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Tag Archives: grouchy

Imperium

As It Was, So It Is

He sat on the other side of the bookshelf. He had red hair and shining eyes. He was fit and tall and walked with confidence and certainty as he came and went. There was a poster on the wall above his desk. It had an F-16 fighter in some kind of banking turn or attack […]

On Defining the Problem

In a recent interview, James Galbraith said this. [They are] not going to escape the consequences of this. […] it’s a choice that [they] can, and I’m sure, will make. But what is necessary is to state clearly what the choice actually is. In this particular conversation, he was discussing Germany and the Eurozone and […]

Not Too Big to Leave

No Personal Banker For You “I’d like to close my account,” I told the teller. She told me I should sit down and wait for a personal banker. I sat down at waited. Across the vast, empty expanse of the bank, a couple personal bankers were busy helping other customers. And when it got to […]

I Have Some Suspiscions

Bobby Jindal quoted in The National Review carrying the water for the haters: I suspect that many in the Obama administration really don’t believe in private enterprise. At best, they see business as something to be endured so that that it can provide tax money for government programs. [Jindal, TNR] Really. Is that so? And […]

The Bank Down the Street

1. Down on the Corner There’s a bank on the corner just down the street. It has a spacious lobby, lanes of drive-up tellers, a fancy building with tinted windows to resist the grueling heat of the summer. And its grounds are dying. The grass and the bushes and the trees around it are dying […]

Us and Them

GNP 275

She groaned out loud and hit the steering wheel with her hands—not typical Trudy. “What?” I asked. I thought we had forgotten something. “I can’t believe … that lady … with wind like this and the fires … that lady just flicked her ashes out her car window.” The light turned green. The lady went […]

Caving

You have to work hard and long to lose Kevin Drum, to get him to sound shrill, but our fearless leader has done it. Caving on deficits, caving on taxes, caving on unemployment, Kevin covers it all with a final exasperated, throw-up-your-hands and hang-your-head-low frustration about the President’s reversal of EPA’s regulations, a reversal that […]

Shell Station on the Hill

We pulled off state highway 46 at a Shell gas station on a hill overlooking Interstate 10 stretching west to El Paso and back east to San Antonio. I waited with the dog at a picnic table while Trudy walked in for a drink. When she came out, I went in. There was a young […]