Better than the Debt Ceiling

Newt Gengrich was on Meet the Press this morning, and he did toss out one good idea.  Newt is full of ideas, many of them bad, but this is a good one. 
   We have the federal debt ceiling coming up and the newsies are talking up a big fight along the lines of "Do spending cuts or we shut the government down".  They tried this two years ago, gained a lot of negative press and just a few fake cuts.
  Newt points out that we have a "Continuing Resolution" coming up.  The Republicans could refuse to pass that, and instead pass the proper spending bills, one for each department.  You want the cut spending?  Then cut the spending bill.  Works like right now.  Newt suggests that a spending cut fight centered around the continuing resolution and spending bills would be easier to win, less damaging, and very effective. 
    Could it be, that politicians like the debt ceiling 'cause it's just money, we aren't talking about cutting any interest group's program.  Whereas when you get into appropriations, you have to vote on real programs, each of which has people getting money thru it, and who will be angered if their gravy train stops running.

Low Information Voters

What a great way to say "clueless". 

So what do we Republicans want, REALLY?

The fiscal cliff bill, which kept income taxes the same for those making under $400K (most of us) was better than doing nothing and having everyone's income taxes go up.  Raising taxes in a depression is a downer leading to more Great Depression, more layoffs, and less hiring.  
  And 150 Republicans voted FOR doing a cliff dive.  What did they want?  And did their constituents agree with their vote?  Did they think going all the way over the fiscal cliff was better than a taking half-a-loaf?  Taking more money away from working stiffs and giving it to Obama to fritter away on Solyndra is better?  I haven't heard any of these fiscal cliff divers explain what they want to do. Possibly they don't know themselves.
   The Republicans need to figure out what they want and where they are going.  And then push laws thru the House getting what they want.  If they want Paul Ryan's plan for Medicare, they need to pass it thru the House.  If they don't have the votes to go that far, nobody will think they are serious.  You gotta vote your plan into law or you are just a bunch of whiners.
  "Negotiating" with Obama is a non starter.  Obama likes federal spending, wants more of it, and wants more taxes to pay for it.  He will spend any extra revenue he gets, he won't use it to pay down the US debt. And he is a lousy negotiator.  Obama's idea of negotiating is "my way or the highway".  Don't negotiate with this turkey, just vote your plan into law.  If you can't do that, then you don't have a plan worth talking about.
  We are bumping up against the federal debt ceiling.  If not raised, the US will be unable to borrow more money to keep federal spending going.  Which means a lot of feeders at the federal trough will go hungry.
   The Republicans are talking about playing chicken with Obama, give us our spending cuts or no debt ceiling hike.  Unless they get together and agree just how far they are willing to go, Obama will call their bluff and the wimpier RINO's will fold.  And unless they can vote their desires thru the House, nobody will believe they mean it.
  So what do we Republicans want?  How bad do we want it?  Are we willing to cut off borrowing and force a massive reduction in federal spending.  Like right now, not ten years from now?  How much metaphorical blood are we willing to spill?  How much do we dare spill?

Good Stuff Cheap

A digital camera program, for free, Picassa by name.  I came upon it after suffering thru the program that came with the camera ( a Kodak) .  The Kodak program was such a ramhog that I had to buy another memory stick to prevent lock up, it was slow, and it kept trying to put all my photos on the Kodak for-pay website. 
  Picassa does the down-load-from-camera part with grace and ease.  You plug your camera in to the USB and Picassa recognizes it.  Picassa keeps track of what you have already downloaded to hard disk, and only downloads stuff from the camera that is NOT on the hard disk.  Very handy for those of us that leave photos in the camera after we download them.  Prevents the build up of multiple copies of the same thing on the hard disk.
  Picassa allows grouping of photos into "albums" which you can name useful things like "Trip to Uncle Joe's" or "Christmas at Grandmothers".  It allows hierarchical album structures such as "Model Trains" with sub albums such as "Structures" and "Rolling Stock"  And the best thing about Picassa is the albums show up in Windows Explorer as file directories by the same names. Which makes working with your photos with other programs a lot more straight forward.  You can locate a photo to upload to the web, or burn to CD-ROM, or attach to an email using the same names you use inside Picassa.  All too many photo programs hide the photos out on disk in random number named files making it difficult-to-impossible to work with your photos with any ordinary Windows programs (browsers, CD-Rom burners or email).  Picassa got this one right.
   Picassa allows you to put a caption on each photo, and the captions stick.  I can upload a Picassa captioned photo to Facebook and the caption uploads with the picture and shows up in Facebook without me having to type it in again.  
  Picassa will retouch photos for you.  You can fix under exposure, bad color, red-eye, and a number of other things.  The red eye corrector is cute.  It uses face recognition to outline the subject's eyes and then it makes the red pixels go away.  Turns red eyed demons back into cute and adorable children. 
  The face recognition part of Picassa goes thru all your pictures matching up faces.  When you assign a name to one face, than all the other photos with that face get the name.  You get a list of all your named people and their photo's.  The face recognition is darn good, gets it right most of the time. 
  If you are into digital photography, Picassa is the way to go.  And it's free.

Nancy Pelosi, political animal

Nancy Peloisi gave an interview to NPR  (a friendly media).  It came on the radio this morning.  Nancy spoke at length about the fiscal cliff bill.  She discussed how it effected the fortunes of her party, the other party, and a little bit about the president.  She declared her undying love for public programs, public health, public schools, public roads, public this public that.  Her hopes for the democrats to retake the house.  Her support of the "middle class".
  She never spoke of the effect the the fiscal cliff bill might have upon the general welfare.  Whether it would create jobs, economic growth, end Great Depression 2.0.  She didn't say if it be good for the country as a whole.  She spoke entirely about inside-the-beltway political struggle, never about making things better for the country. 
Political animal.

The last 600 Megabytes comes hard.

I have been cleaning up the hard drive on AntiqueLaptop.  I gave this HP laptop to youngest son when he was in high school.  Since then youngest son has graduated college, and the high school laptop wasn't cool enough for him, so it came back to me.  It has plenty of punch to run all my programs, and  I can sit on the deck in summer and web surf with it.  When I got it back, the 40 Gig hard drive was full.
    Some obvious weeding of music and games, followed by passes with CCleaner, turning off System Restore freed up 10 Gigs or so, enough to install M$ Visual C, all my digital photos, all my back email, lotta stuff.
    Then I ran Windirstat.  That showed me 2.7 Gigs of  recycle bin files that the recycle bin didn't see and would not flush.  Some how a second Recycler directory had taken root in Program Files.  That's not supposed to happen, but with Windows all things are possible.  Explorer failed to delete it.  But Windirstat has a zap files feature that did 'em  just fine.   

Then I found that  hidden system C:\Windows\Installer directory had grown to 1.6 Gigabytes.  A real diskhog on a 40 Gig laptop.  I was able to recover 0.6 Gigabytes with Microsoft program MSIZAP.exe.  The Installer directory is a space waster invented to support uninstallation of Office.  It contains hundreds of fat files with random number names.  Some (but not all) files are obsolete, they belong to old products previously removed from the system, except the uninstaller leaves the fat files behind.  The MSIZAP.exe program is a DOS program that with command line switches ! and G will delete any files in the installer directory that are not referenced in the registry. 

Step 1 is to obtain MSIZAP.  This is non trivial because Microsoft has withdrawn it.  Apparently Windows 7 and 8 are less robust than XP, and MSIZAP was breaking something in the "new and improved" Windows versions..  I am still running trusty XP, so I don’t care about breaking Win 7  and 8.   Despite the M$ down check, the program is so useful that private websites still have it.     I found it at: http://majorgeeks.com/downloadget.php?id=4459&file=15&evp=fe1c76da3437592326a3d668d72bf8f5  under the name “msicuu2.exe”  Actually msicuu2 is a fancier M$ installer cleaner upper.  The fancier part calls good old msizap to get the work done.  After downloading and installing the msicuu2 package you will find msizap.exe in the newly created Program Files/ Windows Installer Clean Up directory. 

Step 2 is to run it.  Do Start -> Run and then open a dos window by typing “Cmd.com” in the run box.  Use the DOS  CD command to set the current directory to c:Program File\ Windows Installer Clean Up.  Remember to inclose directory names containing spaces in double quote marks.  Such as

CD c:\”program files”

Followed by

CD “windows installer clean up”  to avoid typing a long filestring in one fell swoop. 

Then execute msizap with the following command line

Msizap !G 

Be sure to include the !G command line switches, otherwise the program may do bad things.  On my machine the msizap issued a couple of “Error 2”  messages and then reported removing about 20 files. 

Checking afterwards showed the Windows Installer directory had shrunk from 1.6 Gig down to 1 Gig. 

  That's a lot of work for a measly 600 Meg.  BTW,  I read a lot of web chit chat to the effect that MSIZAP does bad things to Win 7 and 8, and newer versions of Office so beware.

Article 1 Section 7

"All Bills for the raising of Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives;" 

Anyone know how the Senate can originate this morning's fiscal cliff bill?  Seem like they did, and the newsies haven't said anything about Article 1 Section 7.