Forever!

I don’t know these people, but I would like to:

(Hat tip to Katy Dixon.)

What Should They Name the Children?

Kelly Hildebrandt is getting married.

An engaged Florida couple has the same first and last name.

Here’s how it all started: 20-year-old Kelly Hildebrandt decided to search Facebook for other people with her name. Up popped Kelly Hildebrandt of Lubbock, Texas. For the next three months the two exchanged e-mails and then started calling each other.

Then he decided to visit, and the couple soon began dating. Eight months after Kelly Hildebrandt sent her first e-mail, he proposed. The couple plans to marry in October.

They say the sweetest sound to a person is the sound of their own name, you know.

A Laughing Matter

Did you get a chance to see the Department of Treasury posting for a humorist with the following job description: “The Contractor shall conduct two, 3-hour, Humor in the Workplace programs that will discuss the power of humor in the workplace, the close relationship between humor and stress, and why humor is one of the most important ways that we communicate in business and office life. Participants shall experience demonstrations of cartoons being created on the spot. The contractor shall have the ability to create cartoons on the spot about BPD jobs.”

Republicans just shook their heads, but Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) intervened:

“Of all the agencies, the Bureau of Public Debt should know that there is very little that is funny about today’s economic conditions,” Dorgan said in a statement. “I understand the need for motivation in the workplace, but I think we have a greater motivation to save the taxpayers some money.”

The bureau canceled its plan to hire a cartoonist after Dorgan intervened.

An Anti-Pope Kennedy. Shocker.

Color me annoyed that Newsweek gave Katheen Yet-Another-Clueless-Kennedy Townsend a platform for her nonsense:

When Obama meets the pope tomorrow, they’ll politely disagree about reproductive freedoms and homosexuality, but Catholics back home won’t care, because they know Obama’s on their side. In fact, Obama’s agenda is closer to their views than even the pope’s . . .

Here Obama (the community organizer from Chicago) could teach the pope a lot about politics—and what a Catholic approach to politics could entail . . .

While the pope preaches love, listening to the other has been a particular stumbling block for the Catholic hierarchy (as it is for many in power) . . .

Un-be-lieve-able. Having failed to muster up much of a political career, the woman wants to expose herself as having even less competency in the understanding of a faith she claims to hold.

She disbelieves, for example, the doctrine of papal infallibility, charging that Pope Paul VI reiterated the Church’s teachings on contraception with Humana Vitae (1968), not because he believed it to be the correct thing to do, but because – wait for it – because he was “fretting that to change this position would weaken his authority.”

She further exposes herself with a sweeping statement that “Pope Benedict, having lived in the safety and security of the Vatican for much of his professional life, is part of this culture that silences dissent. (His last job was as the enforcer of doctrine.)” Neglecting, as she does, this scholarly Pope’s progressive ideas about evolution and scientific inquiry that cause hard-nosed-traditionalist (small “t”) Catholics to gasp, she speaks in ignorance about the role of the CDF, which was precisely created for the purpose doctrinal apologia. Were dissenters silenced, we wouldn’t require such an office.

The rest of her article – ranting on about the mean ol’ Church’s position on women priests, extramarital sex, contraception (y’know, all the usual bugaboos that the children of the 60s cling to with such bulldoggish tenacity) – suggest a woman too witless to understand that the Catholic Church is not a democracy. It never has been. It never will be. The Church’s teachings are meant to be a moral compass by which we Catholics check-and-balance ourselves against Truth. These Truths apply to priest and laity alike. It is not for we Catholics to remold Truth to fit our desires, however much we yearn to be given license for the naughty things we want to do.

Okay. Coming down off the soapbox. Essentially, this doltish woman begins from such a deficit of understanding as to be teetering on the brink of blathering idiocy. She is, for all intents and purposes, not Catholic and has a puerile understanding of the subject that she seems unwilling to remedy. It’s deplorable that she should ever be granted a voice by the popular media.

She should be confined to a personal blog.

Didja Know It’s Working?

If you were wondering about the state of thestimulus package:

President Barack Obama said his $787 billion stimulus bill “has worked as intended” . . .

Obama spoke after stocks fell for a fourth week on concern that an economic recovery will be delayed. A government report last week showed that employers cut 467,000 jobs in June and the unemployment rate rose to 9.5 percent, the highest since 1983.

His evidence is that not as many people are unemployed as would have been. (Thus citing evidence of a condition which – as dozens of columnists and politicians have pointed out – is impossible to prove.) He gave full realization a two-year time frame.

It seems he is relying most heavily on a friendly media to spin it properly. We’ll see.

In Addition to the Teleprompter . . .

. . . the President needs a spell checker and some blinders.

Wheeee!

The Big Slide at Mt. Tabor Park in Rocky Ridge, Maryland is worth an afternoon. Take a fleece blanket.

Rooting for Blue, for a Change

Having lived in relative fiscal comfort for the last few generations, I really do blame a lack of historical and economic understanding that permits travesties like the Waxman-Markey bill to become a reality.

The hit to GDP is the real threat in this bill. The whole point of cap and trade is to hike the price of electricity and gas so that Americans will use less. These higher prices will show up not just in electricity bills or at the gas station but in every manufactured good, from food to cars. Consumers will cut back on spending, which in turn will cut back on production, which results in fewer jobs created or higher unemployment. Some companies will instead move their operations overseas, with the same result . . .

Note also that the CBO analysis is an average for the country as a whole. It doesn’t take into account the fact that certain regions and populations will be more severely hit than others — manufacturing states more than service states; coal producing states more than states that rely on hydro or natural gas. Low-income Americans, who devote more of their disposable income to energy, have more to lose than high-income families.

Personally, I found the caveats suggested by the Republican party to be unacceptably compromising. I would have preferred that they attempt to defeat the bill outright.

During the brief few days in which the bill was debated in the House Energy Committee, Republicans offered three amendments: one to suspend the program if gas hit $5 a gallon; one to suspend the program if electricity prices rose 10% over 2009; and one to suspend the program if unemployment rates hit 15%. Democrats defeated all of them.

At this point, the only hope is the Blue Dog Democrats. Hopefully they inject some sanity into the situation.

Eat Your Heart Out, Betty Cooper

Why on earth would Archie Andrews ever want to get married?

Granted, he is choosing the right woman, but it’s still nonsensical. Why would it ever be advisable to have Archie grow up?

Drive Them South

Maryland couldn’t balance its budget last year, so the state tried to close the shortfall by fleecing the wealthy. Politicians in Annapolis created a millionaire tax bracket, raising the top marginal income-tax rate to 6.25%. And because cities such as Baltimore and Bethesda also impose income taxes, the state-local tax rate can go as high as 9.45%. Governor Martin O’Malley, a dedicated class warrior, declared that these richest 0.3% of filers were “willing and able to pay their fair share.” The Baltimore Sun predicted the rich would “grin and bear it.”

One year later, nobody’s grinning. One-third of the millionaires have disappeared from Maryland tax rolls. In 2008 roughly 3,000 million-dollar income tax returns were filed by the end of April. This year there were 2,000, which the state comptroller’s office concedes is a “substantial decline.” On those missing returns, the government collects 6.25% of nothing.

Boyoboy, did I pick a gem of a home state.