*NEWSFLASH* DTV change Extended to June 12.

[Sam E]

When are they getting into our brains to wipe memories of the last 60 years? That's what "taking it away" means.

[snip]

[Gary H]

They're not taking away what you've got, just failing to provide MORE.

[trader4]

That figures.

Yeah, there goes that theory.

You poor baby. I'm reading any newsgroup I want, and the only password involved is between my ISP and me. I set it once and never looked at it again.

Being on dialup fits in nicely with your other positions on modern technology.

Not after June, unless you adopt some new technology. Wow, perish the thought!

Figures, do you eschew the modern automobile too?

=A0I

I guess they could just draw the pics of the horses in little x's so you could read it in text. Gee, wonder why they don't?

I'd rate your opinions as 90% garbage.

Probably because you're still running Win98.

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

I've known a lot of people addicted to TV news.

[trader4]

[e-mail]:

Oh no! Will you ever recover from that $13 economic hardship? We really have become a nation of whiners, haven't we?

[Harry K]

I watch a lot of news shows, not because I am "addicted" but it beats most of the crap that is broadcast. I stick to the nature, science, etc. channels mostly but National Geographic has become an "all religion alternating with UFO kookogy and the like program".

Harry K

[Robert Neville]

Here's another unintended consequence... Apparently, the electronics manufacturers that were making the converter boxes had long since shut down production based on the February date and the assumption that everyone who wanted a box would have them by now, or could draw from retail stock.

So, even though Congress in its infinite wisdom decided to extend the deadline and create more coupons, there may not be much to spend them on.

[George Orwell]

-- President Obama, Feb. 4.

Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.

And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.

The Daschle affair was more serious because his offense involved more than taxes. As Michael Kinsley once observed, in Washington the real scandal isn't what's illegal, but what's legal. Not paying taxes is one thing. But what made this case intolerable was the perfectly legal dealings that amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years.

He'd been getting $1 million per year from a law firm. But he's not a lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist. You don't get paid this kind of money to instruct partners on the Senate markup process. You get it for picking up the phone and peddling influence.

At least Tim Geithner, the tax-challenged Treasury secretary, had been working for years as a humble international civil servant earning non-stratospheric wages. Daschle, who had made another cool million a year (plus chauffeur and Caddy) for unspecified services to a pal's private equity firm, represented everything Obama said he'd come to Washington to upend.

And yet more damaging to Obama's image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama's name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.

It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.

It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

Not just to abolish but to create something new -- a new politics where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the "fierce urgency of now" includes $150 million for livestock (and honeybee and farm-raised fish) insurance.

The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports the Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting "planted" for "ready to market" would mean a windfall garnered from a new "bonus depreciation" incentive.

After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell -- and that this president told better than anyone.

I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.

Il mittente di questo messaggio|The sender address of this non corrisponde ad un utente |message is not related to a real reale ma all'indirizzo fittizio|person but to a fake address of an di un sistema anonimizzatore |anonymous system Per maggiori informazioni |For more info

[---MIKE---]

I was in Wal-mart last week and they had plenty of the Magnevox converters on the shelves.

---MIKE---

[Robert Neville]

If you are going to quote a newspaper column verbatim and in its entirety, at least credit the author:

Charles Krauthammer - The Fierce Urgency of Pork