Wendy Davis, Classic Texas Four-Flusher | RealClearPolitics

This woman should be a politician, no doubt about it.  She's perhaps the perfect example of what politicians need to be good at.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/01/26/wendy_davis_classic_texas_four-flusher_121348.html

These days, The Texan doesn't need a man to come to the little lady's rescue or lead her out of the wilderness. Today, The Texan is a woman herself. In Wendy Davis's case, it's men that got her in this fix. She was a single mother, born into poverty to another single mom, this one with a sixth-grade education. Like her own mother, Wendy was abandoned as a teenager. But she aimed to overcome all that. On the strength of academic scholarships and student loans—and her own brains and grit—she traded the trailer park for Texas Christian University and Harvard Law School. Next stop: the governor's mansion in Austin.  That's the story line, anyway, and it's real bootstraps stuff. But is it true?

I Got Those Old Beat-Up Orion Blues | Military Aviation | Air & Space Magazine

This was a fun read, reminds me of my time flying the mighty Orion.  Very forgiving and versatile, the P-3 became sexier as you put it through its paces chasing subs, and with the other missions the Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance community picked up over the years.
http://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/I-Got-Those-Old-Beat-Up-Orion-Blues-241532641.html?device=iphone

George Will: Doubts over Common Core won’t be easily dismissed - The Washington Post

Many proponents seem to deem it beneath their dignity to engage opponents' arguments, preferring to caricature opponents as political primitives and to dismiss them with flippancies such as this from Bill Gates: "It's ludicrous to think that multiplication in Alabama and multiplication in New York are really different." What is ludicrous is Common Core proponents disdaining concerns related to this fact: Fifty years of increasing Washington input into K-12 education has coincided with disappointing cognitive outputs from schools. Is it eccentric that it is imprudent to apply to K-12 education the federal touch that has given us HealthCare.gov?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-doubts-over-common-core-wont-be-easily-dismissed/2014/01/15/68cecb88-7df3-11e3-93c1-0e888170b723_story.html

Where Have All the Uninsured Gone? - Bloomberg

You all those uninsured who were going to be saved by this enormous intervention into liberty?  Where the heck are they ...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-21/where-have-all-the-uninsured-gone-.html

Resolved: Obamacare Is Now Beyond Rescue - Bloomberg

"In a nutshell, Obamacare has so far fallen dramatically short of what was expected -- technically, and in almost every other way. Enrollment is below expectations: According to the data we have so far, more than half of the much-touted Medicaid expansion came from people who were already eligible before the health-care law passed, and this weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the overwhelming majority of people buying insurance through the exchanges seem to be folks who already had insurance. Coverage is less generous than many people expected, with narrower provider networks and higher deductibles. The promised $2,500 that the average family was told they could save on premiums has predictably failed to materialize. And of course, we now know that if you like your doctor and plan, there is no reason to think you can keep them. Which is one reason the law has not gotten any more popular since it passed."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-21/resolved-obamacare-is-now-beyond-rescue.html

Do you get the feeling that most of those who were i support of the ACA will still be saying "Yes but" to most of these objections?  IOW, because they were personally invested in the meaning of the law - government will help people who need help, damn the costs and loss of liberty! - they will view the law's deep flaws as cosmetic issues that hardly matter in the context of all the good that is surely to come from this political triumph.

George Will: Illinois home-care workers should not be forced into unions - The Washington Post

The Democratic Party is the party of government because it embraces a proposition it has done much to refute — that government is a nimble, skillful social engineer — and because government employees are a significant component of the party's base and of its financial support through government employees unions. Franklin Roosevelt, architect of the modern party, believed unionization would be inappropriate in the public sector. Today's party, however, aggressively uses government coercion to create supposed "government employees" from whom unions can extract money, some of it for the party.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether the Illinois government's policy of herding home-care workers into unions violates the workers' First Amendment rights. It does.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-illinois-home-care-workers-should-not-be-forced-into-unions/2014/01/17/c58bf068-7ed3-11e3-93c1-0e888170b723_story.html

Fascinating Concept

-The modern agricultural system is responsible for putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the actual burning of fossil fuels

-Herds raised according to modern, conventional practices contribute to desertification—turning land into desert—which does not support plant life and photosynthesis, thereby worsening atmospheric CO2 levels

-According to an African ecologist, dramatically increasing the number of grazing livestock is the only thing that can reverse both desertification and climate change

-According to estimates, grazing large herds of livestock on half of the world’s barren or semi-barren grasslands could take enough carbon from the atmosphere to bring us back to preindustrial levels

Integrating biological farming principles can increase plant performance by 200-400 percent. What’s more, not only does it improve the quantity, it also improves the quality of the food you’re growing.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/01/12/grazing-cows-biological-farming.aspx