Politics and other nightmares

With talk of the U.S. leaving iraq and Afghanistan, there are mounting calls for a "peace dividend." But we've been there, done that -- we made major military reductions after the Revolution, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War and the Persian Gulf War. As a result, we were ill prepared for the next conflict, and in some cases it could even be argued our downsizing even  contributed to the next conflict. Furthermore:

There are a couple of significant changes in the city's new trash contract:

One step forward:

Future historians will pinpoint Democratic Sen. Harry Reid's energy legislation, released Tuesday, as the moment that the political movement of global warming entered an irreversible death spiral. It is kaput! Finito! Done!

First it was Casual Fridays (which I take very seriously; don't drop by here on that day if you expect to see someone who looks professional). That was followed by Lazy Fridays, the trend from Australia in which workers take off for the pubs at 3 p.m. Now we have the logical extension, Furlough Fridays:

Another office older has "wandered off the Meet the Press reservation (love that phrase) and further blurred the line between politics with entertainment. Yes, it's President Obama,  sitting down to play Roses and Thorns with perhaps the four silliest people on television:

For the past two days, I've been harangued by phone and e-mail and in person over a letter to the editor we published Monday. It spoke against the recent City Council proposal to ban K2:

Discussion of a VAT as a replacement for the income tax is a valuable part of the fiscal policy debate -- for one thing it would "broaden the tax base and make everyone pay for the welfare state that still has substantial political support." But I doubt the conclusion:

What do you know -- some common sense from a Washington Post editorial:

The New York Times does an analysis of the Supreme Court that starts out trying to be scary (if you're a liberal, anyway):

In those five years, the court not only moved to the right but also became the most conservative one in living memory, based on an analysis of four sets of political science data.

Some new buildings in Columbus are higher than the Bartholomew County Courthouse, which means people can look down into courtrooms, so they're spending $8,000 on tinted windows. Is this a legitimate expenditure or the wasting of taxpayer money on paranoid fears?

Commissioner Paul Franke said judges worried that those perches "gave too much of a full view" of the interiors of courtrooms on the courthouse's second and third floors.