Debating the Next Potential Disaster

I have never liked debates as a way to determine the best candidate, and the latest spate of contentious gumsnappery has done little to change my mind.

Debates should be, at most, a small portion of what potential voters consider when they choose a candidate to champion. Unfortunately, in today's world of reality television and 24 hour a day populist news jibber-jabber, it is the candidate who is quickest on his rhetorical feet that gains most on the staged political stage.

Newt Gingrich, a candidate who carries more baggage than a Michelle Obama stoop-shouldered bellhop, did nibble around the edges of my argument when he challenged debate moderators on two separate occasions to ask serious questions of the debaters rather than trying to manipulate potential presidents into embarrassing exchanges as if they were Snooki and Michael "The Situation" Sorrentino.

Each of the presidential candidates in the current Republican stable have years of history in business or politics or both, and a voter's investigation into these histories is a far better way to judge a candidate than whether or not they can deliver a scoring soundbite in the form of a quick comeback. And yet, this is not how I see many voters choosing candidates.

Debate moderators are offered but a few opportunities to dig into this history. Unfortunately it seems that they, and their bosses, would rather turn these events into entertainment spectacles rather than embrace their utility.

My Mom is a true believer in conservative principles; she believes an ever expansive government is dangerous, that a government, as well as those that it governs, should live within its means. She is a conservative that believes that the federal government should not nose its way into state issues, that the state government should not nose its way into local issues, and that local government should not nose its way into private issues. My experience is that she has no problems with parents nosing their way into children's issues, but that is another story.

So, at the end of the of the past couple of debates, she has decided that she is a supporter of Mitt Romney. This is not because of his long history of offering big government solutions, but because he is such a good debater.

I'm sorry, but this is akin to spending weeks investigating the best kind of car to buy, spending many hours digging into the option packages, the gas mileage, the warranty, the attendant service agreement, and then, when it is all said and done, choosing the pretty green one.

If not for his debating skills (and the not so subtle endorsement of mass media) a former community organizer with no business or administrative or foreign policy experience would not now be sitting at the helm of a country sliding off the end of the earth. A man who has never created a job in his life, but for political debates, would not be in charge of the national strategy of creating jobs. A man whose self-admitted real life administrative experience prior to his election amounted to nothing more than running his own presidential election campaign, but for debates, would not now be the CEO over the largest economy on the planet.

So, sure, pay attention to the debates. Let's see how quick witted and fast footed these celebrities of politics are. But, in the end, lets look at some history and track records. Perhaps we can avoid the next disaster.

A Belated Political Humor Trifecta

I've been gone for ten days and blogging, as always, is difficult when I'm on the road.

While I was gone I saw several things that I believe are worthwhile reposting here.

First, with a hat tip to NewsBusters...Martin Short sings a lasting tribute to Osama bin Laden.



Then from Moonbattery I ran across this:



But not to be left out, Iowahawk jotted down a number of questions he wished to be asked of the president during his twitter press conference a few weeks back. My favorite among many hilarious queries..."Why do you need permission to be clear, and not need permission to bomb Libya?"

9/11/2011

...Daniel F. Libretti...

I've been watching the somber 9/11 memorial proceedings on Fox News and Daniel's name has just crossed the bottom of the screen in what seems to be a never ending scroll of the murdered.

This is a day of rather raw emotions. Anger. Pride. Grief.

America has been accused of not letting go. Of not getting on. We've been accused of celebrating this day and turning it into a holiday.

This is no holiday. While it might be a day on the calendar that many Americans circle in red ink, it is more likely a day that most of us simply allow our eyes to become circled in moist redness.

I would guess that a vast majority of those that stand solemly today on that ground once buried under thousands of tons of rubble, do so not because they want to be there, but do so because they have to be there.

...Luis Manuel Lopez...

That was a day of disbelief.

We vowed then, ten years ago, that we would not forget the images of bodies as they tumbled out of the sky, that we would not forget the images of the towers as they fell, and that we would not forget the sacrifices of those who selflessly charged into fiery buildings fated to fall.

But, I think what we vowed to remember on that day has become more than the simple evil that attacked us. We also remember the good that is America.

Today, as we feel the painful effects of the baring of old wounds, as we watch names circle the bottom of our television screens, we also salute the goodness that is America. We remember the vivid past, but we are also being reminded of who we are, as a people and as a country.

Ten years on and we have not forgotton.

...Joseph Ross Marchbanks, Jr...

I Cannot Wait

I will not be watching our President as he makes his much anticipated jobs speech tonight in a joint session before some of both houses of Congress. It is being predicted that his Majesty will be regurgitating parts of several past proposals that at one time or another, within divergent contexts and in different financial times, a few of his detractors might have endorsed.

Well, I personally am not so thrilled at what I believe will be his $450 billion worth of slush fund projects to get Americans working again. As we saw in his beloved bailout bill, much money will be channeled toward hard left union constituencies where the taxpayers get totally screwed. The money enters a narrow pipeline where the recipients of said funds will be providing to the taxpayers no more than a fifty cents on the borrowed dollar value.

I'm not so thrilled either about proposals that would supposedly reward businesses for hiring new employees or not laying off the ones that are already unjustified given current economic conditions. First of all, with the rising flood water of employment regulation just around the corner these tax credits do nothing but temporarily negate the inevitable higher cost of doing business under Obama. Secondly, if any company is ever rewarded for not letting go of unnecessary employees we toss the entire working apparatus of the free market system and capitalism out the window.

But lets look at the timing of this jobs speech in the current business context.

We have one company, Boeing, that has been told by the Obama administration that it cannot operate a factory in South Carolina because doing so, according to the NLRB, would be an act of punishment aimed at unionized labor. The Department of Labor has demanded that Boeing keep production at its union facilities in Washington rather than let right to work state South Carolina provide the several thousands of employees that would operate the factory.

Now, Boeing is not shuttering the Washington factory. In fact, since its announcement of building a plant in South Carolina became public, it has actually added hundreds of jobs in Washington.

Lets look too at Gibson Guitars, a company incidentally that is owned and operated by conservative supporting executives. The Justice Department raided two of the company's factories in Tennessee to investigate whether or not the company was in violation of foreign timber harvesting laws. The company is not even being charged with violating any American laws. Gibson's largest American competitor, Martin, is not being scrutinized in the same manner even though its instruments are manufactured using many of the same woods. Martin is owned by big Democrat political contributors.

Lets look too at the fossil fuel industries. Barack Obama has suggested that he wants to bankrupt the coal companies. He has said that, under his plan, electricity rates must necessarily skyrocket.

Yet, at the same time that he heaps huge piles of red tape in front of efficient energy sources, he rewards his solar panel buddies over half a billion dollars worth of federal subsidies. Now that the company has gone belly up, FBI agents have raided the company, Solyndra, and seized a huge cache of information. How this information will be used, whether to indict Solyndra officials (unlikely since they visited the Oval Office over twenty times) or to cover up whatever hazy relationship has existed between the administration and its corporate lap dogs is anyone's guess.

So, the Obama speech is being anticipated by many. I wonder, however, how filled with anticipation the executives at Gibson Guitars are, or how excited the executives at Boeing are. I wonder how excited the owners of big oil and big coal are over the prospect of listening to the US President tell them how he is going to create jobs.

They all know that this administration is using whatever means it has available to it to actually shut down companies unfortunate enough to belong either to an unfavored industry or to be unwise enough to believe in a political ideal that runs contrary to the one held in the White House.

Politics when fought within the political arena can be an ugly game. Politics, when fought in the private sector, is as revealing as it is ugly. It tells us a lot about those that try to use their political power to shape industries and companies into instruments of the state itself.

This is not liberty, it is tyranny. This is not freedom, it is fascism. This is not the free market, it is a cobbled together obstacle course designed to trip up all businesses that do not parrot the talking points of this administration.

Ya, I cannot wait to read tomorrow what the President will say in a few minutes.

Well, You Can't Blame Him For Everything...

How many times have we heard this from defenders of Barack Obama as it relates to the horrible economic climate we live in these days?

'You cannot blame him for everything.'

Dozens of times? Hundreds?

It is an excuse used by this administration in its own defense as well as by progressive media pundits who acquired all they know about journalistic objectiveness in a beer tent outside an NEA rally. Certainly the basic tenet of the comment is true...Barack Obama did not create every single situation that led us too far down this road to economic ruin.

And yet, such defense of Obama is rarely evenly applied by the literati to George W. Bush who took office in charge of a largely dismantled intelligence community just nine months before a bloodthirsty collection of Mohammedan adherents decided the best way to serve their God was to kill a few thousand Americans in New York City, Washington DC., and an infamous Pennsylvania field.

In fact we fiscal conservatives were alarmed by Bush's inability to locate his veto pen until about year seven of his administration, and we felt horribly betrayed by the "compassionate conservative" after we found out that his brand of conservativism and compassion amounted to a perpetual commitment to growth in government. No Child Left Behind and the prescription drug benefit are two far reaching intrusionist examples that expose Bush for the big spending Republican that he was.

But this post is not about Bush at all (he isn't still President, is he?) but rather about a barely wavering media and voting constituency of Barack Obama (as if they were two different things) who refuse to apply an equal standard to this President Messiah and his evil predecessor.

So, while Barack Obama cannot be directly blamed for everything that is leading us to ruin, we have to point out three things to those receiving their political education from National Socialist Radio.

1. While Obama did not create all the policies that are breaking the bank of our country, he philosophically supports nearly every one of them regardless of whether or not he was around to vote on them when they were instituted.

Some will argue that it was the expensive wars that created our problem or the greed on Wall Street. These arguments can be easily dispensed with when one looks at Obama's unnecessary and misguided escalation of the Afghanistan war partnered with his arrogant participation in a Libyan war where we don't even know who we are supporting. And while Wall Street does house a staggering number of greedy bastards, a majority of those greedy bastards are supporters of Obama and his trademarked brand of crony capitalism.

Bush supported a Wall Street banker bailout. Um, so did Obama. Obama also supports the sort of Keynesian intrusionism that allows the genius of bureaucracy to pick the industries and businesses that are supposed to win and lose. It is this genius that bails out automobile companies and their socialist workforces while it tries its hardest to castrate the oil, manufacturing, clothing, and agricultural companies that it finds socially unhelpful. It is also the genius that preys on companies like Exxon/Mobil while it slathers doomed-to-fail Solyndra Inc. with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

When Bush supported No Child Left Behind and the prescription drug benefit, he was only hounded by progressives such as Obama for their narrow scale. They were underfunded! They needed to be even bigger!

The housing crisis and run up in energy prices, which are largely the cause of the current situation, are both the direct result of progressive socialist policies that Obama has always supported fully. As our gas prices rose Obama opined that "[energy] prices must necessarily skyrocket." As housing concerns tangled, Obama was actively involved in ramrodding, at the community organizer level, the federal policies that not only encouraged high risk mortgage candidates to buy homes they could not afford, but helped put taxpayers on the hook ultimately for their mortgage obligations.

Is it more important that Obama was not in office when the Community Reinvestment Act was voted on or not in office to help spearhead a disastrous and progressive energy policy, or is it more important to recognize that he is now and always was sympathetic in toto to the reasonings behind their commencements?

2. While Obama did not create all the policies that are breaking the bank of our country, he has used the regulatory powers of every federal agency that he has at his disposal to hamstring the growing of the American economy.

The EPA, the FDA, the Departments of Energy and Education and Commerce, HUD, the DOJ, the Department of the Interior and the Consumer Protection Agency, HHS, etc., etc., have all used their expanded powers of tyranny under Obama to not only destroy wealth but to hinder its creation at either the wellhead, in the laboratory, on the factory floor, or atop the tractor. I cannot wait until those 10,000 new IRS officers cut their teeth imposing Dodd-Frank and Obamacare mandates.

This ain't helping.

3. While Obama did not create all the policies that are breaking the bank of our country, it has to be recognized that Ronald Reagan inherited an economy from Billy Carter's dumber brother that was in many ways worse than the one inherited by drunk driver Onyango Obama's nephew.

Two and a half years after Reagan inherited a disastrous economy, the American economic machine had turned around. When he took office he faced higher Carter level inflation, comparable unemployment rates to those suffered by Obama, and interest rates of nearly twenty percent. Reagan faced a tumultuous Middle East, an oil squeeze, and a Congress decidedly of progressive vein.

Under Ronald Reagan America began the longest lasting period of sustained economic growth this country has ever known. He cut taxes, cut regulations, rebuilt the military, supported our friends abroad, and set free the American spirit.

Barack Obama believes in different tactics. He wants to raise taxes, introduce crippling regulations, cannot wait to gut the military, sold our traditional friends down the river, and has dismissed American exceptionalism as nothing more than cultural narcissism.

No, Barack Obama is not at fault for everything that this country suffers today.

But, that he agrees with all the policies that helped create this situation, that he has used every tool at his disposal to exacerbate the situation, and that Ronald Reagan took a worse situation and quickly turned it around all should give pause to even his most loyal progressive political groupies.

Down, Down, Down

Once again, the US economy has produced some unexpected news--job creation was low in August. In fact, according to today's Department of Labor report, no net new jobs were created. This is the first time since 1945 that there has been a zero job growth figure.

But, it gets even worse. The dismal job growth performances for the past two months have both been revised, wait for it...downward. A dismal July estimate of 117,000 jobs created was lowered to an even more dismal 85,000, and an embarrassingly dismal June estimate of 46,000 jobs was lowered to a wear-a-sack-over-my-head-dismal 20,000 jobs created.

This is the success story of Barack Obama and his army of economy killing regulators and Keynesian economists. You cannot wage a war on employers without it having a crippling effect on the numbers of employees they can afford to either keep on, or add to, the payroll.

Sanity, Ignorance, Ignorance, Sanity/Ignorance, Intrusion, and Intrusion with a Dash of Ignorance

How else can I describe the six cost-efficient ways that our ex-Governor and ex-First Gentleman have laid out to help this country create jobs?

We Michiganders are fully aware of the skill set that Jennifer Granholm and her trophy husband, Daniel Mulhern, brought to the Michigan statehouse.

Under Granholm's leadership the state became a wasteland of vacant homes and shuttered storefronts. The only good good news was that business was brisk in both the outbound moving van and Michigan Works! staffing sectors of the economy. For half of her time in office, Michigan led the nation in unemployment and was the only state in the union to actually lose population during the decade that contained her administration.

And this is the experienced perch from which Michigan's dynamic duo will point out to the rest of us 'six cost-efficient ways to create jobs.'

Before we explore the list, can we not at least ask an important question? If these two were so smart when they had tens of thousands of state employees and agencies at their beck and call, why didn't they use some of their expertise to, you know, actually help get Michigan's economy moving?

The answer to that question can be found within the six cost effective solutions they forward. They just don't get it--never have, and never will.

Here is the list.

1. Give global companies, which have parked more than $1 trillion in earnings offshore to avoid U.S. corporate taxes, incentives to "repatriate" those foreign earnings.

Of course, this is a borrowed stroke of genius from conservative economists and business leaders. One cannot plausibly argue with point one. It is the earmarking these two want to do with the repatriated funds that gives me pause.

2. Put half those proceeds toward a blockbuster "Jobs Race to the Top," modeled on the highly effective Education Race to the Top.

First of all, one would have to be two points shy of lucid to say the Education Race to the Top has been highly effective, but that is not the point. Secondly, has there ever been a scarier word than "blockbuster" ever attached to a government spending initiative?

Granholm and Mulhern do not recognize what private sector jobs are--they are a byproduct of a successful and profitable business, they are not the purpose of a business. Such failed logic is seen within the solar energy industry (one of the Mulherns' favorites) today where heavily subsidized companies are still going belly up because of the inherent inefficiency--not just the relative inefficiency of solar energy physics, but also because of the economics involved. As hard as it is to believe, solar industry leaders have been known to brag about their sector creating more jobs per Megawatt produced than any other energy sector. Hey dipsticks, this is not a feature, it is a flaw.

Imagine Henry Ford's success if he had tried to bring his product to market while employing more people per car produced than any of his competitors. (No, that an innovation of the UAW some decades later.) How many early model Fords would have been sold with such a claim to fame? How could the cars have become accessible to the American consumer if they were more expensive than any other car on the road? No, Henry went in the opposite direction and tried to produce more cars per employee rather than the other way around.

The solar energy industry has everything exactly bass ackwards.

If you really want to incentivize job creation, make profit more achievable. Leave cleverly disguised intrusions into the free market at home.

3. Invest the remaining proceeds toward capitalizing an infrastructure bank, broadly defined — construction for roads, bridges, technology, grid upgrades and schools.

Great, then lets spend the rest of the windfall in the same manner that was wasted on our other stimulus boondoggles--namely slathering money onto the Democrat Party's favorite monolithic voting constituency. But hey, if the hundreds of billions of dollars that have already been spent on supporting union jobs haven't been successful, what could a few billion more hurt?

Why can't we just use the windfall to pay down our huge debt? That would lower our debt obligations, strengthen the dollar, lower the costs of commodities, and maybe make it possible for me to eat a hamburger once in a while down at the restaurant. Why do socialists believe that every boon to the economy has to start with the spending of billions of taxpayer dollars?

4. Lower the nation's corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, and pay for it by streamlining the tax code and eliminating loopholes.

America's corporate tax rates are among the highest in the world. Even the socialist paradises of Europe have significantly lower income tax rates on corporations. So, what could my beef be with this?

It is once again a complete misunderstanding of economics. Lowering of tax rates helps grow the economy--as such, they all but pay for themselves. Letting anal retentive Democrats rewrite tax laws in order to pay for tax cuts will not turn out well. Just cut the tax rates to a level that is competitive with the rest of the world, and watch our economy grow.

5. Modernize our unemployment and workforce training systems.

Government funded job training programs are misguided, inefficient, and completely outside the responsibility of government.

How can Granholm and Mulhern ever possibly discern what jobs our evolving economy will need unless they also believe they can nudge this economy toward their own favored outcome? No person, not even a brilliant Harvard educated Canadian lawyer, can interject herself into an economy and determine what industries of the future will be successful. Corn ethanol anyone? Solar panels?

No, lets let consumers determine what products they will want in the future, and lets let business provide those products and train their own workforces to produce those products.

6. Adopt a federal clean energy standard to proclaim to clean energy businesses — which can locate anywhere — that a market exists here for their products.

And here you have it. Granholm and Mulhern believe the best way to achieve inexpensive job creation is to further regulate the American economy so that inefficient energy sources can compete with efficient ones. I wonder how much that will cost.

It is just another angle to the failed Keynesian principle that you can create wealth by destroying it.

I will not be buying the book by Granholm and Mulhern. Its a brand new book certain to contain glossy terms to describe the same tired old ideas. Ultimately, all we really need are the proper puppet masters to pull the right strings.

Granholm and Mulhern should be available shortly after the book is released.

Back Blogging

My quaint and nearly unread little blog was taken off the web by those at Google who determined some odd activity was taking place on the site. What that means for sure I don't know...perhaps they just think my writing sucks. And why not? I do.

In any case, I'm going to continue blogging at a rather subdued pace--enough to keep things active but not so much that I get burned out. I'm hoping to catch my second (or third or fourth) wind this fall when the election season really comes into focus.

Meanwhile I am simply going to enjoy being called a racist by certain members of Congress while other members tell me to go to hell. There is some industrial grade ugliness permeating our political landscape and I'm not just talking about a Maxine Waters cameo.

I want to be a part of the political give and take, and knowing my own personal frustration level I believe these things have to be approached delicately.

So, expect to be inspired! Just not for a long time.

Wasted Money is Wasted Money

I had a debate the other day with a relative who was strongly supportive of the FAA spending millions on a project at the local county airport. Now, to put this in perspective, you have to realize what the local county airport consists of.

It has always been, up until the multi-million dollar project, a dirt runway with very little flight activity. There are at most one or two aircraft stationed at the port, and a busy week on the tarmac would amount to a couple two-seaters touching down.

A couple years ago, the airport landed a grant from the FAA as part of Obama's vast project to improve infrastructure while paying off union supporters and buying local votes. The total cost of the projects from coast to coast cost the US taxpayers billions of dollars. With the completion of the local project it is hoped that air travel into Oscoda County will increase. (It had better if the justification for the money spent is to ever generate enough local business to cover the price tag.)

The reasoning my relative used for his support of the project was that the money, if not spent here, would just get wasted elsewhere and, besides, the county only had to pay a small portion of the project's costs. Of course, the first of these arguments makes nearly any earmarked cost containment impossible regardless of where it might occur, and the second is false on its face. Ultimately, whether funds are spent from local coffers or are ultimately borrowed from the Chinese by the Obama administration, we, the taxpayers, are on the hook for the whole thing.

The fact is that all conservatives everywhere must fight the spending of discretionary dollars regardless of where it is going to be wasted. A waste is a waste whether it is spilled milk on my doorstep or on some other overtaxed person's threshold.

There was a time perhaps when we could pick and choose which boondoggles to throw our money at. Those times are long gone. It is time for conservatives to stand on principles that transcend the locality of waste. Now, when a hurricane ravages any portion of our country, or when wildfires lap at the homes of our fellow Americans, we have to go begging to the credit markets to get the capital we need.

Perhaps Oscoda County should have gone without the project, and perhaps the other airports around the country should have done likewise. We could do with fewer bike paths, studies on animal sexuality, and should stop the expansion of our country's benevolence on the fly. When this country collapses under our burgeoning debt the least of our worries will be whether the borrowed money was wasted locally.

Speaking of Food Stamps...

The Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has run to a microphone with his own facts, namely that for every dollar invested in the SNAP Program (food stamps) $1.84 is generated in additional economic activity. In fact, according to Vilsack, the program is directly stimulative and creates jobs.

Now, I'm not even going to spend a minute trying to unravel the methodology of the study that produced the $1.84 gained per $1.00 spent in food stamps claim. Who knows, he might be right.

What is unfortunately omitted by Vilsack is the fact that the $1.00, before it is ever spent, has to be extracted from the larger economy. The dollar, if it had not been taken from the private sector, would have had every bit as much impact on the economy even without its metamorphosis into a vehicle of benevolence. Let's be generous to Mr. Vilsack and grant him his $1.84 figure.

But that is only a small part of the morass. In actuality, the $1.00 that was ultimately bequeathed to the food stamp recipient began as closer to $3.00 in the pocket of a privileged taxpayer. What began in the private sector as three crisp one dollar bills, became atrophied by the salaries and benefits paid to bureaucrats and further, were exposed to other extravagant overheads rarely enjoyed by any entity outside of the federal government.

So, yeah.

Once Mr. Vilsack begins tracking the $1.00 that is spent in his program he might very well arrive at the $1.84 in economic activity. The problem is that he begins tracking that dollar way too late because the extraction and bequeathing of what became one dollar actually subtracted in the neighborhood of $5.52 from the economy. ($1.84 X 3) Then, once the shriveled three dollars in the form of one dollar were spent, the $1.84 figure so glowingly referred to by the secretary comes to life.

A more valid claim from Mr. Vilsack would be that every $1 spent on food stamps only costs the economy $3.68. ($5.52 minus $1.84)

Which, all things considered, is not a bad deal coming from Washington.

Victims of Benevolence: Part II

Yesterday I mentioned a plan spearheaded by the USDA to have all Detroit school children receive free meals each day. Included would be a breakfast, lunch and snack.

These meals will be presented without qualification. The story quoted one of the program's DPS supporters:

“One of the primary goals of this program is to eliminate the stigma that students feel when they get a free lunch, as opposed to paying cash.”

I thought about that a great deal and have a bit more to say.

This program presents charity without graciousness and it demands acceptance of charity without humility. It aggressively attempts to white wash the charitable transaction as if doing so will somehow be beneficial to the children, the school, and society at large.

Of course, the opposite is true. These sorts of situations will make needy (and not so needy) children and underprivileged (and not so underprivileged) parents feel entitled to what they routinely receive from the government. It will also further encourage bureaucrats to assume that they are the grand benefactors of children because parents, for whatever reason, have failed to step to the plate.

I would submit that parents have failed to step to the plate because government has interjected itself into every aspect of the family. It has encouraged fathers to leave, it has encouraged mothers to go it alone, it has encouraged single parenting for the financial benefits it incurs, and it has encouraged for decades the listless lifestyle that would keep disadvantaged families in a dependent and perpetual state of disadvantage. This program is just such an encouragement.

So we taxpayers will fund (or rather, borrowed Chinese currency will fund) this latest program which is in part designed to expunge both graciousness and humility from the fruits of the program. Taxpayers will not be thanked for the charity, indeed, the charity will not be acknowledged because its goal is to make the giving a non-charitable event.

Bureaucrats? They will have successfully shoved their noses further into the natural order of parenting. They will have disrupted the supportive acts of parents providing for their children and, more damagingly, disrupted the lessons that would have been learned from that nurturing.

No one wants to see children go hungry. Myself included. My biggest regret is that decades of government interference has created so many hungry children.

Victims of Benevolence

One of the standards of both economics and human behavior is that you will get more of the activities you reward, and will get fewer of the activities that you punish.

What should we expect then from an initiative that will grant all children in the Detroit Public School District a free breakfast, a free lunch, and a free snack? Certainly their will be short term positives from such a program. Less hunger in the classroom has got to be a good thing as far as that goes.

And yet, the program has further goals:

“One of the primary goals of this program is to eliminate the stigma that students feel when they get a free lunch, as opposed to paying cash.”

Here we are getting into a gray area where the long term negative outcomes might very well overwhelm whatever positive returns might result.

What becomes of a society where a natural revulsion for accepting government handouts has been systematically stamped out? What results when young people are trained that government wealth redistribution efforts are every bit as legitimate as those that teach citizens to be independent and self-sufficient?

In its quest to stamp out all negative things that might happen to a child, the government in its many forms has tried to form a safety net around all children, and in the process has assumed many of the responsibilities that parents would normally hold for themselves.

They help feed children, and clothe them. They help keep a roof over the heads of children. They give them health care, dental care, and in many instances, child care. They provide education and use this perch to help promote their moral and blessed standards on the next generation of voting Americans.

And yet, good parents and an ill-equipped government accept the role of parenting with a different perspective. Parents wean their children so that they can become independent and become successful in this difficult world. They do this intentionally. They punish and praise, they instruct and they nurture.

The government, despite all its well intentioned efforts to replicate the parental role, is sadly both ill-equipped and too lacking in common sense to pull it off. While it is great at offering suckle, the problem with governmental parenting is that it does not know how to wean--its recipients encouraged to suck at the public teat for generations.

This instance in Detroit is but another example of an ill-advised government takeover of a role once reserved for parents; an effort that holds as a primary goal an attempt to both legitimize and perpetuate its status there. It uses children whose parents are perfectly capable of buying them their own food as pawns in a campaign for other children to learn the feel-good status of depending on the taxpayers for their calories.

You get more of the behaviors you reward, and you get fewer of the behaviors that you discourage. Tell me please, what will this result in?

Shocker!

What a shocker!

One of the biggest recipients of corporate welfare in this country thinks this country's corporate welfare program is just peachy.

Heck, pretty soon even Jeffrey Immelt will come out in favor of Obama's policies. Oops, too late.

Coming to a school district near you

Funny how the old 900 mile trip by car can drain even the most well intentioned of blogger's initiative. And then there is me, an essentially lazy blogger in the first place who needs little more than a ten mile drive across the county to dry up whatever motivation might occasionally seep into his beleagured veins.

But, things occur down here too.

So, I am well south of Michigan and soaking up the 95 degree heat in a city where the school children are just today entering back into the hallowed halls of cheating. This is great for the kids that happen to be young enough that a great majority of their schooling years have not been stolen from them by highly sought administrators and teachers; educators who discovered that accolades can be more easily achieved if they dispense with all that learning crap and just sort of erase littly Johnny's answers if he gets them wrong. For the unfortunate majority of Atlanta school children, however, this pretty much sucks.

How does the recent graduate ever get back the one shot at a public school education his youth will ever provide? What about this year's senior who has had his test scores altered since he was in the fourth grade?

Well over a hundred educators from the Atlanta school district have been implicated in perhaps the largest cheating scandal ever to embarrass public education. In the Atlanta school district it is apparently more important to appear as if you are being successful than it is to actually teach Johnny to read and write and do his math.

Which leaves little Johnny a bit behind the eight ball if he were ever in the situation where he might need to know something to get a job or, perhaps even worse, might have to serve the public with competence once he landed that job. Such trivialities cannot be allowed to stand in the way of an Atlanta educator in his or her never ending quest to be successful get more funding.

And this is ultimately the danger and disaster that is public education today--a system that has removed the responsibiity of educating children from the local level and instead placed it upon third parties who control the purse strings from on high. When Johnny flunks math, er, passes despite dubious results, his parents can be pleased to know that in the stead of the E he deserved, his teachers and adminsistrators can give him a solid B while his school system can qualify not only for additional grants, but also the right to snuff out Johnny's younger brother's education too.

A recent survey among educators found that the pressure to cheat on evaluations and tests was becoming more and more apparent. How difficult is that to figure out? With the free market expunged from the machinery that delivers a product, how tough to predict should it be that the product delivered would be less than the customer wanted while costing more than it should have, and consequently, how tough to discern that a little rail greasing needs to take place to keep the money flowing?

No one will recapture the lost decade of Little Johnny and tens of thousands of students like him. In the mean time, one hundred plus educators will lose their jobs and perhaps face criminal charges and well-deserved civil suits on top of it all. Absent an education, perhaps Johnny can soak up a few Gs from his now unemployed English teacher.

But this leaves greater society exactly where? I'll tell you where, with the same system in place that begs educators to cheat while it more forcibly, year after year, removes parents and localities farther away from their responsibilities to each other.

And it is all coming to a school district near you.

The Blues

Has there ever been a better time for this?

We Must End Our Dependence on Foreign Energy Sources

Uh oh.

Next Target: The Family Farm

Now that the country has been saved by our benevolent President and our excellent collection of congressional miracle workers, I can get back to pointing out how difficult it will be to ever cut the expanding growth of government when it continues to assume an ever larger role in making sure the rest of us behave properly.

With each added government advancement into our private lives not only does government grow larger and more expensive, but the private sector, which pays all of the taxes in this country to begin with, is forced to operate more inefficiently. This inefficiency makes profitability and wealth creation more difficult and reduces the amount of tax that can be paid back to the government. These tax losses have to be made up somehow...perhaps higher tax rates?

Such trivialities are of no concern to a government that has already assumed that it has providence. The Constitution notwithstanding, with clever usage of the commerce clause, the general welfare clause, and outright dismissal of the 10th Amendment, bureaucrats and regulators have wormed their way into every facet of our lives.

While Michelle Obama grows turnips in the White House lawn, a resident of Oak Park, Michigan is prosecuted for growing inappropriate vegetables in front of her more modest home. Just a county north of there, a cider mill operator is in trouble with the regulators who feel it inappropriate for the proprietor to sell firewood alongside his fruit and donuts.

In Georgia, residents are prosecuted for selling vegetables grown on their property without obtaining the proper licensing, and little girls are threatened with prosecution for selling lemonade and girl scout cookies without the blessing of inspectors. While Amish farmers are prosecuted for selling raw milk in Pennsylvania, farmers everywhere are told to begin treating their spilled milk as hazardous waste. (Truly farmers these days do have a real reason to cry over spilled milk.)

Of course, once all the hurdles of producing food are cleared, those who market and sell the food must clear a number of additional hurdles put in place. If you happen to be a packager and seller of walnuts, you had better make certain not to make health claims on the packaging, even though those claims have been confirmed by numerous laboratory studies--doing so will run afoul of the FDA.

If you happen to be a fast food producer you had better make certain to advertise your products in a manner that doesn't appear to make your food too fun to eat. If you happen to own a restaurant you'd better watch the salt content, proudly display nutritional information, and make certain not to serve fat people. Heck, if you have a kid attending a certain school in the Chicago area, don't even bother to send a sack lunch--it is assumed to be unhealthy and just butt out, thank you.

None of these examples could have an impact on the ability of a family farmer, gardener, distributor, restauranteur or entrepreneur to make a living, could they? None of them could affect the price of food being sold to consumers, could they?

I'm not even going to get into the Department of Energy's fingerprints being all over the whole ethanol disaster and why that has affected prices and every American's cost of living.

We have to be close to the end of this regulatory mess, don't we? I mean, seriously, aren't the EPA, the FDA, and the DOE sufficiently involved into everything already?

Well, no, as it turns out. There is still the Department of Transportation that is suggesting a reclassification of all farm equipment to that of Commercial Motor Vehicles and requiring all operators of the equipment to get the proper licensing.

The change would prohibit family farms from using young workers to operate a tractor who are not old enough to drive a car on public streets; the same applies to seniors who are unable to drive on public streets.

Likewise, those who do operate the tractor would be forced to undergo advanced testing and fill out the same paperwork that is required of those who drive semi-tractor trailers.

The changes would ultimately infringe upon the operation of family farms by imposing loads of paperwork, such as detailed logs to be kept by all drivers, and regulations, which include a physical and drug test to be administered every two years on all drivers.

As the choke hold on American wealth producers tightens, the wealth the country depends on to pay its bills and feed and clothe its population gets more difficult to obtain.

Except for high paid regulators, that is. Its always nice to be on top.

h/t Protein Wisdom

That Ain't No Promised Land: II

I wrote the previous post basically in response to a rather irritating edition of the Laura Ingraham show that I listened to (tape delayed) while I was on the road Friday night. I'm not much of an Ingraham fan but when in the car I listen to what I can listen to.

I listened to an hour long lament of the tea party's impracticality when it came to its unrealistic expectations. We only control one half of one third of the government...blah...blah...blah.

Ingraham was adamant about the GOP's need to fall in line in order to better our prospects in the next election cycle. Boehner is doing all that he can--we cannot stick out our necks too far and then become blamed for the fiasco that is the collapsing foundation of our economy. On and on. For all her fire, she sounded as if she had complete confidence in the Republican establishment to do the right thing once they get control.

I do not. Not even close. I do not trust Boehner and I do not trust Mitch McConnell, and I do not trust Eric Cantor, and I do not trust that blabbermouth John McCain (the GOP's last presidential candidate) or any of the other bluebloods that want me to be a good little party member.

But that doesn't mean that I'm not a bit practical too. I realize that the tea party cannot expect to have any impact on the political landscape if it forms its own party, and if they do such a thing, their foray will essentially hand the government to the fascists on a silver platter.

From a practical standpoint, the GOP to me is nothing other than a host animal on which I wish to affix my determined conservative proboscis. Just call me Roug of Borg.

John Boehner is not a conservative and never has been. He is a big time government statist who believes that government, when controlled by a benevolent puppeteer, can provide nearly all things.

This is antithesis to what I believe government is and should be. Boehner, et. al., must be assimilated.

While the tea party has to be proud on the impact it had in nudging the Grand Opportunist Party slightly toward the right, it has to recognize that the work has only just begun, and that as long as tea party supported candidates are still a "practical" part of a centrist led Boehner GOP, our accomplishments will be minimal. I have zero confidence in a Boehner led party ever getting us a smaller government--his actions over the years clearly indicate that that is not the foundation of his beliefs.

The next step of the tea party must be to expand its influence in the GOP and then to dethrone the entrenched bureaucrats that populate its leadership.

That Ain't No Promised Land

In an effort to bridge the timeline between now and the next election, practical Republicans have said they'd love them some many hundreds of billions of dollars in added debt over the short term in order to budget an additional $7 trillion in debt over the next ten years.

This is the new face of fiscal and political practicality.

Now, even the impractical among us knew that the Boehner bill, as written, was as dead on arrival as the dermis underneath a Nancy Pelosi botoxic expression. We'll just have to wait and see what the mouldering Harry Reid can do to the bill before he sends it back to Boehner.

Wherever this leads, many of us in the tea party are being considered "impractical" or "hobbits" by the establishment GOP because we are not falling in line behind our christened party leaders in their Orwellian attempts to rein in spending.

But, from an equally practical standpoint, what evidence do we hobbits have from these GOP leaders that they have any intention of cutting overall spending when, according to the lexicon they employ, a $1 trillion cut in spending in reality is an $8 trillion increase in spending over ten years?

Let's go back a few years. It was a Republican president with great Republican support that gave us No Child Left Behind and the prescription drug benefit. TARP was a bipartisan fiscal calamity. Every one of these examples have the sticky fingerprints of John Boehner all over them.

When Boehner's support of these massive government expansions is juxtaposed with a bill that approves of an additional $8 trillion in spending over the next ten years, the practical among us hobbits begin to think that Boehner might be part of the problem and in no way capable of or interested in finding a solution.

So, ya, I'm not too happy with what the tea party has been able to accomplish so far, but I realize that we've only been a movement for the past three years, and I also realize that for the time being our little movement only occupies the caboose of a long established train.

My representative, Dan Benishek, was elected with support of the tea party, but he is not a member of the tea party caucus. He is one of the dutiful republicans that, in a thrust of practicality, got his ass in line behind John Boehner. I had two signs in my lawn that proclaimed my support of Benishek in the last election. They announced clearly that "Enough is enough." Now, as it turns out, perhaps they should have read "Enough might not quite be enough yet, but after getting my ass in line a time or two, enough really will be enough!"

But, while I'm a bit miffed at the moment, I'm not certain this is totally fair to Benishek. I'm certain he made what he thought was the best "practical" decision. I'm certain he believes that with one more election under our belts, with added Republican control over the Presidency (if they are able to gather it,) with added control over the Senate (again, if they are able to gather it,) and an expanded control of the House of Representatives, that real change can finally take place. I believe that he thinks that to see tea party people act impractically at this juncture would put additional Republican gains in the next election in greater doubt.

On all of these counts he might be exactly correct. The problem is, of course, that we hobbits know in our heart of hearts that the current GOP leadership is not to be trusted with the future of our children and grandchildren. We know the track record. We've seen them in action.

Establishment GOPers want me to have confidence in them for their vision of the future. They want me to believe that they will do the right thing. They want me to not only end my protests, but to buy in. But they cannot point to any history that would help me gain the confidence they demand. They were happy to gain back the House in large measure because of the tea party, but they were even happier to assume their positions in power while commanding the rest of us to "get our asses in line."

To a simple sort of hobbit, this seems suspiciously like business as usual.

We'll have to see how all of this works out, and while I don't necessarily support a primary challenge to Dan Benishek over this, I certainly support any effort that would oust John Boehner from his anointed leadership position.

We know the types of government programs that he supports. We know the types of deals he is willing to make. We've heard the condescension and we're wet with the drippings of his practicality.

Oh, he's a leader all right, but it ain't no promised land that he's leading to.

This Screwed

This is what John Boehner's proposed dramatic cuts to the budget actually look like on paper.


How screwed are we again if this is the plan the good guys are proposing?

Bozo Economics

I've said it many times before and now it looks like I have to say it at least one more time.

Jobs are a necessary byproduct of a successful business but they are not the reason for a business or an industry to exist. Any company that exists in order to create jobs is either a company that will fail or a part of some public/private partnership existing on the marriage of an inefficient premise with some government entity willing to invest your tax dollars on that inefficiency.

Which brings me to this article on WUWT:

According to Rhone Resch, the last three years have seen the U.S. solar industry go from a start-up to a major industry that is creating well-paying jobs and growing the economy in all 50 states, employing 93,000 Americans in 2010, a number that is expected to grow between 25,000 to 50,000 this year (PDF). In the first quarter of 2011, the solar industry installed 252 megawatts of new solar electric capacity, a 66 percent growth from the same time frame in 2010.

Solar energy is creating more jobs per megawatt than any other energy source (PDF) with the capability, according to one study, of generating over 4 million jobs by 2030 with aggressive energy efficiency measures. There are now almost 3,000 megawatts of solar electric energy installed in the U.S., enough to power 600,000 homes.

And these jobs created are supposed to be a feature.

In a comment to the article ferd berple responds in an even more beautiful manner than his name might suggest is possible:

Imagine for one moment that it is 1908 and Henry Ford announces to the world that he has discovered a new car manufacturing process for the model T that creates more jobs per model T produced than any other technology available.

Wouldn’t that have meant the death of the model T? If Ford had required more jobs created to produce a model T than any other car, then how would Americans been able to afford the model T? Wasn’t the secret of Ford’s success to reduce the manpower required to build the model T and thereby reduce the cost so that everyone could afford to buy a Ford model T?

It seems that by taking the other route, by requiring the most workers per megawatt produced, that solar power is pricing itself out of the market. Why not simply hire people to turn hand cranks to produce energy. That would certainly create even more jobs than solar power per megawatt.

Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner!

How many times in the past ten years have we heard Jennifer Granholm or some other government yokel praise the new economy and the jobs of the future that it will create? These masterminds have spent the better part of this century trying to kill efficient energy production systems in order to have them replaced with ones that squash wealth and ultimately cost many more jobs than they could ever replace.

More jobs per megawatt is not a bug, its a feature! Everybody cheer!

Where did these bozos learn their economics?

My Opinion on the Boenher Plan

John Boehner could be a huge political winner here. So says a number of Republican operators and beltway journalists who are much more experienced in observing the political scales that measure such things than I am.

Dana Perino, Charles Krauthammer, John McCain, and Bill Kristol are among those siding with Boehner in his quest to increase the deficit over the next several years to the tune of many hundreds of billions of additional dollars.

Perhaps the passage of Boehner's plan would amount to a huge political victory. I'm not so certain it would be a huge victory for the country.

Boehner and company are willing to accept that the government would assume unfathomable amounts in new debt in exchange for symbolic cuts to future spending increases and the hope that their political adversaries will oblige them with more meaningful cuts on the morrow. (Sure, like that always works out.)

Boehner's plan is clearly less expensive than any plan that would be favored by President Obama, and it is clearly less damaging to the current US economy than any pined for by Harry Reid. However, Boehner's plan does not attack the debt in any meaningful way as it merely would slow the rate of growth of spending by our country's regulatory overlords rather than actually shrinking the debt.

You see, government accounting methods allow for tricks and verbal gymnastics the sort of which led to the collapse of Enron and Worldcom and the incarceration of those who encouraged the accounting. While these accounting tactics are not allowed in the private sector because of the fraud such methods perpetrate, their employment provides the desired obfuscatory cover for politicians who know the government will spend hundreds of billions more next year while making it sound like they will be spending hundreds of billions less.

If this is not the case, why would future increases in the debt ceiling ever be necessary? The way that government accounts for expenditures is a bit different than what we plebs do.

Lets suppose the government planned on spending $2 next year when this year it only spent $1. Along comes a government plan that suggests that rather than spending the additional $1, we should actually be cutting a dime from the budget. You and I look at this and we say, "Gee, we will only be spending 90 cents this year--those politicians are sure cutting back."

But all of that is before you discover that government is using Enron accounting practices. No, that dime taken from the budget is not based on this year's actual spending but instead is based on what government intended to spend next year. In effect, the dime in cuts amounts to an increase of 90 cents in spending above and beyond what was spent this year. Of course, we are not talking about mere dollars here, but trillions of them.

Sadly, this has become a game of blame dodging in which establishment Republicans have determined that it is preferable to be complicit in the possible financial collapse of this country than it is to be blamed for today's comparative crisis in miniature.

Sooner or later this country is going to have to take the hit and every day that it is delayed will make that hit more painful and costly. Ultimately, blame will be assigned indiscriminately regardless of who deserves it most.

It is better, I think, to demand more meaningful cuts today and establish a firm apparatus that guarantees actual cuts for tomorrow.

GOP Establisment Must Be Put Out To Pasture (Or a Glue Factory)

This is why the establishment wing of the GOP, a country club gaggle of blue bloods that stood idly by as our national debt reached $14 trillion and our country's unfunded liabilities ballooned to over $100 trillion, cannot be allowed to stay behind the reins of the party.

John McCain has few principles by which he governs other than a desire to have his side win. As far as he is concerned, his country can slide ever farther into massive debt and can inch ever closer to economic collapse as long as his side looks better to the masses than does his rival fraternity.

Enough is enough.

The tea party wants people like John McCain to retire their mouldering bones to the political sidelines so that younger and more vibrant thinkers can cut through the crap that his ill tempered dementia has helped create.

Seriously, how can any man who has been sitting in Congress as long as he has and has helped issue in the circumstances under which the country now resides, think that he has enough moral authority remaining to lecture the tea party about wanting to save the country?

To think I voted for this hemorrhoid for President is enough (though I did it only because I supported Gov. Palin) to make me want to puke.

Amy Winehouse

This is perhaps not the sort of thing you would expect to hear on The Rougblog, but your humble host really liked much of the music of Amy Winehouse, the musical prodigy being remembered today in London, some sixty years too soon.

She was soulful and bluesy and not wrapped up in producing the generic sort of sounds that are squeaked by literally thousands of performers the world over. She was different.

While I read with disturbing frequency about her ever more erratic behaviors no doubt spawned by needles, bottles, powders and smoke, I was never so cynical as to pick a date on which she would die as many others did.

Four times in rehab was not enough to turn her away from what turned out to be the inevitable.

She was special in a way that will be forever clouded and diluted by her end. The heralded heights of her musical career will forever be tempered by the depths of her demise--her memory marked with an ugly asterisk.

As Archbishop Cranmer states with such eloquence:

Some are born dead, some achieve death, and some have death thrust upon them. At whatever point it occurs, it is unavoidable, inevitable, inescapable.

Amy Winehouse was of those Marmite kind of artists: you either loved her or loathed her. She had recently cancelled a number of concerts in Serbia, Turkey and Greece so she could 'sort herself out'. Sadly, it appears that rehab was not enough. Her long battle against drink and drugs has brought her music to an end, and the world has lost another talent at a tragically young age. RIP.

Corporate Jets...Boo!

According to reports from people with more patience than I have, President Obama once again uttered the usage of "private jets" in his campaign budget speech last night. Private jets, you see, are an icon of corporate greed gone wild.

It is not, I suppose, that corporations who own such jets are evil from a generic standpoint, just that corporations that can afford to own such jets by definition do not pay enough in taxes. Here are some choice quotes from Mr. Obama about corporate jets in a recent speech:

“It would be hard for the Republicans to stand there and say that the tax break for corporate jets is sufficiently important that we’re not willing to come to the table and get a deal done.” President Obama

"You'll still be able to ride on your corporate jet. You're just going to have to pay a little more." President Obama

[wishing to close] "egregious loopholes that are benefiting corporate jet owners or oil companies at a time where they're making billions of dollars in profits." President Obama

We're getting the point...the jets themselves are not evil, but those brazen enough to own one (and those politicians who are doubly brazen for standing up for those who do own one) are choosing to toss the elderly to the dogs so that caviar and champagne can be savored at 30,000 feet.

This is not the first time that the evil rich have been singled out for their tastes toward the expensive--never mind that corporate jets are used primarily to transport high paid executives from city to city at the company's own cost to conduct the company's own business, rather than blathering Commanders In Chief who enjoy the same sort of globetrotting but instead are tucked comfortably inside the taxpayer provided cabin of Air Force One.

No, toward the end of George HW Bush's single term in office, he broke his lukewarm pledge of "no new taxes" by, among other things, targeting items of excessive value purchased by the rich. These luxury taxes targeted furs, jewelry, yachts, private planes and automobiles all priced above a certain threshold.

Less than two years later the luxury yacht industry estimated layoffs of about 25,000. That is, there were 25,000 fewer people making good money in the boat building industry (and paying no income taxes on that good money earned in the boat building industry) so that people purchasing boats built by the boat building industry and priced at more than $100,000, would kick in an extra 10% to the government to help cover the costs accrued by the government due to higher unemployment levels in the boat building industry.

While that lesson may not have been learned by our current President, those people who work within the corporate jet industry are definitely taking notice.

Gov. Sam Brownback led a news conference in Wichita on Wednesday criticizing Obama's remarks.

The governor said at least 30,000 people in Kansas are employed by the aviation industry, and more than 40 percent of general aviation aircraft around the world is built in Kansas. Wichita is home to manufacturing plants for Cessna, Hawker Beechcraft and Bombardier, along with roughly 200 parts suppliers who depend on them.

Obama seems to believe that taxing the bejeebus out of items that most people cannot afford is an attractive way to promote class warfare, it is not painless to those whose jobs are washed away in the wake of the punishment. You see, these punitive actions tend to spread out beyond their intended targets.

Higher taxes on certain items will change the purchasing behavior of consumers. They buy fewer of the items, find additional means to lower the tax burden, or seek out jurisdictions where the tax bite is not so punitive. One need look no farther than the actions of a very enlightened and progressive former democratic candidate for president to see that this is true.

The corporations that own corporate jets pay billions a year in taxes and provide millions of jobs to employees that also pay billions a year in taxes. The corporations that design and manufacture corporate jets pay millions a year in taxes and employe tens of thousands of people who also pay millions a year in taxes. The tens of thousands of employees of corporate jet manufactures spend millions of dollars a year in restaurants and hotels, in food and in apparel, in appliances and automobiles. Companies that provide hospitality services, household goods, and durable items in turn pay billions and employ millions. (Rumor has it that some of these companies also happen to own corporate jets.)

Are these not good things?

As Americans, we should celebrate the iconic corporate jet for the wealth creation and employment that it represents. We should celebrate a society that allows the most inventive and innovative among us to make millions of dollars while they provide the rest of us with gainful employment, a life more comfortable than that enjoyed by our parents, and the opportunity to slice out our own little part of the American dream.

The White House does not celebrate such icons but instead wants to change American society by vilifying and dismantling the apparatus that allows such wealth and private employment to exist.

It is said that those who do not know history are destined to repeat it. I think that Barack Obama and his progressive minions know their taxation history. They simply like what they have seen.

Rod Allen: RACIST!

Detroit Tigers' television commentator Rod Allen made a huge mistake the other night by suggesting that the seven Tigers on the field at that time might (gasp!) want some rice and beans during the after game meal.

Allen: "Lot of quality at-bats tonight by Tigers batters."

(Avila fouls off a pitch.)

Allen: "Tigers pretty much got a all-Latin squad out there tonight."

Impemba: "Ordoñez, Cabrera, Martinez, Peralta, Guillen, Avila, Betemit. Jackson and Boesch don't qualify."

Allen: "They're gonna have to get some rice and beans for the postgame spread tonight."

Impemba: "[Nervous-sounding laugh]. Yes, they are. ... Two and two!"

Now, there is no hint that any of the mentioned players were offended by the suspected racist remarks of Allen, but in the absence of their echoing an injured protest, some white guy from Yahoo got offended for them.

Give me a break. There is already enough legitimate racism in this country that the empathetically benevolent among us need not create it out of thin air and then waste our time in drawing our attention to the creation.

Says the too offended David Brown:

It might have been tricky for him, [ed. Brown isn't suggesting that Allen, as a black man, is incapable of such a thing, is he?] but Allen could have referenced how the Detroit clubhouse — which includes respected stars such as Victor Martinez, Miguel Cabrera and Jose Valverde) — is a place where Latino players can feel comfortable. That's not always the case in the major leagues. Such a discussion could be valuable.

Short of that, if only Allen had tried to be funny, maybe something stereotypical he said theoretically could be defended. But Latinos eating only rice and beans? It wasn't funny the first billion times someone said it, so why keep it going? Allen comes off like he's mocking them, even though — giving him the benefit of the doubt — he probably didn't mean to.

No, it didn't sound to me like he was mocking them. For instance, from what I heard, Rod Allen didn't suggest that the players would only want to eat rice and beans as Brown asserts, but merely that they might want it included. But then again, I don't try to interpret every word uttered by anyone I hear through the filter of racism and cultural disrespect.

Perhaps Allen could have made it all easier for the rest of us by simply coming right out and uttering a colorful slur. After all, its getting pretty darn hard these days to tell the real racists from the poseurs.

But, I've got an even better idea, this one for David Brown.

Lighten up a little bit, take to the sidelines, and let the Latino players on the Tigers speak to Rod Allen if they are actually offended. Let them be the ones to draw Rod Allen aside and tell him that his words cut them to the quick, otherwise it just sounds like your lecturing of Allen is done because you feel that Latinos are somehow either incapable of speaking for themselves or are simply too dumb to know when they've been insulted. (See how two can play at this game.)

Journalist in the Headlights

A degree in print journalism or broadcast journalism is, to oversimplify, the successful completion of a line of study designed to perfect a certain type of communication. A journalism degree trains its recipients to confidently communicate effectively the information a journalist sees fit to disseminate.

Sadly, a person so degreed and steeped with nearly unequaled communication skills can know relatively nothing about economics or history or psychology or anything else.

Their degree, however, gives them the license, too many of them believe, to blather on condescendingly to other people who actually did study economics, history or psychology in college.

Enjoy...



h/t Daily Pundit

Rule of Law Versus Democracy in Detroit

Jesse Jackson is back. This from MLive:

The Rev. Jesse Jackson is back in Michigan, and he's calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to join his fight against the state's recently-expanded emergency manager law.

'We have a profound economic crisis in the country and the state," Jackson said this morning on WJR-AM 760. "There's nothing about the economic crisis that should allow one to demolish democracy. The vote remains sacred even in a time of crisis."

In response to another commenter I posted this:

The United States is not a democracy and it never has been. It is a representative republic. There is a significant difference. What democracy basically boils down to is "majority rule." While this is great for those in the majority on specific issues, it doesn't do a lot of good for those who find themselves believing in something that the majority finds distasteful.

In truth, the founding fathers feared democracy. The ignorance of our political system displayed by people on here who sound otherwise intelligent is troubling to me. Don't they teach history or government in school any more?

Detroit is a cesspool today because it has operated for decades in a manner inconsistent with individual rights and the rule of law. It has been a center of corruption, graft, and the welfare state for so long that it has virtually crumbled other than what few crumbs it could pander from those who refused make it face the consequences of its own corrupt actions.

I don't feel sorry for Detroit. It made its own bed and for too long now it has been making the rest of us wake up next to it.

What is most interesting about Jackson's (and I presume the commenter's) thoughts is that while they endlessly pander for the money of others to help prop up historically corrupt municipalities, they simultaneously demand that those whose money they spend should butt the hell out.

It is the rule of law versus democracy. I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you, that Jackson winds up, once again, on the wrong side of the equation.

Rising Medical Costs: A Case Study or, How the Grand Trifecta of Government Intrusion Into the Free Market Screws the Rest of Us

My family is once again growing. The soon to arrive boy or girl will be joining the family of my niece and her husband who only four years ago blessed us all with twin boys. I wrote about their miracle here.

Those births occurred with myriad complications and the final medical bill landed well within seven figures.

In America we have to admit a couple of things. First, we have to admit that our medical community is the most advanced and successful on earth. Second, we have to acknowledge that it is expensive.

One of the evil villains in the rising cost of medical care in this country is the pharmaceutical industry. Sure, doctors are also greedy, as are nurses, as are hospitals, as are those who test your gross blood, your disgusting stool, and your even more disgusting growths. And, let us not forget the greed of ambulance providers, insurance companies, and anyone else remotely involved in the providing of medical services. Yet, somehow, when we are in need of their services, we manage to grovel back to these too-rich (and competent) devils and pray that they save our lives and make the pain go away.

And, with every advancement, costs rise.

Too often absent from the accusations lofted at medical providers over the cost of our best-in-the-world care is our beloved government--the largest and most benevolent corporation on earth.

Which brings me back to my expectant niece. Because of the premature birth of her twins, she is at very high risk of premature delivery of this next child. Her doctor has dealt with this the same way that many doctors have routinely dealt with it for the past few decades--with the prescribing of a hormone called progesterone. The drug, delivered by injection once a week, is given to expectant mothers during at-risk pregnancies for up to the last 20 weeks of the pregnancy.

The cost per injection...about $20 for a total cost of approximately $400. Or at least it was.

Enter the US government in the form of the most benevolent FDA. New cost...$1,500 per shot, or about $30,000 for twenty injections.

How did this happen?

In its quest for a perfectly regulated society, the FDA determined that progesterone as it was produced for decades did not meet the standards that should be applied today. To wit the drug was manufactured by pharmacists and not under the heavily regulated umbrella of the federal government.

This could not stand.

Recently, the FDA granted a patent to the K-V Pharmaceutical Company for Makena, the new government approved form of progesterone.

K-V Pharmaceutical, having hurdled the quarter of a billion dollar cost of dealing with federal regulations for the delivery of the new drug, and then enjoying the virtual monopoly provided to it by the FDA for this product that a pharmacy could make in its back room for $10, the market cost for the brand new old medicine was increased overnight by 750%.

This is no problem for the evil rich, who most likely are insured and, if not, can afford the medicine regardless. It is no problem for the insured who will have it provided for them after coughing up a copay--the category that my niece falls into. It is no problem for the poor who, after levying the government, can have the note toted by Medicaid and the taxpayers. It is a problem for a growing number of families who are still employed by companies that can no longer afford to provide health care coverage for their employees.

Meanwhile, medical costs skyrocket, insurance rates skyrocket, consumer prices skyrocket for any product made by those who provide insurance to their employees, and America saunters one step closer to the cliff--all this while progressive thinkers scream for even greater regulation on everything from what we eat, drink, breathe, use, rent, buy, sell, or otherwise brush up against in even our most casual walks through life.

Do I hold K-V Pharmaceuticals harmless in this whole mess? No, but I recognize that they are acting in exactly the way that we would expect for a company to act that has just spent a fortune for the right to produce a product for which they have also been granted a government monopoly. Really, that is exactly what we should expect from companies that feast off the nectar of a benevolent government bathed in fascism; a government whose two main priorities are to guarantee safety in all aspects of our dangerous human existence, followed closely by an insurmountable desire to make certain no members of society act in a manner not blessed by the collective.

Lets multiply this by the millions of intrusions the government makes in the free market every day. Increase regulation. Restrict individual choice. Squash competition.

It is the grand trifecta of a well-engineered benevolent state. Freedom would be cool, that is, if it wasn't so darn dangerous.

Epilogue: Due to great consumer pressure, K-V Pharmaceuticals has made some price changes to its product and claims it is now priced only about 330% higher than it was just a few months ago. Thanks.

Unwilling To Learn

A balding former roommate (and occasional reader) of mine tells a story of his youth.

When he was about ten years old he had his bicycle stolen from him. In an effort to get his bicycle back from the thief, he gave the thief's friend $10 to retrieve it for him.

While waiting listlessly for a bicycle that never returned, his Father disgustedly pointed out that "You live and learn, Son. You live and learn."

Tom Coburn, Mitch McConnell and Saxby Champliss are today seriously contemplating spending another couple trillion on their third stolen bicycle in the past few years.

Some people refuse to learn regardless of how many times they've been snookered.

The Good Old (hot) Days

You know it is hot when my 91 year old Dad is sporting blue jean cutoffs with black socks that are, as you have most likely pictured by now, pulled up as high on his calves as the elastic properties of a fine cotton-Coolmax-polyester-nylon blend could possibly allow.

And, you know it is really hot when my Mom hasn't yet made him go inside and change into something a little less offensive to the eye.

So, here we sit wearing whatever we can to stay cool inside a high pressure dome that is being advertised as the strongest to cover the country's midsection since the mid-90s. It has to be global warming or, at the very least, some global climate change action.

Which all made me wonder what my Dad was wearing some 75 years ago when a pre-global warming climate produced a steamy 112 degrees in Mio.

That was way back in 1936 when on July 13 of that year the all time record high for Michigan was recorded some ten miles from the farm on which my Dad was raised. My Mom was perspiring only two miles from Mio on the family farm where she was raised.

What would Al Gore be saying this week if, instead of temperatures that will flirt with 100 degrees, we were facing the temperatures my parents suffered through back before any rural homes enjoyed central air and before farm families even enjoyed insulation in their walls?

Perhaps this will be a good week to buy carbon credits on the open market because this high pressure dome is going to stay in place for at least a couple more days. But personally I think it would be a better investment to pick up a pair of old jeans and scissors. Just don't tell Mom.

We Could Use a Little Truth

Barack Obama has hinted that if the Congress cannot raise the debt ceiling that he could not guarantee that Social Security checks would be mailed out. We expect these sorts of scare tactics because they come right from the written works of Saul Alinsky, the Communist community organizer from whom Barack Obama learned most of his playbook.

But, any of us who have spent any time investigating this know it to be, as Joe Wilson might shout from the Capitol floor, a lie. There will continue to be money flowing into the treasury after a deadline. In fact, there will be more than enough money necessary to pay the interest on the debt, social security benefits, benefits to military personnel, Medicare, Medicaid and, with enough votes, they could still fund an all important study of AIDS transmission in Chinese prostitutes and maybe even build a library or two.

So, why doesn't Kay Baily Hutchinson say just that? Rather, the "establishment" GOP Senator from Texas says that social security checks can still be mailed out because it comes from another fund altogether.

On Fox News today with Shannon Bream:

[...]we shouldn't be having the President say he might not be able to send social security checks out, he can. He absolutely can. It's a different fund. They know that. So, I think it is a scare tactic."

Ms. Hutchinson, the only reason we are in this financial mess to begin with is because the other fund of which you speak does not exist. It has been used up. Spent. It is gone.

It would benefit Americans everywhere to know the truth about this financial mess. Covering up Obama's pessimism with your own brand of optimism is obfuscatory.

Speaking of an Overreaching Nanny State

Let's not leave the good people of Colorado out of it either.

The wonderful bureaucrats of the Rocky Mountain State are getting serious about turning themselves into the parents of every child in the state. They know what is best for the children and, in order to make sure that incompetent parents don't neglect to teach future citizens about tolerance and multiculturalism, they're writing regulations making it mandatory for all day care centers in the state to make available dolls that represent three different races.

It's bad enough that these red-tape artists have the gall to attempt such a foray into the private sector, but then they have the stone cold gall to spend months parading around the state wasting tax payer's money in order to implement "this [...] lengthy, thoughtful, deliberate process."

I wonder if an Irish, German, and French doll would suffice?

h/t Drudge

The Nanny State Is Coming For Your Vegetables

There are few things on Earth that tick me off more than self righteous bureaucrats using their authority to bully the people that pay their salaries.

It is bad enough that we have bureaucrats trying to tell us what we can eat, if we can invite other people to smoke on our own private property or if we might, pretty please, be able to add some salt to our food.

Now we have a benevolent overlord threatening a homeowner for growing vegetables on her own front lawn. Why? Apparently for no other reason than he doesn't want them to.

Michelle Obama can grow a whole garden on the White House green but Julie Bass, of Oak Park, Michigan should know a little bit better.

From My Fox Detroit:

"We thought it'd be really cool to do it so the neighbors could see. The kids love it. The kids from the neighborhood all come and help," she said.

Bass' cool garden has landed her in hot water with the City of Oak Park. Code enforcement gave her a warning, then a ticket and now she's been charged with a misdemeanor.

"I think it's sad that the City of Oak Park that's already strapped for cash is paying a lot of money to have a prosecutor bothering us," Bass told FOX 2's Alexis Wiley.

"That's not what we want to see in a front yard," said Oak Park City Planner Kevin Rulkowski.

Why? The city is pointing to a code that says a front yard has to have suitable, live, plant material. The big question is what's "suitable?"

We asked Bass whether she thinks she has suitable, live, plant material in her front yard.

"It's definitely live. It's definitely plant. It's definitely material. We think it's suitable," she said.

So, we asked Rulkowski why it's not suitable.

"If you look at the definition of what suitable is in Webster's dictionary, it will say common. So, if you look around and you look in any other community, what's common to a front yard is a nice, grass yard with beautiful trees and bushes and flowers," he said.

But when you look at front yards that are unsightly and overgrown, is Bass' vegetable garden really worth the city's time and money?

Surely Julie Bass must have a crappy looking garden. I mean, how else could it bind the city planner's thong underwear into such a tight little knot that it would so thoroughly encroach on Kevin Rulkowski's already too retentive anal cavity?

Nope.



If George Washington was alive today he would beat Kevin Rulkowski's ass.

h/t The Agitator via Drudge

A Post That Repeatedly Bangs Its Head Against The Wall

We don't have the money. Our children don't have the money. Our grandchildren, if the fruits of our legacy remain a constant, will not have the money either.

And yet, despite the fact that everyone on the face of the planet knows that we don't have the money, Michigan's junior Senator, Debbie Stabenow, will be introducing fascist legislation designed to circumvent the energy free market by plowing another $2 billion into one of our government's most favored initiatives, advanced battery research.

That $2 billion will have to be either borrowed from the Chinese or pulled out of a secret vault Timothy Geitner keeps securely hidden inside his own large intestine. Did I mention that we don't have the money?

Debbie Stabenow is not an expert on much of anything other than identifying air turbulence as global warming. Yet, because of her cozy relationship with union boneheads in Michigan, she has been afforded multiple opportunities in office to push for additional graft that will benefit her most loyal voting subjects in the run up to future elections.

Environmentalists and jug head union members holding hands with socialist public officials have literally driven Michigan's signature industry out of state and out of commission. In its place these same dipsticks are pushing for "future alternative industries" that can only survive if kept on the perpetual life support pried from the wallets of future taxpayers by politicians like Stabenow.

The Kwame Doctrine

Full disclosure: I have neither read the book nor do I ever intend to read it. In fact, I vow at this moment in time to never engage in any activity that might put one red cent in the hands of the poster child for municipal corruption, Kwame Kilpatrick.

But, what's not to like about the book? Here I thought J.K. Rowling had an imagination.

Really, the reasoning printed on its enlightened pages puts blame squarely on those who cause sordid political downfalls--not on those such as Kwame who admit guilt of betrayal, of scandal, and of cover-up, but on those who uncover the crimes.

If his guilt had been successfully enshrouded he might still be mayor.

This is not the doctrine of someone who has hit bottom or understands his mistakes. This is the doctrine of a narcissist who believes that actions are justified by virtue of his own desires.

Cronyism, corruption, cover-up, misuse of public funds, conspiracy, etc., are all merely tools to be used in the administrations of elected officials to better one's pocketbook or political influence. And if the whole thing unravels we can blame the police.

Chomsky Denounces Chavez

...because leftists are reasonable in their expectations that all the narcissistic political tyrants they endorse should know exactly when they have reached the appropriate level of absolute power.

Or something.

Rationing the Necessities

Remember Elaine Benes begging for a square of toilet paper during an episode of Seinfeld?

Her situation is being repeated on Coney Island these days, only it isn't Jerry's date in the next stall from whom she must beg some two-ply.

From the New York Post.

The city is so hard up for cash that it's rationing toilet paper in women's public restrooms -- to the point where bathroom attendants are doling out a few measly squares per patron -- along the world-famous Coney Island boardwalk.

The Post witnessed stone-faced Parks Department employees leave toilet-paper dispensers empty last week and instead force astonished female beachgoers to form "ration lines" in the bathrooms.

Regina Ballone, 25, of Brooklyn visited a boardwalk bathroom at West 16th Street Wednesday and was "grossed out" at the thought of someone else handling her toilet paper.

"Never in my life have I experienced anything like this," she said. "I walked toward a stall, and a bathroom attendant stopped me by shouting, 'Hey, mami! There's no toilet paper here,' and she whipped out a big roll for me to grab some."

That socialist paradise that is New York is coming face to face with the realities of an economy that makes war against job providers--well, that is all private sector job providers because the government can apparently still afford pay people to hand out a square here and a square there when it cannot afford to stock up the wall dispensers.

Sheesh.

h/t Publius Forum

Hating on Old Dudes that Once Founded a Country

In the last few years, what many people believe of the Founding Fathers has gone from a group of wise men whose vision helped to found the greatest nation in the history of the planet, to a group of deeply flawed men with vision too narrow to even contemplate the circumstances that would surround the lives of needy Americans in the years following the country's founding.

Protein Wisdom (and Dr. Larry Arn) have something to say about that.