View 684 Friday, July 22, 2011
It’s late, I have dental appointments, and I’m getting further behind.
Mark Steyn sitting in for Rush Limbaugh today brought up the Department of Education’s SWAT Team, and the notion that this might be a good time to eliminate a number of spending drains in the Federal government. I have some indication that people in the Limbaugh staff read this site. In any event, maybe this will get the idea to people in the Congress. There is a lot of discussion about just how much of the Federal Government is “discretionary” and how much is solid locked in entitlement, usually with the conclusion that you can’t reduce the annual deficits by cutting spending; there have to be more taxes, generally on “the rich”. The rich already pay about half the taxes collected, and the rich plus the middle class pay just about all of them already. Perhaps they will have to pay more – but surely we can at least cut bunny inspectors and Department of Education SWAT teams? Surely those are “discretionary”? Surely the Constitution doesn’t decree that once one becomes a Federal employee one is set for life including pension with health care? That no one ever gets laid off? If something can’t go on forever, it will stop. At some point the spending increases have to stop. At some point there have to be actual cuts in spending. We have to stop doing things we can’t afford.
We’re already cutting the space program, which didn’t amount to all that much per American. We could dispense with that, but we have to have a Department of Education that does – what? Isn’t that “discretionary”? What about bunny inspectors? I am sure every Congressman can find a project or activity that we can do without. Can’t we at least do that before we start raising taxes?
Your nook books
I actually purchased a couple of books attributed to you via the nook store already. In this case they were Red Heroin and Red Dragon. Not a bad pricing strategy there. 🙂 Any chance those were part of the list of novels you were expecting to put up as nook books?
Sincerely,
Chris Willoughby
I should have made it more clear: a number of my books are available on Nook and through iStore and on Amazon, through arrangements made by my agent. Those include Red Heroin and Red Dragon. There are, however, some older works, long out of contract, which I have been putting up on Amazon myself and will now post on Nook when I can. Those are done directly by me, largely because I don’t expect the revenue to be very high. The most important of my eBooks have been done through my agent. We are doing very well with those, and I am well pleased. Go buy some!
Today I tried to call Nook and was informed that they’re confirming the information by hand and don’t need to talk to me. They’ll get back to me Real Soon Now. At some point all that will be done and I can upload a couple of books that Eric has put into Nook format, and I have some other works for that mill. We’ll be doing that over time. Eric has been a wonder at this.
And I am off to the dentist.
