Framing the Dialogue

Posts Tagged ‘pennsylvania’

News Briefs – Volume XIV – Upside Down World

News briefs are a collection of interesting news stories and this volume is chock full of stories from an upside down political world…

Brief 1:  The Keystone State (Pennsylvania) has recently announced that they are making changes to their appliance rebate program.  Pennsylvania budget deficit projects are not good so you would expect that a rebate program might be on the chopping block.  Not in Pennsylvania’s upside down world.  It was announced that the rebates are actually INCREASING, some by more than 100%.  In all fairness this is “stimulus” money (federal tax dollars versus state tax dollars). 

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Immigration I Can Live With

Relax I am not for open borders allowing a bunch of people to overtax our economy.  I am thinking about a forced immigration policy where we can go and drag a person back to our side of the border.  We would overly compensate the individual for their inconvenience and allow familial visits or suggest that they bring their family with them.  We could even substitute a similar person.

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The Chinese Are Stealing Our Jobs

CalvinEconomicsAbout a year ago I was asked to participate on a committee (I know yikes a committee) from our local school district.  The idea was to pull together the community to work with district personnel to better prepare students for college and working life.  Our district has an outstanding track record in academics and that is one of the main reasons that we moved here long before we had children of school age.  At one of the first meetings we brainstormed about topics where more emphasis was needed to better prepare our children.

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Environomics

kermit-the-frog“It’s not that easy being green…It could make you wonder why, but why wonder why?  Wonder, I am green and it’ll do fine, it’s beautiful!  And I think it’s what I want to be.”

When Kermit the Frog famously sang these words, being green was not all that popular and that was the point of his song.  Fast forward a couple of decades and green is good.  Green is so good that television networks have green weeks, schools go green, cities go green, and lots and lots of money is steered toward green enterprises.  Investments in green infrastructure is necessary, it is explained, to drive development of the technology.  That is a reasonable position and one taken by most politicians.  Even the staunches fiscal conservative often bows to green energy.

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Life Meanders

1119090658The last 36 hours has been really weird.  Hence the lack of posts for the last two days.  One of the stretches of road that I take to work is a four-lane road characterized by an abundance of traffic signals and they seem to add one more each year.  It is not too bad during off peak hours, but during rush hour it stinks.  I am able to flex my schedule and start early, but the past few months, that has not made much of a difference.

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WTF – Ed Rendell

George WTFTwo things happened this week that were the inspiration of a new series for Framing The Dialogue.  The first was perhaps my favorite poster that was displayed at the September 12 TEA Party in Washington D.C.  Our first president wondering “WTF.”  Evand every time that I see this I just crack up.  In case you did not know, “WTF” stands for “What the Freak” or something less printable on my blog. 

The second incident was when I saw this headline “Gov. Rendell named one of Esquire magazine’s ’75 Best People.’“  That headline worked as I skipped to the article and sure enough our Gov. is one of the 75 best people “in the WORLD.” (emphasis added).  I thought to myself “WTF” and a series was born.

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