Good morning to everyone on this 235th year of our nation's life. Happy 4th of July, all.

Yesterday was highly frustrating as you probably could tell. Our cable/internet was out for about 2 hours over all and afterward was running very slowly. About halfway into our isolation Mom noticed me tapping away on the keyboard and asked, hopefully, if service was back. I had to disappoint her and tell her that I was simply catching up on my garden notes. Since I have the Appleworks program on my computer and all past notes I was able to work on it. That kind of situation is what makes me very leery of 'the cloud.' It is nice not to have to clutter up your hard drive with all your programs and projects. And I have heard that some new computers will be (or, perhaps, already are) on sale at the very low end of around $500 but with a memory only as large as the machines of 30 years ago and they will be totally dependent on 'the cloud' for programming and storage. Funny, in a way. I remember when IBM took a big hit in its computer sales (the big mainframes) because everyone was shifting to the desktops. Some bright person in the company asked 'Who wants a computer cluttering up their desk?' and came to the wrong conclusion. Now the computer is asking if people wouldn't rather have all their 'stuff' somewhere in some undefined cloud. Some may but not me. I have all the interaction with the cloud I want or need.

I have often shook my head over news stories where the headlines (and often most of the commentary) are in direct contradiction to the facts of the story. Dan Baker illustrates just that point in this piece (found by way of Naked Capitalist). For those who don't go beyond the headline and the first paragraph, it appears that a couple of Repthuglican hardliners have finally discovered some rationality and balance. Unfortunately, nothing is farther from the truth.