Car Wars

‘We The People’ have decided to apply a misguided dictatorial approach to building cars to try to save the companies. This is the same approach the U.S. government has applied so well to all our other ventures that have worked out so well.
Let’s face the truth – since no one in Washington or the media wants to talk about ‘the truth.’ The reason the CEO and several on the board got the boot was because they were not retooling to build cars no one wants to drive fast enough to suit the Obama Administration. That should be an indicator that Washington has no idea what they’re doing when it comes to building cars. You have to have a market for the cars you build. Americans will buy trucks and SUVs, but those little golf cart-looking cars are still not something we want.
Ah, so rather than build the cars we want, being the government, they will change the playing field. Last week when the Congress passed their Omnibus Land Bill placing two million more acres (land masses larger than the size of Montana and Wyoming combined) of potentially oil producing land off-limits to development they made the U.S. more dependent on foreign oil and as a result of not allowing oil exploration we are also cutting the amount of oil on the market which will cause the price of oil to go up. Investors Business Daily covered that issue today in the attached article. http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=323305469830589. Last year when the U.S. announced opening those lands the price of gasoline began dropping from nearly $5/gallon to under $2. Closing them again is going to have the opposite effect. The thinking in Washington is that by creating artificially higher oil prices people will buy the cars the Left and the current administration want to force us into driving. Oil companies will be back to being demons again and Obama will look like he knew what he was doing. And he did. He manipulated the markets and lied to the American people so he and his ilk got what they wanted all along.
So now we understand how the government is going to get us to buy the cars they plan to build at GM. They are going to lie to us and manipulate us into them. A look at the Treasury report on GM indicates there are 20 cars GM makes that are turning a profit. Eleven of those are SUVs and ALL of those have to be dropped as part of the plan to save the company.
Added to this is the notion that the United Auto Workers knows what’s best for the car industry. Let’s dispense with that farce right now. Unions are there to protect their members, collect dues and obstruct management. Throw that into the present mentality in Washington to cave to the unions at every turn and you have a better picture of what happened to the CEO of GM. His very public firing would fit into the image of a ‘revenge example’ as to what happens to people who defy the U.S. government’s wishes. It set an example for other CEOs who show less than enthusiastic support of the policies of the Obama Administration and it take the head of one of the biggest names to oppose the UAW and puts it on a pole for the whole auto industry to see.
Managers are on their own in the business world. They’re the cowboys. Union members – not all, but enough – prefer the herd mentality. The unions enjoyed being told they have made ‘sacrifices’ in Obama’s speech yesterday when nothing could be further from the truth. The UAW talked about concessions at the hearings in front of Congress, but when they got back to Detroit the told the car manufacturers to go to hell. So where are the union sacrifices? In truth, there are none – but why let the truth get in the way of a good speech… Managers, on the other hand, are the ones facing down having to make sacrifices. Their jobs will be cut while Washington will fawn over the union members who have had a large hand in the problems facing the automotive industry. As this takeover of the private sector continues more and more managers will have their salaries adjusted to fit some outline Barney Frank feels fits where he wants it and more will face elimination as sacrifices to unions or the ‘taxpayers.’
For the first time in several decades GM was finally building cars that were hot and could compete with imports on all levels. Now Washington, in their desire to control Americans’ choices, are going to force GM to make cars no one will want to buy, change the playing field by manipulating oil prices forcing Americans to pay more for our gasoline and handing the ‘car war’ to the foreign car manufacturers – because Americans will buy imports if they are the only ones offering the cars we want to buy – and totally destroy the American car sector.
Thanks, Washington, for turning out the light at the end of the tunnel.

Another Punchline - Government Motors

Really? The government is going to take over General Motors and dictate how cars are built?
Sure, why not? The government has done such a bang-up job with everything they've touched roughly since the founding of the country; why not believe they can run an industry like the automotive industry as well? And do it better than the business people who have been trying to get it done for years, under the same constraints as the professional car builders.
Well, maybe I don’t believe it because there's NO evidence they can run a raffle, let alone something as large and complex as a car company. Look at the shining example of the Postal Service. Now THERE is an example of government management at its finest. Even in an industry where they have a monopoly and do their best to undermine their competition in the small package end of the business by transferring money from the letter end to subsidize the package end, they are always out of money, always dead last in service and continually raising rates. Become more efficient? Keep their rates competitve without large transfers of cash? Don't be silly – they're the government. They have all those taxpayer dollars to throw into their operations.
Maybe it's the same theory as Socialism. Maybe it's never worked anywhere in the world it's ever been tried, but because the United States goverrnment has never tried it that's why it's never worked. After all, if we try it we'll be so much better at it. We can tear down the Capitalist machine that has made this country the best in the world for so long, the country people all over the world are trying to escape to FROM those under socialism, and we can spread misery amongst our people better and we'll love it more because we're better at... what? What are we better at doing than the rest of the world that has failed so miserably with Socialism? The answer is, nothing. We'll follow the same paths they did and fall into the same traps because people are people all over the world. The only way Socialism has ever worked was with a gun backing it up.

Objector vs. Objection

The Obama administration is looking at suspending the right of doctors and nurses to refuse to participate in abortions on the basis of their personal moral objections. The administration states that if a nurse or doctor refuses to take part in the procedure they need to find another line of work. That also includes many Catholic hospitals that will have to close for refusing to perform the procedure.
What I find interesting about that is that the same administration has no problem with conscientious objectors on the battlefield. They see no problem with not killing another human in the line of war, but in an operating room they have a problem with a doctor or nurse refusing to take the life of an unborn child.
There’s no difference. Any way they want to spin it, it’s the same thing. It is a personal, moral choice and the government should have no place in that decision. So how is it the president and his administration are seeing it from opposite viewpoints? How can they see the same moral issue as two separate issues? The answer is simple. There’s no moral compass, no guiding principles for them to follow. To this administration and their adherents it’s all about the money. They go where the focus groups and the money tell them to go. There’s no leadership or belief system, it’s all about the particular issue at the time and where they think they can exploit it to get the most votes.
We’re in a lot of trouble…

A Blizzard Of Insanity

Some days there’s nothing you can do to avoid laughing at the blizzard of insanity that comes rushing at you like a freight train in a snowstorm. How did things get so insane so quickly?
The first snowball was the UN passing out a paper explaining how they are going to redistribute wealth in the name of Global Warming. They have dropped the façade of trying to fix the carbon emissions of industrial countries and have jumped directly to redistributing the wealth of the world. No more pretenses. No more scientist with bogus reports telling us why it’s necessary to cut carbon emissions, we’re cutting right to the chase and the UN is admitting that they want to tax the rich nations and redistribute that wealth to the poorer nations. Where have we heard that recently?? Oh yeah… that was what got Joe the Plumber attacked by the press when he asked Barac Obama about why he wanted to redistribute our wealth.
The next side splitting laugher was when I saw the clip of Hillary Clinton on Fox with Greta van Sustern begging North Korea, if they could hear her voice, to give her a call so they could restart the six party talks for dismantling the nuclear reactors over there. What???? Isn’t that her job to make contact with Kim Jong-il and set up those talks on behalf of the United States? Or are we now such a joke to these dictators that they realize they can ignore the United States. Our leaders lack the testicular fortitude to enforce any sort of sanctions against the likes of North Korea, so what's the point in even trying? Let’s face it; our power is slipping rapidly away. Why not just hire Fox News to be our Secretary of State and cut out Hillary and her boss? What are they even collecting a paycheck to do?? As concerned as our Congress and president pretend to be about spending they should do the right thing, resign and let people who know what they're doing take over. We could save ourselves trillions.
And then there were the 92,000 questions to President Obama about the legalization of marijuana during his online town hall meeting. That means that roughly 92% of the questions asked of the president were about marijuana legalization. That’s ridiculous. Then again, who else has time to send in questions to the president and take part in something like that in the middle of the day on a workday? The rest of the country was out trying to earn a living. So it makes total sense that the only people available to ask questions would be those without a job or the dope smokers sitting at home thinking they're going to come up with the most intelligent question ever that is going to cause the president to sign a new law to make their worthless lives worthwhile.
Lastly, there was the side-splitter over the commencement ceremony at Notre Dame. The church is at odds with the Obama administration over the abortion issue, yet tradition dictates Notre Dame invite the new president to speak at their commencement ceremony this spring. That invitation has created a monumental controversy on campus and around the country. How can a man on the outs with the Vatican and at odds with the tenets of the church over his stances on abortion and infanticide speak at a Catholic university? In a sane world it would not even be considered as a possibility.
I’m sorry. The world has lost its collective mind.
The UN and our new president are telling us we should think globally at the same time we have enemies out there who are trying to kill us. Are they so self-absorbed they are missing the realities of the world? Well, yes, they are. Obviously.
We, as a world, are not to a point where everyone is ready to move forward holding hands and singing cum-bay-yah. Does the Middle East look ready to sing together and share a bottle of Coke? All the peripheral sideshows mean nothing until we, as a world, can route out the evil and be ready to move forward. As high minded as some world leaders would like to think they sound when they talk about ‘world movements’ all they are really demonstrating is their lack of understanding of the world as it is and what is right for it right now.

Obama's Coming Gestapo

Was there anyone around during the 1990s in businesses besides me? Or is it we refuse to learn anything from experience? It can't be that we enjoy inflicting government on ourselves. That defies logic! What kind of imbicile would want something like that?
In the 1990s the last Democrat to hold the presidency decided he was going to attack businesses through OSHA regulations. We were several years away from their total demonization of management, so they had to do go after businesses with the tools they had at their disposal. OSHA was one of those tools.
Layer after layer after layer of regulations came out of Washington under the guise of 'protecting the workers' that in reality knit-picked businesses to death. Millions of dollars had to be poured into making structural changes and adding equipment that no ordinances or safety regulations had decreed before OSHA came along and decided it was a good idea. Many of the ideas were counter-productive - and in hindsight I wonder if that was not the intent - and some were actually more dangerous than the condition before it was 'improved.'
Who was there helping though all this? The unions were in total lock-step with the OSHA inspectors. The unions kept track of conditions they thought were unsafe, reported on how meetings were conducted and if they were given serious consideration, insisted on having a voice in solving conditions and always recommended much more costly 'fixes' than necessary – usually resulting in the need to add more union jobs.
We are seeing the rise of the same situation again with the arrival of the new Democrat administration. The regulations to protect our financial system are going to be regulations to make doing business costlier. Count on it. This time they are coming after salaries, how busiensses are run, what they can produce, when and where – if at all. All of it will be controlled through Washington with companies reporting to some Central Bureau that will decide if we are doing enough to please them to allow them to keep our businesses running and minimize 'fines' - read 'another tax.' In turn, those costs will be passed on to us consumers. None of this is a mystery.
What is scary is the power these governmental agencies attain and the way they wield it. In the 90s they locked out companies that failed to comply 100% with their edicts. There was no trial, no hearing, no arbitration, no discussion - it was the way the OSHA representative said or the gate was locked. They get drunk on their power and they use it like a sledgehammer shutting down companies and levying fines with dictatorial glee. Based on the mob stir created by Congressional leaders and fueled by the White House over the AIG bonuses and the outcry for more regulations you can rest assured there were be more regulations that will be applied with an iron fist. This is a 'change' all right - back to Gestapo tactics of old. You can see the same kind of arrogance in these people as any authoritarian governmment lacky gets when they get a little power. Be prepared - it gets worse from here. We've seen it before - we're seeing it again.

Where The Demonizing Will Take Us

You actually have to look backward to see where we’re going. If you view what is going on now through the looking glass of History all the moves right now start to take on shape in terms of a long term strategy.
First you have to see the plays as they stand.
The people in power right now are striking quickly setting the table before their opposition has a chance to respond or even realize they’re under attack. Smart move. The country was sleeping after the elections, we were emotionally spent after a long season of campaign ads and no one wanted to hear more about politics. That’s the perfect time to strike – get us before we come out of hibernation in the summer.
And that’s what they did.
Somewhere in Washington a strategy has been forming for years waiting for the ‘perfect storm’ of political fronts to come together to allow this agenda to be pushed through quickly. Make no mistake; the Stimulus Bill was in the works for years waiting for the right time to roll out. When it came there was not a moment to waste. The recession could start to recover any day and Americans had to still be looking at it on the front burner for there to be enough fear generated to allow Congress to force through at blitzkrieg speed the bills they and the White House wanted to see enacted.
Taking out the private sector in one fell swoop of emotionalism took a lot of skill to recognize the right moment and push the point. After hammering on and on about this being the worst economy since the Great Depression – which most people knew to be false and has now been acknowledged as ‘overstated’ – created fear in the American people. From there it was a short step to demonizing Wall Street and businesses for their ‘greed’ as the cause of the recession.
Looking ahead to where we’re going is a matter of looking back to where the world has been. We have the brewing of a classic class envy conflict like in Russia of 1914 and a power grab like Germany of 1933. Whip the people into a riotous mob and unleash them on the bastions of the French Revolution. The European history of monarchs, endless wars and oppression made Lenin, Hitler and Mussolini possible. By setting up the top wage earners as demons – which is a group of about six percent of Americans – it becomes clear that the group is too small to defend themselves against the masses while being an easy target for class envy attacks from organized groups like ACORN. All this demonizing is going on while trying to grab as much power as possible for the government in the process.
Sooner or later Americans are going to wake up to being played – and that’s where the plan starts to fall apart. How much we will lose before that happens is still hard to tell, but that’s why Congress is working so hard to move so fast.
It’s American history that is going to derail their plans. It’s the uniqueness of the American Experience that is going to be harder to overcome than the current leaders know. The schools may have found ways to quit teaching American history, but we Americans did not quit teaching our kids about the American Experience. Americans have a different take on the world. We fought to overthrow the very bond those aforementioned tyrants put onto their people. We go all over the world to break the shackles our own government is trying to put on us. Americans stand for Liberty and Freedom. We don’t stand for Tyranny. Don’t mistake our kindness for weakness.

Making Sense of Demonizing Wall Street Executives

In a warped way, I see what all this is leading toward – the end game of the attacks on Capitalism.
Over the last few years we’ve seen Republicans fighting against universal healthcare as proposed by Democrats, for Welfare reform, immigration reform and a laundry list of rebuilding and strengthening efforts out of Washington. Republicans wanted to privatize and shrink government – Democrats wanted to grow government and build a power base. The two are clearly diametrically opposed approaches to solving the problems.
Then something happened.
The ‘big government’ approach started to break down – although you’d be hard pressed to find it in the press. The housing bubble burst, Fannie and Freddie were maxed out with toxic mortgages the American taxpayer had guaranteed and the economy went into stall. All the approaches from ‘big government’ were falling apart, but they were taking down the private sector along with them.
At that point it became a race for the Left to get their message to The People and sell it in a way everyone could understand. They went with an old template. Beat the drums of negativity in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Since the beginning of the Iraq War the Left has beaten the anti-war drums calling the war a failure at every turn. Their allies in the press carried the continuous drumbeat for the Left into American living rooms. It was as if the press envisioned rivaling their heydays of the Vietnam War to rebuild their stature with the American public. Their effect on the war was considerably less than it was during Vietnam, but they found they were able to have a serious impact on the popularity of the president.
Then it was time to apply what they learned. It became a matter of beating the drums of ‘poor economy’ and counting on the opposition to have a weak voice – as usual – from their elected leaders. Along with the drumbeat came another factor they counted on – the fears of the American people.
Jump ahead beyond those opening moves to where we are now where all executives at all companies are being demonized by clever versions of class discrimination based on jealousy. The actions of AIG were taken out of context, abused and applied to an old Leninist template of success being bad. Throw in some questionable – meaning unconstitutional – actions by Congressman Barney Frank and Congress and we have a lynch mob mentality.
So where are all these attacks going?
The end game to these moves is to demonize all businesses long before the debates come up over socializing medicine and other initiatives the Obama administration wants to push. The Left is laying the groundwork for the battles that are to come taking the option of privatization out before it even gets on the field. The talk about holding companies taking taxpayer dollars accountable is a smoke screen. The interest is in roping all businesses into the same category so the debate is done before it’s even started. Once again it is creating the necessary ‘shorthand version’ for easy publication that the press can keep hitting on to back the Leftist position.
The Obama administration is looking for regulatory control over any business they feel is likely to have a ‘negative impact’ on the financial structure of the country. As vague and ominous as that power potentially is it allows companies to be blackmailed or destroyed along with being removed from the debate. These, too, are the opening moves in a long campaign that is going to take us to a ‘change’ we did not want.

The New Drumbeat - "Capitalism Is Bad"

It’s obvious our leaders in Washington read the classics!! 1984 and Atlas Shrugged seem to top the reading lists. But… what did they learn from them? Create crisis, keep perpetual enemies and beat down the producers until they finally quit producing. Wow!!! You’d think our leaders would learn from History, but it seems they prefer classic novels instead. This is like college when I was assigned a book to read and then the professor would discuss the book. I know we were reading the same book, but we were getting entirely different meanings from the book. That’s Washington as we know it today. The meaning they’re drawing from the book does not match what was written there.
Since 2001 the drumbeat was, “Bush, the Idiot, lied.” I started to think that was some title or part of his name like Ivan the Terrible or Catherine the Great. We had Bush the Idiot. Every night you could hear it on all the networks in their opening statements, “Good evening and Bush, the Idiot, lied. Here’s tonight’s top stories…” In one way or another we heard it every night until it was shorthand on the talk shows and polite conversations. You would routinely hear, “Because Bush lied and got us into the war in Iraq, we are now faced with having to defend… [whatever their beef of the day was].” It was a shorthand that no longer needed explaining or debating, all the political talking heads knew the background and it was accepted in their circles as ‘truth.’ They threw it in without anyone blinking an eye or questioning exactly where he lied or about what.
Jump forward to today. Now we have other drumbeats starting on the talk circuit. One that you hear regularly is “I agree with what the president is trying to do, but…[then they discuss their current beef].” No one has yet been able to define what it is he’s trying to do – including the president – but they agree with it. They think he’s a great guy who speaks well and has a beautiful family, but no one has been able to tag clearly what his goals are. But… maybe that’s starting to become a little clearer with the other drumbeat.
The other drumbeat – the one that seems to be drowning out the others right now – is the beat that Capitalism has failed and is bad.
This new “beat” is being demonstrated to us in several ways right now, but what is the most unsettling issue about the message is that the places where Capitalism is suffering the most is where government had their fingers in it the most. Wall Street and the banking industry are a couple of the most regulated industries in the free market and they are the ones taking the biggest beating. AIG is the current “whipping boy” for the Great Inquisitor Congressman Barney Frank and his minions. Congressman Frank lead a man the government appointed to be the CEO of AIG, Edward Liddy who was paid $1/year as a salary, into the Congressional hearing room to be the target of this ire. It was nothing more than a dog-and-pony show. It was a ludicrous waste of taxpayer dollars (I think Frank and the word ‘ludicrous’ are starting to become synonymous).
The person who should have been sitting in that chair answering questions under oath was Senator Dodd – who added the amendment that allowed for the paying of those bonuses to AIG. Now we find out that amendment came from the White House and Dodd originally lied about the amendment’s origin. Gee… Why would anyone allow those bonuses to be put in unless they were trying to contrive the outrage that has been generated over their payment? In other words, the amendment was added to create the further demonizing of business executives.
It was when President Obama spoke in California that the bonuses made sense. He used the anger against AIG to extend the circle of executives under attack to include executives outside of the relative few taking government bailout money. The drumbeat he started that day is that all executives are bad and should be punished.
Follow that speech up with Nancy Pelosi calling the enforcement of American immigration laws “un-American” and President Obama calling for “undocumented” aliens to come out of the shadows and join unions so they can get better wages and this whole attack starts to take on shape, direction and purpose.
The drumbeat is against Capitalism. Even though the system made the likes of Obama, Pelosi, Frank, Dodd and their supporters rich they see Capitalism as “unfair.”
And now we’re back to reading the same book and getting different meanings. “Professors” Obama, Pelosi, Frank and Dodd see those people rushing across the borders as coming to America to get good paying union jobs (without explaining how those jobs are going to be generated), to pay dues and create kids to grow up and be good dues paying union workers – all worshipping at the alter of “The Professors” with their votes.

I, on the other hand, see those people rushing across our borders as trying to get a chance to live the American Dream. They want their kids to grow up free, get an education and have a chance in a country where they can eventually hold the very jobs “The Professors” are trying to demonize. They don’t come here to be “good comrades,” they come here to have a better life and – hopefully – get rich.

Whose Show Is It, Anyway??

Looking at the ‘show’ coming from Washington you have to wonder whose agenda we’re seeing. And what’s the point? Where is all this taking us? This is nothing like we’ve ever seen before in the history of America – and it’s not looking good for the country right now. Someone out there is running an agenda and the White House is signing off on it.
What am I talking about??
When has a new president ever come into office and started pushing an agenda through at this rate right out of the box? Never, that’s when. If you will recall, our last president was still trying to get his Cabinet in place when we were struck on September 11th of his first year – and he had his party in power in Congress at the time he took office, too. This is something else entirely.
If you look at what the president is doing you’ll see it’s mostly a few speeches and executive orders here and there. The radical moves are coming from Congress. A bill the size of the Stimulus Bill was not something thrown together in a couple months as the transition team was looking for ideas to help the economy. That monster is an agenda that has been building for years just waiting for a chance to come rushing out as soon as a more conducive administration was in the White House. That thing was loaded for bear at over a thousand pages and there’s no way that was put together in the time span we are given to believe it happened.
Now we see an emergence of the House of Representatives in the media on a regular basis. Congressman Barney Frank is becoming a daily figure shouting people down and demanding his ‘show’ be given more information (read that as ‘fodder to get him more time in front of the cameras’), even when it was pointed out that the information he requested could get people killed if it was made public. His attacks on businesses – in the name of protecting tax dollars – are becoming ludicrous. It’s easy for all of us to fall prey to the populist attacks on AIG for handing out contractually obligated bonuses because we can see that if a company fails or loses money the executives should not be rewarded. Congressman Barney should talk to Senator Dodd, however, since it was Dodd who put in the amendment – he’s now trying to dump on the White House because it’s blowing up in his face – that allowed contractually obligated bonuses negotiated before February 2009 to be paid out. All the screaming in the world by Frank is not going to help anyone but Frank – who really is only interested in getting his face on camera.
Which brings us back to the original question – whose agenda is it?? Sorry, Barney Frank seems like a useful… congressman (Twain lovers will understand that reference). Nancy Pelosi’s?? A San Francisco politician?? Maybe, but even she had to have a lot of help. This agenda is too wide-reaching in scope and too focused in its goal to be the work of one person. The way to find the answer is to do what investigators always do… follow the money.

Thanks Congress, for More Taxes We Can't Afford

I would like to extend a special ‘thanks’ to Congress for considering the tax they want to place on gasoline to bring it back to $4/gallon. For now, it would be a ‘floating’ tax that would keep the price of gas at $4/gallon no matter what happened to the actual price of gasoline. Presumably, as the price goes down the tax goes up, as the price comes up the tax goes down so the price at the pump stays the same – at $4/gallon. The idea is to force us to conserve gas and get us to buy hybrid cars – that we’re not doing with the price of gas down. American car manufacturers are being forced to produce hybrids as part of their circus performance to get bailout money and now that gas has fallen Americans don’t want – the hybrids.
So what happens when the price of gas inevitably goes back up?? Theoretically the tax will get smaller.
Wanna bet???
We all know how this works. Congress will get hooked on that money pouring in to cover all their little pet programs like a bunch of junkies on crack. There will be no parting them from the money they get from that tax.
We Americans are a lot smarter than Congress wants to give us credit for being. We’ll figure out how to save gas if we have that tax forced on us. Then Congress will have to go back to their original plan of getting the money from the top one percent of earners.
What happens when the top one percent no longer have enough money to support all these bailouts, stimuli and pet programs? Well... the answer is obvious. Those of us who are going to be paying the gas tax to double the price of gasoline to sell those cars no one but Washington wants – and we can’t afford to run out and buy – will have to take up the slack. Taxes will have to be levied on us to keep up Congress’s ‘crackish addiction’ to the money. The very people Congress says they are there to protect are the ones who – once again – will feel the brunt of the new tax. The poor, the Middle Class, the hard working people of America who are the backbone of what makes this country great are the ones Congress wants to dump on again.
How much more will we be able to take??? Our pockets are no longer very deep – only time will tell.

The Obama Teleprompter Joke Explained

The joke goes: “How do you know when President Obama is speaking?”
The punchline is: “David Axelrod’s fingers are moving.”
For political junkies that brings uproarious laughter. The problem with the joke is that most people are not political junkies. In fact, most people probably could not explain who David Axelrod is, let alone how he fits into that joke.
After the now famed St. Patrick’s Day Fiasco at the White House last night, I thought it might be a good idea to explain what that joke is all about and how it fits into the St. Patrick’s Day Fiasco.
During the campaign last year it was obvious then Senator Obama was giving some great speeches as he stumped around the country. At last we had someone who sounded ‘presidential’ when he spoke. The speeches were big on flair and hope, but weak on substance. No one cared. After eight years of a president who was horrible in front of the cameras the country was desperate for someone who could speak. Obama was the man.
It was early on in the campaigns we found out it was David Axelrod who was writing the speeches for Obama. The problem was Barac Obama lacked the skill to make those speeches when the teleprompters were turned off. He knew the rhetoric well enough, but to summon it at a moment’s notice and make it sound polished like the speeches he was giving was not happening. The solution was to keep him on teleprompters.
Skip ahead a year and the teleprompters have become a fixture everywhere President Obama speaks. Once he was elected it was expected he would bring out the teleprompters for important occasions, but would speak from the cuff like all his predecessors at smaller functions. That turned out not to be the case. Even press conferences that used to be presented from notes on a 3x5 card are presented from teleprompters. And the person writing for the teleprompters?? Still David Axelrod. He is now seen as the man through whom all words coming from the president must pass to be sure the president stays on message and sounds presentable.
Then came the St. Patrick’s Day Fiasco. This one was so bad even the Lapdog American Media (LAMs – also known as a bunch of sheep capable of taking dictation) is refusing to replay the videos. The inevitable happened. Fortunately, the British press is doing the job the Lapdog American Medial should be doing and they told the story for us.
Speeches were being given at the White House Parteeee. Finally the Prime Minister of Ireland got up and started through his speech. About twenty seconds in he realized what he was reading on the teleprompter was not his speech, but instead it was President Obama’s speech. Laughingly, President Obama came to the dais and started reading from the teleprompter as if it was his speech. Unbeknownst to President Obama, the teleprompter operator had switched the speeches so the Prime Minister’s speech was now up. President Obama got as far as thanking himself for the great party before someone jumped in and put a stop to the whole mess. It had to happen sooner or later. The president was embarrassed, the world press had a good story to report, and the Lapdog American Media had another secret to keep to protect the president.
Now you know how you can tell President Obama is speaking. David Axelrod’s fingers are moving!!!

A Contract Is No Longer A Contract

I have to say, I’m getting a little tired of this knee-jerk reaction from the White House and the Left Wing of Congress – and those who want to get their faces in the news – every time a company does what companies do. When Congress gave these companies money and attached no strings the companies had no idea they were to change what they were doing. There was no directions with the money, just take it and get it into the system.
Enter Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and his statements to the workforce of AIG to give back their bonuses or commit Hari Kari. Well, gee, Senator, there are a lot of us out here who would like to see Congress – and politicians in general – do the very same thing!! All this grandstanding is nice for getting your face on TV, but Puh-LEEEEZ!! Senator Grassley was among the band of fools running to the microphones telling America we had to rush through this TARP legislation or the financial markets were going to collapse – a statement that turned out to be a total lie – but what are we to expect from our elected officials?? Manipulation through lies and contrived emergencies. That seems to be about the extent of it.
Okay… it’s hard to take a man who looks like Buddy Hackett and talks like Sylvester the Cat seriously. I’m sorry, but Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass) is going to have to get on the morning conference call the White House Chief of Staff to get the ‘daily talking points’ before he goes on the morning shows and starts showing his ignorance. Well… to be fair, his ignorance is going to show regardless, but at least he could be in lockstep with everyone else at the news agencies.
Barney Frank was one of the main culprits in the problem we’re facing now by defending the whole Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac fiasco with charges of racism against anyone who tied to challenge them. It was his regulations that got us here and now he wants to sit in judgment and fire people who are getting their contractually protected bonuses because HE failed to stipulate when he rushed his TARP bill through Congress.
President Obama even came out at his lunchtime meeting and swatted Frank down by giving kudos to the newly government approved CEO of AIG Edward Liddy.
Yep, you read that right – Liddy was approved by the government.
(Uh… okay… I have a problem with that, but I’ll deal with that in another post.)
At the same press conference, however, the president said he was going to get back the $165 million in taxpayer dollars that went out in bonuses. Uh… are we going to violate the contracts these people have with AIG?? Those bonuses are part of contracts AIG signed with their people – those people have a legal right to that money.
Is that going to be the rule from Washington that contracts no longer hold up if taxpayer dollars are involved?? In that case the auto industry will be THRILLED!!! The money handed over to the auto industry is tax dollars, so – using that same logic – the car companies can void out their contracts with the unions and dump those bloated contracts with retirement benefits, union employees sitting in ‘pools’ and getting paid and bring those wages back in line with what they should be!!! I see – as usual – Washington is not thinking things through…

Traffic Lights, GM and Congress

Let's start this with something extremely simple like… getting to know each other. I like to walk. A lot. I do it for exercise and because I’ve always enjoyed walking. It gives me a chance to break away from the noise of life and think. I pile up a lot of miles every week trekking around the city and in so doing I get a lot of time to observe and process the world around me. Granted, a lot of my observations are run through the filter of my upbringing in Ohio, life in LA and NYC and throws in a lot of what the world used to call 'Common Sense.' Judging by our world today ‘Common Sense’ is either lost, or it’s not so ‘Common’ after all.
Today we're faced with a FLOOD of crises that need our immediate attention – or so we’re told. The media is extremely good at creating hysteria, but they’re also extremely short on solutions. That gives them flexibility so they can pooh-pooh whatever solutions come along and ridicule those who are trying to make things work. What a deal, you get to set the agenda, let others come up with and implement the solutions, and then you get to critique the solutions, too, which we all know are not going to come up to the impossible standards the media people are going to set up. Amazingly (not really), they miss the things that are right in front of us. In the end it comes down to a lot of us asking, “Are you kidding me???”
So, having said all that let me start with something easy that everyone can understand quickly. It actually should be important to all of us – and at times of the day I’m sure it is!
There’s a lot of talk about Global Warming and the impact it’s having on the planet. I’m not a scientist, so I can’t call myself any kind of an expert on the issue. To me, the planet is where I live. I do my best to keep it looking good and to not interfere with others by blowing smoke in their faces or throwing trash at them. I even take my used cups to the trash container on the way out of the stadium. My theory is I want the planet to be there to hand off to the next generation so they have a nice place to live, too. Ozone depletion and carbon emissions out on the edge of the atmosphere are out of my pay grade. My only input to the debate is what I have seen with my own eyes. Out west on the sides of mountains are lines where ancient oceans left their mark. There are also ancient buildings on the floors of seas. When Greenland was green it was warmer, now it’s not, but it might be again. What that tells me is that we live on an evolving planet. Those are changes that happen in the world and will continue to happen as long as this planet exists. That seems pretty simple to me. I don’t understand how people can preach Darwinian theory one second to explain how we have evolved and how we are going to continue to change, but they think the planet is at its perfect place and we have to keep it here. Again… not my pay grade.
Then there are some things that are in my pay grade.
As I said earlier, I walk a lot and notice things. As I was walking the other day at rush hour I passed cars that had just passed me. They were stuck at traffic lights. Now, if they were coming out of side streets onto a main artery I could understand that happening, but instead I was on the main artery and I was still passing the cars. This is a major city – Atlanta – and the degree of stopping relative to the volume is unnecessary. Atlanta is a growing city, even in these times, but the city and state planners want to build more highways when the conduits they need are already laid. In the future, yes, more freeways will be needed, but when the state and city are well over their planned budgets putting down new freeways now seems wasteful – particularly when other solutions are available. At the moment the better solution is to ‘time’ the traffic lights so the traffic flows during high volume times. Major conduits are set for ‘demand’ lights from lesser side-streets even at rush times creating a situation where traffic pulses from light to light rather than flowing through. It’s an easy fix for a problem that’s not all that hard to see.
The government of Georgia, I will have to admit, tries hard to keep the money of Georgians in the pockets of Georgians. Solutions simply do not seem to be the business of government. They are what American car manufacturers were thirty years ago and they’re headed down the same road.
General Motors in the 1960s and 70s is one of my favorite examples of having money and no plan for the future. Examples? Sure… When Cadillac owners complained that they were having to stop too often for gas in their gas-guzzling monsters of the 1960s GM responded by putting on larger fuel tanks. When the unions wanted money for retirement plans that were destined to cost the company more for retirees than for the active work force or contracts that allowed their members to work three days and make more money than if they showed up for work every day, GM gave them what they wanted. Americans are not buying enough cars? Build in obsolescence that will cause the car to die in five years or less forcing consumers to have to buy a new car more regularly. In other words, GM threw money at problems without regard for what is was going to do to their company in coming years.
We have the same situation today with our governments all the way up and down the line. Roads are clogged? Build more roads. Timing out the traffic lights doesn’t occur to them because it does not require the massive amounts of cash they’re used to throwing at problems, nor has there been a ‘blue-ribbon committee’ using up millions of tax dollars to study why the roads are clogged.
The difference between the government and GM is that our public servants are using our cash to throw at problems. Every program they put in place is put there at our expense. All the grand plans for universal this or that is to be paid for by us. Just like GM of thirty years ago the governments are used to throwing cash at problems and hoping they go away. Only now there is a different twist starting in this country – one that has been missing for almost two hundred and fifty years. Tea Parties. Governments are starting to feel the pinch of no longer having their way with our tax dollars, constituents are starting to want to scrutinize where their tax dollars are going and politicians are going to have to become better at how they do business… or lose their jobs.
We need to start looking closely at what the Congress is doing with our money – including the misappropriation of cash for them to ride on private jets at our expense, whether or not they are earning their pay, their expense accounts, the lobbies they throw money to, who is throwing money to them in the form of kickbacks or contributions to their campaigns and all the other ‘breaks’ they get that ‘We The People’ – the ones footing the bill – are not getting.
Congress started something when the started squealing every time a business used bailout tax money to throw a party or decorate a bathroom. Congress people did it to get their faces on TV to try to get votes. What they failed to realize was they were starting a wave of people who want to see where all the tax dollars are going – and they want to hold Congress accountable for it.
Congress might get their wish to be on TV, but they may find themselves on the pointy end of the camera answering questions rather than being the sanctimonious finger pointers.