Professor “Paul Kurgman” offers up alternatives to Wal-Hitler-Mart so poor people know where they can shop and still feel good about themselves.

Legal Jihad

Reading about Chicago politics makes me sick to the stomach.  Kudos for the Boston Globe for showing how Obama served as a willing cog in the dirty scene. Absolutely disgusting — the whole lot of it.

American companies are attractive to European investors — and not just because of the Euro (but of course, that helps).

Why won’t we drill?

So some Europeans want to buy Budweiser. This should be up to the shareholders, not some scummy politicians.

Republican Gov. Matt Blunt said Wednesday he opposes the deal, and directed the Missouri Department of Economic Development to see if there was a way to stop it.

“I am strongly opposed to the sale of Anheuser-Busch, and today’s offer to purchase the company is deeply troubling to me,” Blunt said in a statement.

Who does this ass governor think he is? This isn’t his company.

Sweden: paradise or purgatory? —wonders Megan McArdle. I don’t know how this woman can see through this carefully constructed myth of the Swedish socialist utopia, yet manages to keep her eyes wide shut with respect to Barack Obama’s vacuous personality cult.

Oh well. My mother who works at the Swedish Embassy in Tirana, Albania, should have interesting thoughts regarding this article.

Strange advertising on TBS. TV just died a little bit more.

Dean Kamen’s new invention — prosthetic arms

Someday we may all want to replace our arms, eyes, ears (and tounges?).

You don’t say? Home prices down, sales up?

Who would have thought?

Water that isn’t really water

Spengler believes the root cause of the credit crisis is a demographic one.

Kejda and I are on the Bolt Bus back to New York right now.  $15 from Boston and it has wireless internet (which is slow, but very nice to have).  They advertise more leg room than normal a normal bus, and that may be the case, but the leg room seems about normal (not great).  A lot of people take the Chinatown bus or Amtrak.  The train is more comfortable but I think I’d rather save $50 each way and have internet access.

Peter Thiel, former CEO of PayPal: “In the long run, there are no good bets against globalization”

Stamp prices going up today. Get the government out of the stamp business, please!  This is 2008!

Jacking up capital gains and the Obama effect

College isn’t for everyone.

Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later.

You can talk about energy independence, but many in congress blatantly do not want it. Actions speak much louder than rhetoric, especially in the internet age. How much longer can they get away with this?

• Banning the import of Canadian tar sands?
• Huge tariffs on cheap Brazillian sugar (which we can use for seriously cheaper ethanol production).
• No drilling in ANWAR.

Could this have anything to do with Saudi money buying influence? Let’s see how they try and stop the extraction of oil in the Dakotas, because you know they will.

No business like race business.

683 million guilty dollars.

The Pinball Survivor:

Being inside a pinball machine factory sounds exactly as you think it would. Across a 40,000-square-foot warehouse here, a cheery cacophony of flippers flip, bells ding, bumpers bump and balls click in an endless, echoing loop. The quarter never runs out.

But this place, Stern Pinball Inc., is the last of its kind in the world. A range of companies once mass produced pinball machines, especially in the Chicago area, the one-time capital of the business. Now there is only Stern. And even the dinging and flipping here has slowed: Stern, which used to crank out 27,000 pinball machines each year, is down to around 10,000.

To buy a home in Manhattan, it is going to cost you a few bucks.

Will Microsoft bring back XP?

An electric car for the middle class?

Professional Panhandler… Not so convincing to talk about being unable to eat when you’re a fat pig! I am sure girls can get away with this much easier and elicit lucrative sympathy.