Phoenix Woman

Imagine a car wrapped in the stuff. You could make a hybrid sedan, or give the Tesla sports car a genuine 200-mile range. Now imagine skyscrapers and apartment buildings wrapped in the stuff. Even the least efficient buildings could generate a large chunk of their own energy. At the very least it would relieve a lot of stress on our aging power grids.

Mondragon has become so successful that the United Steelworkers have adopted it as the model for the reboot of their union co-op enterprises. If the Mondragon model can be made to work around the world, there is hope for humanity.

I have come to bury Thatcher, not to praise her. The evil that she did lives after her; The good was so minimal as to be nonexistent.

The former Senator from Playgirl, having been turfed out by the voters of Massachusetts last year, is doubling down on the stupidity and looking to run against another wildly-popular female political figure — and is planning to move to another state to do it.

This is all stuff that we’re told to ignore, because when the authorities try to point it out, conservatives with lots of money backing them up start screaming and pressuring the government via their tame congresscritters to back off.

Maybe if teachers were actually free to teach as opposed to being made to “teach to the test” and being made into profit vectors for some corporate entity that might as well be turning out tires for all it cared about education, the quality of our schools would improve and all this cheating for dollars would be unnecessary.

The last week and a half has been filled with many examples of Conservatives Behaving Badly. But there are two incidents in particular on which I want to focus because to my eyes they may represent a mini-trend: Two incidents where conservatives bashed non-conservative elected officials by using the children (and grandchild) of these officials as political punching bags.

The latest turn in the implosion of the Daily Caller‘s months-long effort to smear US Senator Robert Menendez has been the sudden self-injection of none other than Roger Stone into the public debate on this topic, via a series of somewhat desperate-sounding late-Sunday night tweets, all done in the space of an hour.

Did Roger Stone and/or The Daily Caller suborn perjury to smear Bob Menendez? Paging Peggy Noonan! After all, she’s the one who said that it’s irresponsible not to speculate.

Hat tip to Boing Boing for passing along this juicy bit of Sunlight Foundation news concerning Mike Rogers (R-MI) and his love of that sweet, sweet CISPA lobby money.