Pardon me if I seemed to imply you personally were an anti-tax zealot, as that was not intended. But you still are of the mind that taxes can be hyper local AND still be levied in a way that shares the cost of federal parks and interstate commerce. How, pray tell, does one decide who pays, and how much, for federal…

True. It is truly mind boggling that the great number of people who supported the tax breaks for billionaires are mainly from states that receive an amount of federal dollars greater than what they send in. The poor defending the rich at their expense!

No, the issue is that we had no problem using Imminent Domain laws for building the Federal Interstate System, so we could have done the same for the rail lines. The rest of the world has 2 lines, one for freight, one for passengers, and we only had one, as we never planned ahead. We likely should have never had…

Well, then, you really do not believe in a United States of America. You seem to like the idea of a Vaguely Associated Group of Dissimilar Thinking Individual States Who Might Cooperate on Mutually Beneficial Items instead - and I don’t think the VAGDTISWHCMBMI would last very long. Either we are all in this together,…

Why should a taxpayer in Wyoming pay for a tunnel in Boston or a train in California?

Except, power generation projects, nuclear, coal, gas, solar, wind or other, are not government projects. They are approved by governments, but the money comes from the companies building and running them, and they choose what to use to make electricity.

4th Gear: Phones Are Out, Cars Are In

I get that Letterman was wrong to do what he did, but then, it was his job, one that a huge number of people wanted him to do exactly as he did it. Not excusing him being a jerk, but he was paid to be a jerk, not just to young women, either. Equality also means the right to be treated exactly as shitty as everyone…

I don’t think as many people like to shit all over Nissan to be cool, so much as a lot of folks are just so damned disappointed in them, in the way a teacher gets really frustrated with a student who should be excelling based on prior history, but instead just sits around with his thumb up his all all day, phoning it…

Really, at this point, what is Nissan getting out of it? Not much, certainly no more than what Ford got out of Mercury, not Lincoln, as the Mercury models were the blatant rebadges. The Lincolns, at least for a while, had their own models that differed from their Ford siblings.

It really is a good idea. And really, it makes for a good argument that if we have commercial vehicle operator rules in place for heavy duty trucks, and for those who drive others around for a living, that we could - and should - apply that for trucks, for large vehicles of any type, for high powered cars, and for…

Like the anti-abortion crowd, that bastion of the liberal left? Oh wait...

I dunno, ask the anti-abortion folks....

Hah, are you wrong. Drive a Miata. And hear all the chick car jokes? Or a Fiat 500, and have people sneer that you are in a tiny cute car, not one appropriate for you? And have you not heard motorcyclist called organ donors, on a crotch rocket, and yet you say nobody calls out motorcycles? And all those non-tree…

I feel your pain. Native (by birth) Floridian here. And we have actually seen Satan come up from Hell and do very well in the polls here. Sadly, we even saw him move his residency to Palm Beach, mostly as a tax dodge, but still.....

Well, the reports are that the system was 5 minutes away from going full on self destruct during the snowpocalypse, so that makes me think they dodged a bullet. YMMV.

So true. People forget that we didn’t have much internet in 1996, but 25 years later, we have Musk shooting starlink satellites up into orbit because he figures he can make a buck on the demand for bandwidth.

Volvo did try, they really did. The P1800, the Bertone Coupe, stuff like that. And they never really made the sales of the ‘normal’ cars. But they never made a Viper-like car because - why? Nobody would buy it from them even if they did.

You may be right about surgeries going long, but then, why would Doc Asswipe schedule a court date and a surgery anywhere near each other? You know, they have really good scheduling tools, their days are well sectioned, and they know that on surgery days, you don’t schedule without expecting delays. So this court date…

Actually, any surgery is risky. That patient has really good grounds for a huge malpractice suit, and the Medical Board should get involved. This was a stunt, one that involves patient care and professional standards, which both seem to have been breached. People die during minor surgery, ask Joan Rivers - oh wait,…