Welcome back, countrywoman. Welcome back. (^_^)

Who redacted the chapeau?

Shouldn’t it be “granddaughter”?

Mano-pause? Second Childhood?

Try picturing Rush as “Yosemite Sam”.

If what you say is true, then we do not have a “volunteer” army.

What you do on your own is a hobby, volunteers make a commitment to a larger cause.

Obama has suggested a practical incentive for taking on jobs that may not otherwise be economically desirable. Considering the declining interest in rural and family practice, this is a good thing. There is no coercion involved.

Volunteer

To enter into, or offer for, any service of one’s own free will, without solicitation or compulsion; as, he volunteered in that undertaking.
1913 Webster

Some people not only fail to learn from history, but fail to learn from current events as well:
New Exotic Instruments Emerging on Wall Street

Do you know how to ‘touch-type’?

Control-Ash-Delete just doesn’t work for me.

iRetro

When the DJIA first hit 10,000 it made me nervous. I thought that it was rising too fast, that there must be some catch, some ticking time bomb. As we found out the hard way, the time bomb turned out to be exotic financial instruments.

This time I have been paying a bit more attention, and I still see questions.

• How much of this is due to binging and purging in the supply chain, as businesses try to manage merchandise-on-hand in an uncertain economy?
• How much of it is from short-term cost savings due to job destruction?
• How much of it is due to stock price manipulation for bigger bonuses?

From the “doomed to repeat” department:
Back to Business - Wall Street Pursues Profit in Bundles of Life Insurance

Feds’ insider trading wiretap snares IBM heir apparent

From the “with friends like these” department:

Outsourcing is clearly not only a good business, but good for business, as Big Blue has been shifting big chunks of its support and supply chain operations overseas for the past several years.

“We are optimistic about 2009 as we again raise our full-year expectations and we remain well ahead of pace for our 2010 roadmap of $10 to $11 per share.”

Thank you very much, ladies and gentleman, my work here is done for the quarter. I’ll take my stock options now.

What does this milestone mean to me?

• Wall Street has moved into recovery without having diagnosed the disease. Note to self: without fundamental changes to stock market behaviors, the stock market is sure to crash again before I retire.
• Investment accounts, including my own retirement account, are in partial but significant recovery. While this bodes well for the future, it has little immediate effect.
• Those who were generously rewarded for failure are now being generously rewarded for working during the partial recovery. I am still waiting to see some jail time passed out.
• Wall Street analysts continue to chain companies to the next quarterly report, undermining true innovation and forward thinking.
• It illustrates a complete disconnect between the stock market and the mainstreet economy.

Outstanding problems:

• Rampant foreclosures
• Big Business attacks on small businesses.
• The Downsizing of America
• The viability of the American economy under current business practices.

Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

From FDR’s first inaugural address. Sounds all too familiar.

I took a quick look at the companies in the DJIA, and it seems to me that several of them are too global to reflect just the American economy.

Not “cheap” - “cost effective”. It’s an employer’s market. It always seems to be that way. Ironically, it is the employees that keep the economy going.

As to where the paintings came from, it was in the article:

Works by those artists were among some 45 pieces that the first couple borrowed from several Washington museums to decorate their private White House residence and the West and East Wings, the White House press office announced on Tuesday.

“We have one rule: We won’t take anything off public display,” Mr. Cooper said in a telephone interview. Nor will the museum lend a work likely to be requested for an exhibition anytime soon. “That limited us to looking at things in storage,” Mr. Cooper added. “But there’s quite a bit.”

“Michael Smith came to us with a long list of artists and asked me what was available,” Kerry Brougher, chief curator at the Hirshhorn Museum, said in a telephone interview. “There are some very interesting figures. It’s more interesting and shows a greater diversity of art than I’ve seen.”

As for the rest, good points. I understand that x-Presidents now get lifetime Secret Service protection - a fairly recent development.