It has largely escaped notice... but the [Indiana] Senate budget rolled out by Senator Luke Kenley strips out the automatic tax refund (or ATR) provision that has been advocated by Governor Mitch Daniels as an important part of his legislative agenda.

Under Mitch’s ATR proposal, the state would automatically return to taxpayer dollars back to taxpayers whenever the state was running a budget surplus (and had a sufficient rainy day fund accumulated as a reserve).

Luke Kenley didn't like that idea...

Yesterday, I wrote that Senator Jim Banks had filed amendment #11 to HB 1001 reintroducing the Automatic Tax Refund (ATR) in the Senate.  But word got out that the amendment was DOA because, get this, it didn’t have the votes!  So, doing some math, if you assume that all 13 Democrats would vote against it, that means at least 12-13 Senate Republicans were willing to vote against it too.  This now means that all hope for the taxpayers is now is in Rep. Eric Turner’s House amendment.  But when you break this down, at least 1/3 of the Senate Republican caucus is willing to stiff taxpayers and the Governor.  And this after he personally asked them for help! - Nick Barbknecht

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 17:24:28 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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New Dell Support Policy: Hang Up On Customers Who Ask to Talk To Your Supervisor

Oh, Dell.  I thought since Jeff kicked you around the block way-back-when, you had learned your lesson.  I thought you had changed.  But here you go, breaking my heart again.

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View From The Porch:

You know you’ve arrived when The Village Voice is snarking about you!

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The federal debt increased $54.1 billion in the eight days preceding the deal made by President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) and House Speaker John Boehner (R.-Ohio) to cut $38.5 billion in federal spending for the remainder of fiscal year 2011, which runs through September.

That's right: even crediting the $38 billion in cuts, the deficit increased more than $15 billion over the last eight days.

Boehner’s argument for why conservatives should be satisfied with this 1/30th reduction of the deficit is that the House GOP is too weak to win.

If you go into a contest with your objective being “as good as we can get,” you will lose.

I didn’t come to Washington to settle for $6 billion less in spending than if I had not been here. I suspect most of my freshmen House friends didn’t either.  That’s barely half a day’s spending at our current pace.  This discussion is simply not credible or serious, and unfortunately, it has not been from the beginning, as the House leadership has made clear.

Think about it another way before you vote: The entire budget cut plans skim 3 percent off the top of our historic $1.65 trillion deficit. That means the side of Big Government got 97 percent of what they want.

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[Canadian Liberal Party leader, and likely prime-ministerial candidate Michael] Ignatieff now claims he has never voted in a foreign country, but quotations from his past suggest he voted Labour in Britain and would vote Democrat in the U.S.

“I am an American Democrat.  I will vote for Kerry in November,” Ignatieff told The Glasgow Herald in 2004.

Ignatieff, a professor at Harvard at the time, was defending his record as a human rights advocate against charges that he had become a neo-conservative who backed then-president George W. Bush...

Despite the statement that he would vote for Kerry, Ignatieff now says he has never voted outside of Canada.

Asked to clarify why Ignatieff once said he would vote for Kerry and why he says now that he has never voted outside of Canada, Ignatieff's spokesman dodged the questions...

British law allows citizens of Commonwealth nations living in Britain to cast ballots. Residents aren't automatically registered to vote and are required to sign up to get their name on the voters list.  According to online records, Ignatieff was registered to vote in Britain as recently as 2002.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 21:33:10 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Charles G. Hill tells all:

This site went live on 9 April 1996 with seven pages...

The dustbury.com domain was obtained in March 1999.  At the time, the counter service I was using had recorded 6,444 visits; I then switched to Site Meter, and set the starting number to 6,445.  The count is currently a bit over 2.1 million.

Originally everything here was hand-coded.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Geezering at 15:53:08 GMT | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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“I don’t want elites setting the rules, because when you look at your elites, they’re not the kind of wise men that they pass themselves off as.” - Mark Steyn

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“Does the fact that we no longer declare any sort of proper war have any impact on the fact that we never get around to peace, either?” - Smitty, at TOM

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“How” I asked the Intern, “in the world does she think I’ve threatened her?”

Intern:  “You’ve made no overt action.  She feels intimidated by you, however, and wished to make an official complaint.  We felt it was better to discuss the matter with you before taking any action, if necessary.”

Me:  “Exactly what did I do?”

Intern:  “Er… nothing, really…. she said she’s intimidated by you, because you talk about people and events that she knows nothing about, and she said it makes her feel stupid.”

Me:  “You’re kidding, right?”

Intern:  “We have to take it seriously, it’s in the manual. ”

...The most concrete statement I could get, after no specific offenses had been cited, was that “I walk around like I’m smarter than everybody.”

I didn’t quit that job until the review few months later wherein I was told, in writing, that I “lack initiative” and ‘frequently overstep my authority”.  In the same sentence.

I have gotten reprimanded for doing too much work and “making everyone else feel inadequate...”

Is it time to throw some dirt on top of Western Civilization?

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 17:04:43 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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One of Britain's oldest tellies - set to go under the hammer later this month - is 75 years old and surprisingly still in working order.

When the Marconi Type 702 was made, in 1936, the BBC had only been broadcasting television shows for three weeks, offering just two hours of programming a day on one channel.

The set has a 12in screen wrapped in a oversized walnut and mahogany cabinet, with a mirror-fitted lid that pops open to reflect the upward facing display out toward the viewer.

It has the original 240/405-line selector switch in place... Around a third of the TV's parts are not original, however, though they were replaced with parts identical to the originals.

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