Medary.com

The Panama Canal-Ft. Lauderdale to San Francisco-20-night Voyage, May 6-26, Regent Seven Seas Navigator

Text by Snookums, Pictures by Filbert

Part One

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May 5 (Wednesday, Day 1, Flying to Ft. Lauderdale) -

The traveling party in their usual positions: Snookums on the phone, Mom and Dad reading, Judy doing something mysterious and inexplicable (or at least not visible from this angle), and Filbert (not shown here) taking pictures of the foregoing . . .

We left our house at 8:30 AM and stopped at Mom and Dad’s to get them and Judy for the trip to the airport. Our flight to St. Louis was delayed since the co-pilot seat was broken.

More after the jump . . .

Shocker… Far Left Progressives Have Low Levels of Economic Knowledge -- which comes from this story:

Economic Enlightenment in Relation to College-going, Ideology, and Other Variables: A Zogby Survey of Americans -- Haven't I been saying for a while that a particular trait of leftism/liberalism/"progressivism" is economic illiteracy? The proof is in this Zogby survey analysis.

SDSU beats ORU twice

Least Successful P.R. Campaign Ever? -- "Notwithstanding relentless negative coverage in the press combined with positive reports on protests against the law, and condemnation by President Obama and many other prominent politicians, Rasmussen finds that nationally, 59% of voters favor a law like Arizona's."

Have people begun to totally tune out and discount anything what Obama and the Democrats say? If so, it's about time . . .

Team Obama Says If There’s a Successful Terror Attack – The US Will Attack Pakistan -- And, related to the immediately above: Does Pakistan take Obama seriously? Does anyone in this world, except hard-core partisan Democrats in the United States?

Oh the Irony: "America is Back!," Baby, But The Magazine Proclaiming This Just Might Go Out of Business -- Newsweek magazine, circling the drain . . .

Nuance: 31% of Birthers approve of Obama’s job performance -- "Enjoy this now because it’s straight down the memory hole tomorrow."

The unintended but foreseeable consequences of Obamacare

Two of the industries that traditionally offer work to members of these groups are leisure/hospitality and retail. As Furchtgott-Roth explains, many of these employers do not provide their employees with health insurance, and both sectors have large percentages of part-time workers. Obamacare threatens to raise costs in these sectors because every employer with more than 50 workers will either have to offer health insurance or pay an annual penalty of $2,000 per worker. For part-timers, employers will pay $2,000 for each "full-time equivalent worker," a block of 30 weekly hours of part-time work by the same or different employees. Employers thus have a strong incentive not to employ more than 50 workers. By avoiding that threshold, they won't have to provide health insurance and will gain a cost advantage over competitors.

See? All it takes is a rudimentary, passing acquaintance with the very, very simple-to-comprehend economic law of supply and demand--of the balancing of demand and supply against a price point.

Here's the basic theory:
If you raise the price of something, people will consume less of it. If you lower the price of something, people will consume more of it.

Now, here's the leap of logic which seems to escape Democrats:
Business owners are people.

They make decisions based on what is best--financially--for their companies.

Obamacare raises the cost of hiring people. Therefore, businesses will inevitably do less of it.

Too simple and straightforward for those wise and wonderful Ivy-League-educated Democrats in Washington to get their minds around, I guess.

Kendall has plugged club’s leaks behind the plate

Big 12 athletic directors meet with Pac-10 counterparts

College buzz | NCAA getting tough on tough guys

Revisions — Dialogue

Grape-loving moth invades Calif.'s wine country

Hyperventilating on Venus -- "I bought off on the “runaway greenhouse” idea on Venus for several decades (without smoking pot) and only very recently have come to understand that the theory is beyond absurd."

New Nerve Cells, Even in Old Age -- In mice, anyway . . .

Politics and Economics: A Deadly Mixture -- Separation of church and state has worked fairly well . . . how about a separation of wallet and state?

Used Car Prices Rise as Administration Declares Victory on Cash for Clunkers -- As I recall, pretty much everybody who understood the first thing about economics predicted that this would be the exact result of "Cash for Clunkers:" higher car prices for the people who can least afford to pay higher prices for cars--those who can't afford new cars but must rely on the used-car market. Your all-knowing government bureaucrats at work as usual--chopping the little guy off at the knees while simultaneously promising him the ability to run faster. It's sweet for the bureaucrats and the power-lusters when the rubes fall for it.

Democratic Leader Al Sharpton: “The Dream Is to Make Everything Equal in Everybody’s House” (Video)

Royals notebook: Ka’aihue says improved mind-set fueled surge

The long and the short of it -- writing . . .

Re-Write Wednesday: I Had to Do This

Fake It Til You Make It -- writing . . .

Flag semiotics and the First Amendment at school -- "Yes, the school administrators who made this decision should be fired, and replaced by people who understand their job." My thoughts exactly.

Simon Cowell Endorses Britain’s Conservative Party

As ‘The Hollywood Reporter’ Chuckles Along, Seth MacFarlane Crudely Trashes Sarah Palin

I Like Socialism. Also Capitalism. Also Family Values.

A Greek Tragedy in the Making

CBO: Doc fix will cost more than anyone thought -- What was the rush to pass Obamacare about? Was it, as it certainly seems, a desperate effort to get it rammed through before everybody understood just how bloody expensive and wrong-headed it was? Was it just to collect a political "win" for the Democrats at the expense of the American people as a whole? Is that what it was all about? It certainly looks that way.

European Markets Respond to Uncertainty With Additional Uncertainty, Concern, and Extremely Pissy Uncertainty

Hey, let’s put an atheist on the Supreme Court

Was Times Square Bomber An “Unhinged Liberal”?

The Best Spaceships in Written Science Fiction

Sports briefs: SDSU baseball adds four

American oligarchy? -- "Noting that the upper reaches of the investment banking industry are overwhelmingly Democratic, Caldwell argues that "there is nothing 'curious' about a president seeking to arm his most reliable supporters with political power." Indeed, according to Caldwell "the intermarriage of financial and executive branch elites could only have happened in the Clinton years, simply because there is not sufficient Republican manpower in New York's investment banks to permit it.""

The traditional (and current) party of oligarchies and machine politics is the Democratic Party. The traditional (and current) party of political and social reform is the Republican Party. Sorry to burst everybody's balloon, there. But the fact remains that by any objective standard, it is the Democrats who wish to--conservatively--extend the current New Deal/progressive policies that have been enacted for the past century, and that are at the root of our current financial (and, arguably, most of our social) problems today. It is the Republicans (or, more accurately, the politically disaffected Tea Partiers, who are trying to drag the Republicans along kicking and screaming) who are the true forces for change, reform, and real progress in America today.

It's not morning. And these aren't the latest links. The next few Whips are Catch-Up Whips from the past few days. This may take a while, but here we go:

Somali pirates hijack Yemeni cargo ship