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