Big Trouble

The latest from Weathervane Music's Shaking Through Volume 2 is big fun powerpop from Ridgewood, NJs Big Troubles. Enjoy, listen, download, contribute.

Rand Paul doesn't care about his constituents (or the deficit)

I mean, you knew that already, but this pretty much proves it.

"Every regulation doesn't save lives," Paul said in the hearing, later adding that the regulations so far have done a “pretty good job” of reducing black lung. "There is a point or a balancing act between when a regulation becomes burdensome enough that our energy production is stifled. We have to assess the costs of regulation and whether they save lives."

Except in this case, they do save lives. Provably, empirically, they save lives. Rand Paul's constituents lives, since Eastern Kentucky is coal country and his constituents are still dying.

But Rand Paul clearly values campaign contributions over constituents lives.

Candidate	Office	Amount
Manchin, Joe (D-WV)	Senate	$178,848
Blunt, Roy (R-MO)	House	$145,253
Portman, Rob (R-OH)		$128,025
Maynard, Elliott (R-WV)		$112,300
Paul, Rand (R-KY)		$99,627

What does this have to do with the deficit? According to The Hastings Center:

The mortality of chronic lung disease is predicted to decrease at a rate of 1.5% a year until 2030, and yet the cost of treating it is predicted to more than double from $176.8 billion in 2006 to $389.2 billion in 2011 and to reach $832.9 billion in 2021. The reason for this skyrocketing increase is a 31.1% increase in the number of diagnoses predicted by the Milken Institute.
Medicare spent over $8 billion on respiratory disease, excluding pneumonia, in 2006, a figure that is bound to increase tremendously in the next decade.

 Wouldn't someone trying to cut the deficit want to prevent expensive, chronic disease?

So you just wanna buy the box set, huh?

Srsly, don't. Friends don't let friends by "remastered" compressed crapola. End the loudness wars, for pete's sake.

Glad we didn't get a lot of snow this year

Otherwise there's a chance my town could have used radioactive brine to melt the snow and ice. Like in West Virginia:

In West Virginia, for example, environmental regulators and highway officials last year announced plans for the state to start paying around five cents per gallon for gas drilling wastewater known as brine, which tends to be extremely salty, to melt ice on roads. They planned to buy about 1.2 million gallons at more than 120 sites around the state and to buy more as needed.

They know it might be radioactive, by the way, they just don't seem to think it's a big deal. West Virginia officials "said that only wastewater from shallow wells would be used, thereby reducing levels of radioactivity."


Lest you think this is just a winter-time problem, and hey, Global Warming will eliminate the danger, think again:

More than 155,000 gallons of this wastewater was sent by a drilling company called Ultra Resources to nine towns for dust suppression in 2009, state records show. The water came from two gas wells in Tioga County and contained radium at almost 700 times the levels allowed in drinking water.

“I was told nothing about frack water or any gas-well brines or anything else,” said Deborah Kotulka, the secretary of Richmond Township, in Tioga County, whose name appears on the state record. Her township received 101,640 gallons of the water from wells with high radioactivity, those records show.

 So when the dust bowl hits, I for one will stand against it with my glow-in-the-dark squirt gun.

And that's all I have to say about that!

I guess if I hadn't said anything at work in 5 years I might get a bad review or lose my job. Unless I was a Supreme Court Justice.

Now that evidence is mounting that suggests his silence was purchased I wonder how much longer he will remain mute?

Beck Adds Google, Community Organizers To His Socialist-Communist-Islamist Theory About Egypt

Beck Adds Google, Community Organizers To His Socialist-Communist-Islamist Theory About Egypt OMG! The Google is looking for the end of the Western Way of Life? Wow. Somehow I just don't buy that a company whose stock price is over 600 is looking to inspire a socialist revolution. Call me crazy.

They could have used jumpy stilts

All of the hullabaloo and bluster from Senator Survey claiming all of our problems would go away if we just build the danged fence turns out to be (wait for it) a truckload of shit.

It's not the gaps in the fence that make it a completely ineffective waste of money it's the fence itself. Observe:

I think this dude could probably shave a couple of seconds off their times:

Faux News, indeed

This survey took the time to prove what I already knew: 

Those who watched Fox News almost daily were significantly more likely than those who never watched it to believe that most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (12 points more likely), most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points), the economy is getting worse (26 points), most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points), the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points), their own income taxes have gone up (14 points), the auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points), when TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points) and that it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points).

Faux News Channel seems a pretty appropriate moniker, after all. All of the above are false. And all of the above are talking points pushed by Fox on a nearly daily basis. The "so-called" stimulus, the "so-called" public option, the "failed stimulus" and the best of all, the Lie of the Year.

Now, how is it that the folks at Fox can just apparently just make things up and stay on the air? Maybe it's because the edict to do so from the top?

Cliff Lee!

So who's your fourth starter? Hot stove season finally warmed up in always sunny Philadelphia. Cliff Lee is a Phillie (again).
Here's another Philadelphian named Lee to start off the day "shouting out loud":

Shouldn't Pretty Pictures make me feel better?

Take a look a the graph on the left and then in your best TalkingHead voice repeat after me: "Obama and the Democrats in Congress are bankrupting our nation with out of control spending."
Now giggle. There, feel better? No? How about if I tell you that the projections in the chart don't take into account the additional expenses of the new Medicare Prescription Drug Program (part D) enacted in 2003, because some of it's estimated 880 billion dollar cost is offset by savings elsewhere.
Still don't feel better?
It's stupid, and if you didn't laugh you'd cry. After 8 years of hearing how everything from 9-11 to the economy was Clinton's fault, then when Wall Street collapsed the Talking Heads on the Right had to go back to 1977 and blame Jimmy Carter for the housing crisis, suddenly the current budget crisis is the fault of the guy with less than 24 months in office. The guy that took office in the middle of the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression.
I'm not exempting Obama or the soon-to-be-defunct 111th Congress from blame. They punted on the extension of the Bush Tax Cuts all Summer, when they could have forced the Republican hand, in a vain attempt to save their majority in the House. It was a calculated bit of political cowardice that backfired, and led directly, IMHO, to the current budget-busting extension awaiting approval by Congress.
I know, I know it's a "stimulus" bill. Parts of it certainly are, but not the estate tax provision. Don't take my word for it, hear (or read) it straight from the horse's mouth.
Lower taxes on estates, capital gains, and dividends "mean they (the wealthy) won't have to invest so aggressively, or risk as much - or create so many jobs."
Higher taxes on the wealthy mean less money to leave their heirs unless they invest aggressively and grow the estate. Lower taxes means the super-rich can park their money in safe, low-yield vehicles like Municipal Bonds and still leave a never-work-a-day-in-your-life fortune to their children and grandchildren.
Guess which of these two scenarios creates jobs and encourages the kind of investment that drives the economy?
So all that rhetoric about cutting taxes so the "job creators" can "create jobs"? Hooey. Taxing the rich forces them to put their money to work, which puts Americans to work.

Find the Lady

Watch carefully folks, as Sean Hannity lambastes the left for their use of "harsh vitriol" directed at Republicans, while calling the President "The Anointed One", just one of his pet names for Barack Obama.

Careful attention as the cards move around, Follow the Lady folks. Just as his favorite pollster, Frank Luntz, tries to explain the problem is neither side takes the time to listen to the other, Hannity interrupts him.

The short con continues as Hannity, the man that just referred to the POTUS as the "Anointed One", who regularly refers to Barack Obama as a "radical Socialist", who along with Rush Limbaugh have accused him of "promoting domestic terrorism", and derisively addresses President Obama as the "Messiah" nearly daily on his radio show, innocently declares the problem is strictly attributable to "the Left" and Luntz states he "doesn't disagree". Huh?

Finally, Hannity declares ala Glenn Beck that if he were to use such harsh terms as the President and Members of Congress used this week about the President, he would be fired.

So calling the President a terrorist would get you fired, huh Sean? Then why do you still have a job?