He’s still waiting to open.

A mother of eight lives in a £2.6 million rented townhouse, paid for by the local council, because her huge family didn’t fit in council housing. She blames society for any problems she’s had in the past; society has “failed her.”

Teachers are forbidden in hundreds of UK schools from using red ink, because doing so is “confrontational.” Being told you’re wrong in green or yellow is apparently more soothing.

Happy Boxing Day!

One thing the polished Miss Williams did buy into, something that seems to be gaining traction in the progressive hivemind, is the promise of “green jobs.” Senator Obama talked about green jobs and the promise of a new energy economy. I posited that government’s bipartisan management of ethanol, a single energy product, has been so clownish and corrupt as to bring into question goverment’s ability to manage an entire energy economy, one that will presumably have lots of products, many of them more complex than corn-gas, and most of which presumably do not yet exist. I ask if this gives Miss Williams pause. It gives her none. Her response, which is expected, is that if only we get the right people into office, government will be good at doing things that government has never been good at doing before. She really, really seems to believe this when she says it. Sen. Obama seems to believe it, too. I ask Miss Williams how the government should go about bringing us into the clear bright day of green jobs. She answers: training. I ask her if she means that the government should begin training people for jobs that do not exist. She answers in the affirmative. She smiles.

Update: Excellent article from “Reason” on the problems with Obama saying he’ll create green jobs.

Anyway, here’s an economist’s summary of the last debate:

The debate was truly awful. The financial crisis was caused by greed (McCain) and deregulation (Obama). We need energy independence. Our priority is to do everything at once (McCain). We will cut spending by spending more (Obama). We can create jobs.

Let me ignore the rest, and focus on jobs. We can create jobs by getting rid of computers and going back to carbon paper for communication and paper and pencil for arithmetic. We can create jobs by getting rid of electric motors and going back to human power to run factories. As long as wants are unlimited, you don’t need to create jobs.

If the candidates were out to correct economic ignorance instead of pandering to it, the debate would not resemble last night’s in any way. There was no winner. Only losers.

No one except my American companions and I paid them any mind, as if it was completely a normal, everyday thing.

This leads to two questions: Why does Europe, of all places, allow huge dogs in restaurants when they are so highly regulated in other areas?

and

Why doesn’t America, land of the free and home of the brave and a country of dog lovers, not allow even small dogs in restaurants?

It turns out that this is not due to restaurant owners’ choice, or any problems with hygiene, but because of an FDA recommendation the whole nation abides by because states adopt the FDA Food Code. The reasons given are that the dogs could pee on floors and that people might pet the dogs and then prepare food. Toddlers and old people can pee on floors as well, but we don’t ban them, do we? I have never heard of an outbreak of restaurant diseases in Europe do to people bringing their dogs inside, have you?

It’s common practice not just in Austria but in all of Europe to bring dogs into restaurants of any level of service.

So the next time you think that Europe is more highly regulated than the United States, just think of all those poor little friendy puppies recommended by our federal government and forced by our states and localities to be left at home in order for their owners to patronize restaurants, while European dogs lie quietly under the table.

I turned to those watching with me and said, “Could they get away with saying that about any of our other allies? Imagine Biden saying, ‘I’ve been England’s greatest supporter during my 30 years in the US Senate’ or ‘I wouldn’t have joined Barack Obama on this ticket if he didn’t share with me a passion for England.’”

Of course, no at-home swing voter mentioned this in the post-debate follow-ups, the mainstream media hasn’t touched it, and it seems to be perfectly acceptable in America today to love a foreign country, but only if it’s a certain foreign country. I’m glad to see that at least Glenn Greenwald, a very smart guy, was thinking the exact same thing I did during this exchange.

Could Sarah Palinget away with saying “I’m glad to see that we both love Spain” or “I’m so glad you love France, too” during an American debate like this? Just think about it for a minute, and you realize how absurd it is.

There is no doubt that Joe Biden is more articulate than Sarah Palin. However, almost nothing he says makes any actual sense.

Biden doesn’t know basic economics, history and doesn’t give a donkey’s arse about the Constitution. Biden misrepresents himself and what he stands for habitually: this is a guy who was all for invading Iraq if the UN had gone for it (and cheered Bush on with early invasion plans) and now pretends he’s Bush’s worst enemy and implies he was against it all along. This is the Joe Biden who created the completely unconstitutional position of the drug czar, which has spurred the growth of an agency which takes billions from those middle-class people Biden says he loves so much. It’s also put many of them in jail. This is the guy who may want to keep the vice-president’s office in the executive branch, but doesn’t care about expanding federal power over everything in your life under the auspices of “interstate commerce.”

As I always say, if you’re articulate and can speak well, you can get elected to office in this country even if you’re mentally insane, a habitual liar, a serial exaggerator or even a murderer. Voters simply go by what feels good to them at the moment, and a good speaker will fool them every time. Someone with real intellect and substance but no speaking ability won’t get out of the gate. Biden is a plagiarist, but it doesn’t matter because he’s “cool, calm and collected” after 30 years of taxpayer-funded practice, and his staffers can filter the facts on Wikipedia.

I also object to those who have stated that Gwen Ifill was perfectly objective despite her forthcoming Obama book. One of her first questions concerned whether “greedy lenders” or “risky homebuyers” contributed more to the subprime mortgage mess. That is a Hillary Clinton stump line if I’ve ever heard one. The home buyers who were buying houses way out of their leagues were also quite greedy in wanting to live in McMansions they couldn’t afford, and the lenders who were “trying to let people live the American Dream” (as Obama and Biden would put it) were also just being “risky.” That wasn’t the only completely partisan question she asked that night, although she did criticize Joe Biden at one point, a decision I’m sure came into play after she received so much criticism in the run-up to the debate. Another question talked about “debt-strapped mortageholders” and “some people have said that mortgageholders paid the price”– in other words, people who (like the Wall Street billionaires) made bad decisions and are now suffering for it who want other people who didn’t make those bad decisions to give them money.

Palin was excellent in her answer to that question, using a light touch to tell people that they need to learn lessons and not be taken advantage of again and pay attention to their parents’ admonitions to not live beyond their means. She also said that government needed to be more efficient, something Obama is big on but Biden didn’t mention this time around. Tax raises mean that jobs will be cut and the private economy will suffer as the public sector becomes more bloated and inefficient.

Biden’s mantra for the night was “John said, ‘Deregulate, deregulate.’” That alone is quite enough to turn someone away from voting for his ticket, as if deregulation is the problem and as if deregulation is a bad thing. Obama says the same thing, but not to this extent.

Biden did get one hit in when he said that he agreed with Palin’s tax raises on oil companies and McCain wanted to get them tax breaks. I give him props for that, but she got back at him when she said that Biden had offered to run on McCain’s ticket. She made the point that raising taxes on oil companies was good and set Biden up to hit his home run. Palin missed a chance to deliver a knockout when she talked about what she’d done in Wasilla, Alaska to improve it and Biden talked about how Wilmington, Delaware was hurting right now. She could’ve pointed out that she’d improved her hometown but after 30 years in Congress, he hadn’t done much to help his.

I am starting to finally buy into this “liberal media bias” thing. Here are two egregious examples from a quick search of the news.

According to The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Biden provided “oodles of details, numbers and records in his answers” which “might win over intellects,” which ignores the fact that many of his “oodles of numbers and records” were completely wrong. Why would intellects fall for that, and why would intellects be any less into Palin’s arguing that people, for instance, should be smart enough next time not to fall for predatory lenders, rather than flocking for Biden’s argument that these mortgage-holders were too dumb to figure it out for themselves and therefore need to be “saved” by taxpayers?

The Baltimore Sun television critic believes it “is hard to imagine any rational human being not thinking Joe Biden delivered one of the most solid and winning debate performances in recent presidential history… the question is whether facts, reason and logic can win out on TV over attitude and image, which is what Palin’s performance was all about.” Hmm, so Biden is all facts, reason and logic while Palin is all image? I’m beginning to believe that there is a mainstream media liberal bias. Rather than even giving Palin credit for being tolerant of same-sex couples, he says she doesn’t know the Republican position on gays and that evengelicals must have fallen “right out of their seats” when they heard. What the hell?

Ways in which Biden stretched the truth (and ways in which they both did):

McCain did not say he was “surprised” by subprime mortgages last December.
McCain did not say he wants the health care deregulated, only that insurance should be allowed to be bought over state lines.
McCain did not vote the same way Obama did on the tax-raising vote– he didn’t vote at all.
McCain does not only want to give Exxon Mobil a tax cut, but he wants to cut the general business tax rate for all corporations.
Obama has said that he would consider meeting with Iran’s president without precondition; Biden claimed Obama had not said this. It’s not a bad thing, anyway.
We didn’t kick Hezbollah out of Lebanon, and neither did France. Nobody has.

I’ve always secretly disliked Apple, most likely because of its smug Mac apologists who think they’re so much better than everyone else just because of what computer they use and will take whatever junk Apple releases to maintain that feeling. Linux users don’t act like that, even though they would have every reason to because they actually ARE using better computers– and they’re doing it for free.

Anyway, Steve Jobs is now suing New York City over their trademark application for an apple logo (to emphasize the fact that New York City is the Big Apple). Either Jobs remembers when NYC was known as the Big Onion, or he’s reached a new level of madness. “Think Different,” indeed.

I’m not a Bill Gates fangirl, but at least he gives some of his money away and seems like he has a sense of humor– Jobs is just so serious and full of himself and he doesn’t even have a license plate. It’s distasteful. Microsoft also doesn’t name their entire product line “ISomething,” which gets them extra points from me. Bill Gates can also become the richest (or third-richest) man in the world without suspicious Jobs-like stock backdating.

Tags: Steve Jobs, Apple, smug Mac users, Bill Gates, Apple logo, trademark infringement