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My wife and I have a 3.5-year-old female English Springer Spaniel. We got her as a puppy from a breeder, and for the first two years of her life, we were happy with her. She's a beautiful dog bred for the field, not the show line of the breed.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Of all the falsehoods told about President Barack Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree. As would-be president Mitt Romney tells it: “I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno.” Almost everyone believes that Obama has presided over a massive increase in federal spending, an “inferno” of spending that threatens our jobs, our businesses and our children’s future. Even Democrats seem to think it’s true. But it didn’t happen. Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower...

I am still relatively new to the site, so pardon me if I posted in the wrong place. I wasn't sure if this should go in Blogs and Personal, General and Chat, or somewhere else. I am hearing from a number of teacher friends and associates that state pension problems are not the fault of unions or poor budgeting or bad contracts but instead are all the fault of the typical bad guys: Wall Street and "decades of deregulation." It all sounds like a rote argument, but they point to such characters as Goldman Sachs and the practice of offering...