least it used to be.
   We (Congress) ought to repeal the entire CAFE law.  It would reduce the price of the cars we actually7 buy.  I don't know what Detroit does with the hordes of fuel efficient econoboxes they churn out to meet CAFE requirements.  I don't think even the rental car companies will take them.  It would mean cheaper cars for all if  Detroit didn't have to produce a horde of econoboxes that nobody wants to buy. 
 
  

Costing the Ryan "replace" bill

Congressional Budget Office released their study of the effects of the Ryan bill, costs, loss of insurance and other things.  According to CBO the Ryan bill would reduce the federal deficit by $370 billion at the cost of 24 million people losing their insurance.
   Lets be simple about it,  $370 billion divided by 24 million people yields $15416 in savings per person losing insurance coverage.  That's a lot.  Used to be full house family plan company insurance ( the best you can get) ran $12000 a year.  Hospitalization only insurance ran $3000 a year.  So the Ryan bill reduces costs to us taxpayers by MORE than it would cost us taxpayers to buy outright, a full house family insurance plan for each person loosing their insurance policies. 
  Sounds like a deal to me.

The US Flag still means something in the Middle East

TV has been showing a video of a small convoy of military vehicles moving into some obscure town in Iraq. Some hummers, some trucks, a Styker armored car, but no tanks and no Bradleys. Every vehicle is flying a decent sized US flag on a pole above the vehicle. 
   The troops driving must figure that showing the flag won't draw fire and might help establish useful relations with the locals.
   Not bad for Old Glory.