Recent Comments

1. about 19 hours ago on Michael Ramirez

   “Some of these posters seem to forget that much of the foreign aid money is actually money that the recipients use to buy weaponry and other goods from US companies.”

   How about spending that money on American infrastructure and the needs of American citizens?

2. about 19 hours ago on Michael Ramirez

   Not our border. Not our problem.

3. about 19 hours ago on Dana Summers

   Biden doesn’t understand that “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is a novel, not an operations manual.

4. about 19 hours ago on Ballard Street

   Having become frustrated with his inability to lick his “you know what” like his dog, Rocky, Neal finally hit upon the idea of sitting on a chair affixed to the top of a ladder.

5. about 19 hours ago on Bob Gorrell

   “I think he (Biden) has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."

   Robert GatesDuty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

6. about 19 hours ago on Gary Varvel

   “I had no idea that you were a bee or that you believed in regulation of anything. Apparently you’re not as maga as I thought you were.”

   I believe in regulation where and when it is necessary. This country has gone overboard with regard to regulation, much of which is unnecessary and purely punitive … often favoring crony capitalists and their buddies on Wall Street and in DC. Over the last 30 years or so, as I have watched Democrats and Republicans fleece citizens for penny they can extract from them, I have become a big fan of the Kingfish … Huey P. Long. Long, a bona fide populist, scared the bejeezus out of Franklin Roosevelt and the leadership of the Democrat and Republican parties. He was a serious threat to their grip on power.

7. 2 days ago on Michael Ramirez

   “Yeah. Let’s criticize a politician for something he said 40 years ago that turned out to be wrong. Meh.”

   Biden’s political career has been an uninterrupted 50-plus year string of screwups.

8. 2 days ago on Michael Ramirez

   Joe Biden … the empty suit occupant of the White House.

9. 2 days ago on Gary Varvel

   “Legislatures have made a mess of higher education.” Ummm, no, COLLEGES

   BZZZZZZT! There is a direct tie between deregulation of tuition by state legislatures and rapidly rising tuition assessments. This has been covered probably thousands of times in articles and commentaries posted on the internet. Nearly all point out that deregulation of tuition gave colleges carte blanche to increase tuition at rates far in excess of average inflation. Backing up in time 10 years, you can find a brief but cogent commentary on the matter in the December 2014 issue of Texas Monthly. While the commentary deals specifically with Texas, the writer’s observations re: the effects of deregulation on tuition are applicable in every state that endorsed that nonsense:

   Check out: Taking on Tuition Deregulation. Texas Monthly, December 8, 2014.

   A key paragraph from the commentary:

   A different spin on that argument is that higher education, in Texas, is oligopolistic; the state’s top public universities could hike tuition to $50,000 a year and still fill their freshman classes twice. Further, by triggering a rise in tuition costs, the 2003 deregulation has arguably forestalled equity improvements; a new study finds that more Hispanic first-time college students would have enrolled between 2003 and 2007 if not for the swelling prices. And then there are the questions of what the university administrators are actually doing with the money: UT Austin may be twice as expensive as it was ten years ago, but is it twice as good?

10. 2 days ago on Gary Varvel

    “Unfortunately I too have met some people who have chosen to be perpetual students and after lots of years and money still have no marketable skill or experience to secure employment. Thankfully in my experience these are the exception.”

    I’ve met a few “perpetual” students … none at the schools were I earned my degrees. They were typically majors in liberals arts or social “sciences” (I encapsulate sciences in quotation marks because I find there is nothing about them that embraces scientific methodology as spelled out by Karl Popper). I ran into several in Boulder, CO … people who were working on their second post-docs and others who just could not seem to finish their undergrad or grad degree programs. Twenty miles south of Boulder, undergrad and grad students at Colorado School of Mines were aching to move on.