I’m a bad blogger because I have a real life and have been tied up with other things, so I’m late with this.

First off, Lab Kat is done with her hiatus and has a new address www.labkatblog.com. You are redirected after a dire warning by Blogger, probably because she has returned to a WordPress blog.

While PSoTD has hung up his keyboard, the URL will be expiring on March 1 if someone wants it and the extra hits that might generate for you. He added a post about it.

While Mary Beth is off to law school, EBW has been posting fairly regularly over at Wampum. Good stuff on the international scene, as well as very technical stuff on the Internet and the political structure behind it.

News Writer is one of the newer additions to my blogroll, at Stop The Press!. She deals with the media as an insider.

Catnapping at Odd Neighbor Illustrations provides graphics, poetry, and personal views, not politics.  She has been posting more often recently, and I really like her graphics style. [Read more →]

The Senate goes into recess having done nothing on stimulus, and the best that Obama can come up with is an op-ed piece in the Washington Post. The only people who have even read the op-ed are Villagers and bloggers, while the “dittoheads” are jamming the Congressional switchboards. This is not going to work, and someone needs to have a serious heart-to-heart with the White House about how to pass a bill.

Support for the stimulus is dropping because no one is involving the supporters of the bill, no one is addressing their concerns. All of the changes have been to accommodate the people who oppose it, and they still oppose it. Catch a damn clue – the GOP is not going to vote for a stimulus package that will actually do some good.

Tax cuts are worthless. In January 626,000 more people are unemployed and no longer paying taxes, so they and the millions like them will derive no benefit from tax cuts. Tax cuts are only effective if they are targeted to the middle and lower classes and they occur before the massive lay offs start. They can work for a down turn not for the depression we are looking at.

The time for playing nice and being polite is over. This is a disaster in the making, and we need a stimulus package now. If we don’t spend the money now, there will be nothing left to spend it on in a year. Obama doesn’t need to waste time talking to the Village, he need to fire up the nation to start hammering on Congress. It is pretty damn pathetic that Republican governors have spent more time and energy supporting the stimulus package than the President of the United States.

From CNN: Post-Soviet nations to form military force

MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) — A Russian-led bloc of post-Soviet nations has agreed to establish a rapid-reaction military force to combat terrorists and respond to regional emergencies, Russian media reported Wednesday.

The decision came a day after reports that Kyrgyzstan is planning to close a strategically important U.S. military base that Washington uses to transport troops and supplies into Afghanistan.

On Wednesday, the Collective Security Treaty Organization — made up of Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan — decided on the rapid-reaction force at a Kremlin summit, the Russian news agency RIA-Novosti reported.

And what a lovely group of nations it is, led by former Communist Party bosses and KGB operatives. So much for any liberalization in Central Asia. Just another benefit of the “Global War on Terror”, which is the excuse for this.