"Win Ben Stein's Money" with Jimmy Kimmel 

2 on the stand down, 6 on the video. If it is a 6 on the video, the Clintons will throw the President under the bus at the appropriate time.

In college I had to cross a busy, three-lane, one-way street to get to class. Of course, I could have walked half a block to a cross-walk and wait for the light, but like most, I'd jaywalk.

One Spring I had this recurring dream that I was telling one of my friends that I had been hit crossing the street. The first couple of times I didn't give it any thought, after a week, I stood in the fire lane and made sure that the street was absolutely empty before I crossed. One day I was standing in the fire lane between two parked cars, scanning the street. When I was sure the street was clear, I stepped into the street, and Bang!

A girl on a bicycle was going the wrong way on the one-way street and we both got knocked down. I realized that it was over, I had been hit crossing the street, and wasn't hurt. She wasn't hurt either, but seemed frightened. Maybe it was because I was so relieved I was laughing and thanking her as I helped her up.

Amen, my 9th grade son just served a 5-day, zero-tolerance suspension for a fight he didn't start (principal admits this after seeing it on You Tube), or even know anything about beforehand. The kid who challenged him was followed by several other students with their cell phone cameras out and ready (according to Li'l Skinner).

The only other thing we were allowed to know about the incident from the the administration is that the student who posted the You Tube clip was suspended for 3 days, and the clip was removed.

The best part is that we got a letter from the school district advising us that our son has missed five days of school this quarter, and that attendance is vitally important to academic success.

"Won't Back Down," Tom Petty and Johnny Cash.

Petty is bragging, Cash is stating a fact.

Congratulations!

My dissertation advisor once told me that he wished Universities hired faculty the same way they hired football coaches. Then tenure would be just the length of a contract (which could be extended, bought out, etc.). The more experienced faculty would get more pay and a longer contract than the less experienced. He thought 3-5 years for assistant profs, 5-7 for associate profs, and 7-10 for full profs would be about right.

That seems about right, it would make more room for new faculty, and would prevent the older profs from becoming R.O.A.D. warriors (retired on active duty).

I was 15 and running a bulldozer at night for my dad, who ran a small construction company. We were building a county road in the middle of nowhere, at least 25 miles to the nearest town in either direction. About 3:00 am a carload of guys got stuck in the sand on the new grade. After I pulled them out, one said "you look like you could use a beer." I tried to turn them down, at the same time trying to act like I was at least old enough to drive a car. I was trying to make my voice sound deep, and failing that, I took one and tried to pound it down like I did it every day. Warm Schlitz. I don't know how I managed not to spit it back out. I have no idea how Milwaukee got famous, and it was at least two years before I had my second beer.

Lowering marginal tax rates led to more heavyweight boxing championships, why would golf be any different?

"[T]he IRS ...  was also effectively stepping into the prize ring itself and determining the way the sport was conducted. The 1950s was the era of the 90 percent top marginal tax rate, and by the end of that decade live gate receipts for top championship fights were supplemented by the proceeds from closed circuit telecasts to movie theaters. A second fight in one tax year would yield very little additional income, hardly worth the risk of losing the title. And so, the three fights between Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson stretched over three years (1959-1961); the two between Patterson and Sonny Liston over two years (1962-1963), as was also true for the two bouts between Liston and Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) (1964-1965). Then, the Tax Reform Act of 1964 cut the top marginal tax rate to 70 percent effective in 1965. The result: two heavyweight title fights in 1965, and five in 1966. You can look it up."

The Romans proved that you can have either a Republic, and limited government, or an Empire, but you can't have both. Republics seem to require a citizens with a few important things in common, origins or ideas, maybe. But an empire seems to require a centralized authority to hold disparate groups and customs together. In an odd way, we do have a conservative foreign policy. If the US were a real imperialist power, we wouldn't be the brokest people on the planet. Western Europe, Japan, Korea, and the middle eastern emirates would be paying a heavy tribute for pax Americana, and not the other way around.

Part of the reason that Americans spend relatively smaller part of their income on food is that US farms and farmers are incredibly productive, and are becoming more productive. Another reason is that US farm policy is largely designed to stabilize prices, maybe even near a free market price.

American consumers also pay a smaller proportion of their disposable income on food, compared to consumers in other developed countries. US farmers have long complained about the US having a “cheap food” policy. European and Japanese farm policy is designed to keep imported food to a minimum in order to protect domestic food production.

If we go over this "cliff," it won't result in a free market, the policy just goes back to an older target price. This is another poison pill like the fiscal cliff. Congress kicked the can down the road, and used this threat to make sure that a future Congress passes a farm bill. The poison pill guarantees a policy that no one wants: prices too high for consumers,  restrictive production quotas for farmers, and too much government cheese to be made, stored, and given away.

The "parity price" resulting in $6 milk, is the farm equivalent of the "living wage" so popular with statists. What goes unsaid In the NPR article, is what happens to the milk bought to force the price up? The torrent of free cheese coming out the back end of the government trough will be a sight to behold. So fear not, those who are deemed wealthy enough to pay $6 a gallon for milk will be asked to pay their fair share, and those who can't will be showered with manna from heaven, er, ... free cheese from Washington.

A Walker Percy passage, I've always liked:

"It has been observed that artists live longer and drink less than writers. Perhaps they are rescued from the ghostliness of self by the things and the doing of their art. The painter and the sculptor are the Catholics of art, the writer is the Protestant. The former have the sacramentals, the concrete intermediaries between themselves and creation—the paint, the brushes, the fruit, the bowl, the table, the model, the mountain, the handling and muscling of clay. The writer is the Protestant. He works alone in a room as bare as a Quaker meeting house with nothing between him and his art but a Scripto pencil, like God's finger touching Adam. It is harder on the nerves."

Lost in the Cosmos, p. 147.

I think we've already gone off the fiscal cliff.  The AMT is a huge problem, because the patch expired last year, exposing maybe 30 million more taxpayers to this additional tax, which will have to be paid by those affected this April. The IRS says that at minimum they would need to tell "more than 60 million taxpayers that they may not file their tax returns or receive a refund until the IRS completes the necessary systems changes." This could mean that 60 million filers will not be able to file until at lease late March.

In the 1st quarter of 2012, $285.9 billion went out in individual refunds. Add to that state income tax refunds, and the end of the 2% payroll tax holiday, there will be a considerable amount of money remaining in Government hands in the first quarter of 2013 compared to 2012.

If the economy is not below stall speed now, it will be soon, no matter what congress does in the next few days. If it is too late to prevent the next recession, we might as well make an attempt to get it right in January.

Keep the AMT, scrap the rest of the tax code.

Also, the payroll tax is already limited, you only pay it on the first $110,000 or so.

Mrs. Skinner took me to see this last weekend. I found the switching between "reality" and the choreographed stage scenes weird. In fact, I thought that the opening scene was a take0ff on Monty Python's The Crimson Permanent Assurance. It was awhile before I realized that the actual film had started.

Keira Knightly seems unable to pull off a dramatic role. That combined with the stage/reality scene shifting made me think that the filmmakers needed to get the audience to suspend its disbelief that anyone would have to pay the price Anna did for her indiscretions.