Shorties House Massacre

Naming these “Shorties” items will be a lot easier now that I’ve discovered Horror Movies That Suck, which has reviews if that’s your thing.

How the lottery may kill the Electoral College. Ok, it’s more complicated than that. It turns out that the man behind the movement which “if approved by enough legislatures, would commit a state�s electors to vote for the candidate who wins the most national votes, even if the candidate loses in that state,” thus effectively undercutting the Electoral College, is also the guy who invented the scratch-off lottery ticket.

Not a full-on episode of Security Theatre, but funny nontheless. One fellow feels we are all the way up to Act 456, wherein those confiscated liquid items are dragged behind the security checkpoint, unsupervised. Woe is me, I’m only up to Act XIII! Even Britain, where the whole liquid bomb scheme was allegedly hatched, is relaxing the carry-on rules, wisely saying “We will never compromise on the safety of passengers, but it is right that we continually strive to strike the right balance between properly robust security and arrangements which minimize the burden on passengers and business.” If only we could be so reasonable here in the United States.

“The shocking facts about health care in the United States are well known. There’s little argument that the system is broken. What’s not well known is that the dialogue about fixing the health care system is just as broken.” A nice overview of the problems with health care — or more accurately health care insurance — why most people want the same thing, and why their elected officials aren’t giving it to them.

“As Children Suffer, Parents Agonize Over Spinach” but nobody asks the critical question: Who’s been pooping in the spinach? According to The Washington Post, it is the Government’s fault. Or rather, lax government oversight. God forbid we should hold the actual people who created the problem responsible.

Yes, women do play video games! And that means there are web sites aimed at them, groups of professional, corporate sponsored women gamers, and a clan of women gamers big enough to have a Wikipedia article written about them.

“Statistics indicate times are good, with low unemployment and high productivity. But many voters say rising prices cut into their income.” Oh, and if you’d like a discussion of these issues with more statistics, charts, and econotalk, The Mess That Greenspan Made has laid it all out for you. One telling moment this week was on CNBC, when they had opposing Bond Geeks talking about what the Fed is likely to do at the next meeting. The short version is that nobody knows just yet whether inflation or a “hard landing” is a bigger risk to the economy right now. Maybe we need a new term — something catchy like “stagflation” — to indicate times when the official economic numbers say that things are benign, but people’s experience says otherwise. Of course odds are against that because guys like Larry Kudlow never actually have conversations with Joe and Jane Average.

And finally, if you ever get to wondering whether or not the news you receive is biased, don’t forget that things like Google News exist. They aggregate so you don’t have to try and hunt up all those English language news sites from around the world.