Texas Picks Winners and Losers

Rule of thumb: picking winners and losers is bad if Barack Obama's Washington does it. It's good if Rick Perry's Texas does it. That's the kind of contradiction that makes American politics inscrutable to foreigners and infuriating to the ever-shrinking middle of the American electorate in between the party bases.

Under Mr. Perry, Texas gives out more of the incentives than any other state, around $19 billion a year, an examination by The New York Times has found. Texas justifies its largess by pointing out that it is home to half of all the private sector jobs created over the last decade nationwide. As the invitation to the fund-raiser boasted: "Texas leads the nation in job creation."

Yet the raw numbers mask a more complicated reality behind the flood of incentives, the examination shows, and raise questions about who benefits more, the businesses or the people of Texas.

Source: New York Times.

After the jump, a big loser in Texas.

OTBR: An Olympic Rowing Course in Australia

Latitude: S 33° 43.560
Longitude: E 150° 40.812
A child on a road trip with his family asks, "Where are we?" and the father answers, "Let's check the map. We're off the blue roads [the Interstate Highways marked in blue on the road atlas]. We're off the red roads [the US and state highways]. We're off the black roads [the county highways]. I think we're off the map altogether." It was always my dream to be off the map altogether.

After the jump, a few of the random places (and I mean random literally) that I visited vicariously last month that are "off the blue roads".

Richardson Leaves ICLEI

From David Chenoweth's blog comes word that the City of Richardson is dropping its membership in "ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability." I assume that this doesn't mean that Richardson's interest in sustainability is waning. Or that it thinks sustainability is best accomplished with a go-it-alone approach.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves here. You probably have never heard of ICLEI. If you have heard of it, the chances are it was through some right-wing channel that views it as part of a worldwide conspiracy to impose socialism, herd you into cities, confiscate your guns and pickup trucks, and force you to use contraception and abortion to control population growth. Or something like that.

After the jump, let ICLEI introduce itself to the rest of us.

Repeat Tweets: America Votes

Repeat tweets from November, 2012:

• 1 Nov 2012: A British look at the election: "America could do better than Barack Obama; sadly, Mitt Romney does not fit the bill." economist.com
  
• 1 Nov 2012: Today I've read three different calls for Obama's impeachment. Could GOP be reconciling themselves to defeat and moving on?
  
• 1 Nov 2012: Yelling at Nate Silver is like yelling at a thermometer. We're learning just how many news pros just don't get math. nytimes.com
  
• 1 Nov 2012: The good news of Daylight Saving Time: you get an extra hour of sleep Sunday. The bad news: the election campaign is extended another hour.
  
• 2 Nov 2012: Headline: "Sandy cost $50B." When will business decide the cost of ignoring global warming is higher than the cost of addressing it? #Sandy
  

After the jump, more repeat tweets.

Big Ten Champs -- Rose Bowl Bound

Everything's coming up roses. The Wisconsin Badgers defeated the Nebraska Cornhuskers 70-31 Saturday night in the Big Ten Championship game to earn their third consecutive trip to the Rose Bowl, the "Granddaddy of them all," where they'll face the Stanford Cardinal on January 1, 2013. It was reported that Bucky Badger was on suicide watch during the game, the football team torturing him, forcing him to do so many push-ups. Go Badgers, the best 8-5 team in the country! ;-)

Look back on last year's Rose Parade and Rose Bowl game.