Bus Fumes

I'm sharing these, because if the top of my head threatens to pop off, yours should too:



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And, because it's been an interesting weekend:

In a state with the nation's highest jobless rate, landscaping companies are finding some job applicants are rejecting work offers so they can continue collecting unemployment benefits.

It is unclear whether this trend is affecting other seasonal industries. But the fact that some seasonal landscaping workers choose to stay home and collect a check from the state, rather than work outside for a full week and spend money for gas, taxes and other expenses, raises questions about whether extended unemployment benefits give the jobless an incentive to avoid work.

Yup. This is one of the reasons we've got so many "undocumented aliens" -- because they'll do the work that nobody else has to.

One former landscaper, who has been on unemployment for a year, said he will search for work when the benefits expire, but he estimates he earns about $50 to $60 less a week than he would if he were working.

"It's crazy," he said. "They keep doing all of these extensions."

Crazy? Yes, indeed.

(A tip of the cap to LibertyChick for the above goodies. If she'd spend the same amount of time posting as she did emailing this stuff to me, she'd have herself a dandy blog. (And it's no harder to paste a link into an email than it is to paste it into a blog post.) Hint, hint, hint!)

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And this ought to at least raise your eyebrows to your hairline:

Last week, the American Association of Pediatricians noted that certain, ahem, "immigrant communities" were shipping their daughters overseas to undergo "female genital mutilation." So, in a spirit of multicultural compromise, they decided to amend their previous opposition to the practice: They're not (for the moment) advocating full-scale clitoridectomies, but they are suggesting federal and state laws be changed to permit them to give a "ritual nick" to young girls.

We are opening the gates and welcoming the barbarians with open arms, ladies and gents.

Oh, yeah. The rest of that Mark Steyn article bears reading, too. The above paragraph 'tis but a wee pinch of the entire frightening message.

(A tip of the cap to the Advice Goddess.)
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Madam Speaker once again displays her utter disdain for the average tax payer:

(A tip of the cap to Paul, whose post title says it all.)

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So we have people who want to build manufacturing plants in Michigan, and this happens:

Safer and more long-lasting than conventional lithium-ion car batteries, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor's invention packs 600 cells into a case the size of an airplane carry-on bag. His technology has already transformed the batteries used in many cordless power tools.

So why are Chiang and his company, A123 Systems, having trouble moving to full-scale commercial production? The answer is a story of both the obstacles to a rebirth of U.S. manufacturing and of the tantalizing possibilities if such a rebirth could be achieved.

The obstacles are rooted in the sad history of manufacturing's decline in the United States: Despite the promise of Chiang's batteries, many in Wall Street and Silicon Valley were incredulous when he and other leaders at A123 asked for capital to build factories in America: Asia, yes, but Michigan, why would you want to?

Even more daunting, virtually all of the world's battery-manufacturing industry is in Asia, where plants can be built faster and supplies and equipment are much easier to get than in the United States. These days, it's hard to find Americans who even know how to build a battery factory.

When and how did we let this get so far away from us? And, even if we can build those plants, where will we find skilled labor willing to work for a reasonable hourly wage?

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One more thing: Whether Elena Kagan is a lesbian or not is nobody's business but hers.

To quote Mary Schmich:

If you're an unmarried woman over 40, you're probably gay.

If you are an unmarried woman over 40 carrying 15 extra pounds, you are totally gay.

If you are a stocky, unmarried woman of whatever age who plays softball — gay, gay, gay.

And if you're that woman who's also smarter than most of the boys? Beyond gay, sweetheart. You are scary.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the most narrow-minded, bigoted, craptacularly stupid line of thinking I have ever seen. Well, except that "smarter than most of the boys" "scary" bit. And that is also limited thinking. She's probably smarter than most of the boys and the girls.

As I wrote to a radio personality with whom I regularly diverge wildly on viewpoints, but agree with today:

I don't care if the Supreme Court candidate is or is not a woman, is or is not a lesbian, is or is not a person of color, is or is not a Christian. What I care about is whether or not [he or] she has the credentials to do the job. And I can't wait for the day when that is what people debate, not spending time and bile and ink and airtime on all this other stuff that either he or she can't change or is no one else's business.

Like Martin Luther King, Jr., I, too, have a dream.

P.S. -- I'm over 40, overweight, unmarried and I played softball around the same time Kagan did. Does that make me a lesbian, too?

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