If you look at the President’s site for tracking the stimulus spending, you’ll notice $228 billion in tax cuts. That sounds good, right?
But click the link for details and you find that:
- Tax Relief - includes $15 B for Infrastructure and Science, $61 B for Protecting the Vulnerable, $25 B for Education and Training and $22 B for Energy, so total funds are $126 B for Infrastructure and Science, $142 B for Protecting the Vulnerable, $78 B for Education and Training, and $65 B for Energy.
And then you think, uhh, what? How is any of that a tax cut? Did the English language change somewhere and I wasn’t aware of it? How can the politicians do that with a straight face?
According to the Wall Street Journal:
Total state expenditures have grown to $145 billion in 2008 from $104 billion in 2003 and California now has the worst credit rating in the nation — worse even than Louisiana’s. It also has the nation’s fourth highest unemployment rate of 9.3% (after Michigan, Rhode Island and South Carolina) and the second highest home foreclosure rate (after Nevada).
Worse than Lousiana? Oh no!
Yeah, it’s amusing to me that little extra clause in the sentence. But look at the numbers. A 40% increase in five years! No wonder we’re flat broke as a state. And now all the Democrats and union are whining about restricting spending? What do their own households look like? Repeat after me, you can’t spend money you don’t have. You save money when you have extra.
But California doesn’t believe either of those statements.
Yesterday, Kevin DeYoung wrote a blog entry on what he means by Reformed, in the Protestant Christian context. He listed a number of statements, and they are all positive and God-focused, so it really hit me about expressing our hope.
Here are a few:
- I marvel at God’s holiness, that he is independent, pure, good, and utterly beyond me.
- I glory in God’s goodness, that he should save a wretch like me, totally undeserving, bent toward evil in all my faculties.
- I rejoice in God’s sovereignty, that he chose to save me for the praise of his glory, not owing to anything I did or would do or any potential in me.
DeYoung is one of the authors of Young, Restless, and Reformed, which is a pretty good book. I read it recently.
A senior U.S. lawmaker said Thursday that unmanned CIA Predator aircraft operating in Pakistan are flown from an airbase inside that country, a revelation likely to embarrass the Pakistani government and complicate its counterterrorism collaboration with the United States.
The disclosure by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, marked the first time a U.S. official had publicly commented on where the Predator aircraft patrolling Pakistan take off and land.
Well, that’s unfortunate. Well done, Senator Feinstein.
To be fair, her spokesman later tries to insist she was quoting from a Washington Post story from last year. But that was never mentioned at anytime.
I just copied Tellico trunk into trunk/playground/office/tellico on the KDE SVN server. You can check out the sources from anonymous SVN by using:
svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/office/tellico
I’ll be working on checking out the build system, the i18n generation, etc. and then full-speed ahead with Tellico 2.0!
Tellico 1.3.5, a.k.a. “Valentine’s Reward” dedicated to my wife (!), is available. The md5 sum is ca5d9db11fa1dd33dfe317ffe095435c if you care. This is expected to be the last release of Tellico for the KDE3 desktop, unless some unforeseen bug shows up.
Changelog:
That last bullet may be of interest to you if you have very large collections. The performance is drastically better for loading Tellico data files. The SAX loader will likely be the default for the next major release of Tellico.
This is the first time I built and ran the KDE3 version of Tellico on my shiny new KDE 4.2. desktop, so I hope I got the package built correctly. Let me know if something seems to be amiss.
Big plans for Tellico are coming up. I hope to get version 1.3.5 released this weekend, with a slew of mostly minor bug-fixes that have been made since 1.3.4 came out last September. That will probably be the last release in the 1.3 branch as well as the last release for the KDE3 platform.
I’m taking the opportunity now, with the jump to KDE4, to do something I’d considered for a while. I requested and received a KDE SVN account, and I plan to eventually move Tellico into the KDE Extragear module. There’s a whole process for moving into KDE SVN, so first Tellico will be in playground, then in kdereview, then, I hope, eventually in the office category for Extragear.
I won’t be importing all of Tellico’s history. It will just be a snapshot upload and moving on from there. The advantages that I hope for in moving onto the KDE server are:
Novell Forge has been very dependable in the last year or so after a bit of a rocky start. I really appreciate their generosity in offering project hosting. I’ve not yet decided what I’ll do with the mailing list.
I’d also like to say that I really appreciate the help of everyone who has contributed patches, bug reports, translations, artwork, donations, and even the occasional encouraging email. This is fun stuff! In particular, with the recent work to port to KDE4, Regis Boudin and Petri Damstén have been contributing a lot of code and expertise.
After 1.3.5 gets released, I’ll import a copy of Tellico’s trunk into KDE playground, and we’ll go from there. Happy collecting!