Your Money - The Card-Carrying Starbucks Fan - NYTimes.com

Rewards are nice, but recognition is better. So if I’m one of Starbucks’s best customers, I want to have elite status, as I do on American Airlines. I want shorter lines, better freebies, special seating (Aeron chairs, preferably) and electrical outlets reserved just for me and my laptop.

When I dared express these thoughts in a post on the personal finance Web site FiLife a few months ago, commenters there and on the Starbucks Gossip site called me selfish and self-absorbed and suggested that I get a life. After all, it’s just coffee, they said.

Look, we all want to be recognized for our loyal patronage. I happily plead guilty to self-absorption on that front. And while it is just coffee we’re talking about, Starbucks is a company that others look to as a model. What it does with this program will influence plenty of businesses that deal in higher-dollar products.

Quite appropriately, it’s from a dumbass New Yorker who thinks he deserves VIP seating at Starbucks because he’s stupid enough to (over)spend money there every day.

Look I love Starbucks, too, for their consistently thick and extra-hot coffee, but I don’t expect recognition for it. What? Is Lone Star going to send me a medal or a Barcalounger for drinking a lot of their beer? How about Lance’s sunflower seeds? A platinum-plated spittoon? I’ve smoked Marlboros for a thousand years and Marlboro don’t do shit for me — I want at least a cheap Korean massage with a happy ending every couple of decades for my carton-every-few-days addiction. Pony up, Big Tobacco.

Jaysus, but people are fucked up - they clearly don’t understand how a market-based system, like the one we’ve nurtured for two and three-tenths centuries here in America, works. I mean, c’mon Springfield — got the XD, got the M1A, got the Standard 1911…where’s my Rewards? Besides enjoying your goddamn product in exchange for my goddamn money, I mean? Well? Chop chop, bitches.

Barack Obama gets poor fashion marks after weekend bike ride

Of course he looks like a dork — he’s a damn hack politician who’s never held a real job in his life.

Plus, he’s a liberal Democratic Marxist, so he has to wear the retard-helmet, which is most likely mandated by law so he can be a good example For The Children. The first pol to flip the bird at the Mama safety Nazis and ride without one gets a Plus-One from me.

How many days before we hear “This is not the Jim Johnson I hired a few days ago…” from Changie McHoperson?

Hack. The New Kingfish.

Senate Votes To Privatize Its Failing Restaurants - washingtonpost.com
Y

ear after year, decade upon decade, the U.S. Senate’s network of restaurants has lost staggering amounts of money — more than $18 million since 1993, according to one report, and an estimated $2 million this year alone, according to another.

The financial condition of the world’s most exclusive dining hall and its affiliated Capitol Hill restaurants, cafeterias and coffee shops has become so dire that, without a $250,000 subsidy from taxpayers, the Senate won’t make payroll next month.

These are the geniuses that want to be in charge of your health care (and apparently a lot of you want them to be, too). This is the bunch of super-smarties that produced the three major Presidential candidates and will produce the next President. Yet, they can’t sell a hamburger profitably.

And they have the balls to drag oil company executives into the Star Chamber to answer moronic questions about supply and demand.

The Washington Monthly

This is one of my favorite ideas, but I almost never it see it get any love. It’s revenue neutral, it’s progressive, it’s simple to implement, it incentivizes good behavior without any draconian regulation, and it’s highly effective.

No more draconian regulation than the Feds, the folks who for whatever reason can’t get gas back under $2.70 a gallon, to set prices. Sure, Keviin…that’ll work. They’ve done such a good job on corn, sugar, cotton…why not give them a hack at pricing automobiles based on an esoteric “good” number?