Gibson's Guitar Company Harassed by Obama Officials for Something or Other

In my post Graph: Non-Defense Spending Relative to GDP, Color-Coded by Party in Power, or the Obama Hockey Stick, reader Levi commented "Which policies (of Democratic President Barack Obama) are stunting the recovery?"- he doesn't believe that Barack Obama is pushing any sort of policies that are slowing our economic recovery.

Levi probably isn't a regular reader of my blog, since he has obviously missed posts from just this month detailing Obama's efforts to harm our economic recovery, ranging from his banking policies (Obama Pressuring Banks to Give High Risk Loans to Poor and Minorities) to regulations that the EPA has put in place (Latest EPA Rules to Cost 1.4 Million Jobs and a 12% Increase in Utility Bills) to executive orders that add to the cost of doing business in America (Government Does Not Create Jobs; In July Alone It Added $9.5 Billion to the Cost of Doing Business). These stories were well-researched and filled with details, but perhaps Levi and progressives like him need more evidence. I can provide that.

Via Powerlineblog:

The Justice Department’s raid on four Gibson guitar factories is in that category. The raid took place last Wednesday; this Memphis Daily News story, published this morning, is a good place to start:

Around 8:45 a.m. Wednesday, Aug. 24, agents executed four search warrants on Gibson facilities in the two cities [Nashville and Memphis]. They seized several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars.

But Gibson’s CEO says his company has not been told what it did wrong and that he assumes the allegation is that some of the wood being used to manufacture the company’s guitars is illegal.

“Everything is sealed. They won’t tell us anything,” Juszkiewicz said, never raising his voice but pulling no punches in his defense of the storied guitar maker.

He valued the equipment and raw materials seized from Gibson at almost $1 million. At one point, the chief executive said he’s letting the U.S. Justice Department know he’s telling his employees to keep making the instruments. …

“We feel totally abused,” he continued. “We believe the arrogance of federal power is impacting me personally, our company personally and the employees here in Tennessee, and it’s just plain wrong.”

Now, it may turn out that Gibson's has broken some obscure portion of the Lacey Act, a piece of legislation that is designed to protect exotic trees by putting burdens and fees and regulations on US companies, who extract a fraction of the exotic trees compared to other nations (Gibson's imports only 5% of the rosewood, while an unburdened China that shows much less respect for the environment is encouraged by progressive laws like the Lacey Act to extract 95% of rosewood). If this is so, one wonders why other companies are not also being punished- companies like one of Gibson's principal competitors, C.F. Martin & Company, which engages in the same practices but isn't raided (it's CEO is a big Democratic donor), or Michelle Obama, who gave French First Lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy a Gibson Hummingbird acoustic guitar with a rosewood fret, in clear violation of the Lacey Act.

But the point is that the President and his administration are not helping businesses navigate these useless and harmful laws; the President and his administration are not working with Americans to produce more goods and products in a more efficient and profitable manner; and the President and his administration are not helping our nation to recover from the recession. No, he is instead harassing legitimate businessmen on frivolous ground that are motivated perhaps by political malice and smell strongly of the misuse of federal power. He is not helping America recover- he is acting to hurt our recovery and make a recession into a Depression through his policies.

Record Snowfall in New Zealand Makes Mockery of Global Warming Gibbering

Many in the media are gibbering away at how the recent hurricane that struck the East Coast of the United States is some sort of sign that mankind is permanently warming the entire globe in a horrible way through their energy production and driving habits, but the truth of the matter is that hurricanes have hit the East Coast in the past and are going to do so in the future, regardless of what sort of activities that humans engage in, and that people are just talking about global warming right now because it is still warm in the Northern Hemisphere.

But in the Southern Hemisphere it is cold and winter still, and in some areas of the world they are experiencing record snowfalls. As citizens in these areas freeze and suffer and crops and food is destroyed by the frigid temperatures, they are not begging government to control their behaviors and punish them for using heat and power and technology, but rather they are suffering through record snowfalls that are a result of changes in the suns gravitational field (see my post "Bombshell" Experiment: Global Climate Change Caused by Cloud Cover for more information on my logic and evidence for this theory).

Many, including Democratic-nominee for President Al Gore, believe in the religion of man-made destructive global warming, and want humans to stop 'warming the globe.' But in many ways, a warmer globe will mean higher crop yields, less starvation, and lower numbers of people freezing to death, although if the globe does warm more people will have more to eat and will be warmer, which some people feel is bad.

Regardless, let's gain some perspective on the issue by reading this weather report from New Zealand from this August:

Heavy snowfall in New Zealand essentially brought the country to a standstill on Monday, hitting majorcities including Wellington and Auckland.

Snow fell in downtown Auckland for the first time in 72 years as the city faced its coldest day on record, according to the New Zealand Herald. The weather and temperatures are slated to get
worse in the coming days.

William Neeley, 26, an American living on a farm near the town of Clinton, south-southeast of Dunedin on the south island, said “there’s about a half a foot” of snow. “We have to dig through the snow to find the carrots” on the farm, he said and adding that “it’s awful.”

UPDATE: I just saw on memeorandum a story that reports that parts of Britain experienced the coldest summer that it has had in nearly two decades. Now, I know many people believe that as global warming gets worse that parts of the world will get colder and that snowfall will be higher and stuff like that, but if it is colder in the south and in the north the explanation very well could be that me driving my SUV isn't making the entire globe warmer, and that sometimes it is cold and sometimes it is hot, and that what drives these changes is the sun.

Here is a link to the story about cold weather in Britain.

Taxpayers Pay $8.5M/Year for Postal Employees to Seriously 'Sit Around and Do Nothing'

Taxpayers are expected to pay $8.5 million this year for employees at the the United States Postal Service to show up for work, sit in a break room, and do nothing, according to a recent audit. These workers show up to work, knowing that equipment is broke or that (based on past estimates) mail volume will be low, and then sit around receiving taxpayer money for doing nothing. This 'standby' time, which will amount to 341332 hours a year, also allows these employees to put in enough hours to be full-time employees and fully receive benefits and retirement packages that are quite expensive as well.

Assuming that an average work week is 40 hours and that these employees receive two weeks vacation, that works out to 2000 hours of work each year per employee, if the post office stopped its practice of 'standby time' this would allow the post office to lay off 170 workers. The average postal worker makes $50K/year, so the elimination of this practice would save the postal service 8500K/year, or $8.5 million.

These savings do not include benefits and retirement packages for these employees, which I assume would multiply the savings by several times- postal employees make half their salary on retirement and receive generous benefits before and during employment, so the savings from ending the practice of 'standby time' would be in the tens of millions each year and continue forward into the future.

That's not to say that cutting 'standby time' for postal employees is going to make the United Stats Post Office self-sufficient- the post office has been hemorrhaging red ink for years and is projected to lose as much as $7 billion dollars this year alone. But this is to say that taxpayers should not be paying for employees to stand around.

And keep in mind that if the post office is paying hundreds of workers to 'sit around', it likely has thousands of workers who are doing 'make-work' and who are working at less than full capacity. Oh, I don't mean that postal employees are lazy, I just mean that the structure and culture of their business does not fully maximize the effort and abilities of every worker and likely means that this independent agency is running way below peak efficiency and could save taxpayers billions of dollars a year by becoming a hard working institution of public service.

Postal employees should work and work hard and be paid for their time working- they should not be paid to sit around and do nothing. Contact your Congressman and demand that the Post Office stop its 'paid standby time' practice.

h/p Washington Post

UPDATE: I see from a story today that the US Postal Service is on the edge of default due to its own actions and management. Imagine if the United States government ran critical aspects of our economy, such as healthcare, in the same fashion that they ran investment banks like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, trains like Amtrack, or the mail like in the Postal Service:

The United States Postal Service has long lived on the financial edge, but it has never been as close to the precipice as it is today: the agency is so low on cash that it will not be able to make a $5.5 billion payment due this month and may have to shut down entirely this winter unless Congress takes emergency action to stabilize its finances.

America will Realign Towards the Tea Party in 2012; Write it Down in Stone

In my post NYT's Douthat is Wrong: Realigning Elections Exist and One is Coming I countered an argument that was advanced by the New York Times Ross Douthat where he claimed that Harvard Professor V.O. Key's theory on realigning elections was wrong. Douthat thought that 2008 was supposed to the be realigning election, and now that we can all see that it was not, he has become disillusioned with the theory that Key advanced in his iconic essay “A Theory of Critical Elections” and now thinks that elections that change America's direction are no longer possible. But he is wrong.

In my post Why 2008 Was Not a Historic or Realigning Election (written in 2009) I addressed Key's theory of realigning elections and looked back on the election of 2008 and looked forward to 2012. Here is some of what I wrote:

The theory of realigning elections (sometimes called key elections, critical elections, or historic elections)is that sometimes there is a dramatic change in the political system that you can observe in one election or a couple elections in a row. Usually it coincides with the coming to power of a new coalition of voters or the movement of a large or important bloc of voters to a new coalition, these realigning elections occur when voters decidedly break in a new direction on a particularly important issues, when a new party leader emerges who takes the party in a new direction, when the regional and demographic bases of power of the two parties switches, or when there is a new rules of the political system (ie, expansion of suffrage). Because political parties in America tend to be rather stable coalitions, a sudden realignment by a voting group tends to have a longer-lasting and dramatic effect. These realigning elections seem to occur once a generation (every 30-40 years). V. O. Key, Jr. is the professor who pioneered the study of these elections....

...Based on the 30-40 years estimate, the next 'realigning election' is due 2012-2020. Many though, because Barack Obama is black, want to say to say that the 2008 election (Democrat Barack Obama beats Republican John McCain) was a historic election, an unprecedented election, or a realigning election. Does it fit the model though?...

...If Obama had run as a liberal- running on a liberal platform and advocating liberal issues and highlighting his sharp policy differences from the past- then 2008 would have been a realigning election.

But let's go back to (2008). Watch the campaign commercials that Obama ran. Obama did not run as a liberal. He did not run on a platform that advocated stimulus packages, massive spending, large amounts of debt, pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, nationalized healthcare, raising taxes, cap-and-tax, or government-take-overs of companies. Obama ran as a moderate. He ran as a new and different candidate, one who would not be liberal or conservative, but would reach across the aisle and be a post-partisan President. He talked about tax cuts and strong defense and ending corruption.

Obama ran as a moderate- on a moderate platform- and McCain was a moderate, and the gains in Congress for Democrats were mostly from moderate Blue Dogs, and the polls show the election map as being essentially the same as 1996-2004, so 2008 was not a historic, realigning, critical, key, or unprecedented election...

...2012 will probably be the historic election that we are all looking for. Obama will be running as a liberal and will be seeking a mandate and approval for his policies- which this time around will be clearly liberal and far left. Voting blocs will have to move to vote for him, the map will have to change, and our nation will indeed embrace change with an Obama victory in 2012, setting the stage for likely Democrat control of government for 30-40 years and a shift in our nation farther to the left. If Obama loses, he will lose to a conservative candidate (the GOP is not going with another moderate- Romney, Pawleny, Palin, Huckabee, etc are all conservatives) running on a conservative platform, and it will mark a return to power for conservative Republicans and a move back to the right for our nation.

My theory that 2012 will be a real realigning election continues to receive support. Forbes Ralph Benko wrote an article last week called The Constitutional Populist Realignment Of 2012 that speaks to my theory:

...There are two theories. Progressives believe that the answer lies in government job creation (stimulus, bailouts, “shovel-ready” public works). Supply-siders believe that the answer lies exclusively in human action, entrepreneurs and businesspeople, and that the government needs to get its boot off our necks...

...Constitutional populists, like the Tea Party Patriots, demand a return to free market principles to create jobs. Top notch populists such as Victor Davis Hanson, writing in National Review, anticipate bidding an unsentimental farewell to “A Tottering Technocracy.”...

...Being a republic(an) isn’t for the fainthearted. The sainted Jefferson once wrote “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” One can imagine the outrage which this violation of Civility by Jefferson would have provoked at the Huffington Post (if they deemed him conservative). Compared to Jefferson or Paine Rick Perry thus far has proved himself to be a model of rhetorical restraint.

Will 2012 go down as the year of Constitutional Populist Realignment in which the American political rank and file decisively reins in the elites? A populist realignment, sweeping both the White House and the Senate into conservative populist hands would be epochal and is by no means out of the question.

The populists’ paladin should expect ridicule at the hands of the smug, failed, modern day royalists. The prize is big and the scorn worth bearing. That’s the way to the White House: jobs through free markets. As our Founders knew, as we now rediscover, as Perry, Bachmann, and Paul, among others are agitating for: jobs need real, rather than funny, money. Onward to gold.

The prize is big indeed and the scorn is worth bearing, but the way there is clear- in the primary you must be active in both the Republican and Democratic parties in advancing solid conservative constitutional libertarians who believe in our Founding Principles, and in the general election you must vote for whomever of whatever party better fits that label better and get your friends and family and coworkers to do the same. Let's dream big, my friends, and dream about taking back our nation, one election at a time, over a generation or two, and then perhaps America will once again be the great nation of freedom and liberty and prosperity that it once was.

UPDATE I: Thank you all so much for visiting my blog! Please be sure to look around at some of my other posts- click on the archives and look around from past months or simply do a search of your favorite topic and see what comes up! Bookmark me or email this page to your friends- it does no good if the message stops with you, you have to spread the word of A Conservative Teacher.

Also, I'd love to start posting to my blog wherever I am, and to do that I need a smartphone- sadly, my salary was cut by over 20% over the next 4 years with our latest contract, so I really can't afford one now... unless you donate some money to me by clicking on the 'donate' button on the top right of my blog. I would really appreciate it! Thanks for visiting!

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2012 Will Be a Battle of Visions?

Let's not complicate things- the election in 2012 is about choosing the vision for the future of our nation. For all of the talk on the right about Clinton being too progressive and all of the talk on the left about Bush being too conservative, the truth of the matter is that both of our last two former Presidents have been pretty moderate in reality. But in the coming election of 2012, we will have a real choice of visions this time around.

The vision of these Presidents was to add a modest amount of debt every year, grow the size of government at a steady pace by implementing programs that were called for, cut an occasional budget and talk tough about turning some government functions back to the states, keep taxes fairly the same by lowering but broadening them, keep spending the same amount on the military, invade a couple states, and not question the basic soft welfare state that our nation found itself in.

But in 2012, our nation will face a decision on which sort of vision to embrace. David Warren of the The Ottawa Citizen says this:

If what we want is a functioning, even flourishing economy, and therefore jobs, jobs, jobs, then the policies of Texas make sense. They are, as Rick Perry says, low taxes, minimal regulation, the avoidance of debt, and business-friendly attitudes. It is a political culture which at least tries to focus on the political questions (law, order, and so forth), and leave economic questions to the free market (with its inevitable bulls and bears).

If what we want instead is a dysfunctional and stagnant or shrinking economy, and therefore spreading unemployment, then California's policies are just the ticket. They are: high taxes, maximal regulation, and excruciating debt. Also, a political culture that belittles and despises business, almost as much as it belittles and despises law and order; one not merely addicted to "fine tuning" things utterly beyond anyone's comprehension, but earnestly trying to replace the free market with a "political market" for goods and services - whenever opportunity calls. ("Never waste a crisis.")

I'm not saying the generation of wealth should be the sole purpose of human existence. I am saying it is one of the purposes, and further, that by politicizing economic activity we actually mire ourselves much deeper in materialism than we would ever do by just going out and earning a living.

The Texas model works, and the California model fails. Quite apart from whether anyone in the States should vote for Rick Perry, they must choose between these models.

He's right, and it doesn't even have to be just limited to the 'Texas model', since Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman both are preaching the same kinds of policies as Rick Perry, and even a moderate Romney is talking a strong conservative game and will be pushed to the right by a Tea-Party strong Congress in 2012, much like a moderate-talking Obama was pushed to the left by a progressive-dominated Congress in 2008.

We are facing a real choice in visions in 2012- freedom or tyranny. It's not a new choice, but one that every generation must make.

Obama: Circling Back on the Iceberg?

The title of this post isn't mine- Ralph R. Reiland came up with it in his post which I will talk about. But it's a great title- in my mind, I see the American economy hitting an iceberg around 2007 and start taking on some water, enough that it badly listed by 2008 and went into a recession. The iceberg was too much federal spending that soaked up savings and investments, too many federal government policies that encouraged bubbles in investing and housing, and increasing regulations that choked off economic growth, especially in small businesses, and signaled to business owners that now was the time to play it safe and not take risks and create jobs. The tip of this iceberg of federal policy ripped a large hole in the Titanic of the US economy, and soon the boat started to dangerously take on water.

Although I'm no expert of this, I imagine that once your boat hits an iceberg and takes on water, you have two options. Option one is to continue moving forward and patch the hole- in other words, keep America's booming private economy and remove the harmful regulations and policies that caused the damage. Option two is to stop moving and widen the hole, by which I mean to attack private business and those who are successful in it and put in place more harmful policies. Oh, I guess there was a double-secret third option too, and that is to turn the boat around and try to ram the boat on the iceberg again, this time with the intent on sinking the whole thing. For a while, I thought that Obama and the Democrats were just intent on going with option 2, but it looks like they are honestly considering circling back on that iceberg with the goal of sinking the economy of the United States for good.

President Barack Obama was once named by me as Captain of the US Titanic Spending (see my complete list of Obama nicknames)- and now he's going after that iceberg again!

Here are some parts of the article by Reiland called Obama: Circling back to the iceberg:

Only 26 percent of the public approve of President Barack Obama's handling of the economy in the latest Gallup poll, conducted Aug. 11-14, while a whopping 71 percent disapprove. That's down from Obama's previous low point of 35 percent approval on this top issue.

The public's growing dissatisfaction shouldn't be surprising. Going back to 1890, reports the National Bureau of Economic Research, the only U.S. president with a worse record than Obama in job creation in his first two-and-a-half years in office, measured in terms of percentage change, was Herbert Hoover, presiding over the emergence of the Great Depression.

"Official unemployment is 9.1 percent," stated a New York Times editorial on Aug. 15, decrying the nation's jobs picture, "but it would be 16.1 percent, or 25.1 million people, if it included those who can only find part-time jobs and those who have given up looking for work." "Keeping the economy going and making sure jobs are available is the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning," Obama said back in March. "It's the last thing I think about when I go to bed each night."

Now, nearly six months later, the White House reports that Obama is working on a new strategy for job creation that will be unveiled after he returns from vacation. The task of coming up with a jobs plan that works shouldn't be all that terribly difficult. All Mr. Obama has to do is reverse what he's done and change what he thinks.

First, by the government's own numbers, small businesses have created 64 percent of the net new jobs in the U.S. economy over the past 15 years.

In fact, that understates the role of small business, since the vast majority of America's medium-sized and large businesses began as small businesses. The Heinz corporation began when 16-year-old Henry Heinz grated piles of horseradish at home, using his mother's recipe, and sold the bottled product door-to-door in Sharpsburg out of a wheelbarrow.

Yet since Obama took office, employment at federal regulatory agencies has jumped 13 percent while private-sector jobs shrank by 5.6 percent. Second, 39 percent of small-business owners said in a Chamber of Commerce survey in July that ObamaCare was either their greatest or second-greatest obstacle to new hiring....

...Additionally, 84 percent of small business owners in the survey said the economy is on the wrong track, 79 percent view the current regulatory environment as unreasonable, and 79 percent believe Washington should get out of the way of small business, rather than offering a helping hand (14 percent).

In its first 26 months, reports The Heritage Foundation, the Obama administration imposed new regulatory rules that will cost the private sector $40 billion. In July alone, reports Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., federal regulators imposed a total of 379 new rules that will add some $9.5 billion in new costs.

Bottom line: What's required from Obama is a complete about-face, the shelving of his flawed economic philosophy and a reversal of his counterproductive policy prescriptions.

For those who want to see which way the United States is going under President Obama and his progressive policies supported by the new progressive Democratic Party, watch this movie- Titanic (10th Anniversary Edition).

The Employment Boom in Federal Regulators- 13% Increase in Hiring Since 2009!

People produce goods and services, create wealth, and through their talent and hart work are making America a better place. At the heart of our economic system you have someone with an idea on how to make the world a better place by providing a good or service better than others, and then you have people who help this person to make their dream a reality. Some of these dreams are big (Bill Gates dreamed of making a better home computer) and some of these dreams are small (I dream of being an entertaining and interesting freelance writer and radio personality with a perspective that others don't have), but what makes our nation hum is that we all have the freedom to explore these gifts and ideas and the freedom to work hard to make our dreams a reality.

Except when we can't because our dreams and hard work and ideas are blocked by government regulations. Regulations serve a purpose in our nation- they protect public spaces, they protect areas that are owned by the collective nation, they protect lives, and they protect the freedom of people to participate in our nation- and so it is to be expected that in our nation of laws and standards that there will be laws and standards.

Truth in labeling laws, laws against dumping chemical sewage into lakes and rivers, etc- are reasonable and responsible regulations. Twenty or thirty years ago, I would guess that most people would say that most of the reasonable and responsible regulations had already been passed, and that people were pretty well protected in our nation under its laws.

In 2008, I think most of the people in our nation felt that our nation was pretty well regulated; in fact, many perhaps felt that it was heavily regulated, but very few were demanding a massive explosion in the number of regulations and regulators in our nation.

And yet, one of the fastest growing employment sectors in our nation since March of 2010 is in federal regulatory agencies. President Barack Obama (Democratic President since 2009) and his Democratic allies in the House (Democrat control from 2007-2011) and Senate (Democrat control from 2007) have decided that although the number of private sector jobs has grown only 1.4% that our federal government needed to hire vastly more employees whose sole employment purpose is to control these private citizens, to make rules regarding their behaviors, to enforce those rules, and to punish these citizens when they break the rules that these regulatory agencies invent.

It is tyranny, plain and simple, when regulatory agencies who are not elected and who are unaccountable break down the separation of powers in our nation and exceed their authority to further their political agenda's, and while our nation is willing to tolerate this at a low level, under President Obama and the Democrats this sort of tyranny has exploded in size and number and cost.

Employment at regulator agencies has climbed 13% since Obama took office, and in the past year alone the number of people who are hired to control our economy and its people has grown by 5.2%!

Is this what you all voted for? Is this the change and hope that was supposed to come with Obama winning office- more regulators, more people devoted to controlling business, more people inventing rules and punishing people who violated them? Is this the kind of leadership that you want to keep in office for another 4 years?

I maintain that anyone- anyone Republican or Democrat- would be a better President than Barack Obama, and the Democrats who have supported his agenda and backed him deserve to lose their jobs too for this misplaced trust in a President who is choking off job creation through excessive regulations and misusing taxpayer money by hiring more and more regulators while the United States of America goes bankrupt.

Hat-tip to Ace of Spades.

Obama's Secret Weapon: The Brain Eating Amoeba!

Liberals and progressives and Obama supporters frequently said me emails filled with such intelligent comments as 'you're crazy' and 'who pays you' and 'you're a poopyhead,' and I've always wondered why my critical reviews and hard hitting analysis and data and charts and well-reasoned questioning is met by these left-wing groups with such brainless comments, and today I figured out why- they must be victims of the terrifying brain eating amoeba!

A 9-year-old Virginia boy has died of primary amoebic meningoencephalitis, the second case of the rare illness this month and the third this summer. A 16-year-old Florida girl died last week of the illness, which is caused by infection with the amoeba Naegleria fowleri. A Louisiana man died in June of the same disease.

The illness is rare and nearly untreatable, according to the CDC. From 2001 through 2010, there were only 32 cases reported in the U.S. While several drugs appear to work in the lab, there is little evidence they can rescue infected people.

Indeed, the agency reported in 2008 that a review found 121 cases from 1937 through 2007, but only one survivor. A 1982 report in the New England Journal of Medicine said a 9-year-old California girl was successfully treated after contracting the infection while swimming in hot springs in the San Bernardino National Forest.

The two most recent cases were also linked to swimming in warm, fresh water, where N. fowleri thrives, but news reports said the Louisiana man contracted the infection after flushing his sinuses with tap water.

Virginia state epidemiologist Keri Hall, MD, said that an autopsy confirmed the boy's death was caused by the amoeba, but did not give further details. News reports, however, said he had died August 5 after a visit to a Virginia fishing camp the week before.

N. fowleri invades the central nervous system through the cribriform plate and can be found in the subarachnoid and perivascular spaces, according to the CDC. The subsequent inflammation of the olfactory bulbs progresses rapidly to the cerebral hemispheres, brain stem, posterior fossa, and spinal cord.

One clinical difficulty is that symptoms, which occur within seven days of exposure, are the same as those of fulminant bacterial meningitis, including headache, fever, anorexia, vomiting, signs of meningeal inflammation, altered mental status, and coma.

Seriously though, this is not funny stuff, and I don't wish this sort of thing on even my worst enemy. Perhaps the fools with bark at me as a dog does with their comments and such only got a sniff of the thing and not a full-blown infection.

Liberals and Democrats should try reading Brain Boosting Foods: 50 ways to improve your memory, unclutter your mind, and get your brain working at its highest capacity by eating right.

Obama's Belief in 'Bad Luck' Part of What Religion Exactly?

"We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again," Obama told a crowd in Decorah, Iowa. "But over the last six months we've had a run of bad luck."

If bad luck is the reason that our nation has struggled lately, I wondered to myself just what exactly our President and Commander-in-Chief was doing to combat this recent run of bad luck.

Never in my knowledge has any other President had to battle 'bad luck' before- a google search of past Presidents' speeches did not turn up any results of past Presidents, whether they were Republican like George W Bush or Ronald Reagan or Democrats like Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter, ever blaming 'bad luck' for the problems that the United States faced. Perhaps it was because these past Presidents were religious people, who did not believe in paganism and 'luck' so much as the divine will of God and his plan.

To combat a run of 'bad luck', past Presidents like George W Bush turned to prayer and Bill Clinton took to reading Scripture, but it appears from President Obama's speeches and comments that he has decided not to talk to God or read God's word to turn around the run of bad luck, but rather bemoan the run of 'bad luck' and sing 'woe to me'.

Although in our nation we do have a separation of church and state, that does not mean that there is a separation in our nation between those who believe in a higher power and those who serve in our political institutions. For most of our nation's history, our leaders on both side of the political spectrum have been religious and have prayed and read the word of God and saw in the actions of the world God.

President Bush often said that "these are trying times" when our nation faced tough circumstances like terrorist attacks, hurricanes, the total collapse of our banking system, a recession in 2001, or the difficult times of fighting two major wars against dedicated and evil groups. He did not say that our nation suffered through 'bad luck'- he recognized that God's plan and the free will of men sometimes tried our faith and offered a trial to our nation and its people, whether to fight harder for what is good and right or to not.

Bill Clinton, for all of his faults and failures, was well versed in the Bible and believed that he was doing his best to advance the values that he saw in it- love, hope, forgiveness, etc- and that when he faced trials, that those trials were presented to him by God or by those who freely choose to deny God, and that our nation would overcome those trials by sticking to our values and believing in God.

And yet, President Obama, who resigned from Trinity United Church of Christ after he judged that his affiliation with Jeremiah Wright would reflect badly on him politically, does not quote Scripture or talk about his time in prayer. So how exactly should Obama cope with this run of bad luck- an unaffiliated Christian who does not go to Church or regularly read the Bible or study theology of any sort of any religion?

At some point questions need to be asked about President Obama and his views on God and religion, and I don't just mean the sort of 'is he a Muslim' kind of questions that will lead us nowhere. He does not appear to be a Muslim, and his connection to Christianity is either very very private and unmentioned or thin at best, and since he isn't Buddhist or Jewish, one has to begin to wonder just what exactly does Obama see as the divine plan for our nation. I would suggest that Obama is atheist, but his reference to supernatural 'luck' does not fit with that theory either.

What are President Obama's religious beliefs and what role does 'luck' play in his view of the universe?

UPDATE: Get out of my head Charles Krauthammer! For the record, I posted my post before he came out with his editorial today, but it is amazing that both of us arrived at the same thought days after the event and then posted about it. In his article called Bad luck? Bad faith? he goes a slightly different direction, but struggles like me with Obama's comment about 'luck'.

Via memeorandum.

Those who are interested in learning more about Obama's religion should try The Faith of Barack Obama.

Lingerie Football Team Coming to Detroit?

The Lingerie Football League is the ultimate fan-driven live sports phenomenon, blending action, impact and beauty, and features scantily-clad women wearing shoulder pads and bras and panties, knocking the snot out of other women wearing the same. It started as a halftime Super Bowl show gimmick on MTV, but it has recently become a full-fledged league, with 10 teams across the country where women play 7-on-7 football for teams like the Chicago Bliss, Philadelphia Passion, or the Orlando Fantasy.

And according to LFL Chairman and Commissioner Mitchell S. Mortaza, the league offices are in negotiations with ownership groups to bring into the future LFL teams in San Jose, Houston, Phoenix, Vancouver, Washington, D.C., Carolina, Buffalo, Columbus, New Orleans, New Jersey... and Detroit!

Yes, that is right, soon Detroit could feature a team that has a real shot at winning the super bowl, a 20-woman team of hot babes with overflowing cleavage tackling other women as they try to score touchdowns.

A decision will be made soon on whether or not a LFL team comes to Detroit, but if one does, it is going to need a name. My pick is the Detroit Cougars, what is yours?

For those who are interested, check out

Obama Killed My Child's Dream of Being an Astronaut

Yesterday my oldest son, who is entering elementary school, told me that he wanted to be to pirate when he grows up. This was a surprise to me, because for most of his youth he has maintained that he wanted to be an astronaut. I asked him "Why do you now no longer want to be an astronaut?" His answer stunned me.

"Dad, I don't want to be an astronaut because we don't go into outer space anymore," he said, "But there are still pirates!"

President George W Bush put in place a program that would have transitioned America from the fading Space Shuttle program to another program- perhaps the Constellation Program would have gone over budget and taken a lot longer to implement, but at least the dream of America going into outer space would have still been dreamed by young children and important scientists and engineers would have had jobs to keep them busy and their skills sharp.

Oh, it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows under Bush; the mantra of NASA became 'do more with less' under his administration. But that is better than Obama's policy of 'do less with more.'

But President Obama has cancelled the Constellation Program and fired everyone in NASA who dreamed big and had a vision of Americans on the Moon and Mars. In spite of NASA's budget actually increasing under Obama's administration (from $17 billion a year in 2008 to $19 billion a year in 2011), NASA has abandoned its mission to boldly go where no man has gone before and lead America into outer space, instead becoming yet another agency devoted to the 'green religion', trading manned spaceflight and exploration for 'Earth Observation' and 'Greenhouse Gasses Monitoring.'

President Obama made the decision to end the Constellation Program and change directions for NASA, killing my child's dream of being an astronaut and exploring the starts. Before it was just policy differences, but now it's personal!

For those who want to look back on the glory days of America's time in space, try America in Space: Nasa's First Fifty Years or NASA: The Complete Illustrated History.

Graph: Results of Tax Cuts on Revenue to the Federal Government

Democrats, led by President Obama, frequently advance the argument that the deficits that the federal government has been running since 2001 (~$500 billion under Bush's 8 years, ~$1500 billion during Obama's 3 years) are the result of the Bush Tax Cuts (which Obama and the Democrats continued and extended), thus it is the Republicans and George W Bush's fault for the current nation-destroying federal debt. Let's look at the data:

Drawing on data provided by the White House's Government Printing Office, we can see here a history of the revenue or money collected by the national government since 1980. I went ahead and drew some lines in to indicate 4 of the arguably largest tax cuts that occurred during that time.

As we can see, the revenue that the federal government collected immediately grew by substantial amounts after the tax cuts in 1981, 1986, and 1997, giving us three solid data points from which to draw a conclusion that tax cuts, especially on the wealthy and on business, lead to the federal government getting more revenue to defend our borders and provide services for the truly needy. The Bush Tax cuts of 2001 though did not lead to immediate and substantial growth of revenue- but after another tax law in 2003 was passed which accelerated the tax cuts and added more of them, the result was an explosion of revenue for the government, jumping from $2 trillion to $2.6 trillion in only 7 years.

All other things being equal and the logic being consistent to what was seen in earlier tax cuts, the implementation of the Bush Tax cuts led to an additional $600 billion a year in revenue for our federal government, leading to better protection of life, liberty, and property for the citizens of the United States of America.

Who doesn't like that?

UPDATE: To take this a little further and show you how crazy I am, I suggest that there is a way to cure our current deficits, and the cure is more cowbell. If previous tax cuts led to increased federal revenue, then more tax cuts could also lead to more federal revenue- by my estimate, if taxes were cut by the same level as Bush+Clinton+Reagan, then we'd be able to raise enough revenue to balance the budget.

So there you go- Democrats and liberals and Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Stabenow, and Peters are all backwards again- rather than raising taxes to balance the budget, they should be massively cutting taxes. The prosecution rests.

Educate yourself- try Return to Prosperity: How America Can Regain Its Economic Superpower Status by Arthur B. Laffer.

Six Non-Lethal Weapons That Will Stop Rioters From Coming to America

Via Ace of Spades, this is some pretty cool stuff:

Well, with the riots that just occured in England and the media starting to breathlessly talk about it coming our way, have you given it any thought as to what you might want to have on hand if and when those numbnuts show up on your doorstep? Well, here's 6 Non-Lethal Weapons That Will Make You Wish You Were Dead (see the full post for more details and pictures of the weapons; these are just excerpts):

#6. The PHASR (aka Crowd-Blinding Rifle)... This futuristic weapon is being developed by the US military, who call it the Personal Halting and Stimulation Response rifle. Why such a clumsy name? Because they wanted to call it a PHASR. Get it! Like in Star Trek! How cute!...

#5. The Active Denial System (aka Massive Pain Ray)... The Active Denial System (ADS) is a giant heat ray (or pain ray as it's informally and less ambiguously known). The weapon fires electromagnetic radiation at the target causing a painful burning sensation... the military will have a lot of explaining to do when the ADS crosses streams with a PHASR up there and sends the victim into another dimension...

#4. The Laser Induced Plasma Channel (aka Invisible Pain Fence)... The Laser Induced Plasma Channel, or Portal Denial System, is the kind of electric barrier/force field we've seen in sci-fi for decades. So, it can be set up in a corridor to allow only authorized people to pass through it. Should unauthorized people pass through it, well, let's just say they'll have an electrifying experience. They might get quite a shock. They will suffer severe electric burns....

#3. Taser XREP (aka Electrified Shotgun Shells)... The problem with a Taser is that you've got to be pretty close to make it work, about 20 feet or so. A number of companies are racing to fix that problem, developing non-lethal bullets that can hit you with rib-shattering force from a distance, and then deliver an electric shock just to rub it in. Because you can never be to careful when it comes to hippies and protesters....

#2. The Pulsed Energy Projectile (aka Magic Missile)... The Pulsed Energy Projectile (PEP) used to be called the Pulsed Impulsive Kill Laser, before they toned it down for PR reasons (and because the acronym is basically "pickle"). It's mounted on a truck, plane or helicopter and fires an invisible laser pulse at a target. On impact the pulse creates exploding plasma, which is exactly as painful as it sounds....

#1. The Vortex Ring Gun (aka The Fart Gun)... The vortex ring gun works by creating a cone-shaped pocket of supersonic pressurized air. When this hits the target (Read: hippie) it should knock him over. Wait, that's not the best part. A chemical, like an incapacitating agent or a malodorant (a bad, choking smell) is also injected into the air pocket. So it's basically a powerful, bad smelling wind that will knock you of your feet...

Let's see these anarchists and hippies riot and destroy public property and threaten the lives of law-abiding citizens when they face Fat Guns, Magic Missiles, and Massive Pain Rays. As long as these types of weapons are available for responsible card-carrying NRA members too, there is no way the US will ever be like England.

My 2011 Detroit Lions Prediction

Over the years I've made some predictions for the Detroit Lions, with some luck. In 2008, everyone was saying that they were going to be really good, and I called 5-11, and was wrong when they went 0-16. In 2009, everyone was saying that they were going to be really good, and I called 4-12, and was wrong when they went 2-14. In 2010, everyone was saying that they were going to be really good, and I predicted 6-10, and I was finally right when they really did go 6-10. For those doing some math, I was off by 5, 2, and 0 over the last 3 years- I think I'm figuring it out. So, here is my prediction for the Detroit Lions in 2011...

The 2011-2012 Detroit Lions will be a 7-9 football team, although if they suffer any sort of significant injuries, they could be worse than that, so I am very tempted to say 6-10, but since I drink the Kool-Aid, I'll go 7-9. It is disappointing that they have lost almost their entire draft class to injury so far this year, but I think they did improve the linebackers and secondary a bit and another year for their young core should lead to significant improvement and a couple victories.

If they do improve to 7-9 or better, considering where they were under Matt Millon and where they are now, that it just goes to show you that hiring competent and experienced leaders and then sticking to an overall plan of spending wisely and focusing on the basics will always work better than hiring an inexperienced dreamer who spends money wildly on impulses and flights of fancy and hopes it will work.

Now who's ready for some football!

Rick Perry, The Next President: Analysis and Projections

Rick Perry may just be the next President of the United States.

Last month I ran into Matt Keelen, who is the founder and President of the government affairs firm the Keelen Group, is a widely known and highly regarded lobbyist and political strategist and a reputation for consistently delivering hard-earned victories to clients. He suggested that Obama is beatable and can be beaten by the Republican nominee. Right now the Republican nominee is Mr. Generic, Mitt Romney, who would be the next President and would be a pretty good one I think if he were to win.

But many on the right- conservatives, Tea Partiers, libertarians- are unhappy with the thought of Romney as the candidate, and so have been restlessly searching for someone else to support. They've given Ron Paul some wind, they've given Hermain Cain a straw poll win, and lately they've wandered over to Michelle Bachman. But none of these candidates are really where these groups want to be- they're just waiting for the right candidate to challenge Romney. And that candidate is Rick Perry.

Rick Perry has the experience to match Romney, is more personable and has a good story, passes the 'beer test' better, seems to be a more authentic conservative, and flashes a libertarian streak every now and then. His entry into the race will change the poll numbers for everyone- all that anti-Romney support will coalesce around Perry, forcing the marginal candidates like Bachman and Cain and Huntsman out of the race, creating a Romney and Perry matchup, which Perry will win.

This will set up an Obama vs Perry contest for the President, and it is here where Republicans will be glad they choose Perry. Unlike McCain, Perry is not going to pull punches when he is fighting for freedom and liberty and the office of the President- Keelen said "he'll keep punching hard the whole fight." Obama will of course try to attack him as a 'Bush guy', but the stunner is that Perry isn't a 'Bush guy'- he and Bush are politically opposed and have butted heads many times in the past, so this attack, like most of what Obama does, will only work if you don't know the truth and eat up his lies.

In a general election, expect at worst a repeat of 2000 or 2004, with the numbers tight and Rick Perry winning by a slim margin, helped by recent reapportionment and redistricting, or at best, expect a landslide win by Perry and a mandate for change and new hope in the future.

The biggest threat to the Republican winning the Presidency is that a third party candidate or independent candidate will enter the race to the right of a Perry or Romney, and suck off enough votes from the conservative or running-as-conservative candidate to enable the progressive leftist to win another term of office and destroy our nation.

This is a good analysis, and I hope after the recent troubles that our nation has faced that it brightens your day!

UPDATE: Via memeorandum, I see that Rick Perry has made his official announcement that he is in the running to be the next President of the United States. Good luck sir!

Rick Perry is an author- check out some of his books like Fed Up!: Our Fight to Save America from Washington, On My Honor: Why the American Values of the Boy Scouts Are Worth Fighting for, or Hurricane Kitchen : How to Cook Healthy, Whole Foods for Large Groups and Institutions.

Graph: Non-Defense Spending Relative to GDP, Color-Coded by Party in Power, or the Obama Hockey Stick

Via Doug Ross, I saw a neat graph over at a blog called Super Economy in a post called The Obama Hockey Stick. Here is the explanation and the graph:

Let me illustrate how much of a departure from history the Obama Presidency represents in terms of spending. I will graph non-defense federal spending as a share of GDP since 1975. What emerges is what I refer to as the Obama Hockey Stick, parallel to the IPCC global warming Hockey Stick. While federal Non-defense spending was quite constant previous to Obama, it has risen rapidly under his administration.

Now, I love color-coding this graphs to see what emerges, since I have a curious mind and want to see what the data tells me. Below you can see two graphs- the first one was color-coded to display which political party controlled the Presidency, the second one as color-coded to display which political party controlled the Congress:

Looking at the first graph, which displays which political party controlled the Presidency, we can see a sharp increase under President Carter (a Democrat), movement up and down under Reagan and HW Bush (Republicans), a sharp decrease under Clinton (a Democrat), a modest trend up under W Bush (Republican), and then a mind-bottling explosion of an increase under Obama (a Democrat). The conclusion that I draw is that Republicans keep federal defense spending as a share of GDP near the historical average when they are in power, but Democrats are more inconsistent- there was Clinton on one side of the ledger, and Carter and Obama on the other. In particular, Democrat Barack Obama is the worst President in the history of the United States when it comes to this measure.

Looking at the second graph, which displays which political party controlled the Congress, we can see an increase under Democrats (particularly when paired with a Democratic President), a modest decline under a divided Congress, another sharp increase under Democrats (particularly when paired with a Democratic President), a sharp decrease under Republicans, steady under divided government, steady under Republicans, another sharp increase under Democrats (particularly when paired with a Democratic President), and steady under divided government (with the little data that we have). The lesson here is more clear- under Democrats, non-defense spending increased at a greater percentage than GDP increased, and that giving Democrats total control of government (President and Congress) resulting in irresponsible explosions in non-defense spending and/or the collapse of the GDP. Putting Republicans in charge seems like the best bet- they keep this measure steady or decrease it, either by cutting spending or by increasing the GDP.

If I were using this data to vote in 2012, I'd vote Republican up and down the ticket.

Obama Pressuring Banks to Give High Risk Loans to Poor and Minorities

As we learn more about the financial meltdown of 2008, it becomes increasingly apparent that one of the main causes for this economic disaster was government policy that forced banks to extend loans to those people who were unable to pay those back. Government agents put pressure on banks and government banking institutions like Freddie/Franny to give loans to people who under normal circumstances would be unable to pay back these loans and who were especially unable to protect themselves from the exposure to risk that these loans entailed. Misguided government policies ambushed innocent people who believed the dream that politicians peddled and banks were coerced into following, and in 2008 the house of cards came crashing down and peoples lives were ruined. It was not the failure of the markets, the lack of government policy on the issue, evil rich people, George W Bush, or the Republicans who were the minority party in Congress at the time- it was government policy that put pressure on banks that led to the collapse in 2008.

And the lesson apparently was not learned by the Democrats.

From Townhall's Bob Beauprez comes this stunning mind-blowing information:

The Department of Justice is executing a "Witch Hunt" against banks. Through the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, Attorney General Eric Holder is forcing banks to "relax their mortgage underwriting standards and approve loans for minorities with poor credit as part of a new crackdown on alleged discrimination," according to a published report by Investor's Business Daily after reviewing court documents.

The DOJ has already extorted $20 million for weak and poor credit loans from banks that "settled out of court rather than battle the federal government and risk being branded racist." The DOJ admits another 60 banks are already under "investigation." Holder's demanding the banks sign "non-disclosure" settlement agreements barring them from talking while allowing the DOJ to operate behind a curtain of secrecy.

The settlements already extracted from banks force them to make "prime-rate mortgages to low income blacks and Hispanics" with credit problems, even if they are living on welfare. According to IBD, the DOJ has ordered banks to advertise that minorities cannot be turned down for a loan "because they receive public aid, such as unemployment benefits, welfare payments or food stamps." No job; no problem!

In other words, the DOJ is forcing banks to make loans to people that they know don't qualify for them and likely won't be able to afford to repay them, which is precisely the kind of failed public policy that precipitated the financial collapse and recession in 2008.

Can you believe it? Obama took an economy that was going through a usual recession, killed the recovery, set us up for a double-dip recession, and is now working on creating another epic economic collapse!

Read the whole analysis- it'll really scare you!

For more on the background of the Great Recession and how Obama plans to recreate it with his policies, check out The Great American Bank Robbery: The Unauthorized Report About What Really Caused the Great Recession or A Decade of Delusions: From Speculative Contagion to the Great Recession.

Stupid is as Stupid does: Is Obama Smart?

Via Ace of Spades I saw this story that ran in the Wall Street Journal called Is Obama Smart?

Before you read it, I want to point out for the record that I am not hugely interested in how smart our politicians really are, since I vote mainly based on which politician better realizes that governments are instituted among men  only for the purposes of better protecting my life, liberty, and property than I could do so myself in a true anarchy. If I had a chance of a genius who hated liberty and wanted to redistribute wealth or an idiot who loved liberty and wanted to let me keep the fruits of my labor, I'd choose the idiot. In fact, I'd prefer an idiot tyrant over a genius tyrant to- I imagine they'd be less successful than a genius in pushing for regulations and rules and fees and taxes which control me and seize my wealth.

That being said, by looking at whether Obama is smart we can learn two important things; first, what does it truly mean to be smart; and second, whether his supposed intelligence just another example of bizarro world where smart is dumb and dumb is smart.

...I just think the president isn't very bright.

Socrates taught that wisdom begins in the recognition of how little we know. Mr. Obama is perpetually intent on telling us how much he knows. Aristotle wrote that the type of intelligence most needed in politics is prudence, which in turn requires experience. Mr. Obama came to office with no experience. Plutarch warned that flattery "makes itself an obstacle and pestilence to great houses and great affairs." Today's White House, more so than any in memory, is stuffed with flatterers.

Much is made of the president's rhetorical gifts. This is the sort of thing that can be credited only by people who think that a command of English syntax is a mark of great intellectual distinction. Can anyone recall a memorable phrase from one of Mr. Obama's big speeches that didn't amount to cliché? As for the small speeches, such as the one we were kept waiting 50 minutes for yesterday, we get Triple-A bromides about America remaining a "Triple-A country." Which, when it comes to long-term sovereign debt, is precisely what we no longer are under Mr. Obama.

Then there is Mr. Obama as political tactician. He makes predictions that prove false. He makes promises he cannot honor. He raises expectations he cannot meet. He reneges on commitments made in private. He surrenders positions staked in public. He is absent from issues in which he has a duty to be involved. He is overbearing when he ought to be absent. At the height of the financial panic of 1907, Teddy Roosevelt, who had done much to bring the panic about by inveighing against big business, at least had the good sense to stick to his bear hunt and let J.P. Morgan sort things out. Not so this president, who puts a new twist on an old put-down: Every time he opens his mouth, he subtracts from the sum total of financial capital.

Then there's his habit of never trimming his sails, much less tacking to the prevailing wind. When Bill Clinton got hammered on health care, he reverted to centrist course and passed welfare reform. When it looked like the Iraq war was going to be lost, George Bush fired Don Rumsfeld and ordered the surge.

Mr. Obama, by contrast, appears to consider himself immune from error. Perhaps this explains why he has now doubled down on Heckuva Job Geithner. It also explains his insulting and politically inept habit of suggesting—whether the issue is health care, or Arab-Israeli peace, or change we can believe in at some point in God's good time—that the fault always lies in the failure of his audiences to listen attentively. It doesn't. In politics, a failure of communication is always the fault of the communicator...

There is more, all of it good, all of it pointing out that Obama is not a smart guy. That's okay though- although he lacks experience, doesn't know his or government's limitations, and has surrounded himself with yes-men, the fact that he isn't smart is not why he is one the worst Presidents in the history of our nation. He's a bad President because he erodes the quality of life, encourages abortion of babies, puts in place policies that result in people dying, removes choices and freedom from people, acts in a tyrannical manner, and uses the power of government to unjustly take property from people so that he can give it to others. He's a bad President not because he isn't smart, but because he is a tyrant.

Government Does Not Create Jobs; In July Alone It Added $9.5 Billion to the Cost of Doing Business

Pivoting away from other issues like the environment ("Bombshell" Experiment: Global Climate Change Caused by Cloud Cover) or education (More Than 200 D.C. Teachers Fired! Progress?), let's return back to jobs and the role that the government plays in job creation.

In my post Coming To Grips With a Political Economy I wrote about a class that I took in college called 'Political Economy.' The class was an attempt to indoctrinate students with the idea that government could create jobs through its actions and could create wealth through proper regulation and control over free markets. I struggled through this class, mostly because I rejected entirely the idea that government can create wealth and jobs through its actions, and today I still believe that.

Government does not create jobs. It takes wealth from those who are productive and creating wealth, cycles it through many layers of bureaucracy and 'management', and then gives that wealth to those people who are favored by the government. Some of those who are favored by the government should be- the Constitution identified those who the government can give 'jobs' to and states further have identified those who the government should give 'jobs' to. But many others who the government gives 'jobs' today in America are simply those who benefit from the kind of crony capitalism and banana republic policies that are more common to two-bit dictatorships and tyrannies.

And the 'jobs' that are created by government are inefficiently created- much wealth and property is squandered and lost and burned by having government provide these jobs because of the many layers of 'management' and bureaucracy that mark the government. This is an acceptable price to pay for fire, police, and military jobs, but for most other 'jobs' the government creates the cost to create these jobs far exceeds the useful good that these jobs provide to society.

For example, many liberals claim that Obamacare will 'create jobs'- agencies and regulatory bodies that will hire overlords and masters who supervise a once-free and vibrant economic sector and regulate, tax, and control it. But the cost of these jobs was demonstrated graphically by the reaction that businesses had to it- after the passage of this law businesses dramatically dropped their hiring of workers. The Heritage report explained why this happened:

Businesses with fewer than 50 workers have a strong incentive to maintain this size, which allows them to avoid the mandate to provide government-approved health coverage or face a penalty; Businesses with more than 50 workers will see their costs for health coverage rise—they must purchase more expensive government-approved insurance or pay a penalty; and Employers face considerable uncertainty about what constitutes qualifying health coverage and what it will cost. They also do not know what the health care market or their health care costs will look like in four years. This makes planning for the future difficult.

Yet President Obama and the modern-day Democratic Party continues to think that regulations, spending, taxes, and control over free people can 'create jobs'. They take wealth from those who have it- either through taxes or fees or by simply sucking up savings by selling debt- and give it to those who they favor and try to pretend that they have made society better. But they haven't- they have killed legitimate jobs that millions of people through their free actions wanted and needed (the unseen hand of the market) and made society less because of their actions that took away freedom and property.

In Latest EPA Rules to Cost 1.4 Million Jobs and a 12% Increase in Utility Bills I wrote about how the Washington Post reported that the new EPA rules that were recently published will cause electric bills will jump 12 percent nationally by 2016 to comply with these new policies, with residents in areas such as Kentucky and Tennessee seeing a 24 percent increase in their utility bills. These policies are project to eliminate 1.4 million jobs- real jobs that will be destroyed by the actions of government, creating people who will no longer be paying taxes any more and will now be sucking down government benefits, all thanks to these policies pushed by Democratic bureaucrats employed by a Democratic President supervised by Democrats in the House and the Senate and supported by Democratic unions and a Democratic media.

And now Wyoming Republican Senator John Barrasso has put together a report that showed that the executive actions of the Democrat President have put in place in July alone an additional $9.5 billion in new regulatory costs by proposing 229 new rules and finalizing 379 rules. Among those rules that are going to add to the cost of doing business, kill jobs, and make our society less productive and wealthy are rules regarding the fake issues of global warming, healthcare reform, and financial regulatory reform rules.

IN JULY ALONE A DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENT PUT IN PLACE $9.5 BILLION IN NEW COSTS! I don't care how many times Obama 'pivots' to talk about jobs, the heart of the matter is that he is wrong about the government being able to create jobs and wealth through its actions- government is best that governs least because when people are free and free to live their lives and free to make their own decisions and free to do with their wealth and labor as they see fit, then jobs are created and wealth is created.

Make the choice in 2012 to turn America away from tyranny and 'government-created jobs' and to freedom and 'people-created jobs'.

For more reading, try Productivity versus OSHA and EPA regulations (Research for business decisions).

NYT's Douthat is Wrong: Realigning Elections Exist and One is Coming

Via Memeorandum I read an article by Ross Douthat, writing for the New York Times, called Waiting For A Landslide, in which he discusses V. O. Key's essay “A Theory of Critical Elections.” In his article Douthat claims that:

...One reason American policy-making has become “less stable, less effective, and less predictable” — in the words of the downgrade that Standard & Poor’s handed to the United States on Friday night — is the enduring influence of V. O. Key’s theory, and the seductive dream of realignment that it conjured up.

This dream has hovered over national leaders from Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. But it has loomed larger in the last decade, as our politics have grown more polarized and our country has suffered through a series of dislocations and disasters. Events like 9/11 and the Great Recession have persuaded partisans on both sides that a dramatic realignment is imminent; the breadth of the ideological divide has convinced them that it’s necessary...

...The dream of realignment has become the enemy of such compromises....

...In reality, the next election may be no more transformative than 2008 turned out to be.

Douthat sadly makes two mistakes in his article- one, he rejects the theory that Key put forth, and two, he thinks that Obama's election in 2008 was any sort of a transformative election.

Let's all take a moment to go down memory lane and read what I wrote in 2009 regarding realigning elections in my post Why 2008 Was Not a Historic or Realigning Election:

The theory of realigning elections (sometimes called key elections, critical elections, or historic elections)is that sometimes there is a dramatic change in the political system that you can observe in one election or a couple elections in a row. Usually it coincides with the coming to power of a new coalition of voters or the movement of a large or important bloc of voters to a new coalition, these realigning elections occur when voters decidedly break in a new direction on a particularly important issues, when a new party leader emerges who takes the party in a new direction, when the regional and demographic bases of power of the two parties switches, or when there is a new rules of the political system (ie, expansion of suffrage). Because political parties in America tend to be rather stable coalitions, a sudden realignment by a voting group tends to have a longer-lasting and dramatic effect. These realigning elections seem to occur once a generation (every 30-40 years). V. O. Key, Jr. is the professor who pioneered the study of these elections.

Most experts agree that the following where clearly realigning elections- 1800 (Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson wins over Federalist John Adams), 1828 (Democrat Andrew Jackson wins over Democratic-Republican John Q. Adams), 1860 (Republican Abraham Lincoln wins over others), 1896 (Republican William McKinley wins over Democrat William Jennings Bryan), 1932 (Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt wins over Republican Herbert Hoover), 1968 (Republican Richard Nixon beats Democrat Hubert Humphrey), and 1980 (Republican Ronald Reagan beats Democrat Jimmy Carter). In each election, patterns in politics were broken and new patterns were put in place that lasted many years and large blocs of voters moved from one party to another. Based on the 30-40 years estimate, the next 'realigning election' is due 2012-2020.

Many though, because Barack Obama is black, want to say to say that the 2008 election (Democrat Barack Obama beats Republican John McCain) was a historic election, an unprecedented election, or a realigning election. Does it fit the model though?

There is support for the argument that it was a realigning election. There was an important issue that a candidate could have advanced a different view on (the War in Iraq), there were some realignments of geographical areas (surprisingly strong Democratic gains in the Northeast), and there was a change in the number of voters who declared themselves to belong to a particular party (dramatic rise in the number of voters who declared themselves to be Democrats). If Obama had run as a liberal- running on a liberal platform and advocating liberal issues and highlighting his sharp policy differences from the past- then 2008 would have been a realigning election.

But let's go back to last year. Watch the campaign commercials that Obama ran. Obama did not run as a liberal. He did not run on a platform that advocated stimulus packages, massive spending, large amounts of debt, pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, nationalized healthcare, raising taxes, cap-and-tax, or government-take-overs of companies. Obama ran as a moderate. He ran as a new and different candidate, one who would not be liberal or conservative, but would reach across the aisle and be a post-partisan President. He talked about tax cuts and strong defense and ending corruption.

Obama ran as a moderate- on a moderate platform- and McCain was a moderate, and the gains in Congress for Democrats were mostly from moderate Blue Dogs, and the polls show the election map as being essentially the same as 1996-2004, so 2008 was not a historic, realigning, critical, key, or unprecedented election.

Obama's victory in 2008 is closer in its character to 1976 (Carter over Ford) or 1964 (LBJ over Goldwater) in that it represented simply dissatisfaction with the proposed candidate. The later unpopularity of Carter and LBJ did set the stage for the historic realigning elections that followed.

2012 will probably be the historic election that we are all looking for. Obama will be running as a liberal and will be seeking a mandate and approval for his policies- which this time around will be clearly liberal and far left. Voting blocs will have to move to vote for him, the map will have to change, and our nation will indeed embrace change with an Obama victory in 2012, setting the stage for likely Democrat control of government for 30-40 years and a shift in our nation farther to the left. If Obama loses, he will lose to a conservative candidate (the GOP is not going with another moderate- Romney, Pawleny, Palin, Huckabee, etc are all conservatives) running on a conservative platform, and it will mark a return to power for conservative Republicans and a move back to the right for our nation.

The recent data from 2009 supports my argument. Read Charles Krauthammer's article The Myth of '08, Demolished to see that the evidence is that 2012 will be re-aligning- areas that once consistently voted Democrat (like New Jersey) will switch and even moderate Republican candidates will be defeated by conservatives. The elections in 2010, in which Republicans will likely make big gains, will further vindicate my theory that 2008 was nothing more than just another ho-hum election and not the unprecedented, historic, realigning election that many on the left want it to be.

Let me continue to suggest that 2012 will probably be the historic election that we are all looking for- a conservative Perry or running-as-a-conservative Romney will win the election, Republicans will hold the House and take back the Senate, and the party that wins will continue to increasingly reflect the realigning ideals of the Tea Party. Historic indeed.

UPDATE: Today via RealClearPolitics I read an article by Salena Zito, who is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review editorial page columnist, that also gets at this idea that 2012 is going to be a real 'change election':

Another wave is coming, Washington – and “the ‘ins’ may be thrown out, and the ‘outs’ may be thrown in,” according to Michael Genovese, Loyola University political-science professor.

Genovese thinks the economic and political turbulence of the past 12 years are “eerily similar” to the Panic of 1893 and the unsettling election cycles of 1884 to 1896. Both eras feature fantastic wealth created for a privileged few, fiercely competitive and highly partisan elections, an ineffectual and seemingly corrupt government, and an angry, disillusioned electorate. And both have had populist movements – the Progressives of the late 1800s, the Tea Party of today – born of economic dislocation that has pressured the status quo, Genovese said.

While people call the 2008 presidential contest a “change election,” it was merely a small part of the unsettling of the country, rooted in economic uncertainty that has crippled the middle class. If Barack Obama’s election truly was the “change” the nation sought, then solid-Democrat New Jersey would not have rebuked his policies less than a year later by electing Republican Chris Christie as governor. Nor would Virginia have given Republican Bob McDonnell a landslide victory that same year. And Republican Scott Brown had no political rationale to run for Teddy Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, let alone to win it – but he did.

Despite all of the warnings, the White House was blindsided when Republicans took back the U.S. House in historical numbers in 2010. Last week, New York voters in a Democrat-stronghold district reminded President Obama that nothing is safe, not even in Brooklyn: Republican Bob Turner comfortably won the House seat that text-happy Democrat Anthony Weiner was forced to give up.

Economics drives politics, Loyola’s Genovese says, adding: “If the past is a prelude, another angry election is on the way."

Best Powerline Video: Doorbell

One of the blogs that I follow most consistently is Power Line, an online blog that provides news and commentary from a conservative point-of-view. It is written by three lawyers who attended Dartmouth College together: John H. Hinderaker, Scott W. Johnson, and Paul Mirengoff. I like it because it is honest, direct, and usually fits closely with my thoughts on issues and topics. Over the last month or two, Powerline has been conducting a contest to see who could come up with the most creative production that comments on issues facing our nation politically. You can see all the winners and watch the videos and hear the songs and marvel at the artwork by following this link.

This one didn't win, but it is one of the best productions I saw. Watch it on Youtube to get the full HD production values, or watch it here:

This video fits nicely with my post America's Youth Will Rue the Day They Voted for Obama.

Former Thatcher Adviser Unleashes on Obama

Nile Gardiner, a British conservative commentator and former aide to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, unleashed on US President Barack Obama (Democrat) in his latest column, summing up Obama and his Democratic administration's actions perfectly:

The decision by credit agency Standard and Poor’s to downgrade America’s AAA credit rating for the first time in 70 years is a massive blow to the credibility of the Obama administration, and a damning indictment of its handling of the economy. No doubt the White House will pathetically try to blame the Bush Administration, Republicans in Congress, and of course its favourite target, the Tea Party, for the move by S&P. But without a shadow of a doubt, responsibility for the country’s financial mess and staggering levels of debt lie with the current US president and his administration. They have been in charge of running the economy for over 30 months, during which time the United States has witnessed an unprecedented increase in government spending and borrowing.

As the Congressional Budget Office revealed In January, the deficits generated under the Obama administration are the largest since the end of World War Two...

...Since President Obama took office in January 2009, the United States has embarked on the most ambitious failed experiment in Washington meddling in US history. Huge increases in government spending, massive federal bailouts, growing regulations on businesses, thinly veiled protectionism, and the launch of a vastly expensive and deeply unpopular health care reform plan, have all combined to instill fear and uncertainty in the markets. Free enterprise has taken a backseat to continental European-style interventionism, as an intensely ideological left wing administration has sought to dramatically increase the role of the state in shaping the US economy. The end result has been a dramatic fall in economic freedom, sluggish growth, poor consumer confidence, high unemployment, a collapsing housing market, and an overall decline in US prosperity, with more than 45 million Americans now reliant on food stamps – that’s over one seventh of the entire country.

These are increasingly dangerous times, with American leadership being challenged across the globe. Only an historic reduction in government spending combined with pro-growth measures including lower business tax rates to stimulate job creation and attract investment can turn the US economy around. Unfortunately, as Standard and Poor’s decision has shown, this is a presidency in extreme denial over America’s towering debts, leading a nation on a precipice while blindfolded to reality. The United States badly needs another Reagan-style revolution to stave off further economic disaster, preserve American leadership on the world stage, and secure the future of a superpower. Ultimately, greater liberty and freedom, not the deathly hand of Big Government, are needed to turn this great nation around.

He nails it- sometimes it takes a guy from across the pond to really sum up things over here. Click on these links to check out Gardiner's books such as Forever in the shadow of Churchill?: Britain and the memory of World War Two at the end of the 20th century (Historical roots of contemporary international and regional issues occasional paper series).

Michigan Bill Would Restrict Teachers from Using School Resources to Lobby

My local teacher union is pretty good at making sure that school resources are not used to lobby legislators- we are frequently reminded by our local union president that we are not to use school computers for union business and are not to in any way use school resources to lobby legislators.

But many other locals are run differently and our state organization seems to encourage us to act differently, and so it is quite common in the education world that teachers use their work time, their students, and their taxpayer-provided resources to engage in lobbying government officials. This is wrong and needs to be stopped, and I'm happy to say that there is a legislator trying to do just this.

Via MLive:

Facing an onslaught of emails, faxes, letters student-signed petitions and phone calls during a recent school funding debate, a state lawmaker hopes to restrict school districts that use taxpayers dollars to lobby legislators.

Rep. Kenneth B. Horn, R-Frankenmuth, introduced the bill last week that would prevent school districts or their employees from using tax-funded school supplies, equipment, vehicles or school time to lobby or become involved in political activities. He said he wants the same restrictions nonprofits face imposed on school districts and their employees.

One of the biggest signs of our corrupt our modern day government is that government employees frequently use government resources to encourage government officials to give said employees more personal benefits. Teachers are as guilty of doing this as other groups (although the SEIU is probably the most guilty)- they use resources that are given to them for the purposes of being a better teacher- computers, pencils, pens, paper, students, time, copiers, etc- in order to put pressure on government decision makers to give them more money, better benefits, a bigger pension, shorter working hours, less supervision, more job security, etc.

Teachers and union members can still lobby on their own personal time using their own resources- this bill does nothing to restrict that kind of speech. It just reinforces that employees of school districts are public servants and should follow the same sort of rules that other nonprofits face when involved in lobbying. This is exactly the sort of bill that the MEA should be backing and supporting, if it were honest about caring about children and using resources properly and not being unethical with the use of resources.