Good morning, again, everyone. Sunny today with temps in the mid to high 80s. Nice weather to get out in the gardens. I have to adjust some of the small containers that I have hanging on my trellises because either the tomatoes have overtopped them or because I set them too close to begin with. That shouldn't take too long. I have had a mushroom problem this year. I am not quite sure what to do about it. I checked several sites on line and found a number of suggestions. It is about time to feed all of the plants except the tomatoes (I put fertilizer spikes in those last week). They say that mushrooms don't like fertilizers much so that may do the trick. If not I will try a couple of the other suggestions. No, I won't be eating them. I know absolutely nothing about identifying mushrooms.

This little article has a number of excellent points on the Social Security debate. I have seen most of it before but one little section reinforces a suspicion I have had for a long time as I followed this debate. "The program has lots of money coming in. Employment tax collections in fiscal 2009 were $654 billion and accounted for 31 percent of all federal revenue." Does anyone really believe that, if our Congress Critters manage to eliminate Social Security, individuals and businesses will get a tax reduction of 6.25%? Do you really believe that they will reduce revenues by 31%?

I found this item by way of Elaine's Place. As has been noted before: there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. According to the standard measures almost anything adds to GDP while very little actually subtracts from it. In this case the argument holds that the Gulf oil spill may actually add a little bit to the GDP. I think that such items ought to be a double deduction from GDP. Not only are the jobs lost, the tourism dollars lost, the fishing proceeds lost deducted but also the jobs 'created' to clean up the mess and the dollars spent. Those resources might have been productively spent on something that actually grew the economy rather than on repairing damage done to a productive economy. I think this authors analysis is right on target.

I really was not ready to end this post but Google has been giving me a hard time this morning. I hope they get their s**t together damned soon.