The £500,000 a year that the Queen spends on these occasions is, apparently, partly due to the gluttony of the guests - each of whom, on average, consumes 14 buns, bridge rolls and ice creams. A spokesman, demonstrating a grasp of arithmetic that is beyond question, pointed out that if the average is 14, some people ate even more. One of the ways of cutting the royal budget is, as Marie Antoinette failed to recognise, "let them eat less cake".I would venture that the issue is not that the guests eat, on average, "14 buns, bridge rolls and ice creams. I would venture that the issue is that the Queen's caterers order that many "buns, bridge rolls and ice creams" per guest to ensure that no guest ever has to hear the words, "I'm sorry - we're out of buns. Will a bridge roll do instead?"
Still, one thing is for sure: since we don't have the evidence upon which to pass judgment on the overall trajectory of this war, it's important we don't pass judgment prematurely.My memory seems to be faltering - did Brooks issue a similar caution during the lead-up to the war, about the "candy and flowers" scenario? Did he issue a similar warning in the days leading up to Bush's "Mission Accomplished" banner? Or is he only concerned about the thoughtful review of such niceties as "facts", "evidence" and rash action when the wind isn't blowing in the direction he wants?
But there is also the little matter of what's right for the country. Failing to act now will make the problem harder to fix down the road; cuts or tax increases will have to be steeper the longer the problem goes unaddressed. ... Democratic lawmakers keep insisting that they take the Social Security problem seriously and want to deal with it. This seems a good time to start.Unless I missed something, Bush has not reached out to the Democrats and invited them to participate in an effort to reach a bipartisan plan for the future of Social Security. He has been much more consumed with dismissing any criticism of a plan, even as he declines to give specifics, while pressuring Republican representatives to sign on to his plan and attempting (rather unsuccessfully) to sell his plan directly to the American people, so that he can avoid negotiating over details. In terms of negotiation, the available evidence suggests that Bush views "everything I want" as the starting and ending point. If the Democrats offer any plan which gives Bush an inch, he'll take it - and then castigate the Dems for not giving him a mile. So where's the upside for the Dems in proposing reform plans which will never be adopted by the Bush Administration, but will instead be used to advance the distortion, "you voted for it before you voted against it", to obtain compromise at no cost?
Most workers could keep going longer if they and employers reconsidered the old assumption about a career trajectory. They could learn from the example of John Quincy Adams, who was elected to Congress after serving as president. He dismissed objections that the new job was beneath him, and voters didn't discriminate against him for being overqualified.So I guess the next time I see a person, past the retirement age, clearing tables at McDonalds or working as a "greeter" at WalMart, I'll keep in mind Tierney's suggestion of the "inverse Peter Principle" - that they were probably not competent at their jobs before they took the more humble work - and that they could be serving in Congress had they not found that particular job to be beneath them.
Adams started his new career at age 63, just about when the typical American man now retires. He wasn't especially spry, once calling his body "a weak, frail, decayed tenement battered by the winds and broken in on by the storm." Yet he stayed on the job until his death at age 80.
He accomplished so much in those years that he is remembered as a better congressman than president. You could call him an inverse example of the Peter Principle, someone who succeeded by being demoted below his level of incompetence.
In some areas, open competition between political parties gave way to deal-cutting that foreordained most results and so depressed turnout.Oops - my bad. That was about Lebanon.
Americans now feel entitled to spend nearly a third of their adult lives in retirement. Their jobs are less physically demanding than their parents' were, but they're retiring younger and typically start collecting Social Security by age 62. Most could keep working - fewer than 10 percent of people 65 to 75 are in poor health - but, like Bartleby the Scrivener, they prefer not to.Those darn lazy elderly workers have, it seems, no incentive to work once their Social Security benefits become effectively fixed.
Once you've worked 35 years, more work often yields only a tiny increase in your benefits (sometimes none at all), but you still have to keep paying the onerous Social Security tax, which has more than doubled over the last half century.This, of course, is meant to be an argument for privatization of Social Security - that if people contributed to their private accounts, rather than contributing to a defined system of guaranteed benefits, they would have greater incentive to keep working because their "private account" would continue to grow. But somehow, recalling the various elderly people I see working in the community at stores like Meijer or even fast food restaurants, I find it hard to believe that they see no financial benefit from working - it seems far more likely that they are trying to supplement their fixed retirement incomes by working low-wage jobs. Perhaps, though, Tierney (who, in a most non-elitist manner, compares the retired elderly to Bartleby the Scrivener) isn't even aware that such people exist. The Guardian provides a more informed take on the situation:
If the elderly were willing to work longer, there would be lower taxes on everyone and fewer struggling young families.
It is all very well to talk glibly about raising pensionable ages. Nobody has yet explained what many people will do in their extended working lives. Some are capable of carrying on for years past 60: doctors, lawyers, writers, artists, desk workers.The Guardian acknowledges that some realignment of the British system may be requires, but unlike Tierney it directly addresses the realities for elderly workers:
But nobody can reasonably expect manual workers to keep going as their physical strength declines and all the usual ailments of late middle age set in. Even more significant for industry and commerce, it seems absurd to suggest that people in executive roles should be given a right to keep them after 60.
Most of us slow up, some become burnt-out cases. It is already a problem for many businesses that, amid relentlessly changing markets and technologies, key jobs need the energies and imaginations of 30-something-year-olds, not tired sexagenarians.
Many people in their last working years will have to do humbler jobs than they have been used to, for less pay.Tierney also argues that by forcing the elderly to work longer before they could retire, ostensibly while removing Social Security from the tax system, the net result would be "more national wealth and tax revenue available to help the needy, including people no longer able to work as well as the many elderly below the poverty line because they get so little Social Security." Hm. So if the elderly work longer, more jobs will magically be created in the economy? If Social Security taxes are no longer part of the tax system (through a privatization estimated to require $2 billion from the general fund?) tax revenues will go up? And the net effect of this will be to allow us to subsidize the impoverished elderly, who presently retire too early because Social Security is so generous? One hardly knows what to say.
"I find it absolutely outrageous that people who are not in our country legally are having such a profound impact on our political system," Miller said. "Every 10 years the census determines the number of Congressional districts allocated to each state and how those districts are drawn. If we continue to include illegal aliens in that count, we'll allow criminals to steal the Congressional voice of honest, legal Americans. This is about fundamental fairness and the American ideal of `One Man; One Vote."I wonder if Miller would accept a compromise proposal whereby we count all citizens, and three fifths of all other persons.
Now, you want to hear something really bad? The poorest fifth of Americans has experienced a rise in incomes of just 3 percent over the past three decades. The real problem in America is not about the middle class. It's about the underclass; about Americans who lack the skills and habits to advance at all.Hey - wait a second. Aren't we supposed to pretend that we're a "classless society", that everybody is "middle class", and that the richest of the rich aren't really any different from the rest of us? Perhaps I should consult Ann Coulter to see if Mallaby should be indicted for treason.
This is more than merely heartwarming. It takes the ugliest monster in American society and smacks it on the head. Inequality in the United States is sharpening, and income increasingly reflects parental status. And while this may be linked to bad Republican tax policy, it has a lot more to do with bad education policy, defended for the most part by interest groups connected to the Democrats.As you might expect from such a statement, Mallaby essentially argues that the real problem in our society is inequity in our K-12 schools, apparently best overcome by bashing teachers unions and public school boards. (Never mind that performance in charter schools and in private or parochial schools accepting vouchers is on the whole no better, and in some cases is worse, than that of their public counterparts). But the root of why kids end up with similar earnings as their parents has very little to do with the policies of either major political party and far more to do with modeling - kids pick up a lot from their parents. Does Mallaby think it is a mere coincidence that the children of college graduates are more likely to attend college, the children of teachers are more likely to become teachers, the children of doctors are more likely to enter the medical professions.... Even within "bad" school districts, you will find trends of that sort.
Education is the last, lumbering public monopoly, and it is not performing: Only 23 percent of blacks and a fifth of Hispanics graduate from high school prepared for a four-year college; a quarter of all college freshmen require some sort of remedial course. So long as this is so, the alarming wealth gap in this country will remain unbridgeable, no matter whether tax policy is designed by Republicans or DemocratsBut where is his evidence that public schools are not performing at least as well as the alternatives? Citations to exceptional examples do not prove the case, and the statistical evidence to date suggests the opposite - that on the whole charter schools underperform public schools. The most strident supporters of vouchers, particularly where parochial schools qualify to receive them, typically oppose requiring the schools which accept vouchers to administer the same standardized tests which are supposedly essential to measure performance in public schools. That suggests first that their goals are something other than improvement in education, and second that they don't expect objective measures of performance to lend support to voucher programs.
Googleguy, my right mouse key sticks ever since the Google "Bourbon update", and this is costing me thousands of dollars. When can I expect this to be fixed?
I Am Glad To Live in a Country in which the President does not say things like:This passage was attributed to an article in the London Telegraph, which identifies the new Prime Minister of France as a self-published poet, whose "excrable verse" has led President Chirac's wife to deem him "Nero", adding,Let us stop drinking from the enchanted waters of Lethe, which strike with amnesia those who want to quench their thirst, and let us dare to taste those 'fresh waters that run from the Lake of Memory' -- as the words say on the golden bars of the disciples of Orpheus, that bard of metamorphosis and of ascending reincarnation.
Recently, in an essay on France's need for national confidence (which, note, is not quite the same thing as Euro federalism), de Villepin wrote: "Let us stop drinking from the enchanted waters of Lethe, which strike with amnesia those who want to quench their thirst, and let us dare to taste those 'fresh waters that run from the Lake of Memory' - as the words say on the golden bars of the disciples of Orpheus, that bard of metamorphosis and of ascending reincarnation."I would have thought that context would have been important to Professor Volokh - we're not talking about a statement made in public, but part of a self-published poetic essay by a hobbyist poet - made worse, no doubt, by translation from French into English. Is it the language and metaphor to which Volokh objects? Here's how a song the President has proudly and publicly performed (en masse, in mass) reads when roughly translated into French:
J'ai lu un mandat ardent d'evangile dans des rangées polies d'acier;Battle hymn or no, out of context it looks pretty silly. So perhaps Prof. Volokh's comment,
"comme affaire de ye avec mes contemners, ainsi avec vous ma grace s'occupera";
Laissez le héros, soutenu de la femme, écrasement le serpent avec son talon,
puisque Dieu marche dessus.
In fact, maybe that should be our reaction any time President Bush is mocked for misspeaking: "Hey, at least it's not 'Let us stop drinking from the enchanted waters of Lethe . . . .'"should be taken with a grain of salt. Or at least with an eye first to context, and second to audience - two factors I would expect a law professor to consider as a matter of instinct.
The other big reason for starting a blog, Bodine said, is to increase a firm’s visibility on the Internet. Google and other search engines rate the relevance of a site by how frequently it’s updated, as well as the number of other sites that link to it.Well, then, going back to an earlier example, what happens when you search Google for the word antitrust? The Antitrust Law Blog is result #42 - a decent result given the 7,390,000 hits reported, but not likely to generate significant traffic. Many of the "top ten" results are from traditional websites, some of which have seen little to no change in years. Yes, "fresh" content can get you a boost in the search engines, but that of itself won't give you staying power, and that of itself won't necessarily cause you to outrank established, traditional websites. Further, good content on an established website will continue to rank in search engine results, month after month, year after year, while "fresh" content from a weblog will typically become effectively absent from search engine results within weeks.
“The reason you want to have a blog is because it gets much more traffic [than a Web site] because search engines have tuned up their algorithms to seek and list blogs first,” Bodine said. “Blogs are basically what search engines are looking for — text and something that’s refreshed and interesting.”
For Apple, crossing over to Intel, which many of its longtime customers consider “the dark side”, makes for some interesting future directions.Well, no explanation there. The author continues,
If the release of the Mac-mini was any indication, Apple has decided to try and lower the price of its systems to gain market share (currently a paltry 2 percent of the total PC market). With the move to Intel based machines, Apple will be forced to bring the price point of Macs closer in line to that of PCs.Right.... Just like when GM puts the same engine in a Cadillac as it uses in a Chevrolet, it can't price the Cadillac significantly above the Chevy....
Furthermore, moving to the Intel platform will make it easier for other manufacturers to produce Mac clones – something Apple already knows will make a significant dent in its hardware sales.Well, not really. That is, unless Apple permits other manufacturers to make Mac clones. One of the big attractions of the Intel chip is its built-in features which help facilitate the licensing of intellectual property (and make infringement more difficult) - something that should be of use as the iTunes Music Store continues to grow, but which could also help Apple block its OS from running on any unauthorized hardware. That is, the new processors should make it harder to clone a Mac, absent Apple's express consent.
Can anyone even remember now what Nixon did that was so terrible? He ended the war in Vietnam, brought home the POW's, ended the war in the Mideast, opened relations with China, started the first nuclear weapons reduction treaty, saved Eretz Israel's life, started the Environmental Protection Administration. Does anyone remember what he did that was bad?Ben, pick a better hero.
