From Doug Ross' blog: Old Soviet jokes become reality

In a guest post by Red Square on Doug Ross' blog, we learn that "Old Soviet Jokes Becomes Reality" in Obama's America.

Below is a picture of a bread line--sometime around 1990--in Riga, then the capital of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. What's really ironic is that even in the so-called enlightened times of Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika, there still wasn't enough bread to go around.

Under ObamaCare, will there soon be long lines for health care?

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(Photo) Antelope Island and sagebrush

Mrs. Marathon Pundit is ill with gall bladder problems. She's hospitalized nearby and hopefully will be back home on Tuesday. So this post is of course dedicated to her.

With Little Marathon Pundit, she visited Salt Lake City, Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Park in August.

This is a photograph she took at Antelope Island--which is in Great Salt Lake.

I took a fancy to this picture because of the cloud pattern--and what appears to be sagebrush near the shore.

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ILL-inois: Unions to protest pension reform bill hasn't been filed yet

While a bipartisan legislative committee has devised a plan to fix Illinois' worst-funded-in-the-nation public pensions, no legislation has been filed. As of this writing there is no bill to read, although members of the General Assembly have been briefed on it.

Still, a bill may be voted on as early as Tuesday.

But that hasn't stopped Big Labor from organizing protests against the bill.

From AP:

Up against a determined effort to curtail state employees' retirement benefits, Illinois' unions are staging an all-out campaign to thwart approval of a breakthrough proposal to solve the state's $100 billion pension crisis, specifically targeting a small contingent of moderate Senate Democrats.

The effort includes plans to flood lawmakers' offices with retirees this week as they return to the Capitol beginning Monday, in addition to an ongoing phone campaign aimed at members of both the House and Senate.

Of course the bill should be made public and adequate time is needed for analysis, but that's not the ILL-inois way.

Nancy Pelosi infamously said of ObamaCare that "we have to pass the bill so you can find out what's in it."

Big Labor is compelled to protest a bill before they know what's in it.

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(CNN video) Not fixed after deadline, ObamaCare site crashes during sign-up

It's December 1 and the ObamaCare website--two months after its botched launch--was supposed to be fixed by November 30.

It's not on December 1, as CNN discovered this morning.



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100 years ago today: Ford operates first moving assembly line

1917 Model T Ford

America and the world was forever changed by the moving assembly line. It was 100 years ago today when Henry Ford installed the first one to build Model T automobiles. Ford slashed the time to manufacture a car from 12 hours down to two hours and thirty minutes.

Ford did it without federal government subsidies--or any federal assistance at all.

Flash forward a century--the feds can't even operate a website to sell insurance after three years of what passes for work in the public sector.

Business--not government--creates prosperity.

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