Category Archives: The World

Inauguration enthusiasm way down among the rich

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If you can fly to DC in a private plane and park it (overnight or longer) you are rich – whether you own the plane outright or not.

Private plane parking at Dulles is expected to be down more than 50%.

Interesting.

 

“We expect about 300 private aircraft this inauguration,” says David Mould, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority.

“We have parking areas at Dulles Airport that will accommodate a number of aircraft, but when those begin to fill up, we will move them out onto the runway area that we have reserved for this purpose,” he says.

The western-most runway was set to close Thursday night. The airport’s three other runways will remain open.

The airport also closed a runway for Obama’s first inauguration. For that event, 700 private aircraft arrived, a record there.

 

Compensation and Adjunctification – there will be more jobs for more people – at lower compensation

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Hopewell, N.Y. — Provisions of the Affordable Care Act  — the federal health care law commonly known as ObamaCare — have Finger Lakes Community College examining the workload for its adjunct professors to avoid what the college said could be hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional health insurance costs.

You mean you didn’t see this coming? Not only is the adjunctification of Higher Education continuing, but it will be handled by even more people as adjuncts teach fewer sections to limbo in under the ObamaCare bar.

And much as I love the model at These Colleges, I understand that we’re the carriage trade. Many more people attend or teach for community colleges than ever pass through the selection process at liberal arts colleges.

Can’t tell the players without a program – the Hostess (Twinkie) Bankruptcy

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What a mess!

End result: a near total loss for everyone involved, except the secured creditors of course, who will now get pennies on the dollar, or perhaps even par, for their claims when all is said and done.

 

Sadly, in many ways Hostess is now indicative of that just as insolvent larger corporation, the USA, whose insurmountable balance sheet liabilities will be the eventual catalyst for its collapse, but only once the Income Statement and the Cash Flow sheet join in. For now, the Fed provides the flow needed to avoid the day of reckoning, but everything ends eventually.

 

In the meantime, what the Hostess story will hopefully teach the always gullible public, is that nothing is ever black or white, and there are numerous shades of gray in every story: even one in which an “evil” PE firm is unable to come to resolution with labor unions, despite the man in charge of it all being a prominent democrat. Because when it comes to money other things such alliances, ideology and certainly politics are always, always, secondary. Sadly, ever more Americans will be forced to learn this lesson the hard way.

Silencing General Petraeus

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This is sounding worse and worse.

All this—the FBI spying on the CIA—constitutes the government attacking itself. Anyone who did this when neither federal criminal law nor national security has been implicated and kept the president in the dark has violated about four federal statutes and should be fired and indicted. The general may be a cad and a bad husband, but he has the same constitutional rights as the rest of us.

No keen observer could believe the government’s Pollyanna version of these events. When did the CIA become a paragon of honesty? When did the FBI become a paragon of transparency? When did the government become a paragon of telling the truth?

 

 

 

Sobering Report from Lower Manhattan

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6) I did not witness a single Red Cross Truck or FEMA Vehicle or in lower Manhattan. Recall the assistance these agencies provided after 9/11 – this is NOT HAPPENING. There are bound to be hundreds of elderly people, rich and poor, who live on the upper floors of buildings with elevators that are now disabled. IF POWER IS NOT RESTORED, THIS WILL MOVE FROM BEING AN ECONOMIC DISASTER TO A HUMANITARIAN DISASTER.

For everyone who thinks government does it better – go read the whole thing.

Differential Party Turn Out

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Why all good Republican children are raised to pray for a rainy (or snowy, up here) first week of November. Because WE know that Republicans exercise their franchise in greater proportion than the Democrats. Because, you know, think what you will, we take citizenship more seriously than people who are discouraged by bad weather.

I, of course, have the delight of voting for 3rd and 4th party candidates, because I know the state as a whole will pull the Government Teat Lever.