I live in a unique area - far up in the high desert of Southern California. From my backyard, I can see the southern most end of Edwards AFB. To the north west a bit is El Mirage, a dry lake bed that was formerly noted as a film location, and now is home to our drone building facility. Further out in the desert is the China Lake Naval Weapons Development Station - where all of ...

Fossil fuels, what a name... When I was a boy, the Sinclair Dino was everywhere. The theory at the time was that when the dinosaurs died out, they provided the base product that became oil. Even back then I wondered why they all walked to Saudi Arabia to die. As time went on, the theory was that the basis was the lush plant life of prehistory. Still I wondered how all of those plants got a ...

President Obama has officially come out of the closet and endorsed same sex marriage. He did it in the same clumsy style that he introduced other wedge issues into the campaign - this time by having chief spokes-gaffer Joe Biden throw the subject out there for all of our consideration. We remember this tactic with George Stephanopoulos introducing contraception bans as a question in one of the middle GOP debates. That morphed conceptually into the "war ...

We've all had the headlines screaming at us lately. The Eurozone is in trouble. The poorer nations (snarkily named the PIIGS), who were part of the Eurozone expansion, apparently fudged their numbers when reporting the state of their economies to the member nations. In short, the original Eurozone, laid out a sub-prime loan on an international scale, and the PIIGS are showing us their empty pockets. Oops.

The PIIGS are Portugal, Ireland, Italy, ...

The TSA is back in our sights. Earlier this week they had a 4 year old girl in tears. She was given an enhanced pat down after giving her grandmother a hug at the airport. This was after the girl and her mother had cleared security, and as grandma was clearing security. The girl did what any four year old does. She ran to greet her approaching grandmother with a joyful hug. My boys do it ...

It's Joe again. I'm usually the angry voice of TPP and Common Sense Dictates. I'm not angry today. Just sad, or maybe bittersweet. But I have closure now.

In my first piece here Economic Reality: A Voice In The Crowd  back in October 2009, I was angry and rightly so. Still I kept a reasonable tone. Things were bad, but it looked like the "government" help was well-intentioned, even if it was ineffective. By my second article

There are a fair amount of disappointed conservatives right now. Well, maybe disappointed is the wrong word. They are resigned - resigned to the fact that Mitt Romney will be the GOP nominee. Once again the nod goes to the next guy in line, not to a fire-breathing conservative who will excite us.

History tells us that this is not a good strategy for the GOP. We can cite John McCain, Bob Dole ...

It wasn't the "Fairness Act". It wasn't a lack of listeners. It wasn't even a lack of facts. Still, somewhere along the line, and fairly recently, TalkRadio died as a means to educate people about conservatism and what is going on in DC that will affect all of our lives. We are now left with New Media alone.

What causes this dire proclamation? I listen to Talk Radio on and off - background ...

In the heady days of all of 4 months ago, a jubilant Rick Santorum declared "Game on!" in his unexpectedly good showing in Iowa. Today that game was walked away from. Rick gave a classy speech, with his trademark upbeat message and call for the shoring up of families as the way back to prosperity. We wanted to accord Senator Santorum the respect of not going for the obvious title.

We liked Rick ...

Regular readers know that I like a good math problem. There's nothing like cutting through the numbers to come up with the truth. Numbers don't lie. This time the math problem is not mine. The math is a problem to anyone who is not Mitt Romney.The fat lady is singing right now. Mitt is going to be the nominee. Time to wrap our heads around the idea and figure out how to win in November.

My head is about ready to explode. The vast majority of my readers are engaged, informed and thoughtful, however there are nuts in every box of Cracker Jack. I may lose readership because of this, but someone needs to take this on.

In the course of our Facebook communications yesterday we passed on a story about how Marco Rubio has endorsed Mitt Romney. We commented that this looks like the beginning of the end of the GOP primary process. ...

You stay informed, so you've heard the rumblings. All through the primaries, the Newt people hate the Mitt people, Rick and Newt are asking each other to drop out. And Mitt, well, he's a nice guy, but a little out of touch, and we're not in love. Ron is crazy or scary. We get it. There's no perfect candidate unless we combine the best of each candidate. There have been rumblings of a brokered convention or ...

It's March Madness for more than just the NCAA. The GOP is moving into elimination phase, that could after tomorrow's primaries set the stage for the GOP championship. Two men standing. The final contest to see whether we wind up with Mitt or the not-Mitt in November.

Alabama and Mississippi are the battlegrounds, and both are too close to call according to recent polling. Mitt, Newt and Rick are in the high 20s / low 30s. Over the weekend ...

OK, I can't stand it anymore. We have an economy in the toilet, wars in 10 or 12 countries, with Iran and Syria on the back burner. Real unemployment (the kind that doesn't filter out the people who ran out of unemployment benefits, part timers, and people who have given up all hope of getting a job) sits at 15 - 16%. Gas is rapidly approaching $5 per gallon in my home state of California.

Let's get this straight. President Obama has proposed gutting $500 billion from the military budget. He's cutting 100,000 active duty troops. He wants to reduce our nuclear stockpile by 80% to 300, and he wants to do it unilaterally (no mutual cuts from Russia).

At the same time we are involved in military actions (active troop deployment and/ or destroying things in air, missile and drone strikes) in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia. We are providing military "advisors" ...

Well, no, this was not the last debate - there will be continued debates ad nauseam. I'm just going to stop watching them until it's our guy up against President Obama, assuming that he agrees to debate.I'm stopping because I knew going in how this one was going to go. Rick Santorum was going to get ripped on contraception and earmarks. Mitt was too smooth by a half.Mitt and the current not-Mitt slapped each other around. Newt gave his ...

"Science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul" - Rabelais

Most of you are aware of the controversy of the new rules emanating from Health and Human Services. For those who are not aware, they require all employers to include in their health insurance plans full coverage for contraception, sterilization and the drug RU-486 (alternately called the "morning after" or "abortion" pill). RU-486 is taken after unprotected sex to cause a spontaneous expulsion of a fertilized egg, or embryo, in effect ...

People complain about "party politics" all the time, and how the extremists on both ends of the political spectrum are ruining the process of governing the country. To look at DC, one would think that the GOP and the Democrats were 2 three-year olds fighting over a toy. George Washington decried party politics as destructive. All sorts of tinkering has been tried to "fix" the problem, and it only gets worse.

There is ...

We occasionally revisit issues when the conversation about them is particularly heated or some new ideas spring out of the conversation. Such was the case with our last article Walking On Sunshine

In it we took a dim view of how solar power is being pushed on a market before it is market-friendly. Market-friendly implies a dependable product at an affordable price, or at least a price that most ...

OK folks - this is a consumer protection piece. God knows we love the idea of cleaner energy and energy independence. We just base our strategy in the reality of where we are as opposed to where we can be in a few years. And yes, we can be there in a few years, maybe 8 maybe 12, maybe 20, no one knows when exactly, but it will come. It's just not here now. As Don ...