And I don't pay half as much attention as some of you lot...I don't know how or why we do it to ourselves, sometimes I think the apolitical pay no attention crowd has it right.  Ignorance is bliss.

But seeing the Prisoners of 2nd Ave. w/ the stupendous Jimmy Vivino in a packed little club Saturday lifted my spirits big time...lots of Traffic, lots of The Band, some Buffalo Springfield...and the greatest live version of the Moody Blues "Question" I ever heard.

The lyrics seemed poignant as ever...check 'em out y'all.

Forbes link

"The proposal would do away with (for everyone presently under 55 years of age) the current single payer government system for senior medical care and replace it with a program whereby seniors would choose private health insurance coverage from a menu of approved private health insurers. The government would subsidize the program by giving seniors a voucher to be used in purchasing coverage, the amount of such payment to be defined according to need.

Does any of this sound familiar?

I'm sure there's stuff going on. I'm not interested enough to go find out what it is. Apathy is taking over.

Obama has said that "it is up to us".

You must be under the impression that it is up to him.
No.
It is up to us.

There is no time for apathy.
There is no time for down time.

It is up to us.

We must put our shoulders to the wheel, our noses to the grindstone and put our best foot forward.

The future lies not before us, but behind us in the dustbin of forgotten tomorrows.

We must work.
We must sacrifice.

The US Department of labor has sent a request for reimbursement saying if Governor LePage of Maine is going to remove the mural from the state Labor Department he has to give back the money used to create it.

The department said Monday that LePage violated the terms of a federal grant that paid for most of the mural's $60,000 cost when he removed the artwork from state offices last month.  
...
The mural was created in large part with a federal grant that provided 63 percent of the cost of art work. Gilbert's letter said the state must return 63 percent of the current fair market value of the mural, which could now be higher than the $60,000 it cost to create it. link

And, hey, Butler's the team who's been here before. I think experience will play a factor, and enough of one to get the Bulldogs a national title.

But, as BTD does, I also like the under.

The assisted suicide of a woman who wanted to escape old age has reignited the debate about euthanasia.

Nan Maitland, 84, a right-to-die campaigner, was not terminally ill but suffered from arthritis and said her life consisted of `more pain than pleasure'.

The issue at question here is the integrity of the readings made by thousands of land-based temperature stations. Watts has long argued that, for a number of reasons, surface stations have exaggerated global warming over the past century. His argument is laid out in detail in a rebuttal letter written in response to Muller's testimony. To his credit, Watts has put some muscle behind his assertions; he leads a team of volunteers who have spent many hours locating and documenting problematic surface stations.

For years, the mainstream climate science community has responded to Watts' assertions with the argument that the potential anomalies in surface station temperature readings have already been accounted for.

Muller however, has not been part of that consensus. His Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project was explicitly designed to take into account the anomalies identified by Watts and others. Watt's team even shared their painstakingly accumulated surface station data with BEST -- "in confidence," according to Eschenbach.

Then came Muller's testimony:

   

Many temperature stations in the U.S. are located near buildings, in parking lots, or close to heat sources. Anthony Watts and his team has shown that most of the current stations in the US Historical Climatology Network would be ranked "poor" by NOAA's own standards, with error uncertainties up to 5 degrees C.

    Did such poor station quality exaggerate the estimates of global warming? We've studied this issue, and our preliminary answer is no.

No. There is a lot of squawking now -- from both the left and the right -- about whether Muller should have given any kind of answer to Congress in advance of publishing his conclusions in a peer-reviewed journal. But I am 100 percent certain that if Muller had said "our preliminary answer is yes," there would have been hosannas of joy and exultation coming from the climate skeptic community. In testimony before Congress, Muller directly contradicted a theory that is at the heart of the brand of climate skepticism most associated with Watts Up With That? And he used Watts' data to do it. That's gotta hurt.

Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation's income--an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.

Finally, if progressives organize independently, perhaps President Obama might do something about the stunning economic inequality corroding our nation, as he woos our votes to get reelected. I still have a gut belief that Obama shares our values, and he might show us that in his second and last term. But we're more likely to push him that way if we work to build a constituency behind policies that make this country work for everyone again, rather than flock to join a corporate juggernaut masquerading as a grass-roots movement in Obama 2012.

Thus I have other political interests and priorities beyond Obama 2012, for now. And I think I'm going to have a lot of company.

I was curious what they looked like

But with coffins in the U.S. costing around $2,000 on average - with bronze and copper versions going for more than $10,000 - Hainsworth caskets are a relative bargain.