Lately I've been hearing from certain friends that Obamacare is EVIL.  They're hearing it, they say, from their doctors, and I have to believe they're telling me the truth.  I don't understand why any doctor would favor health care profiteers over a plan--watered down as it may be--that at least makes an attempt to bring some relief to health care abuses, but my own dentist seems to be one of them.  He objects to Obamacare for reasons he didn't make entirely clear, but since he was railing against it while puttering around with a drill deep inside my tooth, I wasn't much for talking about i

Interesting action in the Senate today.  The Republican plan to extend the Bush-era tax rates for everyone failed and the Democratic plan to extend them for all household income up to $250,000 a year succeeded*.  Now the House is expected not to vote on, or to vote down the Democratic proposal and will likely pass the Republican one.  The bill will then go to the Senate, where Reid and company will replace it with the Democratic plan that the Senate passed and send it back to the House.

In the Times today, a professor of philosophy and a professor of government team up to tackle the "Moral Hazards of Drones," and they evoke Plato's tale of Gyges to make the case.

I used to work in Central Pennsylvania — just PA to anyone from there. I was there long enough to realize that Penn State was both a revered institution and an 800 lb gorilla. I suppose that's true of other schools, but I have lots of family and friends who attended or worked for PSU, and still do. 

Loyalty to Penn State and faith in JoePa continues to be very strong. On Saturday, in a stealthy 6 AM maneuver, PSU removed the Paterno sculpture, calling it a "distraction." The faithful are appalled. Even my liberal, union brother-in-law is resentful, claiming that the Freeh report is not the last word in the investigation.