It looks like we're going to have another nesting pair of mallards in the little inlet in front of my house. The last time this happened, in 2009, the nest was at the edge of the water 25 feet from the living room, so we got to see the little ducklings have their first swim.
This morning I was watching the mallard pair as the sun rose. Sitting on the couch with laptop and coffee, I was of course joined by the dogs. My lap became a very crowded place, but all was peaceful as the glow through the morning clouds grew into gray daylight. Today's blog pictures are of Jupiter, the enormous dog owned by my offsprings out there in California. I imagine that Jupiter does not sit in laps.
The other graphic today is for the more wonk-inclined, rather than canine-oriented among us. I'm both. This graphic, which for me sums up the political situation in our country, comes from the Off the Charts blog
http://www.offthechartsblog.org/.
You don't need to go into a nerd frenzy over this chart, just look at the brightly colored stripes. They represent the contribution to our national debt that originates from the Republican-originated tax cuts, wars, and trashed economy. If you subtract those colored stripes, you get a declining debt instead of the balloon we're saddled with way into the future.
By the way, another more politically-neutral cause of our declining government revenue is the much-discussed transition of our economy from making things to providing services. Our local governments derive a lot of income from sales taxes. Sales of material things. So if you buy a DVD you pay a tax. But if you stream the same movie over the internet, your local government receives little or no income. There's more about this, if you're interested, on the Off the Charts blog.
I'm famously bad at math, and many charts look like jumbled contemporary art to me. It's worth putting a little energy into well-done resources like Off the Charts - a project of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities - to get a clearer picture of what's going on all around you.
Speaking of what's going on around us, I'll return now to some serious duck watching.
