The economy grew at a faster-than-expected 5.7 percent pace in the fourth quarter, the quickest pace in more than six years, as businesses reduced inventories less aggressively, the Commerce Department said on Friday.
The first estimate put fourth-quarter gross domestic product growth at its fastest pace since the third quarter of 2003. The economy expanded at a 2.2 percent annual rate in the third quarter.
Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast GDP, which measures total goods and services output within U.S. borders, growing at a 4.6 percent rate in October-December period.
What a load of crap. You know when they get finished adjusting these figures it won't look anything like this. And you know when they adjust the figures the news reports won't be anywhere near as prominent.
The reason they keep lying to us is because we keep letting them get away with it.
By the way, this...
businesses reduced inventories less aggressively
...sounds to me like they sold less stuff.
How does that translate into a better economy, hmm?
Am I the only one who finds it remarkable that the most powerful man in the free world spent 70 minutes last night complaining that The Man is keeping him down?
...a way to track the actual UPS truck carrying the package I'm waiting for.
According to the UPS website my package was "out for delivery" at 5:15 this morning, way the heck and gone over in Peachtree City, almost ten whole miles from Castle McGehee. I realize those trucks have a lot of stops to make, but it would be nice to have some idea when the damn thing was actually going to get here.
Months ago the inside door handle on my truck came off in my hand as I was trying to get out. Since then I've been having to roll down the driver's side window to open the door from inside.
Last week I finally found PartsGeek.com and ordered a replacement (plus one spare for each door, that's how freaking cheap they are), and I'm waiting to finally be able to put the new door handle in.
Hell, if I knew where the truck was I could have gone to where it was and picked the damn thing up hours ago. In fact I could have gone to the UPS place to pick it up myself, if they hadn't already put it on the damn truck.
Updated: Friday, January 22, 2010 · 8:45 a.m.
Or not. Instead of being delivered to my home, the package got diverted to New Jersey.
Fucking UPS.
Updated: Monday, January 25, 2010
The parts arrived today, finally, and my door is once again intact and fully functional.
Except for the window crank, since the knob has been falling off persistently and -- when I was reassembling the window crank's three separate pieces on the door after restoring the inside door cover -- flew off to parts (heh) unknown, leaving me with a window crank I can probably still use, but not easily.
It's probably just as well anyway, because it's going to be a while before I stop wanting to roll down the window to get out of the truck. Meanwhile, it's good that I got spare door handles since rolling down the window to open the door from inside, won't be even a marginally tolerable option without that knob.
Ferchrissake, Barack Obama was already running for president by the time he'd won his Senate seat, and look how well he's been doing. Can't we leave this "flavor of the month" bull[CENSORED] to the Democrats?
What is it going to take to get people to grow the [CENSORED]UP???
Oh, good: the Obamarrhoids are going to double down and keep trying to energize their infernal creation.
White House senior adviser David Axelrod told POLITICO: “I think that it would a terrible mistake to walk away now. If we don’t pass the bill, all we have is the stigma of a caricature that was put on it. That would be the worst result for everybody who has supported this bill.” He said the administration will work with Capitol Hill to figure out how.
Obama's former campaign manger, David Plouffe, added on ABC's "Good Morning America": "I'm very confident we can pass health-care reform."
Democratic leaders insisted they planned to press ahead with health reform, and met late into Tuesday night in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office.
President Barack Obama will appear with politically embattled Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in Las Vegas next month, according to a White House official.
Assuming there were a difference between fascism and socialism, what difference would it make?
Seems to me the only people who should care about any such alleged difference are socialists and fascists, and then only because their mutual sectarian hatreds prevent them from admitting they both worship at the same altar.
There may still be the odd clump of unmelted snow sheltered here or there around the neighborhood (it's 19°F hereabouts this morning) but we got into the upper 40s yesterday and they're claiming mid-50s for today.
I find wintery weather more congenial in places where people are more accustomed to it. Where studded tires are commonplace and the county snowplow fleet consists of more than a rusty old International Scout with a bolted-on blade. Where persistent icy patches get treated before half a dozen accidents have occurred there.
It's not that I fault the local authorities; while this area has tended to get a snowstorm about every couple of years, there was no reason ever to anticipate that the snow would fall on ground already thoroughly chilled by a persistent cold spell, and stay put for almost a week.
Warmer nights and a couple of days of rain this weekend should clear away whatever remains of the snow, and generally we only get one shot in any given winter so this was ours.
The Coming Ice Age™ may eventually make it more commonplace, and train everyone better in how to deal with it, but a lot of people really would die before that happens -- and that's just in the checkout line at the supermarket.
I'm beginning to think the safest place to be is just ahead of the advancing ice sheets.
James Cameron's movie Avatar is causing suicidal thoughts in its audiences, according to that other suicidal-thought inducer, CNN.
James Cameron's completely immersive spectacle Avatar may have been a little too real for some fans who say they have experienced depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora.
Today while out with my wife I chanced to hear another of the sampling of popular tunes from the Reagan era that demonstrated more about the ignorance and moral preening of the songwriter than about anything that was actually going on in the world at the time. And into my head all unbidden popped the word crapaganda as an apt label for such tripe.
If only I could have thought of that while I was blogging. It would have been a great name for a category.
I've decided to go ahead and give each item its own anchor tag so they can be permalinked separately. Since now I know there is still at least one person who wants to be able to link to stuff I write.
It's almost midnight and according to Weather.com we're still above freezing in the vicinity of Castle McGehee. Last time I looked we still had a nice patch or two of snow in the backyard, making us one of the last in the neighborhood. It looks like this cold snap has broken, and come the weekend we're even supposed to have lows way up in the 40s for a couple of rainy days.
Xrlq fisks an op-ed complaining about the proliferation of law schools and of people graduating from same.
Mark Greenbaum has an uncommonly silly op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times in which he advocates stripping the ABA of its law school accreditation process, not because of its loony-left leanings (a pretty good reason in its own right, but that’s another topic) but because it … get this … obeys antitrust law. That’s right, while most normal people accuse lawyers of behaving like a guild and protecting their own from the market place (see, e.g., Standard Mischief and Jody laying the guild trip on me a few years back over UPL issues in SC), this guy is actually complaining about the ABA not doing so.
It's not only because I consider Xrlq a friend (as bloggers-I've-never-met-in-person go) that I agree with his basic premise -- that having more lawyers isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially for their clients.
There's also the fact a booming overpopulation of lawyers will make it easier for Dick Cheney to bag the limit during hunting season.
And there are few things more warm-and-fuzzy-feeling-inducing than the sight of a bunch of lawyers on street corners holding up signs reading, WILL LITIGATE FOR FOOD.
I've long been of the opinion that more people should know what they need to know, to bypass the use of a lawyer's services for their own needs. The monopoly lawyers enjoy in "the practice of law" refers solely to performing services for others, especially in exchange for money. Having a lawyer draw up your will or a power of attorney from a standard form he keeps in a file cabinet, is simply ludicrous.
I can only remember two instances of my needing the services of a lawyer, and both of those were because Georgia real-estate law is so freaking backwards that we had to go to a law firm's offices in Newnan just to close on our house and, a few years later, to close on a mortgage re-finance. Both my wife and I have wills, and I drew up a power of attorney years ago allowing my mother, who had possession in California of a truck I owned, to see to transferring it to a buyer when I was living in Alaska.
I hate that we as Americans ever need lawyers to tell us what our own damned laws mean. I hate that lawyers have become so pervasive in American life that we have them doing things for us that true citizens would insist on doing for themselves if they possibly could. But if we have to have so damned many free-range lawyers running around loose, then by God we might as well have enough that Fish & Game will let us harvest a few every year for food.
Er, I mean, that when we do have to hire one, it doesn't cost body parts or firstborn children.
As noted in the update appended to the Wednesday post below, all we got at Castle McGehee was a dusting, but even that was enough to stick to roads after all these days of sub-freezing overnight temps and only-too-brief above-freezing daytime temps. And many Coweta roads, in addition to being narrow and twisty, are also hilly.
Imagine a bunch of Southerners -- people who descend like locusts on supermarkets for diapers and baby formula just in case a 73-year-old woman who hasn't had sex in 20 years suddenly and unexpectedly goes into labor in the middle of a blizzard -- driving on steep, curvy, iced-over roads where local government's idea of plowing those roads is to send out a guy with a plastic shovel.
I went out for a bit of a look-around this morning and found myself in the following predicaments:
Tailgated on a two-lane road at 40 mph by a five-ton, off-duty county fire department ambulance. To the driver's credit, both of the times that I made a point of looking in my side-view mirror to check if his "outa-my-way" lights were going (of course they weren't), he backed off. But even then he never got far enough back that I could see his "outa-my-way" lights out my rear window.
Confronted on another two-lane road with fire engines responding to a car slid off the pavement; fortunately I saw the response far enough in advance that I was able simply to turn around and go back the way I'd come.
Trying to climb two steep hills on still another two-lane road, with more ice on the pavement than I had seen anywhere else on my travels. On the first, I felt my rear wheels lose traction just once, but managed not to slide. On the second, with opposing traffic to worry about, I put the right wheels off the pavement onto snow-covered grass and trundled on up the grade as though the ice didn't exist. I wonder how many of the passing vehicles saw my faux-Alaska front tag and thought I was showing them a winter-driving trick from the Frozen North.
Actually, in Alaska I would have been in a low-center-of-gravity car with front-wheel-drive and studded tires. In the Bronco, all I could think of was all the 4WD trucks I used to see back then in the ditch after a heavy snowfall.
Back in 1995, after his party took over the majority in the House of Representatives on the strength of the Contract With America -- of which one of the points was congressional term limits -- Rep. Henry Hyde took to the floor to argue against term limits by claiming you couldn't find effective representation by taking names at random from the phone book.
With that comment -- along with his longtime support for federal gun control -- Hyde eclipsed, to my mind, everything worthwhile he ever had done or ever would do. That idea, of the indispensable political veteran who must intermediate between the people and their government, has been the single most corrosive concept ever introduced into American politics. For his part in blocking that legislation, Hyde deserved to depart Washington by rail in a sticky, feathery suit.
“More voters have greater confidence in the telephone book these days than in the current Congress, and most think their national legislators are paid too much to boot,” Rasmussen reported.
45% of voters would rather pick names randomly from the phone book to run Congress than to have Nancy Pelosi, et al, in charge, a Rasmussen Poll found.
Only 36% disagree.
“That’s up 12 points from October 2008, just before the last congressional elections,” Rasmussen reported.
William F. Buckley Jr. looks down from heaven and smiles.
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) says Obama made "a mistake" trying to push ObamaCare in the middle of one of the worst recessions in recent memory.
Sen. Ben Nelson, the Nebraska Democrat who played a pivotal role in helping the Senate pass its version of health care reform right before Christmas, said this week that the Obama administration should have delayed taking up the issue to spend more time tackling economic problems.
"I think it was a mistake to take health care on as opposed to continuing to spend the time on the economy," Nelson told the Fremont Tribune.
"I would have preferred not to be dealing with health care in the midst of everything else, and I think working on the economy would have been a wiser move," he told the newspaper.
I'm sure he would. Especially since, by selling his vote for a mess of pottage, he's put himself into such a deep hole, approval-rating-wise, that he's damn lucky he's not up for re-election until 2012.
By the way, Scott Brown is the Republican contender in the special election in Assachusetts for the remainder of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy's Senate term. I've read he's a RINO, but in New England that's as good as it gets. Depriving Harry Byrd of his 60th vote just might help scuttle ObamaCare until the next time the electorate has a collective brain fart and puts Democrats in charge. Maybe help him out -- the collegial opponent of my mortal enemy is my convenient, albeit temporary, ad hoc ally.
According to The Weather Channel, we're looking at a 60% chance of mixed rain and snow tomorrow, with a high of 41°F, and a 40% chance of snow showers tomorrow night with a low of 20°.
Thing is, rainfall just before sub-freezing temperatures tends to turn into ice. Now, it could be worse -- the rain could be falling into sub-freezing air, and building up on everything it touches -- but it's still not real good. I expect to hear the sound of sirens tomorrow evening.
Hello winter, my old friend
I see you've come around again
Tomorrow there will be some rain dripping
And that night so many cars slipping
On these roads, narrow, windy and all too dark
A skating park
And the sound
Of sirens
Will echo through the chilly night
And we will see the flashing lights
Near the fenders that are all wrinkled
Yet so pretty with the snow sprinkled
While the victims stand exchanging insurance cards
In nearby yards
To the sound
Of sirens
Apologies to Simon, Garfunkel, and music lovers everywhere.
Updated: Friday, January 8, 2010
Well, we only got a dusting, but judging from the traffic reports from elsewhere around metro Atlanta, with people having, like, forty-car pileups in the driveway, it's just as well.
Updated: Thursday, January 14, 2010
In writing the above filk lyric, I knew it needed a third chorus but I'd run dry after two. Well, here's the long-unawaited third:
If I were you I'd hesitate
To get onto the interstate
Because you know it won't be heavenly
Going sideways doing seventy
Knowing it will end with a hollow, crashing thud
And spurting blood
And then the sound
Of sirens.
A news item today -- about an Obama effigy displayed in Jimmy Carter's hometown -- interested me enough that I chose to post it at the PW Pub where readers can post comments, rather than here on my own site.
This may be a worthwhile option for future items that cry out for reader feedback and don't really inspire me to say anything meaningful about it myself.
This post having been the first with two unrelated items, I found a flaw in my intended modus operandi. So, starting now, if you want to permalink to a day's post, you need to use the datestamp up top, under the separator line and above my name.
Well, you can't post a comment on it, there's no RSS feed, and there's no database for an in-house search function to process in the background. I guess what that makes it is, a web page where I post whatever the hell I choose to write about, whenever the hell I choose to write it, in whatever format or order I choose.
Not all of those traits make it not-a-blog, but enough of them distinguish it from what passes for a blog these days that I think I can get away with saying it's not a blog. And anyway, lacking an RSS feed is all by itself enough to disqualify it as a blog in the eyes of Technorati, Bloglines, and pretty much anybody else out there. And if you link here using Blogrolling.com, and even if Blogrolling.com works as advertised (HA!) this site will never show up on your 'roll as updated 'cause this site don't ping.
(I haven't been pinging Blogrolling.com for months anyway, even when I did have a pinger in my pocket and was happy to see you.)
Anyway, "blogging" strikes me as on the wane these days and the new stuff -- social-networking and Twitter and all that stuff -- just isn't for me. So, it's back to my roots, doing the same thing I used to do before I signed up with blogger almost eight years ago.
After all, it's the content that matters. If I post a bunch of stuff that doesn't mean anything, why should I clutter up your RSS feed with it? But if I'm producing stuff you want to read, it's up to you to come looking for it.
Update:
An advantage of this format that I overlooked before: because of "smart quotes" and the like inserted on the fly by most blogging software, there often appear anomalous characters in copy-and-paste excerpts from other sites -- and sometimes also from a main entry to a comment, even here. That won't happen now though; what you'll see, and lift if you copy an excerpt over to another site, are the raw text punctuation marks generated by my very own keyboard, rendered in UTF-8.
Whatever other site you post it on, though, may edit those marks according to its own protocols. Can't be helped.
And a new(ish) format for My 2¢. This is going to be kind of like the old Blogger archive format, with pages "torn off" at appropriate intervals (assuming the amount of content justifies it) and each entry permalinked with an anchor tag rather than its own page. And I think anything I write on a given day will all be kept in the same entry, with different items set off in whatever way I find most suitable.
Year before last I remarked here and there to the effect that, being offended by other people's opinions, is retarded. There was a reason why I phrased it that way, and on at least one occasion a retarded person did actually take the bait. Well, there will be a lot of bait here in 2010. Starting today.
There will be congressional elections in November but it's anybody's guess what's going to happen. Right now the electorate is fit to be tied over the Democrats' refusal to drop ObamaCare despite its overwhelming unpopularity -- but the Establishment Media are in the Democrats' pockets and it remains to be seen whether the voters will be lulled once again into accepting the spoon-fed media narrative.
I refuse to be optimistic. There's just too much reason to expect the worst; the American people simply haven't demonstrated the wit in recent years to understand what's being done to them and to their country. And it doesn't help that even those who are better and smarter are nevertheless scarcely better than pigs and hardly smarter than houseplants.
It's up to my countrymen to prove to me they're capable of saving themselves. I'd have to be an idiot to bet they are.
Update:
All of the above was actually written in advance of New Year's Day, as is this update. Anyway. I've just read about Rush Limbaugh winding up in the hospital while on vacation in Hawaii; here's hoping he'll make a swift and complete recovery. As for his detractors, what they say is unimportant, and we do not hear their words.
