AMERICAN REDNECK SOCIETY formed to advocate for rural Americans.

Any group that can laugh at themselves gets my vote. Follow the humor links.

ONCE THE ELITE HIGH SCHOOL in Washington, D.C., Dunbar High is out of control, reports the Washington Post. Former D.C. schools chancellor is excoriated in the comments, but the problems in the D.C. schools long predate her tenure.

Also from the comments: "I laugh when I hear progressives say, “We need to empower kids.” No, we need to DIS-empower them –so that they listen and learn, and thereby, ultimately, become intellectually empowered."

MUGGED BY PUBLIC OPINION: “Republicans ... clearly have a mandate to hack away at spending and to defund and derail Obamacare.... And there does seem an opening ... for a 1986-style tax reform that eliminates tax preferences and cuts tax rates.

Read it all.

ATLAS HAS SHRUGGED AND CALIFORNIA HAS CHANGED –
government has ruined this place and I will never forget it. “How can we let the progressive nightmare continue to happen to the nation when a state of almost 40 million (nearly a nation unto itself) has already experienced the disaster first?”

FIVE MYTHS about school food. And the myth that must remain unspoken: Parents are incapable of feeding their children.

YA THINK? Near-record 49% say Democratic Party “too liberal.”

OBAMA VS. PALIN: Scratch beneath their personable surfaces ... and they represent polar opposite visions of what leadership in this country should look like.

More here.

WHY DOING A PhD is often a waste of time.

As a PhD (1978; Electrical Engineering), I would no longer recommend going for the doctorate. In fact, I am increasingly skeptical of the economic value of a Master’s degree.

Read the comments as well.

I’M A SENATOR. I’m too important to read the bill I’m voting on.

SMART GRID PRIMER. [W]hat exactly is a smart grid, and how might it affect you?

A smart grid would help make everything better, thus improving reliability, security, and efficiency, which are of critical importance given that electric power consumption worldwide is expected to triple by 2050.

The key to making things better is two-way data communications among all the elements, so that information about the grid's condition can be shared and acted upon. To do that, many devices, including those on the customers' premises, must be computer controlled and interactive.

Ultimately it’s about control.

IVIES MOVING TOWARD restoring ROTC. Given their sheer incompetence at governing, why would the military even wish to consider returning to their campuses?

Linked from Instapundit.

IT’S TIME to bury the estate tax.

[I]f it hasn’t been pointed out often enough already, the wealth has already been taxed repeatedly. There comes a point where enough is enough already.

Paraphrasing the President: “I think at some point you have taxed enough money.”

GEORGE WILL on the ’No Labels ‘movement’: ”The label ‘conservative’ conveys much useful information about people who adopt it. So does the label ‘liberal,’ which is why most liberals have abandoned it, preferring ‘progressive,’ until they discredit it, too.”

Instapundit comments: “Why are they against labels? Because if they were labeled accurately, no one would listen to them ....”