"Bits-‘n-Pieces" - Commentary by Tony Seton

Bits-‘n-Pieces

Bits and pieces from this reporter’s notebook...da-deet-da-deet-deet.

There are a lotta deadbeat moms and dads in this country and one way to tell is that when Washington sent out those tax relief checks starting last spring, a million-and-a-half were diverted to pay child support. They totaled close to a billion dollars.

Da-deet-da-deet-deet...Barack Obama says the recession could put the brakes on his rescinding the Bush tax cuts. They’re due to expire in 2010, but he was planning to cancel them sooner. Now with the economy in trouble, he apparently thinks that trickling down, such as it is, should continue.

Da-deet-da-deet-deet...From the folks who gave us the Hummer instead of the Prius, and their cohorts, a request for $50 billion in government loans to help Detroit transform itself to building fuel-efficient cars. Why don’t they instead take it from the salaries and pensions of the executives who for the past fifty years have been driving our auto industry into the pits?

Da-deet-da-deet-deet...Here’s an AP lead that describes the sub-text of the times in which we live. "With Hurricane Ike steaming into the Gulf of Mexico, Texas emergency officials Tuesday stood ready to order 1 million people evacuated from the impoverished Rio Grande Valley and tried to convince tens of thousands of illegal immigrants that they have less to fear from the Border Patrol than from the storm."

Da-deet-da-deet-deet...Today’s the big day for scientists in Switzerland who launched their supercollider experiment in an effort to find "evidence of extra dimensions, invisible ‘dark matter,’ and an elusive particle called the ‘Higgs boson.’"Stephen Hawking has bet a hunnert bucks that they don’t find Higgs, also referred to as "the God particle." Detractors claim this may result in the Earth being swallowed by a black hole, in which case you’re probably not reading this.