Just another day in southern California

Here’s a pic I shot recently on my trip to San Diego:

Paragraph of the day

From Tim Cavanaugh:

I have an alternative explanation: Credit froze because all over the country defaults on mortgages, car loans, student loans and credit cards were reaching historical highs. Letting Lehman die was Henry Paulson’s single act of courage, and he followed it up by doing what he does best: soiling his Depends and scaring the children with wild tales about the bank failures, derivative defaults and lover’s lane murderers that would be unleashed if the taxpayers didn’t give a trillion dollars to the largest banks on the planet. The entire ethical structure of the free market was destroyed so that Sheila Bair could be spared the inconvenience of euthanizing crippled, syphilitic ghouls like Citigroup and Bank of America.

Jetting through the Grand Canyon

This would have been amazing–flying jets through the Grand Canyon:

Where in the world is my wife?

Jacaranda City – Pretoria, South Africa, originally uploaded by South African Tourism.

Where in the world is my wife?

Today my wife is in London:

Tracking the spread of Eyjafjallajökull’s ash cloud

Here’s the original gif.

Obama believes were are undertaxed

…if not, but else would it take him 17 minutes to respond to a simple statement that we are overtaxed. From the Washington Post:

Toward the end of a question-and-answer session with workers at an advanced battery technology manufacturer, a woman named Doris stood to ask the president whether it was a "wise decision to add more taxes to us with the health care" package.

"We are over-taxed as it is," Doris said bluntly.

Obama started out feisty. "Well, let’s talk about that, because this is an area where there’s been just a whole lot of misinformation, and I’m going to have to work hard over the next several months to clean up a lot of the misapprehensions that people have," the president said.

He then spent the next 17 minutes and 12 seconds lulling the crowd into a daze. His discursive answer – more than 2,500 words long — wandered from topic to topic, including commentary on the deficit, pay-as-you-go rules passed by Congress, Congressional Budget Office reports on Medicare waste, COBRA coverage, the Recovery Act and Federal Medical Assistance Percentages (he referred to this last item by its inside-the-Beltway name, "F-Map"). He talked about the notion of eliminating foreign aid (not worth it, he said). He invoked Warren Buffett, earmarks and the payroll tax that funds Medicare (referring to it, in fluent Washington lingo, as "FICA").

Why don’t the new fuel economy standards impact global warming?

Today, the Obama Administration announced their new fuel economy standards and required automakers to produce cars and light trucks that get an average of 35.5 mpg by 2016, four years faster than the law passed in 2007. The Washington Post calls this the “White House’s most significant achievement yet in addressing global warming.” You would expect that the “most significant achievement yet in addressing global warming” would actually have an impact on global warming, but you would be wrong.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency itself, "global mean temperature is estimated to be reduced by 0.006 to 0.015 °C by 2100 . . . and sea-level rise is projected to be reduced by approximately 0.06-0.14cm by 2100." (See page 355 of the final rule.)

It might be surprising that a rule that will have serious repercussions for automobiles in the United States results in a climatically meaningless amount of reduction in global temperature, but that is because the vast majority of future greenhouse gas emissions are projected to come from the developing world. In fact, it’s already happening. According to the Global Carbon Project from over the past 10 years, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions only increased 2 percent while China’s carbon dioxide emissions increased 112 percent, India’s increased 53 percent, and Russia’s increased 12 percent. Even Japan, the country in which the Kyoto Protocol was signed saw its carbon dioxide emissions increase nearly 7 percent.

So while forcing American to buy more fuel efficient cars might seem like a “significant achievement” in “addressing global warming,” it isn’t.

Shooting video with DSLRs

I found the video of this shootout to be strangley compelling. Until now I’ve thought that shooting video with a Digital SLR didn’t make much sense because of the limitations. But this video shows you how good some of the DSLRs are at video.  

Why the President Isn’t Moving the Health-Care Numbers

Scott Rasmussen explains:

Why can’t the president move the numbers? One reason may be that he keeps talking about details of the proposal while voters are looking at the issue in a broader context. Polling conducted earlier this week shows that 57% of voters believe that passage of the legislation would hurt the economy, while only 25% believe it would help. That makes sense in a nation where most voters believe that increases in government spending are bad for the economy.

 

When the president responds that the plan is deficit neutral, he runs into a pair of basic problems. The first is that voters think reducing spending is more important than reducing the deficit. So a plan that is deficit neutral with a big spending hike is not going to be well received.

 

But the bigger problem is that people simply don’t trust the official projections. People in Washington may live and die by the pronouncements of the Congressional Budget Office, but 81% of voters say it’s likely the plan will end up costing more than projected. Only 10% say the official numbers are likely to be on target.

…

The final piece of the puzzle is that the overwhelming majority of voters have insurance coverage, and 76% rate their own coverage as good or excellent. Half of these voters say it’s likely that if the congressional health bill becomes law, they would be forced to switch insurance coverage—a prospect hardly anyone ever relishes. These numbers have barely moved for months: Nothing the president has said has reassured people on this point.

 

The reason President Obama can’t move the numbers and build public support is because the fundamentals are stacked against him. Most voters believe the current plan will harm the economy, cost more than projected, raise the cost of care, and lead to higher middle-class taxes.

 

That’s a tough sell when the economy is hurting and people want reform to lower the cost of care. It’s also a tough sell for a president who won an election by promising tax cuts for 95% of all Americans.