Saturday, October 23, 2010
Friday, October 22, 2010
We all make mistakes
I’d like to thank Right Change (who sponsored and are planning an ad campaign to support the spot) and all the wonderful actors and crew who volunteered for the “Call Me Madam” video.
I was motivated to do something on this after I saw the video of Barbara Boxer interrogating the General.
I remember immediately feeling embarrassed that a member of Congress would treat an officer of the U.S. military like that. And doubly embarrassed that back in the early 90’s I had contributed to Barbara Boxer’s campaign. I was so outraged at the pure arrogance of that moment, that I sat down to write the spot, highlighting the pure absurdity of our California Senator dressing down a General for calling her “Ma’am.” No Naked Gun or Scary Movie ever had an opportunity as good as that one for pure ridicule. Never mind that the military are instructed to call their superiors including members of congress ‘Sir’ or ‘Ma’am’, including specifically, Members of Congress!
I was trying to think what would be more embarrassing........... being rescued by paramedics after being chained to a bed wearing nothing but a ball gag and leather chaps or voting for Howard Metzenbaum.
I did one of those but I'm too ashamed to come right out and own it.
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Life in "Progress" School system - Brooklyn edition
A rambling letter from the principal of a Brooklyn middle school was so poorly written and full of grammatical errors that parents and teachers say he deserves a dunce cap.
Principal Andrew Buck of the Middle School for Art and Philosophy was defending his policy of not providing textbooks in the email sent last week.
Or at least he seemed to be.
It was hard to tell because his logic was so bewildering, his language so stilted. His subjects and verbs didn't always match. He repeatedly misspelled "textbook" as two words.
After Buck fired off the email to teachers, parents got a hold of it and passed out copies in front of the East Flatbush school. Many are calling for his ouster.
Illiterate public educators protected by the state?
Now that's "progressive"!
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"Progressive" must eat hypocrisy for breakfast
The midterm mud is being slung at a ferocious pace and U.S. subsidiaries of foreign corporations are now in the cross hairs.
Fifteen Democratic Senators recently sent a letter to the Federal Election Commission urging them to "repair and strengthen protections against foreign influence of American elections" by not allowing foreign-controlled subsidiaries (or U.S. subsidiaries) to donate to political campaigns and "influence" the election. Those Senators were Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Al Franken (D-MN), Kirten Gillibrand (D-NY), Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), Pat Leahy (D-VT), Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Patty Murray (D-WA), Jack Reed (D-RI),Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and Ron Wyden (D-OR).The kick of this is, with the exception of Sen. Franken, the fourteen other senators have accepted PAC donations from U.S. subsidiaries of foreign corporations. According to opensecrets.org, Menendez tops the donations list with $247,204. Combined, the fourteen Senators have received a total of $1,216,122.00 from U.S. subsidiaries of foreign corporations. Outside of this group, a total of 86 Senators on both side of the aisle have accepted funds.
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Who will they vote for? #910
Meet David Moore and Nicole Rycek.
Why are they in the news?
A mother and father are accused of taking their two small sons along on a drug deal to a police informant.David Moore, 25, and Nicole Rycek, 23, both of Cleves, were booked into the Hamilton County jail Thursday on multiple drug and child endangering charges.
Both sold $30 in crack cocaine to the police informant in front of their children, who are 3 and 4, on Thursday, according to Cleves police. In addition, Rycek is accused of selling $20 worth of heroin on Sept. 21.
The duo spent the night in the Hamilton County jail without bond and are expected to appear Friday morning in Hamilton County Municipal Court.
Now I believe that these two reside in OH -1. On November 2nd, will they cast their ballots for Steve Driehaus (D) or Steve Chabot (R)?
Article here..........
Question of the day
If you lesson to the mainstream media and the NAACP, the tea parties have been infiltrated by racist elements including white supremacist groups.
If both of these claims are true then how do you explain this............
Among the many reverberations of President Obama’s election, here is one he probably never anticipated: at least 32 African-Americans are running for Congress this year as Republicans, the biggest surge since Reconstruction, according to party officials.
Seems kind of odd that a bunch of racists would support more blacks in the party doesn't it?
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Life in "Progress" City - Cincinnati edition
Reader Jeremy reminded me..........
The Cincinnati Public Schools system "expressly denies" that it did anything wrong when it allowed a group of high school students to be bused during school hours to the Board of Elections, to be shown sample ballots that included only Democrats, and then to vote.
And it promises never to do it again.
Thomas Brinkman, a Republican candidate for county auditor, and a group called the Coalition Opposed to Additional Spending & Taxes filed a legal complaint after three van loads of students from Hughes High School were bused on Oct. 13 to the Hamilton County Board of Elections. The students, all registered voters, were given sample ballots that listed only Democratic candidates -- "clearly with the intention of instructing [them] how to vote," according to the complaint -- before they cast their ballots.
Then the kids were then taken for free ice cream, a move Brinkman and the coalition said was tantamount to "bribery."
Here's some questions I have.
1) Are you sure wasn't an actual ballot from the city of Cincinnati? There probably wasn't a republican on the ballot in the first place.
2) They had enough kids in the high school to need multiple vans for the transportation? The last I heard, the CPS absentee rate was about 40%.
3) How's this different from the unions hauling a bunch of homeless guys to the polls on the promise of a free 40 when they finish?
Indoctrinating the masses?
Now that's "progressive"!
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Another Econ 101 lesson for the "progressives"
Let's repeat again. I'm not a conservative for me but for the low skilled worker who will no longer exist in this country because it's so much cheaper to haul their jobs to China, Ecuador, Mexico, Philippines, Indonesia, Vitenam, etc. etc. etc.Most people intuitively know that the worst thing government can do in the middle of the deepest recession in 70 years is enact policies that increase the expected cost of labor. Yet that is exactly what happened last spring, with the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
How bad is it? Right now we’re estimating the cost of the minimum benefit package that everyone will be required to have at $4,750 for individuals and $12,250 for families — understanding that the proclivity in this Congress and in this Department of Health and Human Services is to add benefits, not reduce them, making the package even more expensive. That translates into a minimum health benefit of $2.28 an hour for full time workers (individual coverage) and $5.89 an hour (family coverage) for fulltime employees.
Granted, the law does not specify how much of the premium must be paid by the employer versus the employee — other than a government requirement that the employee’s share cannot exceed 9.5% of family income for low- and moderate-income workers and an industry rule of thumb that employers must pick up at least 50% of the tab. But the economic effects are the same, regardless of who writes the checks.
In four years’ time, the minimum cost of labor will be a $7.25 cash minimum wage and a $5.89 health minimum wage (family), for a total of $13.14 an hour or about $27,331 a year. (I think you can see already that no one is going to want to hire low-wage workers with families.)
Read the whole thing if you still don't get it.
The promise of Obamacare
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Incompetence exceeded by vanity
Barack Obama's approval ratings might have slipped, but he gave himself an appreciative job appraisal on Thursday, saying on the campaign trail that he was a "pretty good president".
Obama gave the upbeat assessment of his own performance during a stem-winding speech to an overflow crowd at a rally for Washington state senator Patty Murray, part of a four-day mid-term election campaign swing.
"I've been inspired by you. Wherever I go, travelling across this country, especially when I meet young people, I'm reminded of your energy, and your drive, and your imagination," Obama told several hundred young people.
"For all the problems we're going through right now, we still have the best workers on earth, the finest universities on earth, we've got the best entrepreneurs on earth, we've got the freest, most vibrant economy on earth," he said.
One female supporter then yelled out "the best president on earth" and Obama replied, "Well, I won't say that, but we got a pretty good president".
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A 259 billion dollar "misread"
Now for me, I would consider a misreading something to the tune of missing the "s" at the end of a plural noun, reading "there" instead of "their", or adding a tape and missing a number. But this is what constitutes a "misreading" in Barney world..........
The government spelled out Thursday just how much the most expensive rescue of the financial crisis will end up costing taxpayers — as much as $259 billion for mortgage buyers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.That figure would be nearly twice the amount Fannie and Freddie have received so far.
By contrast, the combined bailouts of financial companies and the auto industry have cost taxpayers roughly $50 billion, according to the Treasury Department's latest projections. And the bailouts of Wall Street banks alone, which sparked public fury, have so far brought taxpayers a $16 billion return.
Fannie and Freddie were battered by losses on loans they backed, once the housing bubble burst and foreclosures soared. The two companies buy home loans from lenders, package them into bonds with a guarantee against default and sell them to investors.
On Thursday, the government provided a broad estimate of the costs of bailing out Fannie and Freddie, because their losses depend on home values over the next few years. If prices fall sharply, as some analysts forecast, Fannie and Freddie won't be able to recover as much money on foreclosures. And they would require more taxpayer aid.
Fannie and Freddie's rescue has cost $135 billion so far. Their bailout could end up costing taxpayers between $142 billion and $259 billion through 2013, the Federal Housing Finance Agency projected. Those figures take into account dividends that the agency estimates the two companies will end up repaying.
Holy shit, a 259 billion dollar "misread"? That would make Frank illiterate to the millionth power.
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Heaven forbid he acknowledge our Creator
At a Democratic fundraiser on Monday night, President Obama once again misquoted the Declaration of Independence’s most famous sentence and once again omitted its reference to our “Creator.” According to the text of his remarks published on the official White House website, he said: “[W]hat makes this place [America] special is not something physical. It has to do with this idea that was started by 13 colonies that decided to throw off the yoke of an empire, and said, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that each of us are endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’”
The first time that something happens and is met with publicity and criticism, it could well be an accident or part of the learning curve — like the first time one bows down to foreign royalty when other U.S. presidents haven’t; or the first time one issues a public apology abroad for past (real or imagined) American sins in a way that other presidents haven’t. But the second time, the assumption must be that it’s probably deliberate — and that makes it all the more appalling. Other presidents didn’t deliberately misquote the Declaration, and they didn’t leave out (or rewrite) the words about our rights being endowed by our Creator.
The first time President Obama misquoted the Declaration in this way, when addressing the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute a month ago, I wrote:
“Only two plausible explanations spring to mind. One is that President Obama isn’t very familiar with the most famous passage in the document that founded this nation; that even when plainly reading from a teleprompter, he wasn’t able to quote it correctly. The other is that President Obama doesn’t subscribe to the Declaration’s rather central claim that our rights come from our ‘Creator’ (also referred to in the Declaration as ‘Nature’s God’ and ‘the Supreme Judge of the World’).”
He probably believes the separation of church and state is in the First Amendment of the Constitution as well.
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Welcome to Obamaland
Free checking as we know it is ending.More.....The days when you could walk into a bank branch and open an account with no charges and no strings attached appear to be over. Now you have to jump through some hoops -- keep a high balance, use direct deposit or swipe your debit card several times a month.
One new account at Bank of America charges $8.95 per month if you want to bank with a teller or get a paper statement.
Almost all of the largest U.S. banks are either already making free checking much more difficult to get or expected to do so soon, with fees on even basic banking services.
It's happening because a raft of new laws enacted in the past year, including the financial overhaul package, have led to an acute shrinking of revenue for the banks. So they are scraping together money however they can.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
The Velvet Tea Party
Here's an interview of her views and her attendance.
Money quote............
What are some misconceptions that people have about Tea Parties (and their attendants) in general?
That they're all racists, they're all religious nuts, they're all uninformed, they're all stupid, they want no taxes at all and no regulations whatsoever. Those "arguments" are presented by the Dems in order to keep their base of uninformed voters on their side. In my opinion, as soon as you start name-calling, your opinion is immediately deemed invalid!
Life in "Progress" Country - France edition
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Protests have gotten out of control in Paris. Riots have broken out in the streets of the French capital after several youths set cars on fire, vandalized stores and blocked traffic as they fought with riot police. They are protesting the raising of the retirement age in France to the age of 62. The riots in Paris come on the heels of a major oil refinery strike that has left the country in a major gas shortage. Nearly one third of all gas stations in France have run dry.Up to this point the demonstrations had basically been peaceful. Tuesday, however things turned ugly, especially just outside of Paris as well as in Lyon.
More failed promises for Obamacare
It's that time of year when employers deliver bad news about next year's benefits.Chances are you'll learn that your 2011 health insurance tab will be sharply higher, as companies continue to shift the burden of rising costs onto their workers.
Employees' share of premiums for a family plan is up an average 14%, to $3,997, vs. just a 3% rise in the total bill, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
And it's not just premiums that are spiraling higher. You're also likely to be hit with higher deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums as well as bigger bills for doctor's visits and drugs.
"Increasingly, employees have to be thoughtful about not just the cost of the plan, but the cost of the services they use," says Michael Thompson, a principal with Pricewaterhouse-Coopers' human resources practice.
We report, you decide
I never "early-vote" because voting on Nov. 2 is like Christmas to me. It's symbolic, I like the day, I get all jazzed to go do it and I wear my "I voted" sticker on my forehead for the whole day. I've always been suspicious of early voting. Why give the crooks 2 whole weeks to pull off their ballot stuffing? One day is time enough! Make them scramble, I say. But this year I noticed an early voting sign at the village and I decided I had the time and, being a busy mom, who knows what my Nov. 2 will look like this year. So I tried to vote. This was the beginning of a crazy chain of events that are still unfolding. Warning: The following may make your head explode.It's why I'll never change my registration from democratic.
"I'd like to vote please," I said to the girl behind the window. After checking my drivers license, an act which shocked me since I didn't think anyone checked IDs anymore when voting, I was denied due to "not being in the system." The rather cranky and dour girl at the village reluctantly called the Will County Clerk to find out what happened since I remembered registering in April at the Midlothian DMV. The Will County Clerk said they had no record of it and if I wanted to vote I would have to drive a half hour out of my way to the Clerk's office in Will County and register AGAIN and vote there before the 26th of Oct. If I had waited until November 2, I am not sure if I would have been denied my vote entirely, but that's what it sounded like. (Can one vote if one is not registered?)
Read the whole thing.........
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Quit helping small businesses
Now, I have a damn good economist with my back.........
Who better embodies the American dream than a small-business owner? Independent, self-reliant, flexible, and hardworking, small-business owners, we are always told, are the cornerstone of economic growth and prosperity. That’s why lawmakers are always pushing policies to help them prosper.
During recessions, small businesses are inevitably hailed as the key to recovery and showered with still more targeted programs. This latest recession is no exception.
In his State of the Union address this year, President Barack Obama announced that “jobs will be our number one focus in 2010, and we’re going to start where most new jobs do, with small business.” Since then he has proposed and signed a series of targeted tax breaks. The president also asked Congress recently to use $30 billion that had been set aside from the Troubled Asset Relief Program to start a new program providing loans and tax credits to small businesses.
These policies are based on a myth. It’s not true that the key to boosting employment is to help small businesses, even though Washington’s definition of the term is far more expansive than you might think. According the Small Business Administration, a small business is a firm with fewer than 500 employees—not just your average mom-and-pop shop. By this definition, 99.7 percent of all employer firms are small. Still, big companies—the ones that employ more than 500 workers—account for about half of the country’s total employment. In the 1990s, as the McKinsey Global Institute economists James Manyika and Byron August recently explained in The Washington Post, large multinational corporations created jobs more rapidly than other companies, and they have been vital to employment in the subsequent decade as well. In other words, new jobs come from small and big businesses. If your goal is to boost jobs, it doesn’t make sense to favor one over the other.
I continue to say that if you want to help small businesses, make the environment for big businesses to kick ass.
Guy gets revenge on ex on CSPAN2 panel
1) Dude, did it ever occur to you that your tremendously passive aggressive, spineless whining might be why she dumped your ass in the first place?
2) Are you related to David Arquette?
3) Do we need to take your man card for your inability to "man up" in a public discussion?
Where's the shovel ready projects?
It took 410 days to build the Empire State Building; four years to erect the Golden Gate Bridge. The Pentagon took two years; the Alaska Highway just nine months. These days it takes longer to build an overpass.
For instance, planning for Boston's "Big Dig" officially began in the early 1980s with a budget of $2.6 billion, but ground wasn't broken until 1991 and the last ramp wasn't opened until 2006. The final estimated cost: $22 billion. According to the Boston Globe, it won't be paid off until 2038.
Meanwhile, the "race" to rebuild the World Trade Center as some kind of remorse theme park approaches its second decade.
And across the harbor from Ground Zero, Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has earned scorn for thinking that a proposed underwater rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey might be too pricey. Under discussion for decades, it was originally projected to cost $5 billion. Estimates are now $9 billion and rising.
Monday, October 18, 2010
A reminder to Dems in tough races
How do I know?
Just remember the words of the leader of your party from last January.............
"Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me."
That should make you sleep well tonight............
Who would have thunk it?
Aerospace giant Boeing is joining the list of companies that say the new health care law could have a potential downside for their workers.Let's see. Insure more people, expand coverage, reduce deductibles and premiums should drop like a rock ........right?In a letter mailed to employees late last week, the company cited the overhaul as part of the reason it is asking some 90,000 nonunion workers to pay significantly more for their health plan next year. A copy of the letter was obtained Monday by The Associated Press.
"The newly enacted health care reform legislation, while intended to expand access to care for millions of uninsured Americans, is also adding cost pressure as requirements of the new law are phased in over the next several years," wrote Rick Stephens, Boeing's senior vice president for human resources.
Boeing is the latest major employer to signal a shift for its workers as a result of the legislation, which expands coverage to more than 30 million uninsured people and ranks as President Barack Obama's top domestic achievement. Earlier, McDonald's had raised questions about whether a limited benefit plan that serves some 30,000 of its employees would remain viable under the law. That prompted the administration to issue McDonald's a waiver from certain requirements under the law.
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Why I'm a conservative? #66
Consider the "War on Poverty"..............
Instead, editors of The Annals firmly declare that the main cause of poverty is “material deprivation itself.” In other words, the cause of poverty is poverty: The cure for poverty is to artificially boost the incomes of the poor through welfare payments, free food, housing, medical care, and so on.
This is nothing new. Liberals always have insisted that poverty causes dysfunctional behaviors rather than vice versa. But, if having a low income caused problem behaviors (such as illegitimate births and eroded work ethic), then most Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries (whose incomes were far lower than those of today’s poor) should have been drowning in dysfunctional behaviors. Of course, they were not.
One of the goofier notions behind the War on Poverty is the idea that that those in the underclass behave differently than the middle class because they have less money — and, therefore, the way to improve behaviors is to give the poor more income. The U.S. already has “invested” over $15 trillion in anti-poverty spending based on this idea, and the problem has gotten markedly worse.
It just plain troubles liberals to forthrightly examine the behaviors that lead to poverty. Following tradition, The Annals’ experts tiptoe circumspectly around the main cause of child poverty today: the collapse of marriage.
In low-income communities, the overwhelming majority of children are born outside marriage and raised by single mothers on welfare. If these single mothers were married to the actual fathers of their children, two-thirds would immediately be lifted out of poverty. But, despite these obvious facts, the Left is reluctant even to mention the connection between marital collapse and poverty.
To illustrate this point further. I'd be willing to take the census of any prison in this country and for every inmate who came from an intact two parent family, I'll give you ten dollars. For every inmate with no father in the house, you give me $1.00.
Anyone want to take me up on it? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
"Progressives" like to spout how they rely on "science" when it comes to global warming but somehow seem to walk away from real science when it's tea bagging them right in the face.
You'd think one or two might change their mind by now.
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Who will he vote for? #88
Meet Shannon Blanton. Why is Shannon in the news?
This week's J-Bro of the Week goes to Shannon Lyn Blanton, of Charlotte, North Carolina, who was busted for not paying child support. Judging by his outrageous "Got Beer" tattoo stamped on his forehead, we have a pretty damn good idea where all that money went: Down his throat. He'll get his day in court. But, seriously, doesn't this just look like the type of father who'd rather get sloppy, sloppy drunk on Mad Dog 20/20 and Natty Boh than, say, buy his kid diapers and baby food? The mugshot alone was too hilarious not to share.
Now in two weeks, will Shannon here pull the chain for his local Republican or Democratic candidate for congress?
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Shields and Brooks on the Tea Party's Message, Obama's 'Shovel Ready' Jab
I always love how these left wing operations always match up uber-liberal with lukewarm moderate.
Life in "Red State" - Texas edition
Texas already looms large in its own imagination. Its elevated self-image didn’t need this: More than half of the net new jobs in the U.S. during the past 12 months were created in the Lone Star State.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 214,000 net new jobs were created in the United States from August 2009 to August 2010. Texas created 119,000 jobs during the same period. If every state in the country had performed as well, we’d have created about 1.5 million jobs nationally during the past year, and maybe “stimulus” wouldn’t be such a dirty word.
What does Austin know that Washington doesn’t? At its simplest: Don’t overtax and -spend, keep regulations to a minimum, avoid letting unions and trial lawyers run riot, and display an enormous neon sign saying, “Open for Business.”
At bottom, the struggle between national Republicans and Democrats is over whether the country will adopt a version of the Texas model, or of the Michigan, New York, or California model. Will government allow the private sector to thrive, or stifle growth with its hyperactivity and favoritism for anti-business interests? If migration were a referendum, the Texas model would be winning in a rout — more than 1,300 people a day moved there between their 2007 and 2008 tax filings, according to Internal Revenue Service data.
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