Good Morning, Everyone.  We had a fairly nice day yesterday--after the clouds cleared out.  We got a couple of brief cloud bursts.  Although it looked impressive from inside it didn't rain enough to more than moisten the gardens.  I will have to water thoroughly this evening.

MaryContrary's gardens are growing nicely, thank you.  Here are some of the latest pictures.  

The blue tubs (30 gallons each) are the latest additions. So far I have yardlong pole beans, acorn squash, zucchini, snap peas, lavender, double petunias and lavender in them.  I will be putting in more snap peas this weekend.  The red tub has gypsy peppers, lettuce, and more yard long beans and the Tidy cat container next to it has a false alarm pepper and portulaca.  My first snap peas are in the pots and will be replace soon.

In this corner we put all of the tomatoes and the rest of the peppers and lettuce.  As you can see from the leading picture we already have tomatoes blooming.  We were not surprised by the one shown in the picture.  That is the early 4th of July.  But the late season Better Boy is also blooming.  Just for the heck of it we bought Mexibelle and Chocolate Beauty bell pepper plants to try out.  Our little fairy eggplants are still hanging on but they simply haven't thrived--yet.  Since they ain't dead yet we will leave them in and hope.

I found this little item on Forbes.com this morning.  It goes along with comments Mom and I made over coffee.  The news these days is all about jobs 'saved' or jobs 'created' with the various programs to use the stimulus money.  Chrysler goes into bankruptcy and the U.S. Government 'invests' $80 billion (when all is finished) to 'save' less than 1/3 of the jobs Chrysler once provided.  How much per job is that costing us?  We reminisced about stories over the last two decades in which local and state governments provided millions in tax abatements and infrastructure improvements, etc., to lure companies and the jobs they promised only to have the companies move away in less than 3 years.  It seemed to us that the math never added up even when the so called multiplier effects were included.  The number of jobs and the revenue generated never quite justified the public costs.  The Forbes article raises another question:  why should public money be put into businesses to 'create' jobs in industries that produce for a glutted market?  If your business have produced too many goods, whether chickens or vehicles, why support the production of even more of those goods?  There has to come a time when the better strategy is to cut your loses.

James Kunstler's Clusterfuck Nation post this morning parallels these notions.  Perhaps our failure to recognize the situation we are in is exactly why we aren't cutting our losses.  We hope that things will return to what we had thought of as normal and most of us are unable to think outside that box.

John Aravosis at Americablog makes some observations on the current quality of Republican intellectual leadership and gives a link to another excellent blogger, Eric Bohlert at Media Matters.  Engaging these people on the field of ideas makes me feel like I am engaged in an intellectual battle with an unarmed opponent and/or as though I need a long hot shower to get clean of the slime being thrown in my direction.