Bob's Links and Rants

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Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Quote de l'année

I can't even pretend to have a quote du jour any more. But here's one from Bob Harris, commenting on poll results that show that the leader for the Democratic presidential nomination is a woman half of American voters say they'd never, ever vote for:
Shouldn't we all be stepping back to marvel at just how dysfunctional our electoral system so obviously is? Bad enough our campaign finance structure and winner-takes-all system limit the spectrum of "mainstream" political opinion from conventional suck to full-blown delusional. But we're still more than a year away from the actual election, and our most likely leaders for the next four years have already been winnowed down mostly to people we already can't bloody stand.
I should point out that that poll was obviously flawed. Dennis Kucinich came in second as a candidate Americans said they'd never, ever vote for--at 49%. And you and I both know that the percentage of American voters who have never even heard of Kucinich is way more than 49%. And I'd suggest that Hillary's 50% is low--every Republican and half of the Democrats despise her. The Dumbos demonstrated in 2004 how to lose an unloseable election, and they can do it again if they nominate Shillary.

Fire and Water

Bob Morris at Polizeros writes about the California fires and the related and ultimately more threatening water shortage in the west. We've got tens of millions of people living in a region capable of only supporting tens of thousands. And not just living--growing cotton and cattle, playing golf, maintaining ridiculous lawns. Immense amounts of resources (water, energy, money) have been wasted over the past century to make this possible. But more and more it appears that it was possible only for a short time. The piper is at the door, demanding to get paid.

Meanwhile, W, having declared that $35 billion is too much to spend to save the lives of American children, believes $196 billion is needed to continue destroying the lives of Iraqi children. And keeping much of the California National Guard far away from where they're needed. Quite possibly the most evil person ever to live. And the Dumbocrats who have done nothing to end his reign of error are probably the most craven.

Friday, October 19, 2007


From Chris Britt.

What People Want

Thursday, October 18, 2007

New Records

Oil over $89 a barrel. Dollar at a new low against Euro: The dollar will now buy 0.704 of a euro, down from over 1.2 euros back in December 2000.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

There goes the neighborhood

Back in January (no, it wasn't my last post) I wrote about how Pfizer was pulling its 2100 local jobs out of Ann Arbor, and how they were abandoning a huge, expensive facility that they were continuing to expand right up until the day of the bugout announcement.

Well, nine months later, many of the employees are gone, taking the local housing market with them. While construction finally stopped, the "Construction Traffic Only" sign remains:



However, the only traffic lately has been moving vans



and a big crane,



which is removing some valuable piece of pharmahardware to be hauled to its new home in Connecticut (which will be built where the old homes of some old people were).

The moving vans have been departing regularly for the past week or two. The "invisible hand" of the "free market" efficiently allocating resources? Hardly. No, it's evidence of an immensely wasteful and corrupt economic/political system run solely for the benefit of the very wealthy few.