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Thanks to the bad economy illegal immigration is way down. I bet if McCain had won the election a we might have had a few more of republican economic policies and Mexico probably would have been trying to figure out what to do with all the impoverished people from the north sneaking across their border in search of work.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 1:37 AM GMT+4
Looks like 2008 is going to end with an enviromental dissaster comparable if not worse than the Exxon Valdeze
Posted by John Rove as Words at 5:32 PM GMT+4
We seem to discuss agriculture quite a bit here and this post seems to explain the problems with moder agriculture really well. Essentially modern agriculture enables larger populations but it doesn’t improve the quality of life for that population.
This post talk about why we don’t need to keep producing babies to insure social security stays
solvent. It also begs the question of why Rommesh Ponnuru is ever taken seriously.
And this one about what is wrong with the right. Basicaly the only measure of success for the right wing is how bad they can piss off liberals.
Merry Christmas to all
Posted by John Rove as Words at 11:28 AM GMT+4
“So Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Karl Rove all claim that the financial crisis was a liberal conspiracy, generated either by evil mastermind Chuck Schumer or by wily journalists.
Why does such stuff flourish? Probably because there is no punishment for it — as long as you’re on the right, and I mean right, side. Let Michael Moore point out, entirely correctly, the close ties between the Saudis and the Bush family, and he’s blasted as a crazy conspiracy theorist. On the other hand, let Donald Luskin suggest, in 2004, that George Soros is planning to engineer a financial crisis to defeat Bush, and he gets to publish front-page articles in the Washington Post Outlook section declaring that there isn’t a recession.” – Nobel-muckedymuck Paul Krugman
Posted by Al Swearengen as Words at 8:54 PM GMT+4
This one seems suspicious to say the least.
The Republican consultant accused of involvement in alleged vote-rigging in Ohio in 2004 was warned that his plane might be sabotaged before his death in a crash Friday night, according to a Cleveland CBS affiliate
If he really had anything to do with vote rigging I don’t doubt that certain people might want to keep him quiet about it.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 11:32 AM GMT+4
Boston – 1st one between the Celts and Hawks this year, and you’ve got Tommy Heinson with Mike Gorman calling the end of the game. Second one is Garnett and Pierce at the press conference.
Sarah Palin and her “cool mom” friends are back in the news:
WASILLA — A 42-year-old Wasilla woman was arrested Thursday at her home by Alaska State Troopers with a search warrant in an undercover drug investigation. Sherry L. Johnston was charged with six felony counts of misconduct involving a controlled substance.
Johnston is the mother of Levi Johnston, the Wasilla 18-year-old who received international attention in September when Gov. Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd, announced their teenage daughter was pregnant and he was the father. Bristol Palin, 18, is due on Saturday, according to a recent interview with the governor’s father, Chuck Heath.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 12:14 PM GMT+4
I think this has been discussed here a few times.
Via Felix Salmon, Grace Wong does an empirical survey on the impact of home ownership on 809 women in Columbus, Ohio, in 2005:
An interesting portrait of homeowners emerges from my analysis. I find little evidence that homeowners are happier by any of the following definitions: life satisfaction, overall mood, overall feeling, general moment-to-moment emotions (i.e., affect) and affect at home. Several factors might be at work: homeowners derive more pain (but no more joy) from both their home and their neighborhood. They are also more likely to be 12 pounds heavier, report lower health status and poorer sleep quality. They tend to spend less time on active leisure or with friends. The average homeowner reports less joy from love and relationships. She is also less likely to consider herself to enjoy being with people… The results are robust after controlling for reported financial stress.
Count this as another reason that public policy aimed at subsidizing home ownership is misguided. I bet Ed Glaeser’s new book on rethinking federal housing policy is interesting, and am looking forward to reading it.
I wonder if some of this research might also apply to marriage and children as well
Posted by John Rove as Words at 12:02 PM GMT+4
The need for change is increasingly obvious, for health, climate and even humanitarian reasons. California voters last month passed a landmark referendum (over the farm lobby’s furious protests) that will require factory farms to give minimum amounts of space to poultry and livestock. Society is becoming concerned not only with little boys who abuse cats but also with tycoons whose business model is abusing farm animals.
An online petition that can be found at www.fooddemocracynow.org calls for a reformist pick for agriculture secretary — and names six terrific candidates, such as Chuck Hassebrook, a reformer in Nebraska. On several occasions in the campaign, Mr. Obama made comments showing a deep understanding of food issues, but the names that people in the food industry say are under consideration for agriculture secretary represent the problem more than the solution.
Change we can believe in?
The most powerful signal Mr. Obama could send would be to name a reformer to a renamed position. A former secretary of agriculture, John Block, said publicly the other day that the agency should be renamed “the Department of Food, Agriculture and Forestry.” And another, Ann Veneman, told me that she believes it should be renamed, “Department of Food and Agriculture.” I’d prefer to see simply “Department of Food,” giving primacy to America’s 300 million eaters.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 11:56 AM GMT+4
From the daily dish:
As a religious holiday, pre-modern Christmases were rather austere celebrations defined by lengthy church services. That this coincided with pagan culture’s raucous celebrations of the winter solstice was a source of great displeasure to institutional Christianity for centuries. The “kitsch” that Harris discusses (Evergreen Trees, the man from the north who brings us goodies) are pagan icons. Giving gifts and spending time with your family and friends (instead of spending the day in mass) are also holdovers from popular tradition of drinking and reveling which the church had been actively hostile to.
In short, everything WE secularists value in Christmas has been entirely appropriated by the Christian world.
I think you can also look at it as cultural evolution, we have kept the good things about the holidays i.e. Celebrating with friends and family and for the most part gotten away from spending too much time in a musty old church with people we hardly know and probably wouldn’t like if we did.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 12:19 PM GMT+4
Special guest – Brutus Kennedy Rutherford III
Posted by Al Swearengen as Comedy, politics at 3:26 PM GMT+4
This is one of those things that while I think it it is a good idea it is probably better not to leave it under the tree.
Indiana’s Planned Parenthood is offering a unique option this winter. $25-$100 gift certificates that can be used for anything at the clinics from contraception to abortions. The Chicago Tribune reports today on the effort which is available in 35 clinics throughout the state. The CEO of the state’s Planned Parenthood is quoted by the paper as saying the reception has been “pretty robust, and generally favorable” and that the vast majority of those visiting Planned Parenthood are coming for basic health issues, not an abortion.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 7:22 PM GMT+4
If you are wondering why the republican party is in the crapper look no further than this
A state senator in Utah is drafting a resolution to encourage retailers to stop using nebulous phrases like “Happy holidays” and “Season’s greetings” and get back to what shops used to say in December: “Merry Christmas.”
Utah state Sen. Chris Buttars told Salt Lake City’s Deseret News that he’s drafting the non-binding resolution because several employees at a retailer told him they were instructed not to say “Merry Christmas” to customers.
“I’m sick of the Christmas wars,” Buttars told the Salt Lake Tribune. “We’re a Christian nation and ought to use the word.”
Politicians are paid to solve real problems and plan for real futures, not fight imaginary wars. The strangest part to me is that christmas as it is celebrated is more like a pagan tree festival than a celebration of god. As an atheist I find christmas kind of amusing in that the only way the christians can get people to celebrate the birth of the their savior is to give everybody presents and encourage them to get drunk.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 1:48 PM GMT+4
This came via Mathew Ygliasias:
Yet all three of his choices — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as the rival turned secretary of state; Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander, as national security adviser, and Robert M. Gates, the current and future defense secretary — have embraced a sweeping shift of priorities and resources in the national security arena.
The shift would create a greatly expanded corps of diplomats and aid workers that, in the vision of the incoming Obama administration, would be engaged in projects around the world aimed at preventing conflicts and rebuilding failed states. However, it is unclear whether the financing would be shifted from the Pentagon; Mr. Obama has also committed to increasing the number of American combat troops. Whether they can make the change — one that Mr. Obama started talking about in the summer of 2007, when his candidacy was a long shot at best — “will be the great foreign policy experiment of the Obama presidency,” one of his senior advisers said recently.
This sounds like a real commitment to national security rather than just using national security as an excuse to give a lt of money to defense contractors.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 12:04 PM GMT+4
