Saturday, January 21, 2012
Friday, January 13, 2012
Remember the good old days
Like when George Bush was responsible for all the failures at Abu-Ghraib.
If you need a reminder, you can check out all these youtube clips.
Let's set up an over/under spread on when the big three networks will link some marines pissing on some terrorists to Barack Obama. I'll set the number at 19 years, 5 months, 1 day.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Life in "Progress" Country - Greece edition
Children are being abandoned on Greece's streets by their poverty-stricken families who cannot afford to look after them any more.
Youngsters are being dumped by their parents who are struggling to make ends meet in what is fast becoming the most tragic human consequence of the Euro crisis.
It comes as pharmacists revealed the country had almost run out of aspirin, as multi-billion euro austerity measures filter their way through society.
Life in Obamaworld
When the companies that supply motor fuel close the books on 2011, they will pay about $6.8 million in penalties to the Treasury because they failed to mix a special type of biofuel into their gasoline and diesel as required by law.But there was none to be had. Outside a handful of laboratories and workshops, the ingredient, cellulosic biofuel, does not exist.
In 2012, the oil companies expect to pay even higher penalties for failing to blend in the fuel, which is made from wood chips or the inedible parts of plants like corncobs. Refiners were required to blend 6.6 million gallons into gasoline and diesel in 2011 and face a quota of 8.65 million gallons this year.
“It belies logic,” Charles T. Drevna, the president of the National Petrochemicals and Refiners Association, said of the 2011 quota. And raising the quota for 2012 when there is no production makes even less sense, he said.
Penalizing the fuel suppliers demonstrates what happens when the federal government really, really wants something that technology is not ready to provide. In fact, while it may seem harsh that the Environmental Protection Agency is penalizing them for failing to do the impossible, the agency is being lenient by the standards of the law, the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act.
Now ask yourself the question. Who ultimately pays these fines? Hint. It's not the owners. It's not going to be the suppliers.
It will be the consumer. Once again Obama gives you that payroll tax holiday so you can pay it back in oil company fines.
Thanks reader Jeremy for the link.More...
Life in "Progress" City - Detroit edition
The struggling U.S. city of Detroit is on track to run out of money in May instead of April after spending changes made by city officials, Michigan Treasurer Andy Dillon said on Tuesday.Yeah, good luck with that............Dillon addressed media following a two-and-a-half-hour meeting with a team that is looking at Detroit's financial picture and trying to assess whether the city needs an emergency manager to take over operations. It was the first time the 10-member team met since it was appointed last month.
He said Detroit's most urgent issue is figuring out how to arrest escalating retiree health care costs, and clean up a balance sheet laden in debt and interest costs. Detroit Mayor Dave Bing had earlier predicted it would run out of money in April if spending wasn't curbed.
"It's my understanding that April has been pushed back to May," Dillon said, noting that the mayor "needs concessions from labor to avoid running short of cash."
Thanks reader Becky for the link
More.....
Friday, January 06, 2012
David Brooks, Resident Idiot
Funny how all of parochial gun toting neanderthals in middle America seem to know this before the intelligentsia.......Center-right New York Times columnist David Brooks opined a few months ago that President Obama, whom he once supported, was governing like a liberal.
Today, Brooks doubled down, telling Laura Ingraham this morning that Obama is not only governing that way, he is that way — or at least more that way than Brooks once thought.
"I still like him and admire him personally, but he’s certainly more liberal than I thought he was,” Brooks said.
“He's more liberal than he thinks he is. He thinks he’s just slightly center-left, but when you get down to his instincts, they’re pretty left. And his problem is that he can’t really act on them, because it would be political disaster. And so that means, I think right now he’s doing very little, proposing very little."
More.....
Thursday, January 05, 2012
Who will she vote for?
So in the 2012 election will she vote for more Hope and Change or the republican?
Monday, January 02, 2012
Must read
For a few measly millions, Wall Street not only bought itself a president, but got the start-up firm of B. H. Obama & Co. LLC to throw a cabinet into the deal, too — on remarkably generous terms. President Obama, for a guy prone to delivering prim and smug little homilies denouncing greed, greed, greed — the only of the seven deadly sins that truly offends Democrats (though Mrs. Obama has done some desultory work on gluttony) — is strangely comfortable among the Gordon Gekkos of this world. Shall we have a partial roll call? Beat the drum slowly and call out the names: With unemployment still topping 9 percent, the catastatic world economy teetering on the brink of another, even larger financial catastrophe, and trillion-dollar U.S. deficits as far as the green-shaded eye can see, let’s hear it for Obama’s first National Economic Council director, Lawrence Summers (of hedge-fund giant D. E. Shaw and venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz), who has had some nice paydays courtesy of Lehman Bros., JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup. Let’s hear it for Citigroup’s Michael Froman, deputy assistant to the president and deputy national-security adviser for international economic affairs, for Hartford Financial’s Neal Wolin, deputy Treasury secretary, for JPMorgan’s William Daley, Obama’s chief of staff, and for his predecessor, Rahm Emanuel of Wasserstein Perella. Let’s hear it for Fannie Mae’s Tom Donilon, national-security adviser. (No, seriously: One of the luminous interstellar geniuses who brought Fannie Mae to its current aphotic state of affairs, upside down to the tune of trillions of dollars, is running national security, and the former director of the White House Military Office, Louis Caldera, was on the board of IndyMac when it finally went toes up — sleep tight, America!) And, lest we forget, let’s have three big, sloppy cheers for economic-transition team leaders Robert Rubin (Goldman Sachs, Citigroup) and folksy tax enthusiast/ghoulish billionaire vulture Warren Buffett.That’s a pretty fantastic lineup, from Wall Street’s point of view, but the real bonus turned out to be Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, who came up through the ranks as part of the bipartisan Robert Rubin–Hank Paulson–Citigroup–Goldman Sachs cabal. Geithner, a government-and-academe man from way back, never really worked on Wall Street, though he once was offered a gig as CEO of Citigroup, which apparently thought he did an outstanding job as chairman of the New York Fed, where one of his main tasks was regulating Citigroup — until it collapsed into the yawning suckhole of its own cavernous ineptitude, at which point Geithner’s main job became shoveling tens of billions of federal dollars into Citigroup, in an ingeniously structured investment that allowed the government to buy a 27 percent share in the bank, for which it paid more than the entire market value of the bank. If you can’t figure out why you’d pay 100-plus percent of a bank’s value for 27 percent of it, then you just don’t understand high finance or high politics.
Are your national news media types so ingrained with liberal orthodoxy that they just can't even conceive of the notion that it's really the democrats who are the party of Wall Street and big dollar interests who love a government who will protect their turf from intruders?
It baffles the imagination.
Moving jobs to Mexico Act of 2012
Who needs the aggravation?Employers are facing more uncertainty in the wake of a letter from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission warning them that requiring a high school diploma from a job applicant might violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The development also has some wondering whether the agency’s advice will result in an educational backlash by creating less of an incentive for some high school students to graduate.
The “informal discussion letter” from the EEOC said an employer’s requirement of a high school diploma, long a standard criterion for screening potential employees, must be “job-related for the position in question and consistent with business necessity.” The letter was posted on the commission’s website on Dec. 2.
Employers could run afoul of the ADA if their requirement of a high school diploma “‘screens out’ an individual who is unable to graduate because of a learning disability that meets the ADA’s definition of ‘disability,’” the EEOC explained.
More......
Welcome to Obamaville
Seriously, the local fish market accepts EBT cards. I guess if you are a liberal, you probably think I'm a cold harded SOB trying to deny poor people their daily salmon. But I don't shop at this place because it's way over priced and their selection isn't much better than your local Kroger's store.
Besides, if you have the capability to head out to your local fish market (by the way, the local butcher is right next door and they accept the EBT as well) for over priced tuna or crab, you're not f$%king poor enough to need an EBT card.
Happy New Year.
Sunday, January 01, 2012
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
No fraud here
This week we have New York............
A total of four Democratic officials and political operatives have now pleaded guilty to voter fraud-related felony charges in an alleged scheme to steal a New York election.
The latest guilty pleas expose the ease with which political insiders can apparently manipulate the electoral system and throw an election their way, by the forging of signatures of unsuspecting voters that are then cast as real votes.
"The phrase they use is: 'making sure they vote the right way,'" said a source close to the case, which is unfolding in Troy, N.Y. "It is not a Democratic or Republican thing. ... It is criminal."
Former Troy Democratic City Clerk William McInerney, Democratic Councilman John Brown, and Democratic political operatives Anthony Renna and Anthony DeFiglio have entered guilty pleas in the case, in which numerous signatures were allegedly forged on absentee ballots in the 2009 Working Families Party primary, the political party that was associated with the now-defunct community group, ACORN.
Tea Party Takeover
If you want to know what a Tea Party America might look like, there is no place like Kansas.In the past year, three state agencies have been abolished and 2,050 jobs have been cut. Funding for schools, social services and the arts have been slashed. The new Republican governor rejected a $31.5 million federal grant for a new health-insurance exchange because he opposes President Obama’s health-care law. And that’s just the small stuff.
A new “Office of the Repealer” has been created to reduce the number of laws and regulations, and the Repealer is canvassing the state for more cut suggestions.In the upcoming legislative session, Gov. Sam Brownback (R) plans to roll out proposals to change the way schools are funded, taxes are levied and state pensions are administered.
A year after voters vaulted hundreds of tea party candidates to power in Washington and in state capitals, the movement’s goals are being pursued aggressively in states such as Wisconsin, Ohio and Texas.
But in Kansas, as nowhere else in the country, tea party fervor is reshaping government. The same political forces of the Republican Party driving the confrontation over taxes and spending in Washington are now completely in charge in Kansas.
Here's a question for those who are skeptical of tea party influence. Let's say that Kansas stays on this track, will the average standard of living improve or decline in the next 5-10-15 years?
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Blue state exodus
Democratic reaction to the news that Waste Connections, a $3.6-billion company and major Sacramento-area employer, is headed to Houston to seek a friendlier business climate tells other businesses all they need to know about the attitudes of those who run California's government.
State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, gave these clueless and snarky remarks in response to the news: "In this instance you have a company that is, in fact, profitable, making significant revenue gains in 2011 and 2010. That doesn't speak to a bad business climate here in California when a good company is able to thrive in that way. So whatever Mr. Middelstaedt's (company CEO) reasons are to leave the great state of California, I know I'm pushing back."
Is it really the Senate president's role to determine the proper profit margin for a privately owned company? Talk about arrogance.
"The decision by Waste Connections to relocate, despite the 17 percent revenue increase and the $18 million cost to move to Texas, illustrates that businesses will endure short-term costs to ensure long-term prosperity," wrote state Sen. Mimi Walters, R-Laguna Niguel, in response to Steinberg's message. Walters quotes business-relocation expert Joe Vranich of Irvine, who notes that businesses typically save 40 percent in costs by leaving California because of lower taxes and more manageable regulations found elsewhere.
If California wants to improve its business climate and reduce its double-digit unemployment rate, its officials need to understand what companies such as Waste Connections are saying, rather than simply dismiss their concerns.
More......
But hey, Let's not pick on California alone, how about Illinois, the land of liberal milk and honey........
On December 12, Illinois House approved CME-CBOE, Sears tax deal. Indeed, most of the above companies negotiated huge tax breaks and will stay in Illinois at least for a while.The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.
Small companies with no clout and no leverage as well as taxpayers in general are the ones paying the price for the seriously misguided policies of Democratic Governors Pat Quinn, and Jerry Brown.
How to win an argument with a liberal?
It's classic liberal drivel. There's no arguing the facts but twisting the subject matter.
I rarely get into many political arguments anymore. Why? Because I simply demand from the liberal at hand to tell me how life in Detroit (a city that is 92% democratic) is better under any objective quality? Schools, Crime, Unemployment, Poverty, Homelessness, Cost of Living, etc.?
Inevitably, the liberal at hand will either a) tell me there's other socioeconomic factors at hand (which tells me that they're a racist) or b) Try to hint that I'm a racist because Detroit has such a large black population.
So I hit them with California the liberal utopia if there ever was one.
And then I hit them with Europe where Europeans will be using their currency for toilet paper.
That usually shuts up said liberal but they still won't give up their beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The fact remains that everywhere there is liberalism, there is a cesspool of humanity. Take any school district, city, township, state, country, continent where liberalism dominates and I'll show you an armpit.
So if you're liberal, give me example of where I'm wrong!