ROBERT REICH UTTERS fundamental heresy.

And no, it’s not even this statement: “It’s too expensive to treat older people at the end of their life ‘so we’re going to let you die’.” That’s just for openers.

EXPECT MORE STORIES LIKE THIS: ” A proposal to increase employee pension benefits at the region’s main water supplier — at a time when water-rate hikes are hitting recession-weary customers — was withdrawn yesterday.”

MICHAEL TOTTEN: Hezbollah Isn’t A Model For Afghanistan. I’m amazed that anyone would think otherwise . . . .

IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO EXERCISE: Exercise can extend survival even in ‘oldest old’. “The three-year survival rate was about three times higher for active 85-year-olds compared with those who were inactive. Getting less than four hours of exercise weekly was considered inactive; more than that was active. . . . Active octogenarians also reported less depression and loneliness and a greater ability to perform daily tasks. Similar benefits have been shown in people in their 60s and 70s, but there has been little research about exercise benefits in people in their 80s.” Of course, maybe people who don’t have the energy to be active are just closer to dying . . . .

MY NEXT LINE OF WORK: Hybrid Cars May Include Fake Vroom for Safety. I’m going to start recording and selling “engine tones,” the way people now sell ringtones. I think I’ll partner with IowaHawk.

MICHAEL YON: Afghan Lunacy.

12 HOTTEST GEEK GIRLS. Geek girls are usually hot, in my experience.

IN THE MAIL: Harry Turtledove’s latest, The Golden Shrine.

EVAN COYNE MALONEY: The Rise And Fall of ObamaMarketing.

REASON TV: Cuban Punk Rocker Gorki Aguila on Music, Life, and Getting Led Zeppelin Records in Cuba. “Gorki Águila is blunt in his assessment of Fidel Castro’s half century of revolution: ‘Communism is a failure. A total failure. Please, leftists of the world-improve your capitalism! Don’t choose communism!’ Águila, a Havana resident, wears homemade anti-government t-shirts, frequently denounces the Castro brothers as geriatric tyrants, and heads up perhaps Cuba’s only explicitly political punk band, Porno Para Ricardo. And because of his stubborn belief in free speech, he is routinely arrested on charges of ‘social dangerousness.'”

Compare to the “rebel” posers here in the States . . . .

Plus, from the comments: “Someone please send it to Michael Moore and all the other Castro apologists.”

“WASHINGTON IS NUTS:

As boom- and bust-prone as high finance always has been and remains, the greatest systemic risk to our economy is not Wall Street. It’s the growing federal debt (and weakening dollar) being enacted by those Washington politicians — the ones who want to protect us from Wall Street.

It soon may be not a risk but a certainty of generations-long economic stagnation and hard times as a direct result of “unsustainable” and ever-growing national debt, driven by a federal budget almost half of which is to be paid for each year by borrowing money — primarily from China — and already weakening the dollar such that foreigners are trying to get rid of their dollars any way they can.

Yes, when you have the worst political class in your nation’s history — as we do now — your economic prospects tend to dim.

SOUTH CAROLINA: The Fox News of states?

TREASURY, INCORPORATED. “To sum up my position: the theory and practice of corporate and securities law are unprepared for the presence of a control shareholder, like the government, that also enjoys sovereign immunity from the federal securities laws and state corporation law.” Do the individual government officials enjoy similar immunity?

SPOILING THE APOCALYPTIC FANTASY: What Actual Mayans Are Saying About 2012. “In fact, the idea of a countdown to cataclysmic apocalypse is a Western, not Mayan idea, say some Mayans who are getting fed up with the hype.”

CUB SCOUT ZACHARY CHRISTIE will be allowed back in school. On the other hand, here’s another idiotic zero-tolerance story. As I’ve said before, it’s no wonder people are abandoning public schools in droves.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Is Health Care Reform Falling Apart?

MORE FROM WALTER OLSON on FTC blog-regulation overbreadth.

TECH THAT TECH: Charlie Stross on why he hates Star Trek.

THEY WANT TO BELIEVE: “Various media outlets, including CNN, MSNBC and FoxSports.com, have attributed fabricated racist quotes to Rush Limbaugh . . . . Bizarrely, nobody running these career-killing ‘quotes’ seems to question why they weren’t of previous interest.” Apparently, nobody thought to run this by the legal department, either. “How is it that when Righties quote Lefties, they have video, audio, and notarized confirmation from the Pope, but when Lefties ‘quote’ Righties, they have Wiki entries contributed by ‘Cobra’? ”

Nobody tell Keith Olbermann about my abortion . . . .

CHANGE: Still on the Job, but Making Only Half as Much. “That index has fallen for nine consecutive months, an unprecedented string over the 44 years the bureau has calculated weekly pay, capturing the large number of people out of work, those working fewer hours and those whose wages have been cut. The old record was a two-month decline, during the 1981-1982 recession.”

iFRAME: Apple’s new video format.

GAY COMMUNITY increasingly at odds with Democrats.

Related item here.

BOOSTING THE ECONOMY, with regulatory hyper-enforcement.

BUT DON’T WORRY, HEALTH CARE WILL BE HANDLED WITH COMPASSION: IRS: Infant Formula Not Deductible by Mother With Double Mastectomy.

MICKEY KAUS: “Unions Bend the Curve! ‘Card check’ may be stalled in Congress, but Fred Siegel and Dan DiSalvo report that public employee unions are still successfully bankrupting states and cities. . . . The justification for public sector unionism is way weaker than that for private sector unionism. ‘[Government] workers are not extracting a share of the profits but rather a share of taxes,’ as former N.Y. Liberal Party leader Alex Rose puts it. And the right to strike, in the hands of key public unions, approaches a blackmail power. But the political strength of the unions is such that even most Republicans, at the state and local level, are scared to question them. They gelded Arnold Schwarzenegger. You want to be next?”