Why we're broke

Can't pay our bills, says battery maker A123, so lets all go to bankruptcy court.

You won't be invited, however,  because of the distinction between a big creditor with a hot lawyer and a taxpaying chump who probably didn't even know about this particular rat hole.

A123 has been around for about 12 years as the brain child of a professor -cum-business tycoon with ties to China. It has always been a snacker at the public trough, so it isn't wholly a partisan issue,

But, Solyndra-like, it discovered joy of big-time slurping under the Obama administration. The president's DOE handed the company $249 million in 2009. Many more millions were sucked from from local and state tax spenders. (Routing note: The money passes from you to a bureaucrat to a company that doesn't quite know what the Hell it's doing besides scarfing up your personal wealth and having a ball with it.)

A123 promised to create smarter batteries, and possibly it did. But some of them didn't work and had to be recalled. More important, too few private investors believed the proposition was viable enough to risk their own money. Not a problem, mate. We'll just tell a nice green story to Uncle Barack and he'll tell Tim to tell Ben to print a few million more C-notes and give them to us.

We've seen so goddam much of this that it seems almost futile to restate the honest man's premise: If a proposed enterprise holds out a reasonable degree of success, the money to finance it will be available in the free market.  If it's a sky-pie ploy to capitalize on politically fashionable adventures, only elected and appointed government officials can be gulled.

I'll bet you're not a bit surprised that the batteries that broke the company are for everyone's favorite cause, ta-da, electric cars.

Maybe it's the long, dark nights

Sometimes when Sitemeter shows an unusual number of hits from an exotic locale, such as Norway, I look a little deeper. This time I found a half-dozen guys (I presume) hitting on May recently.

Of course it could be that some Norwegian social studies teacher assigned a class to look into racial relations in the United States.

Naah, probably  not. Most likely some randy little devil caught the old post by mistake and spread the word. Can't say I blame him. :)

Score one for The Associated Press

A friend and I were debating the flap over the AP photo showing the girl seeming to ogle Romney's butt. That led to a little research on AP caption corrections in general. I stumbled across this one. It is a dated (2010) but neat story of a cut line change on a captured enemy photo once thought to be of the Bataan Death March.

It shows GIs carrying bodies of their comrades, and for years everyone just accepted it was the march.  Decades later, a Bataan survivor said the Japs allowed nothing to slow the gory parade. The bodies were left where they lay. He believed the image was of a burial detail at POW Camp O'Donnell where the brutalized victims were taken.

AP did some checking, decided the veteran had a point, and,  some 65 years after the fact, rewrote the caption.

Hey, let's fleece Tourist!

News flash: Iowa bureaucrat says tourists spent more than $7 billion in Iowa last year.

About  two-thirds of it was the cost of driving around, trying to find a way out. Wait. I made that up, although it is not a totally implausible thought.

But I find the news item important as an illustration of the genius displayed by our official shreikspersons. For instance:

Economic Development Authority Director Debi Durham says travelers are perfect taxpayers because "they come to our communities for a short time and leave billions of dollars behind."

Well said, Debi. Now if we only had a law preventing our own wild and crazy guys from traveling around and spending money in other hip scenes...  (I'm thinking of places like Nebraska.)