Bug-Eyed January 8, 2014 FUN WITH SNOW You thought you built an impressive snow man or fort. Look at these amazing images. (Thanks, Janet!) CONFLICTED I’m considering whether to wear shorts here today — wracked with survivor’s guilt at being someplace warm yet gripped in paroxysms of schadenfreude. It’s not easy to be wracked and gripped at the same time, but I soldier on. BUG-EYED Yes, that, too, and having nothing to do with the polar vortex (unless you count our inability to confront climate change). I am bug-eyed in frustration over how obvious it is what we should do — and the Republican Tea Party’s refusal to allow us to do it. Such as: put people back to work modernizing our crumbling infrastructure (and watch the deficit fall as this propels the economy into high gear). We should also raise the minimum wage (which would boost the economy in much the way Henry Ford did when he paid his workers enough to buy what they were making), extend unemployment benefits (not least as a way to avoid losing more jobs by sucking demand from the economy) and restore food stamps for those in need (because who are we, if we can’t do that much for the least among us?). We should enact universal gun-safety background checks (which the vast majority of even NRA members favor), make it easier for citizens to vote, not harder (I mean — really?) and focus on the tremendous improvement in health care security most of us now enjoy in case we should, say, ever lose our job or bump up against what used to be the lifetime cap on our coverage. These are topics about which I’ve written before and to which I had hoped to return this week. But — gripped, wracked, and bug-eyed — I am useless. (Plus, Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes do it better anyway.) NBIX Jim Batterson: “HOO BOY! So now what?” ☞ The stock jumped 90% yesterday, to $18.50, which is great for those of you who bought it at $2.60, when suggested here or around $4 here, unless — a big “unless” — you sold at $11 three months ago, as more or less suggested here. But maybe you kept some? Jim obviously did. (Reason enough not to read this page every day!) Guru thinks the stock is not the great bet at $18.50 it was at $2.60, so it could be a good time to take your profit. But that obviously doesn’t mean it won’t go higher.