First, some smart guys sat around and asked the question....did "cash-for-clunkers" work? They collected data, analyzed, and finally poured out a report. What the Texas A&M University study said....was that cash-for-clunkers....was a failure. Most people who did the deal, swapped their old vehicle for a fairly reasonable or cheaper vehicle replacement (there weren't that many examples of people going for upscale vehicles or the $30,000-type cars). The older cars flipped into the system were all required to be destroyed....so the secondary market suffered. Total lost? If you count the two issues....around six-billion-dollars. That's tax revenue that we all generated, which went down the tubes in a bogus way.
Second, the feds keeping hinting of Ebola-testing at airports and preventing the disease from entering the country. News reporters finally got around to asking the FAA, TSA, and such....what kind of Ebola testing? And there is no clear answer coming from the Fed guys. What you see....is some guy in a blue uniform simply doing a temperature scan of your forehead. Got a fever, you get asked where you come from....otherwise, you go on. It's kinda like the Grandma method of checking you prior to school....feeling your head and noting you have a fever or perfectly OK. No real science....just Grandma logic. This kinda makes you wonder if Grandma's ways were right, or if we are just blowing hot-air out in our chatter about preventing Ebola from entering the US.
Third, the President described criticism of his Iraq strategy as "Horse-Sh*t". It's an odd term for the President to use....mostly because he's never been quoted in his life using the term. This kinda suggests that someone around him used the term, and he just carried it over and used it for himself. Will this be a trend....the President uttering "Horse-Sh*t" every two or three weeks? I kinda doubt it. Course, the other thing I might wonder is that he's burned out and tired...causing him to let loose with a profanity term once or twice a week now. As for the Iraq strategy? Yeah, it's a pretty bogus deal....but I wouldn't get worried about it. We have a screwed up economic strategy, a bad immigration strategy, a border failure strategy, and at least twenty other strategies which aren't going nowhere and apparently stagnant. The President would have to utter "Horse-Sh*t" forty times a day....to get anyone worried about these failures.
Fourth, I noted some gal from Arkansas...arrested by the cops for the death of her kid, and possibly the husband. What the cops generally say is that both "Wanda" and "Bob" (my names for the couple) were doing meth (possibly in the extreme), and got to the point of being paranoid....delusional....and lapsing away from reality. They felt unknown characters were after them.....packed up and went off into the hills of Arkansas. There, they must have done more meth.....conjured up more imaginary characters, and apparently thought each other was one of the imaginary characters....attacking one another. All of this led the wife to "go for help"....leaving the kid with the husband (or the conjured evil person, depending on your state of mind). Cops come later to find the kid dead, and the husband dead. All of this leads me to this observation of America. At any given time....at least ten thousand Americans are doping up and high off meth....to the degree of imagining Teddy Roosevelt sitting in their presence, talking to Thor about women, or sitting for a coffee chat with Madam Curie of French radiation fame. Somehow, we are in the midst of some zombie era, and just lucky to survive each and every day.
Fifth, I came to note from my local German news....a bunch of political genius types from Bremen are chatting up a storm on the idea of fixing the brothel and hooker business. Oh, they don't want to get rid of the business structure....but they'd like to start a wage-system. Course, you'd ask why? It would create a fairness in the hooker trade....at least by a bureaucratic mentality. So you can imagine this strategy....sexual act "A" would cost X, sexual act "B" would cost Y, and sexual act "C" would cost Z. Yeah, some government guy would determine the value of each act, and then set the city or county standards to that act. You can imagine the position created for this job....the back-ground required....and how you'd frame these cost comparisons for people to understand. Basically, I suspect within a year....all hooker trade within Bremen would be zeroed-out and four-hundred local hookers would have moved just beyond the city limits....admitting that government help just screwed up the business more than it was already.
Sixth and final.....at some point in July....the government via various contracting elements....was trying to find various places to house hundreds of thousands of illegal alien teens who are in the US and can't possibly be sent back. They were to the point of examining warehouses....possibly converting them over into some kind of dorm....and making it livable. The cost of converting a simple warehouse into a living quarters for four-hundred teens? I'd take a guess that just furniture alone for one warehouse...would be $150,000. Bathroom facilities for one building? Figure around $400,000 to set up enough toilets and showers. The watch-crew for four hundred punks at one location? Figure three shifts a day and enough people to run this operation for seven days a week.....365 days a year? At least forty hired helpers, and a dozen managers/nurses. Billions could be spent on this strategy. It'd be cheaper to ship the kids back to Honduras or El Salvador....paying them each $75 a day in cash....just to sit around there.