Get Your Thumb Out of My Eye

LeBron James and Lindsay Lohan

2010-07-13T12:42:00.003-04:00

LeBron James and Lindsay Lohan? Nothing in common you may say. I say not so fast. Full disclosure I am from Northeast Ohio so am not pleased with James' decision to go play in Miami. That being said what these two infamous people have in common isn't that at the heart of it they are entertainers. It is not that they are on the down side of the news cycle. It is that they live in a bubble that separates them from the majority of people.

First Ms. Lohan. I have never seen anything she has done, nor do I expect to go out and change that. She is a young actress that had the fortunate claim to have been a cute kid that got a break. As a child actress she became very famous. As an adult she has become a drain on society. After missing seven court mandated appointments she was sentenced to jail. This attitude is not unusual especially in Hollywood, but her reaction is what should be shocking. She had an expletive manicured on her middle finger. I doubt if the framers intended the first amendment to be exercised in this way but it is hardly her most egregious error. Her most glaring error is her betrayal of the people who made her famous. Families made her rich. Families went to her movies and saw themselves in her if only as an escape. The actress and her roles were in conflict. She chose the pampered life. She chose to thumb her nose at the families that made her successful. She has every right to do that, but she should not be surprised when the fallout makes her no longer rich and famous.

Now Mr. James. King James as he refers to himself. LeBron James comes from a working class background in Akron Ohio. He skipped college and went straight to the NBA. The Cleveland Cavaliers won the lottery and drafted him number one. Sounds like a fairy book story. In the seven years since, the Cavs have been good, and he has been personally great, but no championships. The fans of Cleveland sports teams have been without a championship since 1964. This of course is not LeBron's fault but being from the area he knows the history.

When the season ended he spoke of his team. He meant his posse not the Cavs. He had several teams entertain him with offers as is normal with free agency. He came to a decision. At his core he had to know that the decision would be unpopular. That should not have made him change his decision, just not twist the dagger into the proverbial backs of the fans. He chose to have an hour long spectacle televised on ESPN. He chose not to let any of the teams know other than the winning Miami Heat. He spoke about his doing what made him happy. This, again is not wrong, but given his history should have known what the outcome would be.

Like Ms. Lohan he gets rich from families. Families struggling to get by to buy their young son a pair of Nike shoes or a LeBron Jersey. He has showed those young boys that narcissism is the order of the day. The young boys get enough of that lesson already. A lesson of character would have been nice.

After it is all said and done, Lindsay Lohan is going to jail and LeBron is going to Miami. They will continue to be surrounded by people who care not at all about the people who pay the bills. They know that their fans will continue to take it on the chin. Someday we fans of both venues will get over our cult of personality. If that happens they will think a little bit about the little people outside of their posse. I'm not holding my breath on that happening soon.

Partisans Come to the aid of your Parties

2010-01-29T12:49:00.002-05:00

Democrats and Republicans have dedicated partisans that believe in their party's' platform. This is common and even correct. By my reading the Republicans are poised to make a comeback this fall. Whether that includes winning back either house of Congress is too early to say. They can also sabotage their own future by then, but that is the way it looks now.

My personal belief is that both parties are populated by leaders that are clueless and destructive. Most of the reason for the rebirth of the Republicans is the stupidity and arrogance of the Democrats. Democrats will sink themselves at some point. If it is not this year it can't be far away. My biggest reason for this is they don't have anyone in their party telling them when they are wrong. The Republican Party is known by some as the stupid party. Their resurgence has little to do with things they have done, but mostly over reach by the Democrats.

For the years leading up the 2006 Democrat victories the partisans in the Republican Party were telling them that they were spending too much money, and they had lost sight of what their party platform was. Today the Democratic leadership is made up of left wing activists (Pelosi, Reid, etc). Their members are telling them that they are on the wrong course and they are ignoring it. As a country we need both parties to be listening to their party members. They have come to believe for good reason that they will pay no price for not listening to their members. Until leadership gets voted out they simply won't listen. Just changing the party in power also won't help. The leadership will just become a minority party instead of a majority party. The leadership will still be safe. It will be the first and second term members that get thrown out. Only by throwing out the entrenched leaders of both parties will anything change.

So now which party has the members effectively telling them the correct things? I believe it is the Republicans. Talk radio plays a big part of that. Throughout the immigration debate Talk radio hosts were telling them daily they were alienating their voters. The voices ranged from reasonable and reflective to extreme and nasty. This will always be the case. Right now Democrats are telling their leaders they are on the wrong track by staying home from the ballot box. They are listening to the extreme leftists such as George Soros and Keith Olbermann. They are not listening to the independents and moderate Democrats. They do that at their own peril. This fall will tell a lot about that. It sounds like the Democratic leadership is determined not to moderate. If that is true even a growing economy won't be enough to save them. The voters are in a particularly impatient mood right now which makes them motivated to vote. If that continues to the fall they won't have a good election. It could still change. If the economy continues to improve and unemployment comes down they may buy themselves some time. Even if that does happen though I believe the time will come when both parties will have to pay the price. The longer both Parties do whatever they want the closer that day will be.

I am somewhat in between on this. If I had to classify myself I am a libertarian. Yes that is a small 'l' libertarian. I think most people in the Libertarian party are not serious thinkers. That leaves me with no real party to align with. I tend to vote Republican but rarely feel good about it. With that reason I am rooting for the Republicans to get serious about small government principles and truly putting out policies that reflect that, BUT I am not holding my breath.

Don't get stuck on Socialism

2010-01-22T12:46:00.002-05:00

Definition of Socialism: The economic system whereby the means of production are owned and controlled by the government.

Lots of conservatives, Republicans and Libertarians are getting killed in the press because they continue to call Obama and company socialists. They have to stop. One reason is that it isn't productive and the biggest reason is that I don't believe it is accurate. I don't believe President Obama or Hillary Clinton, or Bill Clinton, or Rahm Emmanuel are socialists. The media will continue to hammer them every time they make the charge. They hammer them for good reason, the vast majority of them agree with Obama on most things. They simply ask themselves do I want to see the government own all businesses? The answer is always a resounding no!! That does not mean that they don't want the government to control business to a great degree. They do that by levying taxes and instituting regulation.

Jonah Goldberg uses a term that I believe is true of a great many politicians and not just left wing ones. That term is Corporatism. The leaders at any one time know that can't control all business, but they believe if they work with the biggest leaders in any industry they get input from the industry. That is what lobbyists do. This is their very function. The biggest of the big tell the people in Congress and the President how much regulation and tax they will accept without a major fight. The businesses also benefit from this because they know their smaller competitors cannot absorb this. In essence what happens is the businesses run interference for the government by being a bogey man to slay and the government runs interference for the businesses keeping excessive competition (as if it were possible to have too much competition) out of the market place and thereby keeping the large entities secure. After all the sausage making of government is done they all get to go to cocktail parties together and sneer at those little people who want to start small businesses or live their lives without the guidance of them and their billiance.

There are socialists who are not corporatist. Dennis Kucinich comes to mind. I believe if he had to opportunity he would implement full socialism tomorrow he would. This also explains why outside of his intelligentsia district in Cleveland he has no visible support. He doesn't need it, the only people he needs to please are his district.

The people on the right have to shy away from the word socialism and call it what it is: Corporatism and give the credit to Jonah Goldberg. This term should be part of our political lexicon. The people of the right should spend time explaining this term to the masses because as they get that message out the average person who follows politics will understand the process a little better.

Both parties are going to spend this election year trying to court the tea party groups, the 9-12 groups and they disaffected voters. This is a good thing, but unless we voters are willing to demand results from the people they put in nothing will change. Scott Brown is riding high in Massachusetts but the people of his state have to hold him to a standard. If he falls prey to the double headed monster of the party chiefs and the lobbyists he must go back home after one term. Also leaders must fall! Both parties are glad to let their moderates get replaced after one of two terms knowing that they will not lose their places. The leaders of both parties have to be replaced often. Only then do you drain the swamp. Then and only then do you get them to care about what the voters say. In this next election Harry Reid has made himself vulnerable. I say good! They next time the Republicans get power their leaders will need changed not long after, because they also will start legislating to increase their power, not to enhance the people's power. Vote them out!! Only then can we return power to the voters.

On Altruism and Christianity

2010-01-14T12:23:00.002-05:00

This is a tough issue for me. I am mostly a fiscal libertarian. I am somewhat of a rare breed there because I am also a committed Christian. Many libertarians are atheists. The esteemed author of Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand spoke wrote eloquently against altruism.

The Christian church as a whole is involved very heavily in altruism. Food banks, homeless shelters, missions of all sorts. I believe in all of these endeavors. The conflict comes from the blurring of altruism that has occurred since the explosion of government. Everything that the government sells is sold on the basis of altruism. Giving people a hand who are down on their luck has been the selling point of every government giveaway plan from the beginning of time. In stage one thinking I believe in helping people down on their luck. I personally give to the Salvation Army, a local mission in Akron (near where I live), and of course tithing to my church. The United Methodist church is very active in mission work and disaster relief. All of those things I believe in.

To my way of thinking when altruism gets beyond emergency, or survival relief it can become a strait jacket. We see it every day. The natural spirit of man is to succeed. We get our esteem from succeeding. Even when we fail we build the character and the knowledge that is needed to succeed in the future. When we attempt to take away failure we take away the experiences that people need to succeed in the future.

Life is a balancing act. Too much of a good thing leads to too little of another. When we attempt to take away the events of failure we take away the experience which helps us learn to adapt. The most obvious example I can think of is teenage pregnancy. In past days there was a stigma against this. There is no doubt that sometimes these young women were treated very unfairly. I never want to go back to these days, but the stigma taught most young women not to do this. There is a reason for this: It is difficult for the young women and not beneficial for the children. The stigma kept them from making a mistake in many cases. Today as soon as a young woman gets pregnant the government swoops in to educate her in the many ways that the state will help her along the way. We do this under the guise of making sure the children do not suffer. The children don't have to suffer, they can be adopted by people who are ready for the task who either choose not to get pregnant or simply cannot. In today's society though, why would the woman choose adoption? The state is poised to give her support in many ways to have the child. In many cases (certainly not all) the young women simply are not ready for the responsibility of raising a child. She simply has no incentive to choose adoption. She may suffer a little, but mostly the children suffer from not having a dad. Additionally they grow up in a world where the state is at least partially the bread winner of the family. They don't learn independence, they don't learn to take care of themselves because they don't need to.

To use a different example let's look at something less substantive but no less parallel. A couple of weeks back my wife and I took the kids bowling. Every lane now has bumpers. They are great for little kids. They can get a decent score when they aren't big enough to have great control of the ball. The problem is they never stop using them. I looked around I saw teenagers using them as a crutch, I saw adults banking balls off them to get spares. Of course bowling skills are not vital to life but if you are going to bowl, why not have real results and not the bumper related crutch? The people who want to improve simply cannot use them. Life however is not always that clear.

Now, back to Christianity. Can we claim to care for the souls of people and contribute to the dumbing down of people's accomplishments? When we provide altruism beyond disaster or survival, we teach people that they don't need to excel, they don't need to succeed, they don't need to feed the part of their soul that depends on success and failure. You can say that those people don't need to receive that support, they can choose not to. I disagree. If it is there for the taking most people simply won't turn it down. The ones that do are much better for doing so, but most people simply won't. My bottom line is it simply is not compassionate to continue to block people from learning from setbacks. Setbacks are not failure, they are a roadmap to future success.

Of Harry Reid and race

2010-01-13T12:32:00.002-05:00

The political world has gone gaga for the discussion of race and Harry Reid. We have President Obama forgiving him, we have Attorney General quoting his longtime dedication to social justice. Social Justice seems to be the phrase that must have been in the talking points because most of the outpouring of support for Reid includes the phrase.

In case you have been on the moon and missed it during the campaign last year Senator Reid is said to have said that then Senator Obama could win because he is light skinned and doesn't speak with a Negro dialect unless he wants to. This exchange is quoted in the upcoming book
Game Change by Mark Halperin.

My particular opinion is that it is not racist in any way (other than a stupid choice of using the word negro). Actually I believe that it is remarkably consistent to what I have observed of Harry Reid and a good portion of the leftists in our country. To me it shows complete contempt not for President Obama but for the American voters. In the world of Harry Reid the reason we haven't had a black president before 2008 is because we are racist and only now can tolerate a black man as long as he isn't too black. The man is a condescending boob. The only candidates we have had previously were race hucksters who have made a living cashing in on a history of race offenses that while the history is real and detestable, Sharpton and Jackson's actions do nothing to help the lives of real black people today.

He also shows me that he thinks of blacks the same way he thinks of women, Hispanics and union workers. They are all mascots to be used to sell his big government collectivist view of the world. You need to sell health care? Bring out some pathetic examples of people without insurance and if they are minority all the better. The American people are compassionate. We will buy central control if you just show us starving, unhealthy people that you can blame on some group they already hate (like insurance companies, drug companies or just rich people). Need to sell union control, just show how minorities are discriminated against in the job market. It doesn't even have to be true, it just has to lead people to think they are.

Harry Reid is one of the people destroying the country, but I don't think racism is one of his ills. Demagoguery, bigotry of low expectations, nakedly pursuing power? Yes, but not racism.

What is fair?

2009-12-05T09:08:00.002-05:00

Sense of fairness has taken over our society. We hear it all the time. We used to only hear it from children. Health care must be overhauled and started over because it isn't fair that so many people don't have health insurance. The tax system must be progressive because it isn't fair to the people who don't earn as much. Even television gets into it. I read a message Board for the Biggest Loser and constantly read people saying the award system should be changed because it isn't fair to this person or that.

I mention children because using fairness as a measure for public policy is childish. Governments and officials of all activities have to use objective standards. To use fairness as a measure you have to use something to compare to. To say something is unfair to party A you must know what party B has. Public policy must encourage people to be the best they can be. Public policy based on fairness encourages people to not excel but to compare their situation with someone else and cry fowl.

The Constitution never set up fairness as a yard stick. Everything written into the founding document was a rule book to encourage each citizen to excel and pursue their vision of excellence. The first ten amendments all placed limits on government not individuals. Nearly every piece of legislation today puts limits on individuals and gives power to government. Given that truth it is no wonder President Obama is trying to discover the magic formula to create jobs. Go back to limiting government and take the shackles off from individuals and you will have more jobs than we can fill.

Words I would like to see not used

2009-11-05T12:51:00.002-05:00

In political campaigns I wish the following words were never used again:

Special Interest, socialist, greed, fat cat, out of state money, expert.

Why do I dislike these words? They have ceased to have any independent meaning in a political context. Special interest for example has come to mean any group you oppose or does not contribute to your campaign. Greed means anyone doing well that you don't think is doing things the way you would do them. Making a profit is not being greedy, it is doing what a business is required to do to stay solvent. Here's one for the right. Socialist! A politician who wants bigger government may or may not be a socialist. I believe in his heart Dennis Kucinich is a socialist. In his heart I don't believe Barak Obama is a Socialist. They advocate many of the same principles but I see the way they describe their positions as what sets them apart. I do believe Obama believes in much much larger government but I don't believe that he thinks that government controlling most of the resources is the way to get there.

My point is not just the words, it is the shorthand that political campaigns use to get their points across. Advertising is expensive and by using shorthand buzz words they can send their message in code. One version of the code is that if candidate A is beholden to special interests you can bet they are telling you not that he supports different interests as candidate B but that he does it in a corrupt way. Using this code though, candidate B never has to offer any proof in any way. By saying candidate A is supported by greedy businesses the same thing happens, you are pointing to his lack of core values but you never have to offer any proof of it.

Who gets the blame? If you have ever read anything in this space you know who I blame. I blame you and I. We continue to support the same pinheads every two and six years. No matter how many times they show that they have no respect for their constituents we send them back. Some names to look at next year. Chris Dodd has had very shady connections to Countrywide. He was on the friends list that got sweetheart mortgage deals, all the while being the chairman of the Senate committee that regulates the financial sector. My prediction is that the fact that he brings pork home will far outweigh anything that he has done with Countrywide and he will win comfortably. His state will value the pork over anything else. They might return him just because they have heard of him. Barbara Boxer looks to have a serious challenger next year. She has had some embarrassments this past year and over her career. In the end her war chest and her name recognition will win out. In the last year she has brow beat an African American witness
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FoekBjhtWE

she has dressed down a general for calling her ma'am.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pziILAi_Un8

She has been generally an elitist but in the end her pork and power will win out.

In the end Election season 2009 was much like the rest and 2010 will be the same. The candidates will continue to insult our intelligence and we will lap it up like the busy overworked people we are. When we complain that they don't care about us less and less people will be sympathetic, and eventually we will be a banana republic. What else can we do? Support candidates that respect individual liberty (another overused buzzword but I can't think of a better phrase to use) candidates that believe you can improve your life better than they can, and candidates that in their core values believe Washington (or your State capitol) cannot fix your life. I remain hopeful, but not expecting much to change. Good luck!

Live by the Blue Dog Die by the Blue Dog

2009-10-04T17:31:00.003-04:00

So the Democrats are probably going to pull the public option off the table. The Republicans are patting themselves on the back and doing high fives. Guess what? I don't think the public option was ever anything but a bargaining chip. Also the Republicans did NOTHING!!!! By simple math you have to know they couldn't do anything.

Here is my personal opinion. Maybe it is a conspiracy theory but I don't consider it that at all. I believe in the back of the room the blue dogs have gotten together with the hard core leadership (also known as the Marxists) and have agreed that with the public option off the table they can declare a victory and go back to their voters and tell them they protected the voters. After the smoke clears the government still gets total control. With or without a public option they set the ground rules of who insure what and when. There will still be mandates for everyone to carry coverage, there will be no provision to allow competition across state lines. There will be no tort reform. There will be no tax benefit for individual coverage so in the end you will get your coverage from your employer or you will get it from Der Commissar. Just as they set out to do all along.

Have you wondered why the private insurers have been in favor of Obama care all along? Because whatever is agreed to will allow them to keep their oligarchy. No smaller competitor will come along to challenge them. With competition across state lines more competition could have upset the status quo. When the blue dogs eventually cave, Aetna and Blue Cross and United Healthcare will keep the market share they have and can tell their stockholders that they worked with the President to save health care. They will not be forced to endure more stiff competition. As Adam Smith surmised no one hates Capitalism like a businessman.

Why will the blue dogs cave? It is simple, they are Democrats and while they need to stand up for their voters they also need the support that the party in power can deliver. Make Pelosi and Reid look stupid and you will get no plumb committees, you get no help getting re-elected which is only a year away for the House members and you get nothing from the party money coffers. They will fold and they will claim victory and they will puff out their chest while they attend the signing ceremony with the Messiah.

What happens to the Republicans when this happens? Well they will continue to lose because they don't believe in anything. They don't stand for small government they don't believe that they can win with that. They don't believe in the founders because they know the Obama generations wouldn't know Thomas Paine from Elvis Presley. It simply isn't important to them. They will try to be Obama light and they will have another embarrassing crushing defeat in 2010.

And what about those of us who pay the bills? We will continue to do so. Some will just stop paying attention because they will feel like no one is listening. Some will get more radical. Some will follow third parties and some will follow populist charlatans. At some point the House and Senate will change hands, but it will be because the people are tired of the Democrats not because they are aching for the Republicans.

I hope with all my heart I am wrong, but in recent history I haven't been.

Health Care winners and Losers

2009-07-28T12:34:00.003-04:00

People on the left of our political spectrum believe they get to pick winners and losers. Case in point, The Urban Institute believes we should tax food as has been done with done with tobacco and alcohol. They go on about the obesity epidemic causing increases in health care costs. I for one do not argue with the concept that we must combat obesity. I have struggled with this my entire life. Taxing certain foods simply won't do it.

If you want obese people to respond financially there are things that can be done within the private sector. The congressional health care overhaul bill bans refusing health care coverage for pre-existing conditions. This takes away any consequences for unhealthy behavior. I have been for most of my adult life around 300 pounds and now have diabetes and a heart disease risk in my family. I pay the same premium for health care insurance that my co-workers do even though most of them are slim and healthy. If my rates were based on my life circumstances I would be forced to take a harder look at my behaviors. As I get older I might even be refused coverage. I have been struggling to get healthier, if my health care costs went up astronomically I might be forced to get much more serious about it. Additional taxes on soda, doughnuts etc., not even close. To change the insurance market though government would have to rescind a good many mandates that are in place today. One size fits all insurance allows unhealthy behaviors to go on with no consequences as most left wing ideas do. Additionally if we add taxes to selected foods (no chance of that list being arbitrary based on political contributions at all is there?) we will also be taxes healthy people for the same foods. That doesn't seem fair to me. Who gets to decide what is unhealthy. The Adkins diet considers carbs unhealthy. Tax on pineapple. Other diets urge low fats. Olive oil anyone? Ok you say we would never tax those foods, they are healthy foods. The question is who gets to decide? Some smart person that works for the government. Once again they believe they know more than us.

While we in the taxing mood though, risky sexual behaviors cause huge medical costs (government coverage for children of single mothers, sexually transmitted diseases, long term care of HIV and AIDS). Maybe we can find a way to tax them as well. People who jump out of airplanes for pleasure have higher accident incidents than normal. Should we tax this? People who ice skate may have higher accident occurrences. (I broke my ankle a few years back). Tax them as well? Where does it end?

Government cannot be trusted to decide who is a winner and who is a loser. There is no way to remove human nature from the equation. Whoever goes on the committee will have a bias as to what is unhealthy and what is healthy. Using government to try to make people be healthy is like using a sledge hammer to drive a finishing nail. They can only impose broad based solutions. It cannot be successful. Real reform would actual let the market impose outcomes based on real life circumstances, not who has the best lobbyists.

Winners and Losers

2009-07-25T12:24:00.002-04:00

One of my prime objections any time the government gets involved in areas that private enterprise should rule is that they should not have to right to decide who wins and who loses. Another glaring example of the folly of government involvement is the current health care debacle.

One of the largest hidden costs of health care today is the cost of malpractice insurance each and every doctor must pay. The number of frivolous lawsuits is the prime reason that this is true. Most doctors at one time in their career will face a malpractice suit of some form. This results in outlandish insurance rates for malpractice insurance.

You may remember back to the Bush administration that the fact that Bush and Cheney both had backgrounds in the oil business. This was of course enough evidence to the mind of a leftist that they were paying off the oil industry by not forcing additional regulation on them. No such charge can be found today though. Barak Obama has a noted law background as does his wife. In all of the reforms he wants for the health care industry none can be found that will add additional regulation on torts. Is this not a 'payoff'? Using the same microscope used in the last administration it would be, but of course it is not. It is a simple case of the President making the rules and deciding who wins and who loses. In his mind 'Big Law' is not a villain but virtuous so he makes sure that they are not touched.

Any realistic look at this situation has to show us that tort reform could be one step of many in reducing heath care costs. A system where the loser of the suit would pay all the legal fees would go a long way to reducing the cost of insurance and therefore overall overhead to the doctors. If the suits that are on the more frivolous end would be given a second thought since the risk would be much higher. There is simply no risk to someone bringing these suits today. Since the people writing the laws as well as the President have law backgrounds I wouldn't hold my breath on seeing it happen. Since they won the election they get to pick to winners and losers. This doesn't sound like the system our founders put in place, but it is the corrupt system we have given ourselves.

Health care and thinking out loud

2009-07-23T17:19:00.002-04:00

I am not a doctor so I would never dream of making this assertion sound anything like official. I have noticed that the cases of swine flu or H1N1 virus are skyrocketing in other countries, but the cases in the United States are not skyrocketing. A recent story says the number of cases in Britain has doubled in a week with 100,000 new cases in a week. Given that England is much smaller than the United States and the total number as of July 17 (figures released every Friday) was 40,617 in the US what explains this?

Once again I can't say with any certainty that my theory is correct, but I wonder if the fact that in our country availability of health care is almost universal (although not insurance) but in European countries health care insurance is universal but not access to care. Whether you are insured or not you can see a doctor here. That is not the case in socialized medicine countries.

Just thinking out loud. Maybe someone should consider this before we make our health care system like theirs.

Mr President don't Comment

2009-07-23T13:11:00.004-04:00

President Obama last night stated in response to a question about the Cambridge Police and Professor Gates that he didn't have the facts but they acted stupidly. First of all when you say you don't have all the facts it is best not to comment.

He stated that since there was adequate proof he lived there it should have not gone any further. If he had looked into it he would have seen that the professor would not show his ID because he was convinced they were there because he is black. (see the report here) If he had showed his ID it could have ended there. President Obama stated that anyone would have been angry. I for one would not be angry if an officer came to my door and asked for my ID and told me someone reported seeing someone trying to break into my house. I for one would show him my ID and tell him maybe the door stuck or something similar. I would not make a scene and call him names.

In a clarification from the White House (see it here) the President says "Let me be clear I was not calling the officer stupid". Since this is an action by one person how exactly can he not be calling the officer stupid? If the officer arrested someone after it was proven he did nothing wrong he can only be evil or stupid correct? Maybe more facts are required before commenting.

President Obama, show some leadership and stop acting like an activist. You are now among historical figures such as Washington and Jefferson. You are behaving like dare I say it a community organizer?

If not for straw men ...

2009-07-23T12:33:00.004-04:00

I think everyone understands the meaning of a 'straw man' in areas of debating or speech making. The definition on Wiki is "To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position." Increasingly President Obama defeats the straw man.

He refutes that doing nothing is not an option. No responsible Republican activist wants to do nothing. John McCain ran a terrible campaign for President but had a very responsible and prudent health care reform plan. President Bush tried encouraged congress continually to reform the tax favoritism currently in place for employer based health care. There is a belief on the right that if the tax benefits accorded to employer health care were given to non employer health insurance than companies would devise more plans that are more affordable for individuals and small businesses. Even if you don't believe this, it is not the same as doing nothing.

President Obama says that Republicans are trying to damage his presidency in combating his brand of health care reform. He charges that they are practicing politics. On its face this is ludicrous. Of course the Republicans are interested in their parties' performance. I suspect he didn't call it political when as a Senator he rejected every effort at reform proposed by former President Bush. I don't suppose he thought it political when his party rejected every attempt to reform Fannie Mae to regulate their madness and head off the housing crisis. As usual someone playing politics to President Obama is someone he doesn't agree with, just as a special interest is one that does not contribute to him. Let's say for argument that the Republicans don't have an ideological reason to oppose him and are just doing it 'for politics'. They have 40 Senators and less than two hundred House of Representative members. They couldn't stop a vote on what to have for lunch. The fact remains that the most powerful opposition is coming from his own party in the form of freshman and 'blue dog' Democrats.

He continues to make everyone a villain except himself. The doctors are villains, the insurance companies are villains, the opposition politicians are villains, the profit motive is villain. While he provides much clarity he provides no leadership. Only he is to be considered to be pure. He made the charge that doctors remove tonsils to make more money. If he has an instance of this, that sounds like medical malpractice to me. Maybe he should turn it over to the authorities. I know from my personal experience that both my doctor and my children's pediatrician would make nothing from a tonsillectomy since neither are surgeons. Straw man or outright lie?) His idea of changing the way business is done in Washington as he promised so much in his campaign is simply getting bi-partisan support only if they agree with him. While I don't necessarily fault him, after all his party won so they get to set the agenda. I do blame the voters who bought his bill of goods. They bought his song and dance about hope and change even though nothing in his past pointed to him being anything but a committed leftist.

Mr. President how about putting away the straw men and answering these questions:

- How exactly does your plan reduce costs?
- How exactly is it competition when the private competitors have to follow the rules set down by the government option?
- How is it competition when the government can print money but private enterprise cannot?
- If the opposition is the Republicans how can they stop this plan with such a small minority?
- if the government is so able to be more efficient how do we explain the deplorable Veterans Administration hospitals, the cost overruns of medicare and the cost overruns of Medicaid?
- Exactly what is the breakdown of the un-insured and shouldn't the plan find a way to attract those people instead of replacing the entire existing system?

I suspect those and other questions will not be addressed. After all anyone who disagrees with him is a tool of special interests so he doesn't feel the need to respond.

Competition, Chicago Style

2009-07-18T09:15:00.002-04:00

President Obama keeps telling us how we need the government option to 'compete' with private insurers. This is of course ridiculous on its face. I have previously written about this here. Now we are getting more details about what that competition looks like. Here is a link telling us that private health insurance is not to be illegal, but in their own piece they tell us that your private health insurance will be grandfathered in (section 102 (a)) UNLESS they enroll new people, start charging more or make changes in coverage. If that happens they will have to comply with the terms of the government health insurance. This is what constitutes competition in the mind of Pelosi, Reid and Obama.

To make an analogy lets say Anthem is the dominant insurer in market. This is the same as telling the other players in the market you have to offer at least the same coverage for the same price to sell in this market, and HAVE THE FORCE of LAW to do it. This is absurd!!! This is not competition. This is FASCISM!!! (note fascism is not the same as Nazism and no one is making the claim morally or economically that President Obama believes in Nazism).

Health care in America has problems. The answer to those problems are not government control. This is absolutely the last thing we need.

The CBO has determined that far from saving us money the health care takeover proposed will cost us much more. (see here) Given the sad state of the federal budget (see the directors blog, Director of the CBO here), more hits to the budget simply cannot be withstood. More true competition (not Chicago style competition) is what is needed. Congress could today remove the barrier to private firms competing across state lines. While this would not fix all of the problems it would allow more creative plans and attract some of the people who opt out of coverage now. A great number of people simply can't or won't pay the premiums that are charged either for plans through their job because they are healthy and see it as a bad investment. If however they were presented wiht alternatives with high deductibles, low premiums and high co pays they would carry it. Surveys have shown this to be true. This would take a large bite out of the number of uninsured people. Increased competition would bring these plans about.

Higher out of pocket prices combined with tax free flexible spending accounts are what is needed. It is cheaper to go to the doctor than it is to go to a professional sports game. It is cheaper to go to the doctor than it is for some people to get their hair cut (not me I don't have much hair to cut). It is cheaper to go to the doctor than it is to take the family out to dinner. It is cheaper to go to the doctor than it is to go to an amusement park for one person. All of this demonstrates that the current system makes it unusually affordable for holders of insurance to go to the doctor. That is terrific if you are sick. Low prices always lead to higher demand. Over use of the systems keeps costs high and prevents more affordable plans. Cases of sick kids that could be treated with Tylenol or cough syrup now warrant a trip to the doctor. A case of the flu that could likewise be treated, gets a trip to the doctor and of course you always need a prescription. Too many people don't self ration because with the relatively low prices there simply is no reason to.

If coverage were scaled back by the market, affordable coverage could be offered to the not insured at more reasonable rates. In a market based plan if you have higher needs, a chronic illness etc. you could obtain the plan you need at a higher price, but still affordable. This can only come about by the government getting out of the market, not taking the market over. When the government gets involved it does not compete it sets the rules. Private competitors have the option to follow their rules and take their chances or get out of the market into other areas of insurance. Ultimately this is what will happen when the Chicago gangsters (also known as the government run by the head gangster President Obama and his capo regime Rahm Emanual) get into the market. We can still stop this farce, sign the petition to stop this sham. Be informed about what this plan looks like. If you study the details you will have to agree this will not help.

Settled Law

2009-07-14T12:47:00.003-04:00

Judge Sotomayor has said that abortion is settled law. This has of course been said by many people at many times. I believe they are saying that existing precedent law must be followed and what goes unsaid is that any changes to current abortion laws must be confirmed by the all knowing all seeing justices.

As I read it there are other pieces of settled law that were not respected. The ninth and tenth amendments were settled law. They are actually part of the Constitution and ratified by the states. Over the last one hundred years we have chipped away at these amendments that leave powers not provided for to the states. The court has chipped away at the Commerce clause and the first amendment freedoms as if not settled law.

If the court and congress can chip away at ratified law why on earth would we consider precedent based activist judge created law sacrosanct? It boggles the mind if you take time to think about it.

Uncertainty is plagueing the Economy

2009-07-14T12:12:00.001-04:00

Politicians, economists and just about everyone else has an idea about why the economy shows little sign of recovering anytime soon. Reasons include 'George Bush messed it up so bad it will take time', this of course is a rehash of the Great Depression charge that Herbert Hoover ruined the economy by being stingy and not doing enough. We have heard that the stimulus is the answer but won't work as quickly as earlier planned.

I am not an economist and don't play one on TV, but do know a few things about economics. First of all very little of the stimulus has been spent. This was warned by many people because the projects they targeted need to get through many layers of bureaucracy to get to be 'shovel ready' as VP Biden likes to say. I personally don't believe these projects will work either, but as it stands very little has been spent, somewhere around $29 Billion out of $787 billion.

My observation is that uncertainty is holding things back more than anything else. Large enterprises are not expanding, small enterprises are not expanding or starting. This is due to many things. At the beginning of the downturn inventories were astoundingly high. This is working itself out and will be back to normal soon. Many companies have cut costs by reducing hours worked such as giving mandatory days off, and furloughs. Before they start hiring they will return these people to full time. When demand does pickup they can ramp up quickly without massive hiring.

The big question remains why is demand not increasing? This is where paying attention in Macroeconomics in college would have helped people. Demand is increased by many things, expectation of decreased supply, expectation of future increases of raw materials, expectation of competing goods as well as a multitude of other factors (this is why economists rarely agree about their models). Does something about the last one sound familiar? The government is spending money like never before. Businessmen know that you cannot continue spending in massive deficit for a prolonged period. Something has got to give. Either new revenue needs to come in, (increased economic activity, increased taxes etc) or expenses need to be cut. If a businessman were to guess he would have to say revenues are not going to increase and expenses will not be cut so taxes will be raised. Since said businessman does not know what taxes will be raised and on whom, he cannot take risk until he knows those things. In the Congress we have two pieces of legislation that also will affect every business without a lot of details. A health care takeover bill and an energy takeover bill. We do not know the extent of the mandates, nor the details of how they will be administered so again no risk is advisable until we know these things.

That takes care of business. How about consumer spending? The guy or girl that still has a job sees the newspapers too. We see a lot of big changes coming without a lot of details. Do we buy new cars? Do we buy that big screen TV? How about a second home for investment? Not likely on all counts. We also see that banks are becoming solvent, but lots of smaller banks are being closed. This of course reduces competition and gives more power to the big banks that the government propped up. That doesn't signal good things for the consumer, so again risk is not advisable with the prospect of losing one's job in the near future.

What will turn it around? Certainty! As harmful as new taxes will be, or the health care or energy bill, at least if we know what flavor they will take the consumers and businesses can make plans. One thing I can predict is that if government health care changes are undertaken it will be good for large enterprises, but very bad for smaller enterprises. I am sure those business owners believe the same. Small businesses usually lead us out of recession. That cannot happen this time because they will be the targets of health care. Energy law changes will hurt smaller enterprises and consumers the hardest. That sounds like a double whammy to small business. They won't be adding workers any time soon.

So are we just out of luck to fall into a second Great Depression? I don't think so, but times may get worse before they get better. Money is nearly free. Government is offering incentives to their pet industries. Inflation is on the horizon. For me it is still impossible to predict how long this will go on. Government will work with large enterprises and when they recover the economy will recover. This will take longer and be more detrimental to smaller enterprises. This will lead to a less healthy private sector and a larger public sector, so even after it recovers it will not be a robust recovery since the government will be pulling the strings. This is not an optimistic future, but it is the one I see. As negative as it sounds removing uncertainty may be the best thing they can do, God help us!

Competition Obama Style

2009-06-27T10:41:00.003-04:00

The buzz word for the Obama health care plan seems to be competition. He used this word in his press conference this week in regards to reducing costs. As I understand it the competition between private and public health care providers will work to reduce costs and make health care insurance more affordable.

First of all when he uses the word competition in this way Adam Smith and Milton Freidman must be rolling over in their graves. Competition infers a battle of some sort. Sports teams and players compete. GM competes against Toyota and the other auto companies (at least they did until they became Obama Motors). Dell competes against the other computer manufacturers. The common thread is that none of these companies or teams gets to make the rules. They all follow the same rules whether they be an actual rule book as in sports or a set of laws set down by government in the arena of business.

Now the government decides they want to play. Already we have Congressmen and Senators calling up CEO's 'advising them' why the dealerships in their district should not be closed and maybe some other dealership may work out better in the long run (surprise surprise Barney Frank). So now the government wants to go up against the big insurance companies. Part of me says they all deserve each other. It sickens me to defend the principles of free markets with the likes of Medical Mutual, Anthem and the rest of them. They are however privately held firms and therefore cannot print money to attract customers. They cannot write laws to make their own stake more attractive. They cannot lead around a gaggle of sycophantic reporters around to make their pitch. These firms have to pay for advertising, they can't just call up ABC news and ask for an hour infomercial.

Calling this setup competition is vile. It shows how depraved the people are that misuse the language in this way are. Who do we have to blame for this mess? I have to put the blame on the Republican Congress who spent the eight years before 2006 spreading pork and selling influence which brought on the band of miscreants we have running things now.

Make no mistake about this. If this health care scheme passes health care will be entirely in the public domain in short order. This is entirely the plan, of Obama and Polosi and Reid. As government gets deeper into health they will lower the price of their plan. This does not reduce costs it only reduces price. Since the private firms will not be able to match this price they will lose subscribers until the costs will be divided up into a smaller and smaller pool of people. This will necessarily cause their prices to go up and up. They will eventually leave the health care market altogether and put their capitol into markets where they can compete. This will of course leave the health care market to the government and they can boast that they won it through 'fair competition'. It makes me sick!

The dirty little secret is that the government and especially President Obama have us convinced that if we don't pass his plan we are choosing to do nothing. There are other alternatives. Private sector changes will work. One way or another we need to take insurance out of the hands of employers. Please see the Heritage Foundation for ideas of private sector health care. We can increase actual competition by opening up health insurance to the entire nation not just within the state as it is now. Auto insurance competes nationwide. Why can't health care insurance? For auto insurance we pay for nearly everything with our cars and use insurance for the big costs such as accident, collision and theft. While we can't use the same model with a national market for insurance there can be differing levels of insurance. If you want just a catastrophic plan for a lower premium that will be available. If you need more things covered at a higher price that will be there too. You really should be able to set your price depending on what you want covered. More young people would carry insurance in that scenario. They are one of the largest groups of the uninsured now. They don't see it as worth their limited resources to pay for insurance that covers everything when they rarely use it. Let them cover only the big things. That can't happen when the employer is offering a one size fits all policy.

We cannot let this plan pass. We will delegate our liberty to the Democrats. With this group we will be a banana republic soon. We will soon see the disasters that Canada, Britain and the other socialized nations see now. Only narcissism makes this crowd think that what failed everywhere else will work here. Narcissism is the one thing that won't be in short supply when they take over.

Mr. President:Don't we deserve nuclear power as much as the Iranians?

2009-06-12T12:34:00.003-04:00

Back on June 2 President Obama said that the Iranians desire for nuclear power was legitimate as long as they could prove their desire was peaceful. (See the Associated Press story here). Candidate Obama said he could be for nuclear power only when we could prove we could safely store the waste, and then on May 9 decided to end the funding for the Yucca Mountain storage facility.

The obvious questions exist here:

1. Why can Iran have nuclear power but we can't?
2. Why does Iran merely have to prove they are peaceful (which I'm not sure what that means anyway) and we have to prove we can safely store it (again how do we define that?)
3. If our priority is for clean green fuels why can't we use the most successful world wide clean green fuel?
4. If cheesy 1970's movies can set national policy (The China Syndrome), I vote that we pass a resolution that President Obama apply for a name change to President Le Petomane (if you are keeping score that is my second Blazing Saddles reference this week but if the reference fits use it).
5. Does an emphasis on clean green fuels only apply to clean green fuels the President approves of? Part II: doesn't that make him the Emperor not the President?

Pointing out the obvious inconsistencies in the President's policies used to be something our main stream media did, but is left to bloggers now. Luckily there are some that people actually read.

Changing the World one Life at a time

2009-06-10T12:31:00.002-04:00

The environmentalists have an expression, 'think globally act locally'. As it goes I actually don't disagree that much with that. I certainly don't agree with most of their prescriptions, but I think most conservatives and liberals alike want to improve the world we live in. This goes for the environment and the non tangible elements as well.

As I look around at our culture we have become accustomed to a certain amount of creature comforts. We expect to be able to go on vacation to the destination of our choice. We expect to be able to go out to eat if we want. We expect nine gazillion channels on our television for a reasonable price. When we see someone who doesn't have that we think we need something done to make sure that person can do that in short order.

Here is where the left and right move apart. We are so accustomed to these things that it has become unfashionable to ask how to get there. We don't always ask honest questions. Health care is the immediate subject facing us right now. We see millions of people who cannot afford health care insurance at prevailing prices. Now instead of talking about the millions of people that cannot afford health insurance how about one person. OK that is not representative enough, I understand that. Lets take twenty people. First do they all have the same problems? In truth they probably do not. Some may have had children and dropped out of school and not gained the skills necessary to compete in our economic system. Someone else may have developed a substance abuse problem and cannot hold a job. Still another has just lost a job and is going to get another as soon as the economy gets better. Another is young and just doesn't want to pay for insurance they feel they don't need today. Another may not have the problem of cost at al.. Maybe they just want to take the risk and have the means to do so.

You may be saying I have heard this all before. Here is the fresh look. Lets take person one. They poor unfortunate lady who had children in high school and the father abandoned her. After this happened she did her best but just never got around to finishing her high school degree or college. Now let's go back in time. If some person, a parent, a counselor, a pastor, a friend had given her the honest assessment of her future would she have chosen it? By honest assessment I mean when you have that child, and turn to the government, statistics show that you will never be able to go to college, you will never make substantially more than you will today, and you will have very little choice in the direction of your life. Of course these are statistics and they can be wrong in individual instances but for the majority of people these are the realities. If these facts had been given to her would she have chosen to have the baby and raise it or some other choice? One of the choices she could have taken is abortion which I would pray she would not choose. This too has consequences. Her entire life she would wonder what could have become of this never born child. She would have wondered what if she had chosen differently. This is a legal choice but not one without consequences just like all choices.

Let's now say she had been given this information and had chosen to give the baby up for adoption. She would have had her life inconvenienced for the time she was pregnant and would still have the future of wondering where the child is, what the child believes about its mother and all the similar questions. Once again consequences. Now let's go back even farther. Every parent tries to have the talk with their children about sex. Instead of just telling them that premarital sex is wrong and don't do it, what if they knew all they statistics we spoke of. What if they volunteered at a battered women's shelter for a time. What if she went to a homeless shelter and saw all of the lives that hadn't turned out the way the people planned. Would she have chosen a different life? Maybe or maybe not, but we don't know because we lump her in with all of the other people who are nothing but statistics that we use to make our political point.

How about the other people we looked at above. Is there a conversation we could have had for them as well to give them an honest assessment of their future? I think there might be. My children are nine and five years old. I plan to have these conversations. It will still be their choices but at least they will have the long term consequences laid out to them. Shouldn't we start treating the 'poor', the 'disadvantaged', the 'less fortunate' as individuals and not a group? I guess the question comes down to do we want to feel good about ourselves or actually make a difference? You can't make a difference for a group without making a difference for an individual. There will be things that happen that we cannot avoid, untimely deaths, killer tornadoes and Hurricanes. Wouldn't it be nice to reduce the avoidable personal tradgedies? We have always had cases of all these people I talked about, the degree of occurrance is the new phenomena. We may not be able to avoid all of them, but we can reduce them, one life at a time.

Give the President a "Hurrumph"

2009-06-08T12:28:00.002-04:00

This is of course a reference to the movie Blazing Saddles. In one scene the Governor played by Mel Brooks is being ridiculous and the cabinet secretaries are sitting and saying "hurrumph hurrumph". At one point the Governor says "I didn't get a hurrunph from that guy" to which his assistent Headley Lamar says "Give the Governor a hurrumph". Then the Governor says to watch your _ss.

I quote one of the funniest movies in history because watching the early Obama administration reminds me very much of this scene. President Obama is constantly spitting out words of wisdom, which are by themselves all that is needed. No action or results are ever necessary. The main stream press then responds in kind by telling us how brilliant he is and how lucky we are that he decided to grace us with his wisdom.

He goes to Egypt and says many of the same things President Bush said for eight years and it is a magnificent new beginning. Let's not pay attention to the fact that the sticking point in the middle east is still that Israel will not make an agreement with the Palestinians or anyone else before they stop shooting rockets into their country. I don't think they can be blamed for that. The area of Gaza will never advance until Hamas decides to rule instead of conduct terror. Beautiful words or not these things are true. Iran and other terrorist entities will not stop their terror and support of terror until we surrender friendly words or not.

Today I hear he is vowing to step up speed on the stimulus package. The problem with that is that he chose to fund things that don't happen quickly. He chose building programs similarly to what Hoover and Roosevelt did. Unfortunately for President Obama the states have many more Bureaucrats that Hoover and Roosevelt had to deal with (not that their programs worked anyway). For him to say he is going to speed it up simply can't happen. My personal opinion is that he doesn't care that it can't happen. The fact that he says something tells the masses that he cares and that is enough for a Hurrumph.

More examples? President Obama talks constantly about health care reform. Rather than show how his program will control costs, the fact that he says they will control costs is enough. We know already how he will control costs, just like every other national plan controls costs, he will have rationing. It may not happen day one, but we will have rationing. It is not possible not to. When you give the users the illusion that the plan is free demand will go up dramatically. How will costs go down then? Note I didn't say price, I said costs. Costs can only go down if some process improvement occurs, either technology, or raw materials or labor costs. Since he is owned by labor I don't think labor costs are going down any time soon. If it is a process improvement it would be the first time in history that this came about from a government program. None of this matter though, since he is going to pass something that is all that is needed. Hurrumph!

Whose Ox is being Gored

2009-06-03T12:32:00.002-04:00

Imagine this made up news story:

Representatives from the communications giant Salem Communications which is the broadcast home of such hosts as Mchael Medved, Dennis Prager, and Mike Gallegher today said they believe the Justice department should change its anti trust procedures so they could work with other companies to find solutions to their financial woes. Senator John McCain has an alternative idea where they could book losses against the previous five years when they were more profitable.

This is of course a made up story, but the outline was taken from an actual Reuters story dated June 3 about the big publishers of newspapers which are of course facing the threat of going under. I encourage people to read this story. The point I am making is that while this story is highlighting that the publishers don't want to be given an auto industry style bailout because it could hurt their perceived objectivity, but do want some help from the feds to help them survive. If the same point were made by another industry that has real or perceived ties to conservatives and the Republican Party it would by definition be reported as a case of special interests asking for special treatment.

This subject of the newspapers is real and in my humble estimation it is a question of arrogance. The biggies in this field believe that only they can do the job of journalism. Some newspapers have gone out of business and some more are on the brink. The market has shown that we don't need as many newspaper outlets as we have. As long as the firm going out is from a small town it is believed that it is OK to have the market rule. Let it happen to a large market and I might add a large blue state market and it is a matter of dire emergency that the nanny state must act on. Are we to assume that all journalism will stop if the New York Times goes out of business? How about the Washington Post? This is rediculous!

Did transit stop when the street car companies went out of business? Did telephone traffic stop when the telephone operators went by the wayside? The entire argument is laughable. Would we bend anit-trust legislation for an oil company? How about for a software company? I argue that this new bailout industry stems not from size but from who their friends are. I argue that if GM were largely a non-union company today they would still be in bankruptcy, but if no lenders were to be found, they would soon be liquidating.

I have written before about defining what special interests are and I will continue to write about it because it is a subject we must face honestly. To me a special interest is a industry or business that disagrees with the speaker or writer calling it a special interest. A healthy political environment cannot allow this spoils system to continue. This is an out growth of the group politics which was not invented by President Obama but played so skillfully buy President Obama.

As for the newspapers, let the market shake it out and let the chips fall where they may. If anti trust procedures are to be changed I say good. Anti trust has been a giant club to be employed any time the given Justice Department feels like using it. If procedures are to change however let it be for the public good and not because a liberal interest group came knocking with the threat of writing unflattering stories about the Attorney General.

Wisdom and empathy

2009-05-29T12:39:00.003-04:00

President Obama has nominated Sonia Sotomayor to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. The president cited empathy as a trait he found important in a justice. Judge Sotomayor has been quoted as saying in a speech published in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal in 2002, "Justice [Sandra Day] O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases," she declared. "I am . . . not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, . . . there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Parsing this statement could fill many essays. First of all I agree that wisdom goes beyond intelligence. Many wise people do not have high IQ's and many many people with high IQ scores are not wise. That being said why exactly would a wise Latina woman be more wise than a white male? This is taken in our group politics world as being conventional wisdom, but for what reason? Are we to assume that Latina women are more likely to be from a disadvantaged life and therefore that is what she means by their experiences? If a white male had made that statement any hope of being confirmed would be over. Are we to assume that ethnicity is a predictor of wisdom? Are Latinas known to be wiser than Caucasians? Are women generally known to be wiser than men? Are Latina women generally known to be wiser than white males? None of these things are true of course.

Is Judge Sotomayor a wise woman? I can not answer that but our Senators will be asked to. As for empathy, President Obama seems to think this is an important component for a justice. I think it is an important component for all humans but not for a judge in their professional capacity. I expect Justices to affirm law plain and simple. If the personalities involved in a case are rich or poor should have absolutely no bearing on any case. A case before the Supreme court which Judge Sotomayor ruled on illustrates this. A test for promotion for the New Haven fire department was allowed to be thrown out because not enough blacks scored high on the test. The judges ruling this way showed empathy for the blacks but showed anything but empathy for the people who did well on the test. One of the fire fighters Frank Ricci went to enormous lengths to prepare for this test. See more detail on this in a piece by Charles Krauhammer today. A key disagreement I have with government action in most cases is that by trying to show empathy or altruism for a single group or many groups they necessarily show the opposite to other groups. They usually defend this by saying they are of the majority group and therefore have built in advantages. The problem is they are individuals. Just as Fire fighter Ricci went to person expense and inconvenience to obtain a promotion, being a member of a Caucasian group had no effect on his personal life. Empathy would have required the court let the results of the test be made to stand regardless of ethnicity.

Judge Sotomayor most certainly will become Justice Sotomayor. The Republicans do not have the votes to defeat her if they chose to. They must use this however as a chance to explain why using empathy as a judicial philosophy is not only wrong, it is anything but empathetic, and certainly not wise.

What the world needs now is ... Gordon Ramsey

2009-05-26T12:40:00.002-04:00

I must confess I have not written to this blog recently. I have for about three months been successful at losing weight. While not busy all the time exercising, much of my focus has been health and not as much politics and world events. I personally am trying to find more balance in my life between the many aspects.

I have become very much a fan of the British chef and restaurateur Gordon Ramsey. While I try not to take on his vocabulary, I think the standards he displays in his line of work are something every one should admire in their own line of work. He is a poster child for excellence, and through his television shows both on American and British networks show us what we as a culture need badly to pursue. I have no idea of Chef Ramsey's political leanings and quite frankly am not in the least bit interested. He pushes himself and his employees and contestants to the brink of their ability. Couldn't we use a bit more of that?

In America he has two television shows Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares and Hell's Kitchen. In the Kitchen Nightmares show he examines failing restaurants and tries to find the answer to why they are failing and gives the owner guidance (sometimes very loudly) as to how to improve. In the Hell's Kitchen show he runs a traditional reality show competition where the winner usually wins a job as an executive chef in a top notch kitchen. This is where I will take this discussion. In the competition which I have only seen a couple of seasons, most of the contestants are in the food service industry, but not all. While Chef Ramsey is sometimes insufferable, his standards are always consistent and at the highest caliber.

In each season I have seen, there have been contestants that while not in food jobs at present, he recognizes their desire, hunger and hard work and keeps them in the competition until near the end. Put in a societal sense this would be the opposite of what we do in public policy. We take people that show desire, aptitude and hard work and we take from them to give to people who have show none of those qualities. Instead of giving incentive to excel and push harder we show people how to survive by doing the least effort possible.

In one season of Hell's Kitchen the chef took the player that was last eliminated before the finale and showed his opinion of her by paying for her to go to culinary school. He rewarded drive, desire and hard work. In our public policy we reward the people that achieve the least with lots of incentive to keeping achieving nothing. Make no mistake, I am saying nothing about the people on government supported programs only about the incentives we send through public policy. People receiving government aid need to rely on their inner selves for the desire to achieve and too many just don't have it. Sometimes this is because of lack of role models, sometimes because they just don't know what it is to achieve. They don't however get any incentive from our governments to rely on themselves. They only get dependence.

I suggest our politicians watch Chef Ramsey. If they don't learn anything maybe they will be entertained. In addition, when politicians aren't legislating, they can't do harm.

Someone needs to explain Obama Economics

2009-03-03T12:40:00.002-05:00

CitiCorp is extending a lower mortgage payment to unemployed borrowers who are at least sixty days behind on their mortgage payments. See details here. I suspect this policy did not come from their management but rather the Politburo known as the Obama administration. They of course trotted out the management to announce this policy so their grimy fingerprints would not be on it.

Lets look at this logically. Citi Corp is under management of the American Politburo because they are nearly insolvent. We are to believe that it is in the companies best interest to give a break to all of these people that are not paying their mortgage. In effect we are offering an incentive to stop paying your mortgage if you have lost your job. That way you can save up some money for sixty days and pay the new lower 'Obama Rate'. Traditional economics deals with incentives and trade offs. I suspect Obama Economics works under a different set of values. Perceived fairness doesn't amount to economic principles. The problem with fairness as an end goal is it can't be defined. To be fair to group A you necessarily have to punish group B. This always happens when the government is involved.

Sanjiv Das of Citi corp says "We expect that there will be thousands of people we can help". I was not aware that Citi Corp has been re-chartered as a welfare organization nor as a social work organization. How many people you can help is not what they are in business to do. They seem to have forgotten that in their wallowing in the mud with their masters in the Politburo. Let me make this crystal clear, I feel great empathy for those unemployed, I simply don't agree that the continued destruction of the banking industry is going to help them any time soon. We need these behemoth banks to:
1. Get Solvent
2. Start making prudent lending decisions.
3. Get out of bed with the Federal Government.

None of these things are going to happen by cutting peoples payments while bleeding red ink. Unemployed people need jobs more than anything else. Not compassion, not a shoulder to cry on by the government. Let me explain what I mean by that. It is the role of their families, friends, clergy if applicable, not the Government to offer support. These people need jobs. That will not happen as long as banks are acting as charity organizations. This move puts the three things I outlined above further back. As long as the banks are sinking deeper into government control they cannot start making prudent lending decisions.

Now for the Politburo (aka Obama Administration). They need to stop spreading panic. They need to stop throwing out trial balloons that spook investors. We need investors doing what they do. When every day there is a new policy announcement talking about how the government is going to change the fundamentals of the market, they simply will not do this. They will short the market, they will buy gold, they will invest in foreign markets. They simply will not invest in this country. In the Great Depression years, many industries that survived didn't have the option to move their businesses to more hospitable economies. Today they do. The President of course in true Democrat fashion will call them Benedict Arnold Corporations but they will move nonetheless. It is my belief he wants to spook markets. The more panic he can create the more control he can shift to the government. I believe this is part of his world view and will tolerate more bad times if he can see his end goals accomplished. That goal is government control of the economy.

Economic principles have not changed since Adam Smith. Variables in markets do, but principles don't. President Obama thinks he can change the principles just by saying so. by the way the Obama Administration will be referred to as the Politburo until they stop acting like a Politburo. I am not calling him a Communist nor even a Socialist. His economic actions however are similar to the role of the Politburo though so I will refer to him that way.

What Hollywood could learn from Fireproof

2009-02-23T12:40:00.003-05:00

This weekend I saw a movie named Fireproof. This movie is a religious movie with overtly religious themes. I am not suggesting the Hollywood start making exclusively religious movies.

The movie centers around a couple who has seen the spark leave their marriage. They have forgotten how to respect each other and they have forgotten simple decency. They are moving head long toward divorce. This is where the faith came in. At the beginning of the movie neither the husband or wife were faithful people. Through guidance from his father he comes to God and saves his marriage. He undertakes a "Love Dare" to try to save his marriage.

What I believe Hollywood could learn is about telling a story. This movie could have been made from a secular point of view and been equally as compelling. It starts from a perspective that marriages are better saved than not. I believe most people in our country believe that. That is not a common belief in the artistic community. The aspects that the character follows through the dare while backed up by scripture are not religious in nature. The first day he is dared to do something for your spouse to help them they would not expect. It says to do these things with no return in mind, just spontaneous kindness. This is not a religious component. We can all agree I think that kindness is not exclusively religious. We can also agree that a change in a relationship will never happen as long as both parties are practicing everything except kindness. Along the way he is to plan a romantic dinner. This again is not religious in nature. The events in the dare caused the person to think of the other persons point of view and get out of their own skin for a moment.

Another thing that Hollywood would not understand is that you can have romantic scenes without overt sexual references. During the movie the character of the wife has a flirtation with a doctor at the hospital where she works. I can envision if this were a Hollywood movie we would be treated to steamy sexual liaison where they would have consummated their relationship. If a secular movie were made we could get the idea of a physical relationship without seeing it plastered on the screen. I am not suggesting the physical love is never to be tolerated on screen, just not here. This was a movie about relationships and a physical scene may have taken away from that.

One last thing to Hollywood. I personally don't need to see a movie where every actor is a blockbuster A list actor. This movie had a cast that was mostly made up of unknown people from the church who sponsored the movie. In a secular setting how about keeping the budget down by using lesser known actors. That way I might be able to take my family to the movies for less than $50.

There were aspects of the movie that are predictable and formulaic. I admit this, but we also get that from secular Hollywood. Hollywood proves again and again they have no clue of what the vast majority of people outside of New York and California are looking for in entertainment. If they cared to find out they might make more movies that deal with relationships that resemble the rest of us and not them. I don't expect to see this any time soon. I don't even expect them to stop making the dark melodramas they love so. Just make a few for the rest of us. We might even give them some of our money if they did.

A nation of cowards

2009-02-20T12:46:00.002-05:00

If Attorney General Holder wanted a conversation about race he may have to ask himself some questions. First a preface, if you are African American and reading this please read what I write and not what you think I meant. I speak in no code words, I do not try to hide behind anything in this essay. I will mention things that are controversial but part of any conversation on race will contain controversy.

Every liberal politician likes to say we need more dialogue about race. I don't agree. I think we talk too much about race. If AG Holder wants more conversation about race, he needs to be willing to hear opinions he doesn't agree with without calling them racist or extreme. Larry Elder is an African American columnist who writes from the center right. On Townhall.com the following columns are present:
Elgin Baylor: The hero and the race card (a discussion about elgin Baylor)
Obama the magic negro (he discusses a song based line in the LA Times)

Walter Williams is an economist who also writes from the right (mostly libertarian). He has the following columns right now
A minority view

Thomas Sowell is another economist who writes from the right. He also on occasion writes on racial topics. On Townhall I don't see any of his pieces strictly on race. My challenge is this: read any of the three and ask yourself if a white columnist had written any of these pieces would he be called a racist by the popular press?

I will agree with AG Holder on his statement partially. I do not have in depth conversations about race with friends I have that are black. There is a reason. If I don't know how they feel on different subjects I do not want to offend them by saying something that is construed as offensive. I do the same things in conversations with women. I tend not to mention generalizations related to gender. It is simply too easy to be misunderstood and considered to be sexist or racist. Many issues should be discussed at greater length. Just a few I can think of are racial profiling, why sentencing to black males is perceived to be more severe, the general mistrust society has of young black males. These are important issues and can be discussed by blacks, but if a white takes them on they risk either their friendship or their livelihood if they disagree with the popular societal belief. If we could discuss race more openly more discussion is needed about race based preference and the destruction they do to blacks, we could discuss why out of wedlock births are destroying blacks in our inner cities. When these subjects are brought in the main stream the person bringing it up is generallly attacked at great length.

I wrote last year about Don Imus and his idiotic comments about the girls on the basketball team. While I don't consider his comments to be a serious discussion about race, I will point out that if you make similar remarks about a white male, a southern male, a Christian fundamentalist, or a Republican politician you will not lose your job you will get a television show. I don't mean to say that those subjects should also be taboo, far from it. When Imus made his remarks he should have been regarded as what he is, a loud mouthed comedian who frequently makes stupid remarks. If the adolescents that consider him to be funny, want to listen let them do what they will. If his employer thinks it is too far, they will act. They did not consider it too far until the race hucksters came out of the woodwork. That is a subject for another essay, if we had a more serious discussion on race men like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would have to get actual work.

Some years ago Rush Limbaugh made comments on a football pregame show concerning Donovan McNabb and his relationship with the media. Those comments were at the time not taken up by his fellow panelists, some of whom were black former players. I want to stress here his comments were in no way connecting race with performance, only that the national media elevates his performance based on his race. The point itself can be agreed with or disagreed with, but was in no way racist. The comments actually were entirely about the sports media and not McNabb himself. The substance was never debated only the fact that he made the comments. I think it would have been interested to have some substantive comversation about the point, which at the time I disagreed with. As the years have unfolded I think he was right.

Just this week the New York Post had a cartoon with a chimp in it. Is was regarded as racial. While it is not advised to ever have a chimp, monkey or any other such animal in a cartoon with the president because of obvious comparisons, I saw no racial basis in the cartoon at all. The point being made was against the stimulus package. Obama nor his advisers wrote the stimulus so how could it have been about them? There is not obvious racial comparison. In this case the perceived offense overrides the message the cartoonist intended. Whether the cartoon gets its message across or not can be up for debate, the automatic outrage is a deterrent to serious debate about race. I don't think this cartoonist nor any other will publish any kind of cart0on about race any time soon, (nor about chimps). It is simply not worth the risk. That being pointed out the cartoons some time back about Condeleeza Rice that were blatantly racial were never elevated to this level of controversy however. This again is another problem. Political beliefs can be a factor in deciding whether a subject is racist or not.

Whites and blacks alike need to face very uncomfortable aspects of our cultures and relationships with each other. I agree that changes will need to be made long term. Until controversial opinions are tolerated from whites, this will not happen. The risk is simply too great.

So what is the difference

2009-02-17T12:36:00.002-05:00

The stimulus package becomes law today when President Obama signs it. There is nothing we can do to stop it. It is time though to analyze the differences between the two camps of this subject. I have pontificated at length that I believe the private sector is the best way to stimulate the economy. The Democrats seem to believe that the government is the best. We need to understand the differences if we are to make informed decisions.

Government based stimulus has never worked, not even one time. We have been taught that the New Deal brought us out of the Great Depression, but all economic metrics show depression as late as 1939. That was seven years after FDR's election. His own Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. stated frankly that the programs did not produce growth nor reduce unemployment. We added tremendous debt to boot.

Vice President Biden (it hurts me to use those words in a sentence) in supporting this bill said we need to get money into the economy and fast. This is why it was necessary to get this done and signed. If we left money in the economy that would otherwise be sent to government that would also get money into the economy. If we made tax increases that are slated to happen next year not happen that would also add money into the economy albeit not until next year (remember up to 70% of the current stimulus will not be spent until 2010 and 2011 so that is not a problem in this example either). What that would do is add stability to investors and employers. Markets do not like uncertainty. President Obama promised to let the tax cuts of 2003 expire but has recently said he would not raise taxes until the economy improves. That is a good thing, but adds to the uncertainty. Any tax increase at this point would have disastrous effects.

Now if we left money in the economy, for example by cutting the Corporate tax rate to say 18% from 32%. This would leave a great deal of money in the economy that would otherwise be sent to Washington. So here is the question to ponder: Leaving money in the economy or taking money from one group to give to another, what is the difference and why does President Obama favor the direct payments over the reduction of rates? My judgement is that he believes that he and his advisers know better how to use your money than you do. I reject that belief. Let us do a thought experiment. Let's say that the reduction in corporate tax rate all went to the 'wrong uses' in his opinion. Let us say every fat cat in the country used that money to buy yachts, private planes, swimming pools, redecorated their offices etc. What would be the net effect? Airplane companies would need more factory workers, boat builders would need to supply the increased demand for boats, and would need more workers, decorators would be in demand, pool cleaners would be in demand (rich people don't clean their own pools after all), and pool installers would also be in demand. Of all the jobs I mentioned not one of them is a 'rich person job'. We of course know that is not what would happen if corporate tax rates were reduced. We would be more competitive in the capital markets. Companies would be much more willing to invest in our markets, because the risk reward ratio would be increased. There is an old adage that customers pay corporate taxes not corporations. That means that the corporation no matter how large of small has to pass that along in its price. Increase the tax and either prices have to go up or costs have to go down. Guess what the first cost to be cut is? Go to the head of the class if you said labor. You reduce labor costs by laying people off.

I again ask what is the difference? The truth is if they left money in the economy, they do not get to pick the winners and losers in this exercise. They don't trust you to pick winners and losers. That doesn't sound like freedom to me. It also doesn't sound like hope to me. If they left money in the economy teachers unions don't necessarily win, union construction workers don't necessarily win, community organizers don't win, University Presidents don't win unless you and I choose that they do. That won't do for the demand economy fans like President Obama. I say we can do better than them. We won't get to find out for at least four years. What a shame!

Government exists for the whole not the groups

2009-02-13T17:32:00.002-05:00

We the people, of the people by the people and for the people. Founding phrases and the stuff of greatness. Somewhere along the way (I believe it was 1932) we stopped being for the people and for the groups.

President Obama exists for a small set of groups. Nancy Pelosi exists for groups. Arlen Spector exists for groups. Groups get politicians elected. This is unmistakable. Prior to every election we hear the pollsters tell us candidateA is doing well with white males, candidateB is doing poorly with hispanic females. Who is here to help the Joe Citizen? The guy who is trying to teach his children that you are in charge of your destiny. The guy who is trying to put away enough to live in retirement without turning to the government. The guy who wants his children to grow up with the values the he has. Don't get me wrong I believe all politicians believe they are doing just that. They stand up for the 'little guy'. We hear it all the time. By doing so they encourage the little guy not to stand up for himself. Roosevelt called him the forgotten man. He made great prose by espousing the forgotten man. He went to work attacking the powerful. President Obama wants to stand up for 'main street instead of Wall Street'.

Unfortunately we don't live in groups, we live as individuals and families. I know a man that has two houses because he had to move closer to his extended family that couldn't take care of themselves and can't sell his old house. He is in financial straits. He has kept his mortgage current, although it takes an incredible balancing act. President Obama wants to help those who took out mortgages they couldn't afford. There is no stimulus for those like my friend. By the way I don't want more people covered in the stimulus. The problem with government being the savior to all is they can only be savior to a small percentage of the population. In doing so they have to punish one group to help another. They leave very credible 'forgotten men' on the field.

I was having a debate with another friend the other day. This friend was very concerned about the poor who can't live as well as she does and she worries about how much it costs to go to the doctor. I strongly support the compassion and agree with it. Her savior of choice is government, mine is the people themselves. I happen not to believe that getting more and more people addicted to the debilitating power of government is compassion. While the intentions are good, the results are disastrous. Health care insurance is a problem for many people. My friend looks for the government to step in and make her doctor bills go away. Unfortunately we have found nowhere in history where government health care insurance has done that without creating shortages in actual health care as opposed to health care insurance.

President Obama makes pretty sounding speeches, he attempts to put a struggling people's minds at ease. His solutions have never worked in the history of man. They will however get him votes with the groups he needs to get re-elected, whether he accomplishes his goals or not. He looks to FDR as a model of how to fix this crisis. FDR got re-elected without fixing any economic ills. FDR did however make his groups feel like he cared about them. I would rather a leader that respects me. A leader that believes I can make better choices about my money than his planners can. Do we have any of those leaders today? Leaders that believe that the American people one American at a time is more powerful than the America made up of lobbying groups? A leader that will tell the people you can fix your life far better than I and my planners can? I sure hope so, we need one now.

Class Warfare won't stimulate spending or hiring

2009-02-12T12:40:00.002-05:00

President Obama continues to prove that hope and change won't come from him any time soon. As he tours the country selling his pork spending plan, he seems more intent on scaring poor and middle class citizens than anything else. He has told us that if we don't enact this legislation we may never recover. He has told us that any plans Republicans have are moot because the election decided everything. Using that belief we should have had a dividend tax rate of zero after the Bush tax cuts of 2003. Yes that was his preferred rate. Didn't happen did it? The Democrats didn't believe that his election settled the matter. They shouldn't have, we need competition of ideas, even when they are tired old failed ideas like government spending stimulating an economy as Democrats believe.

President Obama in my opinion is showing his inexperience. He is in permanent campaign mode. That makes sense since the only real governing he did was in the Illinois state Senate where when tricky issue came up he voted 'Present'. He needs to understand that he is the President and what he says has an effect. When he consistently tells us we can't be trusted with our own money people simply will not take risk. When there is reduced chance of recouping risk in investing they will act on safe investments only. People consistently putting money in government bonds cannot stimulate the economy. It has never worked. Like it or not we need a vital and expanding private sector. If the leader of our nation tells us we cannot succeed without the nanny state saying so, we will not choose risky ventures. This is done through actions and not through words.

Demonizing the rich and business will also not cause the economy to expand. Whether we like it or not the rich create the majority of jobs. This is not arguable. I have written it so many times, but rich people are not harmed by higher incremental tax rates. They simply find safer but less profitable places to invest. What the end game of this is amounts to less poor and middle class people finding jobs in new enterprises.

A couple of recent examples, he has chastised TARP recipients for having meetings in Las Vegas and purchasing private jets. While I don't think these expenses were the smartest in trying times, these events do stimulate the economy. Union workers build these airplanes. Rich people don't work fueling airplanes. Middle class people do. Rich people don't staff Vegas hotels. Middle class people do. Rich people don't serve as flight attendants on airplanes. Middle class people do. I cannot begin to make a judgement as to whether the plane is a good investment, but without reviewing a cost benefit analysis neither can President Obama. He can sure use it to make you think someone powerful is ripping you off. That way he can continue to sell his liberal group payoff plan and convince you he is the knight in shining honor to the dragons of the business world. It is a cheap stunt and beneath the President of the United States. To a President who has never had to lead, it is business as usual. President Obama has capped corporate bonuses at $500,000 for TARP recipients. On the surface I have no problem with these caps since they are belly of the bar of the government trough. I think we can expand this policy though. University president feel no shame about accepting mult-million dollar salaries despite receiving government money. CEO's of government contractors are not forced into the Obama price control scam, despite accepting government money. Naturally this example is a bit of tongue in cheek. The President should not have anything to say about what anyone makes. This is a prescription for disaster. Government should never be in the business of choosing winners and losers. President Obama needs to learn this, but judging by his first three weeks in office, will not. Hope and change will have to wait while he solidifies his rule over his subjects, whether loyal or not.

Partisan bickering

2009-02-04T12:21:00.002-05:00

We have heard a lot about partisanship lately. I have been lead to believe that partisanship is wrong. President Obama tells us every day we don't have time for partisan bickering. The stimulus bill he tells us is too important. Too many people are depending on it. To that I say, you have the votes right now, pass it.

Of course the truth is they passed it in the House along party lines. The word on the Hill is that they may have the votes or maybe not in the Senate. With fifty eight Senators from his party and not to have a clear majority, maybe the problem isn't partisanship, it seems to be within his own party. Let words mean what they should. Now lets define what we mean, remember I have written since I started writing this blog that words mean things and we can't come together until we let the same words mean the same things for everyone.

For example the Congress just passed the SCHIP bill to radically expand the popular program for children's health care assistance. The plain truth is President Bush wanted to sign the re authorization last year. He just didn't want the spending levels they wanted. It was dropped by the Democrat controlled Congress who made a judgement that they would be able to get everything they wanted under a new president which they expected to be of their party. Partisan bickering or effective political calculation? You decide that.

Way back in 2003 then President Bush called for stronger regulation Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He warned us that they were causing future problems because they were lending money irresponsibly. The Democrats teamed up with centrist to left leaning Republicans and stopped the bill. Partisanship, or political execution of their principles? Again you decide.

We have more than one point of view. I have written this continually. This goes back to the Hope and Change argument. Many people simply don't agree with President Obama's prescriptions for what ails us. I think we have good arguments, but that doesn't make us obstructionists. That being said I think it is up to the Republicans to make their arguments to the people. In the past they haven't had too many people that can string together effective sentences to do that. Maybe that will change with Michael Steele as the party chairman. Time will tell.

For today we have a very bad stimulus bill in front of the Senate. It will eventually pass. I believe the job for Republicans is to get as much pork out of it as possible so it will do the least possible harm. If that makes the Republicans partisans, then so be it. Let them wear it as a badge of honor, but explain to us mere mortals why you are stopping it and not let the other side frame the argument. The more the public learns about this bill the less they like it. Good! Let the light of day shine on this abomination and get to work putting in policies that will allow people to invest and spur the economy. Call it a stimulus package if you like but put in pro growth policies and not government give ways.

What makes a winner?

2009-02-02T17:17:00.002-05:00

I'm sure many books have been written on this subject. I started looking at this in the sense of sports. Last night was the Super Bowl of course and being from Browns country I was not pleased. The Steelers won again. Pittsburgh won the Super Bowl for the sixth time, the most of any franchise. I though about how tired I am of the Steelers and their fans.

I will state here I am not making a point or trying to convince anyone of anything in this essay. I am truly curious and would love to hear from other people and their opinions. I started wondering what makes them the best and most consistent? Unlike baseball where there are great disparities in salaries and revenue, football teams have a salary cap as well as total revenue sharing. So why is it that a few teams, the Steelers, the Cowboys, the Giants, the Patriots and a few others are always in the top echelon, and others are always in the bottom? The perennial basement dwellers include Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati. So why is it?

When you look at the Steelers they do it with different coaches, different General Managers but still manage to come out on top. Using life outside of sports as a guidepost I think I can make some assumptions. Attitude is a great predictor. Looking outside of sports, when we have people who are born leaders, who are used to success and are willing to go to the lengths necessary to succeed, usually do. In life the winners seem to do what is necessary to learn what needs to be done to win. I think this has to play a part. The Detroit Lions for example have a top 5 pick in the draft nearly every year. They are perennial bottom dwellers, and cause their fans much frustration. Their draft picks almost never turn into star players. So are the players substandard to start with or do they play down to the expectation of the organization? I can't claim to know the answer to that not having been involved in pro sports.

Here is another variable. Bill Belicheck. He has become one of the truly elite coaches in professional football. His first head coaching job was in Cleveland, and had extremely lackluster results. He was despised by the fans and basically run out of town. Did he become a genius, or was he always that skilled and held back by a terrible organization, or maybe the market of the team? The organization was the old Browns that moved to Baltimore and won the Super Bowl shortly after. Again, the only common ground is the city. I honestly don't see how fans can make a team bad, especially when the fans of Cleveland are among the most loyal and rabid in all of football. Once again no conclusions here.

Lets go back to the Steelers, one of the most prolific football teams, but one of the most frustrated baseball teams. Revenue and salaries can explain some of that, but what of Cleveland and Minneapolis. In Cleveland after forty years of frustration, since 1994 Cleveland has been very respectable. While no World Series titles, two trips to the World Series and two more just short. The Minnesota Twins have been very good in the last ten years, with revenue streams very similar to Pittsburgh.

I am still looking for the answers and am interested in others opinions. I think I can learn something about life by looking at sports.

On with the show

2009-01-24T09:50:00.002-05:00

Congratulations are in order for the new President Barak Obama. I truly wish him success, because his success is our success. With his coronation, I mean inauguration starts a new period in American history. He has broad public support, but he faces immense difficulties.

Now that he is president, he needs to lead. All the vague talk of 'hope and change' needs to be defined now. I do have some questions about this though. President Bush came to Washington talking about a new tone. That never happened no matter what he tried. The country is made up of Republicans, Democrats, third party people, and independents. They all have different ideas for the country. For us to come together who has to sacrifice their ideas? For instance with all respect to the President many people like me want a much smaller government. He and his followers want a much larger government. Where do we come together on that one? Frankly given his background I would settle for a government that doesn't grow any but I don't think they would go for that.

I favor an education system that relies on national players less and local control more. They prefer one that is run by the teachers unions and ruled by national politicians. Where do we come together here? How about tax policy? I favor a substantial decrease in the corporate tax rate to make our corporations competitive with European countries such as Ireland. For two years President Obama has called that give aways to rich fat cats. Sounds pretty harsh to me. Can we come together on that?

I favor an aggressive war on terror, I really don't know what he favors, because he never really told us. There may be room for agreement here, but how would we know?

I don't bring up these old issues to be divisive, but merely to point out that the time for platitudes and flowery speeches is over and it is time to govern. He can follow the example of Ronald Reagan and trust the American people or he can follow the example of Franklin Roosevelt and trust government and politicians. I think I know who he will follow, but I hope I am wrong.

I for one do not think partisanship is bad as long as the country is the ultimate goal. The President and his party won the power so they will get much of their agenda through. That does not preclude the minority from their ideas. Debate and even arguing is as American as the Constitution. The founders fought like brothers, but never lost sight of the republic.

President Obama has immense latitude right now from the American people. He has an extremely level of approval right now and we will be very patient given the economy and the history of his presidency. I hope he doesn't depend on that. He said in his speech of January 2o that markets create wealth. That is encouraging since most Democrats don't like to mention markets or wealth. Freedom is our only way out of our difficulties combined with responsibility. President Bush seemed to lose sight of that. A new start can be freeing. Lets hope the new president is a student of history. I'm not sure what President Obama reads at night before going to bed (Can I recommend The Forgotten man and Liberal Fascism?)

In Politics Check you Values at the Door

2008-12-03T12:36:00.002-05:00

One addition, only if you happen to be religious. Only the religious can be pummeled in the press for their values. Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House attempts to legislate compassion and good deeds though public policy. Those are her values and she stands for election in her district every two years. Barak Obama campaigned for two years by telling us what his values were and how he was going to shape public policy toward those values. Celebrities tell us constantly what their values are and demand that they pay no commercial price if their values don't correspond with that of their employeers and patrons. All of this is legitimate albeit occasionally annoying to me.

Those examples aside from the examples set in California after the defeat of proposition 8 we are to believe that if you happen to work toward your values and you happen to be Mormon in this case (but likewise observant Christians and Jews have the same results in other issues) you should not be allowed to donate money, man telephones etc. in support of your values. Pickets are massed outside of Mormon places of worship, McCarthyite tactics employed against people who happened to contribute to the defeat of Prop 8. All this from the people that tell us that they are compassionate and inclusive.

This is not a new subject and I encourage you to read Jonah Goldberg's take on this subject here.
The demonstrators and nut roots involved have taken it upon themselves to cleanse the Republican party of social conservatives. My personal belief is that social conservatives have taken too much of the front line in the party but should not be expelled as some are calling for. That being said what right do left wing activists have to say anything about it. The Republican party is doing a fine job of destroying themselves thank you very much. OK that last line was a little tongue in cheek but the point is taken.

My main point is one I have made for a long time and that is religious people should not and cannot be allowed to be shut out of the political process just because they are religious. We do not and should not allow religious sermons in defense of a candidate (although Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton seem to be allowed). We do not and should not allow a state religion as the constitution prohibits. We must not however allow religious people to be shut out of the process. They should have the same right as everyone else. The left wing needs to be brought back to reality. We need to have media that can do this.

As for values the left wing activists mostly base their values on the fact that they are not religious. Why should they have a greater share of the power just because they are not religious? As long as theology is not being legislated all cards should be on the table. If Jim Dobson wants to be political and does it with his own time and money he should be allowed. How is that any different that Susan Sarandon and Martin Sheen constantly using their celebrity to preach to the rest of us how we should practice compassion? There is no difference. I expect that left wing people are not more willing to listen to Jim Dobson that I am to listen to Sarandon and Sheen. That is fine with me, just don't try to shut either side out.

How did we get here? part III

2008-12-01T12:36:00.002-05:00

I have written in two previous posts about how we came to elect the most liberal candidate in our history to the presidency. I spoke of the gradual move away from free market economics to where we are today. I want to focus now on who got us here.

I think one group has to be credited/blamed. The Republican party. The Democrats have long espoused the use of public policy for purposes of compassion. This is their defining characteristic. With the exception of Ronald Reagan and the years of Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House, the Republicans have been mostly unable to explain why free markets and limited government is a goal to work toward. In the most recent election period John McCain was so unable to explain the benefits of limited government that most moderates and left leaning centrists were left with no choice in the face of the liquidity and banking crisis but to vote for the liberal.

Most people when choosing between two alternative candidates that have very little difference will vote for the candidate that explains his position the best. As much as I hate to admit it that was Barak Obama. He used his formidable language skills to paint himself as the candidate that will do something about the problems facing out economy, even though government cannot improve the economy, only harm it. From there it is up to individuals.

Over the years with the previous noted exception the Republicans have been the 'me-too but cheaper' party. That has left voters with the belief (rightly I believe) that they do not believe in limited government, just more limited that the Democrats. George W. Bush expanded the spending to a degree that there is no one that can believe he has belief in limited government. The net effect is that the people have for the most part voted for the party that most eloquently defined their beliefs. That happens not to be the party that talks and talks about limited government and then turns around and expands government to the extreme.

How did we get here? (Part II)

2008-11-20T12:42:00.002-05:00

In my last writing I explored the circumstances that created the political environment we are currently in. At various points of the campaign President Elect Obama stated he was going to fundamentally change America. I think he means that and to a point I believe it has already been done.

In the past the majority of the people would be crushed to accept government support, but today for a percentage of the population it is life as normal. Just fifty years ago divorce and separation were appalling and to be considered a catastrophe. Many now see this as normal.

Why do I mention social issues when I spoke primarily of economics in the previous piece? I do this strictly because they cannot be separated. The Republican party is cutting itself in half trying to carve up the social conservatives and the fiscal conservatives. They are deciding who will run the party. This I believe is the heart of the problem not just with their party but with our current society. We have allowed dependence to flourish and with it with commonly accept defeat as normal. I have a particular passion about this because in certain aspects of my life I accept defeat as normal.

The welfare, medicare Social Security act, the alphabet soup of government support all create a level of dependence. I do not undertake to convince people to pull the rug out on all of these all at once. That would be societal suicide . We have allowed through the last few generations to have people's survival skills taken away. Some forms of support I do not even object to. I have great sympathy toward people physically unable to work. While not the only example the best example I can think of is a cancer patient in the final stages of the disease. This person cannot possibly go out to work every day and his/her family cannot begin to cover the medical costs involved. The only other choice is early death with great pain. This is of course not acceptable.
Since I have advocated for some support, who is to decide who gets support and who does not? That is a tricky question. Some of these questions can be answered through health care reform. If medical insurance were 1.) separated from the employer and 2.) paid for primarily by medical savings accounts we would go a long way to deciding this. If the expenditures are brought back into the hands of the patient and the doctor decisions are made on need and resources rather than contractual agreement with a massive HMO with limited competition within the state. John McCain had the beginnings of this plan in his health care plan. The tax credits offered in his plan would be the funding of the medical savings accounts. The savings by increasing co-pay amounts could be applied to catastrophic insurance plans. By increasing the co pay we would cut down on overuse of the system primarily of emergency room use for non-emergencies. Also by making health savings accounts able to stay in the account rather than re-cycling each year, the younger years when smaller amounts of medical costs allows them to be saved for later years when the expenditures are higher.

What brought us here primarily is misplaced compassion or altruism. By the two political parties competing on how many goodies can be given away all under the guise of compassion we have cruelly taken away the survival skills of people on the fringes of society. This also works to take away the most important thing in learning: consequences. When there is little or no risk in engaging in risky activity there is not reason not to do it. This is true whether the activity is investing in sub prime loans, or in engaging in sexual activity as a teen who is not prepared to deal with adult decisions as an adult. When we provide an easier out for this in the form of abortion, or in the case of keeping the child we offer them subsistence living all paid for by the producers of the society. This as I stated before puts government support in competition with productive work. Since government offers an easier way in the short run, it wins out.

Who got us here? More of that in the next piece.

How did we get here?

2008-11-13T12:36:00.003-05:00

How on earth did we elect the most liberal candidate for President ever? The opinion pages and sites are full of answers. I think some of them are spot on and some not.

I think we have to go back to the dreaded sixties for the genesis of this. The Lyndon Johnson administration was a landmark administration. I personally think it was a disaster, but history making nonetheless. The difference between the New Deal programs and the Great Society programs were very stark. In the New Deal in the Roosevelt administration while they drastically increased government and took money from producers to give to non-producers, the difference was that they attempted to give a hand up. They attempted to give men and women some pride back by putting them to work. Some of the programs had good results many not. The programs of Johnson for the most part though, gave direct payments. They did not create jobs other than government administration jobs. There are of course exceptions but most of the new programs made government a new source for income for people down on their luck. The government in practice went into competition with lower wage jobs. We know of course that when you compete with an entity that can print money en masse you are going to lose. As subsistence and more importantly benefits came to these people, the employers offering low wage jobs turned to automation, outsourcing, eventually illegals etc to find sources of workers.

These low wage jobs while not attractive to some people can be stepping stones to other jobs Just as importantly they provide vital self respect that comes with work. Government subsistence brings no such respect. It brings inner shame, societal scorn and other unintended results. Unintended results are one of the main outcomes of government policy. This had long range results in the American family as well, especially in the inner cities. Before these days families held together through tough times. Money was only one of the reasons. When the government became the bread winner, the support of the family unit became less important to the recipients.

Now we turn the page and we are forty years into this period. We have experienced activist groups, welfare rights groups, community organizers which exist for the expressed purpose not only to gain acceptance for people living on welfare and the difference forms of government support but to convince all involved that they deserve even more of the same. It is no longer their lives to turn around, but the government's role to turn it around. We all watched (I hope in horror) at Peggy Joseph who believes Barak Obama is going to make the world perfect so she doesn't need to worry about making her payments anymore.

Here we are at a crossroads. If we continue down this road the whole thing may go up in flames. It is not just that it is taking more and more taxes to pay for all the entitlements and pushes more people from producers to receivers, it is taking a costly toll in human lives. People like Miss Joseph no longer consider their lives their own to fix. How can she become one of the producers when she doesn't consider it her job? How can we watch this happen and not consider it to be cruel? All along the way we could have stopped it and we did not. This is informative because it can still happen but we all must look at the solutions. The politicians can't do it for us. I will write further on this subject in the next installment.

Why the different standards?

2008-10-23T12:18:00.002-04:00

We seem to have different standards about evaluating problems. We have a major problem with ARORN and vote registration fraud. Thousands of registrations are being received from fictitious people, dead people (a long tradition in the land of Obama) and double registrations. nearly all of them produced by ACORN. The liberal democrats assure there is no organized attempt to defraud, just a few misguided people.

Now lets look at the Sub Prime loan cum liquidity mess. We are told by the liberals and the media (is there a difference?) that capitalism has failed and must be regulated. Lets do some comparison shall we? In the voter registration fraud actual crimes are committed. These people are breaking laws. Will ARORN suffer any consequences? Not bloody likely. In the banking crisis in most cases no crimes were committed. Bad judgment was committed all over the place but in most cases no laws were broken.

In the banking crisis the Congress put into place laws that allowed people to take nearly unlimited risk with the assurance that all would be backed by the government. Since government intervened to try to alleviate risk and therefore pervert capitalism how exactly has capitalism failed? It sounds to me like government has failed. So in effect we are going fix a problem with the same medicine that made the patient sick.

Now taking the two scenarios together it sounds to me like crimes on the left are to always be excused, but bad judgement, not even on the right because to assume that all bankers and borrowers are on the right is absurd, but these things are to be blamed on capitalism. Pretty scary to me!! Wake up and smell the socialism, oops I forgot that is now code word for Black. Wake up and smell the statism.

So how did we get here?

2008-10-20T12:35:00.002-04:00

How did we get to the financial mess we are in? It is being asserted by some people in the political world that unfettered capitalism caused the mess we are in. Many people believe it is the deregulation of the banking industry.

One word is how we got here. Consequences!! Members of both parties in Congress have embraced market economics, but only so far as markets keep raising. That is not market economics. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Since Fannie and Freddie are backed by the government investors believed there was no downside to investing in mortgage backed securities. They knew that when the bottom fell out, and it had to fall out, the government would step in and make it whole. They were right by the way. Since the government would be standing there to bail things out there was no reason to temper their enthusiasm to take on risk.

Mortgage applicants had no reason to temper their enthusiasm. Fannie and Freddie programs were pushing money. The higher the loan the better the deal. Ability to pay never entered into the equation. Money was cheap and the sky was the limit. The government has not yet become the knight in shining armor yet for individual mortgage holders but both candidates are pledging to do just that. Once again no reason to hedge risk because they will be bailed out.

Where the upside is high and no risk needs to be factored in, buy buy buy!

Here is another case. Through the summer speculators bought up crude futures to all time highs. The Democrats and more populist Republicans said the answer is to ban speculation. What excessive speculation tells us is this, either all these traders knew something we didn't. Either they had inside information, which there is no evidence of, or they saw something in the trends that showed them that downside risk was low. What did these traders see? They saw continually upward demand curve with flat supply curve. Why is the supply curve so flat? Foreign oil operators see no reason to increase supply. Our domestic supplies are off limits. Off shore drilling and ANWR have been put in a lock box. If we began to develop our resources they would feel the need to increase supply. Given the fact however that many of these sources are glad to see the United States squirm and they know with certainty that we will not allow domestic stockpiles to be developed why would they limit their ability to enjoy high incremental rates? They have a nearly sure thing. Speculators see this and see the same thing. Nearly no downside risk., Why not bid it up. The trend down did not start until President Bush reversed his executive order and put pressure on Congress to do the same. Without a drop of crude being pumped the speculation slowed. The downturn in the economy and the end of the peak driving season took care of the rest.

So what happens to us from here? I am not an economist nor play one on TV, don't use this advice for investing purposes. I believe given the meddling that has been done with the addition of horrible tax policy that an Obama White House would implement with the help of the Democratic Congress that will almost certainly happen in the upcoming election, I see a long down turn. I believe it will be a deeper recession that we have experienced recently, but not depression. The tax rates even under Obama will not cause a capital strike like we saw under Roosevelt. As long as Obama does not do more and more to declare war on business entrepreneurs will prevail and we will have recovery, just not as quickly as we could under a pro growth president and congress.

The important thing to understand is that markets did not cause this, only politicians trying to take logical consequences out of the outcomes. Markets will bring us out but probably despite the progressives best efforts to crush it.

Is this really what you want?

2008-10-17T12:29:00.002-04:00

With Barak Obama ahead in the polls I have to ask the title question, is this what you really want. First a couple of truths, the lead is not so large that it cannot be over come. In the last two and a half weeks we could see a change. It will be much tougher though since there is no chance to see the candidates together. This is synonymous with a football team that needs help to get into the playoffs.

I must say I am flummoxed by this. Either the country is starting to embrace leftist principles or the country is so bored by the campaign that they are not paying attention to what the candidates are truly proposing.

Some voters want change. Both candidates are promising change. Personally I think this is like Madison Avenue selling soap. Every politician from the beginning of politics has promised change. It has no meaning. I want change too. I want smaller government, less looting by the government and more responsibility. To examine the backgrounds, Obama has promised change. He came to prominence in the most corrupt cesspool of politics known to man, Chicago. In his years practicing politics there he changed nothing. John McCain has been the definition of change. He has gone against his party constantly (many times he has driven me nuts by the way). He criticized the President of his own party when the Iraq war was not going well. McCain was right. When the Republicans had control of the Senate and were promising to change the rules of filibuster because of the horrible policy of the Democrats to filibuster all judges. At the time I thought McCain was wrong. In retrospect he was right. They got a large majority of the held up judges passed and still have the filibuster intact to use in the case of a despicable nominee in the future.

Some people are obsessed with universal health care. Obama proposes to impose a tax for employers that do not provide health care coverage. Depending on the tax rate (he never tells us) employers will drop their coverage and turn it over to the government. My personal opinion is that this is what Senator Obama and his accomplices in the Senate intend. Senator McCain on the other hand changes the system in favor of the free market. He proposes tax credits for those that do not have the privilege of employer paid health coverage. The Obama campaign accuses him of putting employer paid health care at risk. I say good! We need to remove it from the employer. Let my employer pay me what he pays me for my insurance and together with the tax credit, I will get a pretty good plan. How do I know that? I know that the market will fill the gap and provide what is needed. Through competition the appropriate level of coverage will be provided. Of course not every person will have a perfect plan, but we don't now. The difference is the telling difference in the two candidates. Senator Obama trusts the government and Senator McCain trusts the market. We have been taught by the looters in government and their mouthpieces in the media not to trust the market, but that is the only correct way to handle it. Any other method puts our trust in a monopoly accountable to no one.

Some make up their mind through tax policy. Senator Obama promises tax cuts to 95% of people making under $250,000. Since some 40% of people who will receive these 'cuts' don't pay taxes how can they be cuts when they don't pay taxes? Simple the government sends them checks. I have a word for that: Welfare. Again the difference clarifies the candidates. Senator Obama makes his arguments based on fairness. Senator McCain makes his arguments based on what will help the economy. Since I don't trust the economics knowledge of anyone in government including Senator McCain I will trust the guy who wants to help the economy and leave it to entrepreneurs.

The choice is ours very shortly. I am having trouble believing that the country is leaning left, so I have to assume they are bored.

Repealing the laws of economics

2008-09-29T12:21:00.002-04:00

In the last couple of decades we have had market bubbles every few years. We had the dot com bubble. We had the housing bubble that gave rise to a real economic crisis. One wonders why these keep happening.

I am an amateur but I believe that these are caused by big businesses and especially government people believing we can repeal the laws of economics. Certain things have happened every time they are tried. Changes in supply and demand are set down to laws. Defining the variables within the demand and supply curves is more difficult but changes along the demand curve and supply curve are part of economic law.

Stock market transactions are purchases basically of future profit. In the nineties when the stock market created the dot com bubble people were buying future profits that had no chance to ever materialize. Eventually this came to be reality and the bubble burst and we had a recession and the market values got back to their rightful values.

Our housing bubble likewise was caused by people 'repealing' the laws of supply and demand. Demand outstripped supply and values went up at artificial levels. Slowly we are finding out why. Our government in conjunction with many mortgage buyers, lead by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made it policy to get as many people into home ownership as possible. Democrats such as Barney Frank and Republicans such as President Bush were on the same page on this goal. This goal by itself is not a bad goal. All the arguments that were made were good solid arguments. Good citizenship is often a by product of home ownership. None of this can be denied. We are learning now that to accomplish this risky loans were not only granted but pursued and even pushing people to borrow more than they could afford. The borrowers cannot be left out. They signed on to borrow more than they could afford. Again people in the borrowing sector and the loaning sector thought they were smarter than the laws of economics.

When the bubble crashed we did it again. Even though national real estate values went up 50, 60 percent in a short time. These values needed to recover and come back to their natural levels and we wanted someone to do something. No one really knows what we wanted 'them' to do but do something. Today we have multiple bailouts going on. All of these leave me feeling dirty. People on both sides if the borrowing transaction as well as the government looters that made it possible are telling me that it needs to happen. It may need to happen but don't ask me to feel good about it.

Back to present. Our government is printing money it doesn't have in overtime to pay for all these bailouts, and both presidential candidates are telling us what they are going to give us. They like the others are so smart they can super cede the laws of economics. I think the roller coaster is just on the first hill. Adam Smith call your office, or maybe Dagny Taggert.

Hubris

2008-09-12T12:45:00.002-04:00

Last night Charlie Gibson asked Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin if she thought it took hubris for her to believe that she is ready today to be President of the United States of America. I think calling himself a journalist takes hubris, but let me examine some examples that I think take hubris.

Matt Damon an actor who knows nothing about Sarah Palin (he admitted so in his interview) believe it is his place to determine that she is scary. I may not be a rocket scientist but if I don't know anything about someone I generally don't call them scary. Maybe it is just me.

Democrat Activists who continually refer to Jesus as a community organizer. My knowledge of Barak Obama's job as community organizer was to lobby and push for a bigger government role in the people's lives. Jesus rarely mentions the government at all other than to tell us "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's". Jesus spoke to individuals about their personal role in our world. In the Sermon on the Mount he never once talked about our views on the role of government in helping the poor, or the infirmed, nor prisoners. He talked about when we meet him on the day of judgement. That is a huge difference as far as I can see. If anything these liberals are outsourcing their role as helping those less fortunate to a government that cannot do it as well.

Feminists and black activists that want us to believe that they speak for all blacks and women. Women and blacks I have known over the years are individuals and sometimes agree with me on things and sometimes disagree. I have known very few women who agree most of the time with Gloria Steinem and Suasan Estrich. How much hubris does it take for Jesse Jackson to believe he can speak for black people? He speaks for Clarence Thomas, Kenneth Blackwell, etc? Absolute Hubris!!

Finally Barak Obama. "I've got two daughters. 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby. " I could quote many more of Obama's statements but this one sums it up pretty good. The rhetorical scenario he throws out there is such: A child of a muti millionaire politician gets pregnant and for no other reason that convenience ends an unborn baby's life because he feels it would be a punishment. Sums up the left wing mind pretty good I think.

Help Wanted:Must be a Grownup

2008-08-30T10:31:00.002-04:00

One convention down and one to go. Now we get to look forward to two months of the same kind of political ad that we have all grown to HATE!!!!

You may think I am going to lay into both candidates, as I like to do. No this one is for the voters of which I of course am one. Obama and to a lesser extent McCain will try to convince us that he will be the answers to all of our questions, the solution to our puzzles and the savior that will deliver us to that period in history where we consider to be the perfect age. When is that exactly?

For aging union workers like my father it is somewhere around 1952. Unions were strong, no jobs were lost to offshore outsourcing, and there was always enough money in the budget for steak.

For middle age conservatives it was somewhere around 1984. The economy was strong. Reagan was President and we were on the way to ending to cold war with the end of the Soviet Union.

For younger 30 somethings it is around 1996. Dot coms were producing lots of stock gains, we were spending the 'peace dividend' like it was monopoly money and the economy will be strong forever. Bill Clinton ended welfare as we know it and single handedly ended that nasty business cycle.

Now in the present. Everything is bad right? For the Truman 1952 crowd off shoring is ruining everything, for some of the Reagan crowd Compassionate Conservatism has given way to out of control spending and for the Clinton crowd, well everything Bill Clinton 'accomplished' was ruined by Bush. That about sum it up?

I look at it a little differently. Today the economy is on the downward part of the business cycle. We may be on the way back up or we may be sinking further. We won't know for a couple of quarters. We liked to believe that the Soviets became peace loving Russians but that was never true. Ever wonder why none of these former Communists never came out against Communism? Ever wonder why none of them ever said their conquest of the satellites was evil? It is simply because they don't believe it. Today awash with oil money Russia wants nothing less than to reconstitute the old Soviet empire under a new name and manager. Today government is doing what it has done since the days of the Progressives. They are picking winners and losers by choosing groups. The Democrats have their favorite groups and the Republicans have their favorite groups. For the cost of votes and contributions the party in power pays off their groups. I don't say this to say the are corrupt or evil, I truly believe they think that is the best way to help the most people.

Here is how I see economics. We make up the economy. That does not mean that the government has no effect. Far from it, the President and the Congress can either remove barriers or put up barriers. From there you and I take it away. Presidents do not however make your lives better through their existence. They cannot make the global economy become just an American economy again, nor can they make the dot-com world come back and they can't magically return us to a day when America was the only dominant economy in the world as it was in the early fifties. A little thing call a world way had eliminated most of the rest but only for a short time.

Presidents and state and local leaders can do one important thing that they don't do enough of now: Talk about what America means. The more freedom we can produce the better our fortunes will be. The better the climate for businesses to come here the more jobs for our people. The more our cities are cities and not war zones more businesses will come to your city. The cities are run by leaders and not city bosses (Chicago comes to mind) then the more people will have confidence in their leadership.

These all sound like platitudes that will never happen. In some ways they are. What they must start with is voting. Not voting for a candidate for a letter before his name, not for voting for a candidate because either are or aren't a women or of your race. None of these things will restore confidence to the political environment. Here is the tough one. Each and every American trying to produce, without caring about what other Americans have or make, but doing the best every day to be the best human being you can be, and if you make as much as some evil rich person. To me America is about individuals not groups. Politicians see groups. we have to make them see individuals or they will continue to sell us their make believe visions of what they will deliver. You are America, not McCain and Obama. Please vote in November but don't vote for a fairy tale. Vote with your eyes wide open.

The conventions are here

2008-08-26T12:48:00.002-04:00

Recently when I have written I have stayed away from blatant political issues. I have preferred to write about issues that are more philosophical that have their end result in politics. There is a simple reason for this. Both candidates and both parties bore me. Yes I will vote for John McCain and mostly for Republicans but both the party and the candidate are far from my ideal candidate.

Now that the conventions are here we will soon be solidly into the political season. We will be inundated with push polls, attack ads, newspaper endorsements that all things political.

I have a very simple criteria for whom I vote for:
1. Which candidate favors policies that value individualism the most?
2. Which candidate favors policies that do not reward dependency?
3. Which candidate favors policies that are in sync with my social values? Values are important here, I do not mean religion, I mean values.
4. Which candidate favors policies and value economic freedom the most?
5. Which candidate favors policies that support law and order the closest?
6. Which candidate favors policies that support a strong national defense?
and finally, and this should be a summary of the previous six criteria
7. Which candidate favors policies that are in sync with the constitution.

In my view neither candidate nor party is in any way close to these criteria. You might ask why not a third party candidate? My simple reason here is that none of these candidates could possibly win. If a candidate comes along that could win I may consider it, but Bob Barr will not be our next president, neither will Cynthia McKinney. Using this years candidates as an example any vote that makes it more likely for Barak Obama to be president is a bad vote to me.

Enjoy what you can of the political season. I personally enjoy the debate. I don't enjoy the demagogues, but I do enjoy the debate.

Our Curious relationship with wealth

2008-08-21T12:42:00.002-04:00

We Americans are curious in a lot of ways. In many ways we are a contradiction. That is partly because of our historic belief in freedom. Unlike the Socialist republics of western Europe and the dictatorships of Africa and South America we have written into our founding documents the fundamentals of freedom. No matter your political beliefs you cherish freedom. We have great disagreements about what freedoms are most powerful but we cherish freedom.

The political left tends to value freedoms that people on the right don't. That is OK because we have freedom. We have bitter arguments about what are rights and what aren't. This too shows our basic love of freedom.

One 0f the best examples of this is wealth. The left tends to look suspiciously at wealth. Far short of universal condemnation though they dislike a particular source of wealth. Wealth accumulated from business is very suspect with progressives. Bill Gates, before he got involved with his charitable foundation was a pariah. Now he is embraced by the left. We need wealth for charitable giving, but of course the most far left people really don't trust charitable giving as much as they trust government, but in our current society will embrace George Soros with open arms, but not say Rupert Murdock. This of course is because **gasp** Murdock created Fox News.

Another way of looking at wealth is private property. This was a core issue with our founders. The right to keep your private property is at the heart of our commercial success up till now. When incremental tax rates fall production goes up for example. This is simple economics, but that doesn't please left wing believers. Another source of wealth that is good is Hollywood money. Warren Beatty, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Sean Penn are good stewards in popular culture. Oil Execs are not.

What does wealth do for us? This is too broad a question for one piece but I will attempt. Wealth gives the holder the ability simply to create. They may start a business. They may expand a business. They may endow an artist. They may give it to charity. They may put it in tax free government bonds. All of these are possible and of course all are done. Only the values of the wealth holder constrains the options. Personally I don't find it my business what they do with it. Even though I despise many things that George Soros holds dear, I find no need to restrict his ability to do what he wishes with his money.

Why then do right leaning people become villianized for their pursuits. Investments in science that is contrary to the Al Gore school of global warming becomes so evil that it draws angry letters from Senators on government stationary. Investment in local churches is poo-poo'd as wasting resources that could be used on the poor.

Another role of wealth is to safeguard us with better products and innovation. We notice that the industrialized world has less profound effects when natural disaster hits. Better construction, better engineering is purchased with wealth. When third world lands are hit with typhoon or earthquake hundreds of thousands die for one reason, lack of wealth. They cannot build using the latest technology and engineering. This is unfortunate. It is also not going to change as long as we encourage them to shun modernity and capitalism.

Yes wealth is a powerful thing, and a most hated thing in many circles. Count me out of those circles. As for me, I embrace all the wealth I can accrue.

So are the janitors also evil?

2008-08-01T12:39:00.002-04:00

The denouncements from the left are pouring in. Exxon Mobil earned a record amount of profit. They earned $11.68 billion in profit. We are continually told how bad they are. We are told how evil it is that they are earning this profit on the backs of poor people.

My question is this: Is Exxon Mobile a person? Of course not. Exxon like all corporations is built of thousands of people. From the CEO to the janitors that clean the buildings. These people all earn their living supporting the large behemoth that is Exxon Mobil. The left like to act like corporations are the living embodiment of their CEO. We saw it with the accounting scandals of Enron. The workers were victims, only Kenneth Lay was evil.

Senator Obama right on cue has a plan to take money from the oil companies to give away to purchase votes, oops I mean gas. He proposes $500 checks to single people and $1,000 checks to married couples to assist them in purchasing fuel. He would get this by confiscating profits from oil companies.

Using this to make my point, I wonder how many people will need to lose their jobs to pay for this tax grab? How many people won't be offered jobs to pay for Obama's vote grab? How much money will not go into research on alternative fuels because of his money grab? How about those people working for Exxon now? Will they get raises? Some yes, but I'll bet they are cut.

Those janitor that clean the buildings for low wages. Should they be punished because Senator Obama wants to make people think he cares? Do they deserve that? How about the research that won't be done? What if that could make a breakthrough in fuel technology? Is it worth it to get Obama elected? I don't think so.

Personally I think huge corporations are marginally less oppressive than government. You want to punish them? Reduce not increase the restrictions on the industry. One of the things that probably will happen is that more firms large and small will enter the industry. This is called competition. Don't say it too loud. People like Senator Obama don't like that word. They might just pass a law restricting your use of the word. They might tax you when you use it. OK sarcasm aside, increased competition would force Exxon and the other behemoths to put even more money into research and production and yes reduce their profits by forcing them to put more money into future profits. That would be using the market to solve a major problem. That is what guarantees it will never be proposed by Senator Obama. If that happens he gets no credit and therefore can't buy your vote.

On the bright side when Exxon lays off middle class and lower income workers to pay for the new tax bill, at least they will get the $500 bucks that Senator Obama promised us. I think they may prefer the job though.

Do we dream enough?

2008-07-17T12:41:00.002-04:00

I was thinking recently about how our society has changed over the years. I thought about dreams, not the kind we have while sleeping but the kind we work toward in our actions. I thought back to accounts I have read over the years about previous generations. Just one hundred years ago we were a very different people.

We were largely an immigrant country. People in the inner cities lived in tenement houses sometimes multiple families to a single home. Many times many generations in a single home. Those people had a dream. They had an overwhelming desire to do something. It may have been to live in their own home. It may have been to own their own business. It may have been just to get their kids a new pair of shoes. They lived day to day with that dream. They did something about it every day. Sometimes that took working two and three jobs. For the majority though, they made it happen.

Today we still have dreams. I don't think for most of us it has the intensity of the people of their society. Just like anyone else I want a good life for my children. I want them to be financially successful and I want them to be spiritually successful. I don't think my dream has the intensity of the father in 1908. The reason is I have a reasonably good chance of seeing my dream realized. Of course I have to do something to see it realized but not the things they did. I think we have gotten lazy with our dreams.

We have some people in our midst who live in just as dire straits as those people. The difference is for the most part they aren't encouraged to take action. They are told by politicians and community leaders that they are in their current condition because someone else is greedy. While not in words they are taught that nothing they can do will move them forward until we punish the evil doers. These people are discouraged and they stop dreaming. They don't look for what they can do themselves, they just wait for the evil doers to be punished. This is of course a generalization but too often true. Victim hood steals dreams. I define that as cruelty!

What about those of us that have more creature comforts? Couldn't we dream a better dream? I know I could. Those people having financial trouble need money. We need more time. We engage in activities with our families and friends which are all good and valuable pursuits. I can't speak for anyone but myself, but if I eliminated useless pursuits like television and other lazy things I could contribute more to society. I try and sometimes succeed and sometimes fail.

The question is why do we not? Again each person has a different answer. I think for the most part affluence and comfort leads us to comfort zones. In 1908 the difficulties of life caused those people to push. Today we sometimes would like to push, but not at the cost of free time. Young people in India and China and Taiwan don't fall into comfort zones. They are pushing to survive. They are getting educated, they are learning how to do business on the Internet. They want to achieve what we have.

So shouldn't we enjoy what we have achieved? I say yes. I also say we should not be happy with with we have achieved. We should strive for more. By starting to strive for more, I don't necessarily mean more money or things. Strive to help others, not because a politician urges you to, but because you can pass on some of your knowledge and goodness on to others. Maybe it is your children. Maybe it is a class at your church that you teach. Maybe you can volunteer at an elementary school. Maybe it is a soup kitchen. Maybe it is a youth baseball league. Do it for you. Be selfish. Giving can be selfish, it makes us feel good. This is selfishness that can help us all. Personally I give money when I can to a local city mission. I give time to my church. These things make me feel good, but I still wish I could do more, and someday I will as my children grow. I look forward to it. I do not mean to indict anyone, just pass along thoughts. If you live a fulfilling life God bless you. If you could do more, God bless you as well. Just take a minute and think about the past and maybe we can learn something from them. In 1908 there were things I don't want back, racism, anti-semetism, sexism, and others. There were also things that I do want back, strong families bonds, nearly universally strong work ethic, dedication to character. Those things we can ensure we have, one individual at a time, one family at a time, but not one government at a time.

Right Wing conspiracy Again?

2008-07-17T12:25:00.002-04:00

Senator Obama seems to be channelling Hillary Clinton in his interview with Glamour magazine. See his interview here. He blames his wife's negative polling on the right wing, especially talk radio and conservative blogs.

Since these evil people are so powerful I am glad to see that conservatives will be in power for a long time to come, oh wait they are in power of nothing (excluding the President who as a lame duck doesn't exercise nearly the power he did two years ago).

Since the Senator is not fond of criticism of his surrogates, or is it just his wife? Michelle Obama is acting as a surrogate not a spouse. Barbara Bush and now Laura Bush campaigned for their husbands but did not campaign on policy. They were not part of the policy making apparatus. Michelle Obama just as Hillary Clinton did is active in discussing policy. She makes comments that are very controversial. That is of course acceptable for anyone on a campaign trail, they have to be ready to be criticised when they do it.

This is an old story. Liberals or progressives seem to believe that free speech means you have the right to site your opinion with no repercussions, but only if you are on the left. I remember Obama twisting the words of John McCain in regards to staying in Iraq for one hundred years. I remember just this week Obama hanging on the words of Phil Gramm. He made controversial statements and was criticised for them. All well and good. Actually although it may upset some people I would like a little more of that kind of talk. I remember Obama attacking Bill Clinton over comments he has made on the campaign trail. Let's see now we can criticise spouses but only if they are men.

Is it to be our standard that we do not criticise spouses even when they actively engage in policy discussions? Heaven forbid. Bill Clinton free to spout anything that comes to his mind with no fear of critical reprisals. Think about what you are asking for, and while you are at it, grow up a little.

Hey Congress, ban Narcissm

2008-06-26T12:37:00.002-04:00

Normal thought processes would tell you that you cannot pass a law making narcissism illegal nor should you. But since our Congress acts on all sorts of things they should not, why not give it a shot?

They propose taxes on excess profits for oil companies. The obvious questions here that have none or just bad answers are: What are excessive profits and if the companies make less in profit than the government extracts in taxes shouldn't the government also be slapped with windfall profits?

How about this one, since gas prices are high because of inadequate supply to satisfy demand, wouldn't saying we can't drill our way out of this be, well stupid?

You don't want to talk about oil, OK how about this? Since national health care has restricted access to health care treatments everywhere it has been tried, why exactly would instituting it here be successful?

The answer is narcissism. The elected representatives believe they can implement it efficiently even though it hasn't been done anywhere else. Their thinking has their own plans at the center of everything.

Of course this isn't just limited to Congress or even elected representatives. In the run up to the Supreme Court decision about the Washington D.C. gun ban I heard a grieving widow say that governments need to be able to keep their citizens safe. If that actually happened when guns were banned I would agree. Putting results aside (which we should never do) the idea that because her husband was murdered by a gun wielding animal then we should be able to ban guns for everyone. I would not seek to diminish her personal suffering, and I do empathize with her. Narcissism explains this. Personally I would want the animal who killed her husband to meet the same fate, but a law biding citizen in some inner city hell should be able to defend himself by owning a gun if he so chooses.

In the dissenting opinion (Find it here) page 157 Justice Breyer states that "
The Court would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the Framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons,
and to authorize this Court to use the common-law process of case-by-case judicial lawmaking to define the contours of acceptable gun control policy."

Admittedly I cannot expertly argue law with a Supreme court justice but I do remember from my high school government classes that the first ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights all limited the power of government not individuals. Additionally this decision does not take away a local governments' ability to regulate gun ownership, just ban it. They have the obligation to keep guns out of the hands from known violent offenders, criminally insane, etc. They do not have the right to keep them from private law biding citizens. Once again the Supreme court, the minority in this case shows its narcissism.

This is of course a hypothetical essay. No one can or should ban something as un-quantifiable as narcissism, but they also should not try to involve themselves in our lives as deeply as they do. Windfall profit taxes, etc should be just as silly to try to impose as a ban on narcissism.

Thank You Senator Obama

2008-06-21T14:58:00.002-04:00

Much has been made of Senator Obama's decision not to accept public funds for the general election campaign. Ever since he became a candidate he talked at length about the importance of public funds. He thinks we need to get money out of politics.

His decision not to accept public funds has been called a flip flop, hypocrisy and a lie. There is a touch of all those things, but above all it shatters this myth that the government needs to provide the funds and access for candidates. He has been on this bandwagon forever and it hasn't limited the access he has given to shady characters. Look at his circle of friends. It is a motley crue of criminals, terrorists and downright America Haters. Has public financing laws helped that?

The theory is that you need to be rich to get elected. That is true to a certain extent. This is not a good thing, but public finance laws haven't changed that. By passing laws that you cannot use your own money all you will be doing is making sure incumbents will be unopposed. Unknown candidates will not be able to get their message out. That doesn't strike me as an improvement. Incumbents seem to me to be a large part of the problem, not a solution.

Listen closely, we need politicians of both parties that have integrity and a sense of what the constitution calls for. Public financing of campaigns will not accomplish that. Obama recognizes that even he won't publicly admit it.

MIchele Obama another look

2008-06-21T14:25:00.002-04:00

Much has been made of the comments of the would be First Lady Michele Obama. Many people have commented about her comments and some are good comments and some not so insightful. There is one comment in particular that has bothered me and until recently I wasn't sure why.

I re-read the comments today and I think I know what bothers me. Here is the part that bothers me:

"We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she tells the women. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.”

I want to be clear here, I have nothing against nurses, teachers etc. These are all fine important careers. If that is your passion by all means be a teacher, be a nurse, be a social worker be what you want. I might mention that the laws of supply and demand have already not been good to teachers. If the Obama-nation all go into this type of career the supply will go up which will ultimately bring down the price this is what happens when the supply of a commodity goes up without a corresponding increase in demand. The young idealists will not be able to support themselves and I'm certain will turn to the government to fill in the gaps.

The comments bother me because they tend to taint any career where you are making commerce happen. I work as a software developer. I also didn't like being part of corporate America. My response was to go to work for a smaller enterprise. I find that very rewarding. I make a difference. I can do more that a single talk over and over and again I make a difference. I'm sure what would make Ms Obama upset is that I contribute to a profit making enterprise.

My industry is to help people make electronic commerce happen. Thousands of workers depend on our company doing our job. Most of these are factory workers by the way, the only people that the Obama seems to think are 'working people'. We deliver purchase orders, advanced ship notices etc between companies so that the people who work in plants can do their jobs. We format electronic records to health care companies so insurance can be administered effectively and efficiently. I am not a 'community organizer' whatever that is but I think I help companies make jobs available to employees.

What about a mega-sized company like Microsoft? Are they a benefit to the community? The Ms. Obama is telling people to not work in corporate America the hiring managers for Microsoft are looking overseas for qualified people to fill their high paying jobs here in America and overseas. Maybe if some of those young people would forgo their good feelings of 'community service' and be trained in some of these jobs, we wouldn't have so many jobs going overseas. I see that as a good thing. Maybe some of these young idealists could spend some time in corporate America to find out what doesn't work and then they could create their own business using their humanistic values. That would be a benefit to the community.

Now by writing this am I saying community service is not important? Of course not. I believe greatly in community activity. I believe in people volunteering their time and their money for causes they believe in. That can be through their church, for non-faith based causes, for training programs for the poor (non-governmental) parks and recreational groups, for homeless shelters. Volunteer for an organization that works with young people. The people that worship, er I mean support Obama don't like the Boy Scouts but what about YMCA, or Big Brothers and Big Sisters? You will note the things I have mentioned are not government jobs, but activities that we have to sacrifice for. When we give of ourselves we feel good and we make an impact. Just going to work for a bureaucracy as in the additional programs that Senator Obama is proposing doesn't help, it simply takes money away from producing people to give to non-producing people.

Lastly by encouraging people to shun profit producing enterprises we weaken the fabric of the backbone of our country, private enterprise. Without private ownership of profit producing enterprises we lose productivity and ultimately we lose freedom in all its forms. The more decisions are made by large governmental and quasi governmental groups the less productive everything is.

My advice is this, find what you are passionate about and that you have an aptitude for and pursue that career. I spent ten years in a job I hated and it affected me greatly in a negative way. After hard work and temporary reduction of salary I am now somewhat prosperous in a career that I enjoy and I thinks helps others even if the possible future First Lady doesn't agree.

How much pain is Congress willing to inflict

2008-06-13T13:09:00.003-04:00

I am on the edge of a conspiracy theory here. It is unlike me but I am starting to wonder if Democrats in congress know the damage they have done and are willing to see gas prices go to the roof for their agenda.

The thing I am unsure of is why. Are they doing it to make Republicans look bad for the upcoming election or is it just to pacify their masters in the radical environmental movement. If they are doing it to keep the economy sinking under the weight of high energy prices that would be treason and anti American since they would be purposely hurting the country. I would like to believe that is not true and am leaning toward the belief that it is just their dedication to radical environmentalism. That would make them collasally wrong and not anti American.

Under that assumption it can only be one of two things. Either they are so ignorant of basic economics they should immediately resign en mass to make room for someone with a clue or they are so in debt to their masters in the radical environmental movement that they should resign immediately for putting special interests ahead of our citizens. Ironically the poor are being hurt the hardest, the very people they purport to champion. Since that is the normal outcome of modern liberalism I am leaning toward that view. Either way our economy cannot get along with these spikes in energy. Congress has the ability to change it, but I suspect won't. The reasons are still out for conjecture. I still haven't made up my mind on the question.

Conservatives, don't get stuck on stupid

2008-06-13T12:55:00.002-04:00

I keep hearing people talking about Barak Obama in such stupid terms that it appals me. I hear about his 'twisted' Christianity, I hear about him once being a Muslim, I hear about so many things that may or may not be true.

Bringing up these inane things will not turn the public against his candidacy. It will most likely make some people more sympathetic to him. He will be seen as a victim and today's America loves a victim whether they are in truth or not.

Personally I don't care about the doctrines of his church. Saying that does not mean I don't care about his friends such as the Reverends Wright and Phleger. These people show his terrible judgement in mentors and friends, but the doctrines of his church are not terribly important to me, much as the doctrines of the Mormon church were not important to me with Mitt Romney.

Whether or not Obama was brought up Muslim as a child is also not important to me. Many people were taken to church as kids and call themselves atheists today. They religion as a child is of no importance to me.

His middle name is of absolutely no importance to me. He doesn't use it and I think he has a right to be called what he prefers.

What is important to me is his lack of knowledge and commitment to sane foreign policy. I also care about his absolute commitment to the most failed economic system ever to inhabit the world:Socialism. I also care that he gives the impression that if the rest of don't agree with him about Socialism that we have the character flaw.

I care that he sees the tax code as his way of creating little social laboratories. I care that he wishes to reward bad behavior and bad choices. This keeps the young and the down and out from ever improving their lives.

I care about these things a great deal. I also don't care to see him get more issues to make people feel sorry for him. He seems to have enough of those already.

Democrats just know more than the rest of us

2008-06-13T12:39:00.002-04:00

That is what they think anyway. Two major examples here. In the legislation that did not muster the votes for cloture this week regarding the windfall profits tax, they would set up boards to determine what is appropriate profits. In the world of Wall Street these already exist. They are made up of people who know their craft. They analyze the public statements of companies and the guidance the companies provide to determine what their profits will be. They are fairly accurate but even they sometimes miss. When this happens we see huge spikes and valleys in Stock Prices.

I am willing to bet that any board setup by Congress to determine appropriate profit levels will not be industry experts. I expect they will be made up of patronage positions to payoff party faithful, also know as party hacks. Any industry expert will be someone who agrees with the Congressional Democrats. I don't think it would be any surprise that these boards would find that the entire mess of energy is to be blamed on evil corporations and their evil profits.

Profit drives business. This elementary but no less crucial to understand. When businesses make huge profits they expand. They hire more people, they do more research and development and they feed retirement plans with stock price increases and sometimes dividends (thanks to the Bush tax cuts). The idea that oil companies will make energy cheaper by being taxed heavier would be laughable if not so serious.

Another example of Democrat hubris is in ANWR. Unfortunately it is not just Democrats practicing hubris on this one. John McCain is a willing participant. He at least uses the ridiculous comparison to the Grand Canyon. I have heard quotes from several Senators saying that the research shows that it would not benefit the oil companies to explore there.

The shocking thing about this is that the public is not outraged. It is not the governments' job to determine proper risk for business to take. The companies will determine if they will commit their companies to that risk. If it is too great a risk, they have a win win situation. They pacify all of us by voting to open it up and the companies still won't drill. If the opposite is true, which is much more likely we would in a few years be reaping huge amounts of crude and drastically increasing supply which of course would be step 1 but only the first step toward bringing prices down.

Congress knows that they people will not explore the issue further than listening to the six o'clock news so they are safe to throw out whichever ridiculous explanation they feel and no few actual voters will hold their feet to the fire. Maybe we do deserve to be held hostage to these pirates.

Time for Obama to Prove he is serious

2008-06-04T21:04:00.003-04:00

Up until now Barak Obama was auditioning in front of his family so to speak. The primaries were long and sometimes bitter but he was politicking to people that never disagreed with him. In all of the campaign there was little that any of the Democratic candidates disagreed with each other on.

Now that Obama is the nominee (or presumptive until the Convention). Between now and November he has to prove to people in the center that he can be there nominee. People on the right he cannot convince. Me being a person of the right could never under any circumstance vote for him. He is a Socialist plain and simple.

He has to convince religious people in West Virginia that his comments about guns and God were not really how they seem. He has to convince people in Texas that even though they may work for an oil company he isn't calling them evil. He has to convince the lower income people who's taxes he will be raising that by doing so he is really on their side. He has to convince the same people that by raising taxes he will be ensuring that the wealthy will be paying a lower percentage of the total taxes, and the poor will be paying a greater share of the total taxes.

Maybe he can convince those of us over forty five why, for a man that talks about constantly about change has campaign themes that sound distinctly like those of George McGovern. Lets recount them, surrender in an unpopular war, raising taxes to pay for goodies, and the overriding belief that if only we would talk nice to them the people across the world that want us dead won't want us dead.

That shouldn't be too tough. He is a talented orator after all. Being a believer in government he surely believes that all of us in the heartland are stupid.

I guess we will find out if we really are. If we believe that he can offer all of the services that he has promised and it will only be paid for by the evil rich and the corporations (which are made up of working people by the way) than maybe we are stupid.

To be on the left is to have no consequences

2008-06-04T20:43:00.002-04:00

We have constantly seen the lack of consequences of the left. People on the left too often believe that people should not be held accountable for their words and actions. The latest is Father Phlager of racist ranting fame. He made some statement recently that he believed that his comments would be limited to the people in the church. I can guarantee that Trent Lott thought his comments at Strom Thurman's birthday party would be confined to his audience. He lost his leadership position in the Senate.

Hillary Clinton agreed to the rules about Michigan and Florida concerning primary scheduling. Now that she has lost she believes their votes should count. While on the subject of Hillary she believed in the action in Iraq when the resolution came to a vote. Now she believes the action to be wrong. People change their minds and that is fine. She however wants the blame to go to President Bush and not to her.

Barak Obama wants to make everyone who makes bad choices in life immune to the results. Just tax the evil corporations and everyone can be whole. If you make a bad investment with a shaky loan? Just make the banks refinance with a sweetheart deal. If you use check cashing services. Are you accountable? No the government will regulate them.

Speech is one of their favorites. Barak Obama says he should not be held accountable for the rantings of his lunatic pastor. As far as the statement goes I agree. What he should be accountable for is his lack of judgment of the people he considers spiritual leaders. He has a pretty bad track record there. He wants us to believe that he will have better judgement when he meets with the Arab thug dictators.

When the Dixie Chicks singing group make critical statements about the President in their concerts, they could not understand why their fans would punish them by not buying their records. Words matter and so does judgement.

Conservatives and right leaning people also say stupid things. The difference is they tend to apologize and make restitution to the people involved. Pat Robertson has said several stupid things. He has apologized. Franklin Graham has said stupid things. John Hagee has made some stupid and some mischaracterized statements. He made peace with the Catholic church in very public statements. Has Jeremiah Wright ever apologized for his rants? Have the Chicks? I am not saying they have any obligation to, but if they want people to reverse their judgements of them some kind of apology is in order.

Judgment and consequences is how we learn. I was arrested when I was younger for driving while intoxicated. Not being a stupid man I don't do this anymore. I learned from consequences. We can not expect people in our society to learn from mistakes if there are no consequences.

Failure is Necessary

2008-05-16T12:23:00.002-04:00

We need adversity in our lives. Obviously too much of it sets a pattern that may not be able to be escaped from. Each person has a different threshold. Great entrepreneurs have a high tolerance for failure. People suffering from depression would probably not. (Note I am not in any way taking mental illness lightly just using an example).

Adversity has a way of getting us moving. It puts our backs to the wall and shows us our alternatives clearly. Instead of having multiple possible courses of actions we may only have a couple after a failure.

Wallowing in failure is not healthy. Using failure to direct our energies is healthy, and part of what has made the American culture strong.

I worry now though because our sensitive society seems to want to eliminate all chances of failure in our lives. There are too many examples to list but here are a few that bother me. Kids in school that have trouble with math are given calculators in some cases. Politicians are looking for ways to make whole people who have had sub prime mortgages go into default. This one is a two-fer, some politicians want the government to bail out these mortgages, this makes the lender and the borrower whole when they should not be. Young women who get pregnant, instead of deciding to give up the baby to a loving family, now have the decision to either kill it or be given massive aid from the government.

When someone takes away the results of failing, we don't learn the valuable lessons that we need to learn. I was talking to a friend recently and we both we wondering why we as a people are so selfish when it comes to our health. I for one am very overweight and putting my life at risk. When I think of not being there for my children I cringe. (I am attempting to do something about this but it is very difficult). I believe this has to do with the advances in medicine. In our minds we believe someone will find a way out, a new treatment, a new drug and when it doesn't happen we get bitter. It is immature. Another cause I believe is the free time we have. Generations prior to World War II would never have sat around and whined like we do. They simply didn't have time. They were busy trying to feed their families. For the majority of us we don't have that worry nearly as much anymore.

Now how to let people fail without letting it destroy them. That is a tough one to pull off. I think the key is to allow lessons to be learned with love and not dispassionate aloofness. I try to use every setback my children have as a learning experience. It may be something they wanted that they didn't get or a game they lost. All of these things have value as learning experiences. I think the bigger goal though is removing public officials as nanny's. Parents raise children. Politicians should stop trying to devise laws that take away failure. It is hurting out society.

We as citizens also have responsibility here. We must stop looking to public officials to make us whole. Grown ups need to learn from adversity just as we teach our children to. Learning doesn't stop when you hit 21. I write this as someone who has not always learned from failure but all too often has let it destroy me. This is not good for individuals or societies. Victim hood is not a productive mindset. It is within our grasp if only we will reach out for it. We owe it to our children.

Everything in life you need you can learn from George Bailey

2008-04-22T12:16:00.002-04:00

Ok I know 'It's a Wonderful Life' is thought of as a Christmas movie. I was thinking about it recently and thinking about the life of the main character in today's world. He would be thought of as out of step today I think. Maybe that is why it is one of my favorite movies of all time.

George spent his life sacrificing for others. He waited to go to college to help his father. When his father died unexpectedly he gave up college to keep the Building and Loan alive and away from the curmudgeon of the movie old man Potter. The day of his wedding the Great Depression hits and he uses his life savings to keep the Building and Loan open again against a bank run. (George had some terrible planning. Every big day in his life has some catastrophe associated with it). Finally on the day is brother is coming home from the war a hero old Uncle Billy loses the deposit and George is on the hook for jail and scandal, and oh by the way the bank examiner is there.

This of course is an old movie and in black and white. George never turned to the government, never whined to the local news or protested his misfortune. When Potter offered him a job to buy him off he stuck to his principles. These are great values that I wish I could say I always espoused. OK I know he is a fictional character and real people don't always do the right thing. I agree with that but fictional characters can set standards for us.

Now for old man Potter. I know people on the left would see him as a Republican conservative because he is rich and mean. While the movie is thankfully non-political I think Potter would have been a liberal if he existed today. Conservatives understand the need for competition. Conservatives understand that you prosper by improving your own products and not by destroying others. Today's liberals are the ones who try to eliminate competition. Campus liberals institute speech codes to keep disagreeing people from speaking. The democratic party has super delegates to make sure the leadership has the final say of who the winner of the nomination is.

In his darkest hour the George Bailey character shows his values. When the angel Clarence is thinking of a way to help George he jumps into the river so George will jump in and save him. This causes George to think outside of himself and his problems and come back to his values, save the other guy first. This is a value we all have inside of us. The character of George shows us how to bring it out. Love and caring for his family and friends ultimately makes him realize that living in scandal or jail is preferable to not living at all.

If I wanted to tell someone how to lead a noble life I would tell them to watch George Bailey. without invoking God or faith the story tells us how to live an ethical and life full of values. A few stories today out of Hollywood would be welcome, but alas not expected anytime soon.

Obama will have trouble getting beyond Rev. Wright

2008-03-18T12:26:00.002-04:00

First I want to state that I believe Barak Obama has a good heart and I take him at his word that he wants to get beyond racial identities. He has condemned the words of his pastor without condemning the man. I expected that and see no hypocrisy in this. That in itself is going to make it tough to get beyond it. Here are the reasons.

1. He is unknown. By me saying I believe his words I am relying on my judgement to be able to judge people. That is really all we have. Senator Obama has a very short track record. He is a third year Senator. Very little public service before that. For right or wrong we know Hillary Clinton and John McCain. For good or bad their lives are an open book. When they say something controversial we can look at a lifetime in public life and make an educated guess as to whether that is consistent or inconsistent with their values. Senator Obama has a harder time simply because we don't know him.

2. He is a progressive through and through. Whether you call him liberal, progressive or even socialist he is that in every fiber of his being. What we know is that progressives believe that they have the answers and should be put in charge of setting the course for the rest of us. Note he is capable of seeing beyond the words of his pastor who has made villains of whites and the nation as a whole. He sees the good in him. People who disagree with him politically don't get that benefit of the doubt. People who would turn more to the private sector are seen as paying off special interests. Those of us who believe in free trade are seen as exporting jobs. Those of us who believe that the private sector is to be relied on for improving health care are accused of being in the pocket of the health care lobby. Howard Dean has said that the difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals care that children go to bed hungry at night. While Obama has not gone to the extent his implications are the same.

3. He sees groups and not people. Whites have had to decide for a very long time whether or not to accept evil action from their 'own kind'. Far too many whites for far too long did not speak out against evil. Slavery, Jim Crow, Bull Connor. These are all the shame of whites looking the other way. In recent decades more and more whites pronounce evil when they see it. Prominent blacks must do the same. They must teach that calling the United States the UN-KKK-A is not something to disagree with it is an evil sentiment. Where is the difference between this and the whites who proclaimed blacks less than a whole person? Increasingly whites set themselves apart from the neanderthals that still harbor racist views. While I understand I cannot identify with the feelings of black America, the people who consider themselves leaders must encourage excellence and not victim hood. They must do this for the preservation of the young black men that are tearing themselves apart. To group all whites into the KKK of the Jim Crow south is not only not fair, it is not productive.

Barak Obama must continue to run a non race based campaign. I believe this is his intention. he also must run a group free campaign. I do not believe that is his intention. The Democratic party is so immersed in group-ism they can't help themselves. He must fulfill what we expect of a president, he or she should inspire us to be better than we were yesterday, not put your hand out for what the country can give them. He won't be able to that and it may cost him. The polish is off from his exterior. Now his substance must come through. I don't think he has enough to shine through. He has no new ideas, no new inspiration. You may as well substitute his speeches with George McGovern. There are no discernible differences.

There is a little Eliot Spitzer in all of us

2008-03-14T08:05:00.002-04:00

If you are looking for a defense for the former Governor read somewhere else. Likewise his colorful partner in crime. No this column is a admission of humanities' dark side.

Whatever we like to think we have a dark side. Every one of us. Most of keep it under control. Either through faith in God or some other force within us. It could be the opposite sex as in Spitzers case. It could be gambling, it could be booze, it could be any substance or activity. That thing we love to do and turn to when we are a little down. Maybe once in a while we like it a little too much. The difference between a junkie and functioning citizen is that the functioning citizen knows how to keep their dark side at bay.

Eliot Spitzer apparently had everything most people could want. Power, good family, more money than anyone could want, but it wasn't enough. I am strangely drawn to this story. While disgusted with the man and the girl, I am curious what makes someone risk everything and I mean everything for something a little dangerous. This can be nothing short of mental illness.

This subject has been the stuff of songs, tragic poems, Greek tragedies, yet we are no closer to understanding it. If we could than maybe we could find a way to avoid it. Maybe the reason is similar to what I write about frequently. As a society we want to find a macro solution. We think a pill or a government program or something can fix these problems. No the problems that people like Eliot Spitzer have are personal and I expect lonely. I expect he carries with him a lonely secret deep inside him. A void that has not be filled with traditional means. That void can only be filled with the dark side of his being. The problem is, as usual when you fill up on the dark side it is hollow. It is filled for the moment, but when it is over you are more empty than before. You need to fill up on goodness. This is not a piece about faith but for me, god and family are the only way to keep my own dark side at bay. For his own sake I pray that Mr. Spitzer can find a way to keep his dark side at bay. I hope for the same thing for his prostitute as well. Only the dark side of human beings could send someone into the field she has chosen. Mostly I pray that we all find a way to control our own dark side.

Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer

2008-03-12T12:27:00.002-04:00

Your assignment: Compare and contrast Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer and their sex scandals. On the surface not much is the same other than the fact that they are horn dogs who got caught.

Both committed crimes but only one was expected to resign. This one is for New York Democrats. Since many Democrats felt that former Gov. Spitzer should resign, tell me why Bill Clinton should not have. As you remember Clinton was having an affair with an of age intern. No crime there. He lied under oath in a civil suit. Perjury is a felony. Spitzer committed a multitude of crimes. Asking him to step down is a no-brainer. That is a given, but the argument as to why he should resign and the Bill should not have I believe breaks down.

In the case of Clinton the act was not illegal but in the case of Spitzer the act was illegal. This of course is the biggest difference. Anyone making the case I mentioned above will of course point this out. I think it has to do with more. At first the Clinton story was icky. Many people can relate to a man cheating on the job (I didn't say condone I said identify). Very few people man or women can identify with a man contracting a hooker high price or not. I think very few people can identify with dropping $5,000 for sex. The lack of personal identification I believe has a lot to do with the different treatment. Most people at least know of someone who has cheated on their spouse. I can't think of anyone in my life that has been with a hooker. Again knowing of someone is not the same as condoning.

Another big difference I see is one of person and political capitol. Bill Clinton was loved by people in his party. They were willing to look the other way at his sleaze. Eliot Spitzer by all indications didn't have a lot of people watching his back. Politically he seems to have been a brass knuckle politician who seemed to enjoy destroying people. When that type of person goes wrong, not a lot of people are willing to go to bat for you.

The moral of the story? Lots of them. Sleaze is not limited to one party. If you are going to be slimy, make some friends on the way up. If you are going to be the moral avenger maybe it would be a good idea to know what morals are.

The real moral? We are the voters and the employers of these people. If you are voting for someone because they have the best chance of winning, you may end up with slime ball.

Scratch Beginnings

2008-03-04T17:50:00.002-05:00

I was struck by the story of a young man I heard on a talk show. His name is Adam Shepard. He wrote a book called Scratch Beginnings Me, $25 and the search for the American Dream. I have ordered the book that he wrote from his experience. I have not read it yet so I can't comment on the content as of yet.

As his intro tells he was growing frustrated over whining and materialism. These are issues I get frustrated about a lot. The difference is he did something about it. He went out on the road for one year with $25 and the clothes on his back. His challenge was to become a productive member of society with $2500, a place to live and an operable automobile.

He rightly points out that he did not have some of the challenges that others have such as a family to take care of, or lack of education etc. That to me underscores the importance of completing your education and that you can control that. Statistics show that people who achieve at least a high school diploma are much less likely to live in poverty.

This young man points out that he comes at this from no political point of view and has no political agenda. I respect that. I am amazed by his story and look forward to reading his book. A young man of action is someone to be modeled. This man seems to fit that criteria.

Boot straps for me but not for thee

2008-03-04T12:47:00.002-05:00

Barak Obama is a great story. This man has accomplished so much. This is the story of a self made man. Why then does he sell victim hood?

He obviously believes the things he says. He tells people he is selling hope. He is selling change. He is telling people that they can't make it because the special interests have stacked the deck against them. Did the special interests stop him and his wife? I don't think so.

He did not turn to the government to accomplish what he has. Is he smarter than everyone else? He is very smart, but I don't think that is the answer. Is he more talented than us? Again he is talented but I don't know if that is the answer. We all have varied talents and use them in varying degrees.

From where I sit I think when someone made it on their own but tells me that we cannot, I don't see that as hope, I see it as hubris. I don't think he intends it that way, but that is how it sounds to me.

We can't afford Barak Obama or Hillary Clinton. Not just in money although certainly that is true. We can't afford the affects done to the people at the bottom of the ladder. We can't have four or eight years of our President telling us they did it themselves, but you can't do it without them.

They have promised to bring jobs back to Ohio. How exactly? by raising the taxes? They have promised to provide universal health care, how exactly? I have written time and time again that their plans will end up in rationing of care. They can lead by inspiring others, not by being our mommy and daddy. Shameful!! It isn't easy to pull yourself up, but his story and literally thousands of other stories show it can be done. Let's follow that story of Senator Obama, not the victimhood story he is portraying in his campaign.

Your brain on universal health care

2008-03-04T12:20:00.002-05:00

The state of Oregon tried a bold experiment. They were going to provide universal health care. More precisely it was intended to provide health insurance to those not covered between existing government plans and private sector plans. I nice idea, and idea full of good feelings.

I have written this before. As the price of a good goes down the demand goes up. As the economy moves toward a downside in the business cycle the money the government takes in goes down as taxes collected goes down. That does not change the fact that they made commitments. What happens next? Budget cuts and service cuts. This will happen if the federal government wades into health care as well. The federal government can just print money by borrowing. States generally cannot, most states have a requirement to balance their budget.

What are the answers then? There of course are problems in the way we deliver health care insurance. The answers are not to be found in government. The are to be found in the private sector. They answers have to be in reducing costs. Subsidized care from the government only reduces prices. Costs and prices are not the same.

Medical Savings accounts. Let people control more of their medical spending. They will decide if the test being ordered by the doctor is necessary. Instead of the traditional setup where the company tells you what is covered and what is not. Deposit an amount into a Medical Savings account and let them control it. For catastrophic events carry a supplemental insurance plan at a much lower price. When people control their health care they will use it more wisely. Too many people see it as 'free' It is far from free.

Open up health insurance beyond state boundaries. Let insurance companies compete outside of their own state. As the commercial says when lenders compete you win. When insurers compete you also win.

Take steps to unlink health care from our jobs. President Bush had some interesting ideas on this earlier in this term. All were dead on arrival.

Further reform tort reform. The more doctors of all specialties get sued the more tests they will order. They have to do this as documentation when they get sued. Take away the medical lottery when things go bad and you will have doctors ordering the tests that are really needed and not practicing defensive medicine.

These are only the tip of the iceberg. The Heritage Foundation has done great work on this. I truly recommend them as a resource. They have much better info than I do.

All over the country we see state health care plans failing to live up to promises. Do we really want this to happen nationally?

Am I my brothers keeper

2008-03-04T12:02:00.002-05:00

This week is the Ohio primary. Of course the Republican nomination is not really in doubt. That makes the Democratic primary much more interesting even though I am not voting in it. Both Senators have spent a great deal of money on advertising (much to my chagrin while I watch M*A*S*H* reruns). One of the ads that Barak Obama is playing a lot is that his quest is because he believes we are our brothers' keeper. I actually agree with him. Now comes the $64,000 question: How best do we accomplish this?

This question has been answered since people started studying economics. Is the private sector or the private sector better equipped to help. Of course markets do not attempt to perform justice. The market only sets a price. Men and women provide the good or bad. Handing over control to the government for any one action does not eliminate the market for a good or service, it only becomes a player (unless it is nationalized of course).

My question is this: are people better helped by a growing economy, or a government handout? I believe a growing economy. Are people better able to increase their standard of living using government assistance or getting an education and working through the private sector? I believe the private sector. Are people better served by a government health care system or by working to get insurance in the private sector? This one is the gray area to some. Every time we see a government health care plan, services are rationed in time. This has never not happened.

What Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton are promising in essence is security. You can depend on a subsistence living if something bad happens. Freedom must be taken away to make that happen. You must take the money to pay for that security. The individuals and corporations that pay the most cannot use that money to start businesses, to expand businesses, to invest in start ups, to purchase big ticket items that put workers to work. It of course doesn't stop with the rich. Middle class and poor are also affected. The more money that is taken away is the less money that can be saved for their kids college, for a newer more dependable car which would help the auto industry, to get their kids better clothes. Someones freedom has to be interrupted to deliver that security.

If while taking freedom away it could be measured that the programs work, you could still make an argument for these programs, but since the track record of government interventions is abysmal how can we continue to make this argument? I just can't fathom. All that considered, what is the best way to help my brother in need? I say get the government out of security. I can make a case for helping people who truly can't help themselves, the disabled, the mentally ill, the terminally ill. I cannot imagine a good case for security for people down on their luck. The safety net has become a straight jacket. It just isn't compassionate. How to help those people? Charity organizations and human compassion. If we could magically take the money spent on welfare and give it to inner city charities, which would do the most good? I think the answer is obvious.

So what is a special Interest exactly?

2008-02-25T12:40:00.002-05:00

We hear all about ending special interests. Every presidential candidate is promising to end special interests. If everyone wants them gone why aren't they? I contend the simple answer is the term special interest has no meaning.

When you hear a candidate promising to end the reach of special interests that sounds good right? The problem as I see it is conservatives see special interests much differently than liberals or progressives do. Additionally I believe special interests can be good, and they can be bad. We have been lead to believe that lobbyists are bad. After all the Jack Abramhoff scandal was all about lobbyists correct? The New York Times tried to paint John McCain as at minimum a tool of the special interest, and at worst having an affair with a member of a special interest. Lobbyists in Washington do a lot of good. They educate the legislators about their 'special interest'. They bring information that the legislators need. There are some and probably a lot that go too far. Who is to blame when they sell corruption to the lobbyist or the politician? Well both of them. If money corrupts politicians why aren't they all corrupt? Some would say they are, but I don't agree. Additionally if our congressmen and women are all beholden to special interests, why don't we vote them out?

If a lobbyist from the trial lawyer lobby brings valuable info and contributions to a Democratic congressman, is he corrupting him or her? I say doubtful. Most Democrats agree with the trial lawyer lobby and quid pro quo is unlikely to happen, he is getting money and information from a group he agrees with. The same is true of groups that agree with Republicans.

So now what is a special interest exactly? Barak Obama like to paint all corporate lobbyists as special interest. How about union lobbyists? How about specifically teacher unions? How about environmental groups? Are these groups special interests? I think so but I'll bet Senator Clinton and Senator Obama don't agree. I say they are every bit as much a special interest as a lobbyist from the oil industry. Should we eliminate all of their access? Of course not. They educate and more importantly represent the views of ordinary citizens that don't always have a voice. If your job depends on Exxon staying viable do you view an oil lobbyist as a crook or an important asset. How about the if you are a teacher, are your representatives corrupt or working on your behalf? I'll bet I know the answer.

What we need in our campaigns are issues that are honest and matter to the future of the country. Reigning in and providing transparency of interest group representatives is important. Ending special interest doesn't pass the sniff test. It can't be defined objectively. This points out the problem with left leaning politicians and some on the right, they can't speak objectively and get elected, their interest groups traffic strictly in emotions they don't want the light of day put on their arguments, so they spew phrases that mean nothing. End the special interest is one of those phrases.

Re-writing the laws of economics

2008-02-21T12:48:00.002-05:00

I wrote some time back about the religion of change. We are finding out more and more about what the candidates are proposing for change. Barak Obama being the leader on the left is interesting. He is so far to the left and most of his supporters won't admit it or don't know it.

Lets take a few of the things he has proposed in his advertisements I have seen in Ohio this week.

1. He will reduce the cost of health care premiums by $2400 per year. A classic mistatement. He as a politician can have no effect on cost. He can affect price. This is what he is referring to. By subsidizing certain people he can reduce the price of their health care insurance. We should not buy into the statement that this is their health care. No one can be denied health care. Only insurance is the issue in this campaign. The Dems can show where they would pay for the initial system they are proposing. A demand curve tells us that as the price of a good or service goes down the quantity demanded will go up. Unless Senator Obama has a way to change the fundamentals of economics, this will of course happen. There will initially be no restrictions so the quantity demanded will go through the roof. This will of course expand the needs of the system. To cover this demand one of two things will happen(probably both).
A Taxes will be substantially raised.
B Restrictions on services will be put in place. This is where it gets scary. The same type of government officials who fail miserably at veterans hospitals, FEMA, the post office etc will now be in charge of deciding who gets their services cut. Just as with Social Security the taxes and or the rationing will make our heads spin.

2. Education. Senator Obama is promising $4,000 per child per year. I just looked up this benefit and he will require these people to do community service. Nice idea. I have two general problems with this

A More government money with none or very little restriction on the receiving institutution leaves it up to the institution what to do with tuition rates. This windfall of cash will cause increases in tuition of course as it always has. Remember when a large influx of money comes into a market with very limited competition prices go up every time.

B All of these people will need to have their community service will need to be tracked to be sure they perform community service, to make sure they don't get the stipend more than once and many other things. I smell a government agency. Government agencies don't go away and the costs go up astonomically after established.

3. Removing the tax breaks for businesses that export jobs. There is indeed a tax break for mutinationals that open plants overseas. This of course was caused by the Congress trying to fix a problem. In the eighties the cry was that the playing field was not level for American companies to sell to Europe and Asia. Many of these nations had laws that to sell in their nation a certain percentage has to be created in their country. The congress tried to compensate for this with tax break. Nice idea. This of course encouraged to businesses to open plants overseas. This became known as exporting jobs. This break can be removed. It will be a tax increase to the related companies. Since we have among the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world this would further raise the incentive for companies not to keep jobs here, but to move corporate citizenship offshore. That doesn't sound like a great idea. Here is a thought that both parties could get in on. Remove the break, but reduce the corporate tax rate substantially. The increntive to open plants off shore will be gone and the lower corporate rate will encourage multinationals to move here. That of course would not play with the nut-roots in the Democratic party.

My challenge is this. What idea of Barak Obama is different that Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden and other far left wingers have not been pushing for forty years. The specifics are different, but the truth is he has a government solution for anything that ailes anyone. This plus the surrender plan is the same as George McGovern. So much for change.

What about those RINO's

2008-02-11T12:23:00.000-05:00

to a political junkie a RINO is a republican in name only. I have used the term myself. I no longer do. Here is why.

Conservatives have long been fond of saying I am a conservative not necessarily a Republican. The truth is we live in a two party system. There are Democrats and there are Republicans. Other parties sinply bleed off support from the party that comes closest to their views. Greens hurt Democrats. Libertarians hurt republicans more than Democrats, but also bleed some Democrats. In the near term Democrats are not going to embrace any conservative values so until that changes yes Virginia we are Republicans no matter how mad they make us.

There are about 25-35% of the electorate that call themselves liberals or progressives and likewise conservatives. This varies from time to time but over time seems to be in that area. That leaves about 50-65% of the electorate that are independents. They may be slightly right leaning and they may be slightly left leaning or they may not lean either way. I truly believe there are no true moderates. There are people who lean left on one issue but right on another issue to the point that they don't fit into either left of right. When we excoriate RINO's we run the risk of pushing away 50% of the electorate because they are not conservative enough for our vaunted perceptions. I heard someone today saying we are going in the right direction because Senate and Congressional Republicans are more conservative and a lot of RINO's have been pushed to retire. I'm not sure why that is a good thing. While I wish we could be a majority party with all conservatives, I can't think of a time that this has ever happened for either party. In case we haven't noticed that party purity has lead to a minority status with very little hope of that changing in November.

Poltical parties are coalitions of dispirate views. Telling groups that you can't come play in our sandbox doesn't win elections. I also don't believe this view sells out my very conservative views. I can guarentee that the Democrats, the liberal party will happily accept conservative union workers and other middle of the road groups if it means a liberal Speaker of the House and a liberal Senate Majority leader. The Republicans understood that in the nineties. We seem to have forgotten it today.

I can't say it loud enough. Liberals in charge of the House and Senate and if they win the White House in charge of the cabinet positions and selecting activist judges will not further conservative values. My advice, hold your nose and vote Republican, but once and for all, demand that our conservative leaders, lead and not play along to get along. Demand that they teach people about what it means to be a conservative. When a liberal TV host spouts the usual litany of insults about conservatives, take them on don't stick to your talking points. Again I say LEAD, or get out of the way!!

Anger and politics

2008-02-09T16:11:00.000-05:00

Lots of political movements are based in anger. Much of the left is based in anger. Sometimes it sells. Sometimes it doesn't. I think the times that anger has been effective in politics has been very rare.

The civil rights movement from my reading of history was much more effective in the period of the positive messages of Martin Luther King than in the angry messages of Malcolm X. The feminists did better when they talked of equal rights than now that their message is almost entirely based on abortion and, well hatred of men. I should here explain I don't regard the average woman looking for equal pay for equal work and other equalities as the same group as the angry feminists such as Gloria Steinem ,Kate Michaelman, and Betty Freidan.

Now I have been wondering why the conservative movement is not gaining ground. I think it is because the most vocal part of it, have become very angry. This is the time where you think that I am going to launch into an attack on talk radio. No not this time, although some of these hosts deserve part of the blame.

The right has not done a good job of explaining the real benefits of conservative. Some of the rhetoric that has gone along with the immigration debate has often been angry and sounding like good old fashioned racism. Here I don't want to be misunderstood. The immigration battle is important and must be won. Law and order must prevail. Assimilation has to happen. The rhetoric has to follow that aim.

Conservatism is an ideology that has to persuade, not threaten. Many of the things we believe are couter intuitive. Unless you look under the surface it may be difficult to understand that tax cuts actually create higher revenues. Welfare reform actually helps people save their own lives. Massive college subsidies do not in fact create more educated people. These thinks have to be explained patiently and repetitively. Not shouted at people. It plays into the game plan of the left which is that conservatives are based in hate not love. This is why the term compassionate conservatie was destructive. It was a surrender to the left.

We need effective leaders. Other people than just talk radio. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and others have been huge influences on my knowledge. My first 'teachers' though were Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich. I think we lack elected leaders that can evangelize the conservative message. Until we get some more of them we can't move the conservative movement back on track.

I am not sure why we don't have them today. We do have good conservatives in Congress and the Senate. Why they aren't making an impact on society, I'm just not sure why. There is a young left wing person named Barak Obama, maybe you have heard of him. I think if you ask the average Obama voter what his policies are and I'm not sure they could tell you. I'm sure they wouldn't tell you that they love that his voting record is the most liberal in the Senate even more so than Ted Kennedy.

Likewise Ronald Reagan didn't sell policy, he sold a vision of what America was to him. The policies were there, but he sold us on a vision. Of course he had great ideas that translated into great policies. He was a leader first. Why is Mike Huckabee still in the race? He is selling ideas. He has no money and sometimes his policies don't go along with his visions, but he is successful because he is attempting to sell ideas. John McCain is the presumptive nominee because he is selling an idea. A return to a Ronald Reagan America. To win in November he has to sell people that he is the man to bring that to this century with his plans and policies, but he is selling a vision first.

I remember the last few elections we had people running that I think had better policies. Steve Forbes a terrific economics man. He couldn't personalize it to the average voter, not the politics junkie, but to the average voter. Rudi Guilliani I thought was the best equipped to handle all of the roles of President, but just couldn't get the people along the way convinced. Some of it has to do with his social issues, but just didn't get it done. Mitt Romney is a great policy wonk. We never knew what he believed down deep. Unfortunately the most passion I saw him show was in his exit speech.

Great ideas and policies are vital, but the ability to convey a vision cannot be underestimated. Visions are never communicated as anger. Just as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. They won't agree but they also aren't running for office anymore. That isn't because they don't want to, no one wants them to.

My Choice for President

2008-01-31T12:43:00.000-05:00

Like many people the candidate I am backing has changed a couple of times. First I was behind Fred Thompson. When he exited I backed Rudy Guilliani. I pointed out in my post from yesterday that John McCain is not my candidate. Ironically some of the same people I criticized yesterday I agree with on the underlying arguments about McCain, not the made up ones though.

John McCain believes that large companies such as drug companies are to be demonized and has done so in multiple debates. Personally I don't trust drug companies either, but destroying them as he would do by allowing re-importation of drugs would do would harm our citizens more than help. Without profits there is no money or much reduced for research and development. We can't have this as our policy.

I am not totally sold on Mitt Romney either, but he stands a good bit ahead of McCain on economics in my book. I still don't get a good feeling about what he feels down in his gut. I would feel better about this if he would show us what that is. I believe his varied experience will be an asset to him. His experience in business and non profit orginizations will teach him that he has to surround himself with the best people in every are. His experience as govenor will teach him that he still has to make the tough decisions. He will need to draw on all of these to be a complete president.

Mike Huckabee is a non candidate to me. I think he is a good man with populist values. I smell a compassionate conservative.

Romney is the best candidate left in my estimation. That being said everything I wrote yesterday is important. If the candidate ends up being McCain I will proudly cast my vote for him. Even if he is not my perfect candidate he is head and shoulders better than any Democrat in their field.

Political Masturbation

2008-01-30T12:34:00.000-05:00

OK we all know what masturbation is and being a family man no need to go further with any descriptions. It is a good analogy when I look at politics today. The individual feels self gratification but no actual good is done.

The left has been practicing this for years. Going back to Ronald Reagan who ever seems to be the leader of Republicans and conservative becomes responsible for anything bad that happens. They voted for Ralph Nader and effectively elected George W. Bush. Libertarians and other third parties do this as a matter of course. Their precious principles are massaged even if we end up with a much worse candidate. Ross Perot joined in and arguably elected Bill Clinton.

One political movement had been immune to this until now. Conservatives seemed principled even when a perfect candidate didn't exist. George W. Bush is not a perfect conservative, but has enjoyed conservative support. With candidate after candidate leaving the Republican race we are getting angry deluded conservatives. John McCain is the object of the vitriol. For the record I am not a McCain supporter. His record is being distorted horribly. I have heard he is in favor of a North American Union. I have heard he will raise taxes. I have heard he will open the borders. I have heard he will expand government. None of these things are true. I am not going to spend much time defending him because there are enough web sites doing that. and probably better than I could.

My problem is the anger. I have heard Glenn Beck say he would vote for Hillary rather than McCain. I have heard Rush Limbaugh quoted similarly. One of two people are going to be president. Either the Republican or the Democrat. Neither identity is known yet, but if McCain is the candidate on the right and Conservatives have a snit, either Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama will be the President of the US. That means judges that are clones of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, that means leftists in the cabinet, that means a friendly signature if a bill comes out that will nationalize health care and nearly 20% of the private economy.

If being a conservative means I have to go into a snit because Ronald Reagan isn't coming back to life, than count me out!!! I love the memory of Ronald Reagan, but we have to pick a current candidate not our ideal candidate. I wrote a piece a year ago outlining my perfect candidate and stated at that time that I knew that person didn't exist today. Get over it, vote the the person imperfect or not that most closely fits your vision of America.

A long time ago Bill Buckley was a lone voice for conservative values. I was very young but I don't remember reading that he voted for McGovern because a perfect conservative didn't exist. Slowly conservative values built a following. I was personally inspired to be a conservative by Jack Kemp. Many conservatives came to their belief by people like Newt Gingrich. These people spoke, persuaded, cajoled but one thing they didn't do was quit. They didn't take their ball and go home. They went on pursuading. Maybe some of our voices should put aside their egos and run for office. Senator Limbaugh? Congressman Beck? Govenor Hewitt? None of them have any plans to run. Maybe they should. We need some elected officials that can enunciate conservative values. There is a dearth of them right now. Maybe that is because there are so many other ways to make a living in politics without running. We need good men and women and we need them now. Your country needs you.

To my follow conservative, grow up, be adults and don't follow the tactics of the left wing 'netroots'.

Reset Assumptions

2008-01-24T12:53:00.000-05:00

Lyndon Baines Johnson has left a lasting legacy. President Johnson passed the Great Society. He and his left wing comrades passed the legislation. Subsequent Presidents funded it. His lasting legacy has nothing to do with the legislation. The laws helped create the legacy. Keep in mind that many historians rank Johnson as one of the worst American presidents of all time. In my mind he is locked in a battle with Jimmy Carter, but that is another piece.

His legacy is resetting the assumptions we have about poverty and poor people in general. Until the Great society period we believed that poor people did not want to be on public support. We believed that government assistance was intended by the giver and the receiver to be temporary and lasting no longer than absolutely necessary. I don't say this to infer that all recipients want to be there. That would be nonsense. My intention here is to point out that today in 2008 many people in government now start out with the assumption that people considered poor are there forever and by no fault of their own, and more importantly there is nothing they can do about it.

Details of the much awaited economic stimulus package are being leaked. There is an agreement in principle on the provisions between the two parties and the White House. This tells me that the majority of those people believe these are the principles that will make the economy grow. of the estimated $150 billion in costs in the plan is is believed $100 billion will be in the form of tax 'rebates'. Why do I put that in quotes? Some of the recipients paid no taxes at all. You can't rebate what you never paid. Personally I will put mine into either savings or my kids college funds. I believe this will be fairly typical. No spending will occur at all. No major investment either. The assumption is that they should not be left out just because they didn't pay taxes. They are suffering so someone must help them. Prior to the Great Society that someone was believed to be family, friends and charity organizations. Now that someone is believed to be the federal government.

Another area where assumptions are clearly changed is in education. Before that period in history we believed that education was important, but not a right. You saved your money, you went into the military (by the way I don't consider military benefits to be in any way a giveaway, these brave men and women served valiantly for these benefits), or you worked for the University, or you worked your way through college. Personally I did receive loans, not government loans, but private loans. I didn't qualify for government guaranteed loans. The assumption is that education is so important that society has a compelling interest in nearly everyone going to college. Economically this injects a huge amount of investment into a sector of the economy, which there is little downside. if someone fails to get their degree there are very little consequences. it also allows Universities to build and expand regardless of budgets. Even though mass investments of government money have come in and continue to grow, the inflation of tuition continues unchecked. This actually makes sense. There is no competitive pressure on tuition. There is competition based on quality in certain programs, but none on price. The investor should require a better use of their money. A stockholder would, but our government does not. The results? We work on the assumption that if we cut back on government supplied loans and grants than poor people will not be educated. Somehow people were educated before all of this investment, but we believe the private sector would not rise to fill that void. This is a wrong assumption.

These assumptions changed for a couple of reasons. Once politicians found out that the more money and stuff you give out, the more votes you get. People found out that it is easier, not necessarily better but easier to subsist, than to go through the effort of excelling. One more thing, the longer we go on assuming people will not strive to excel, the farther away we will get from that ideal. Elections matter!!!

Walter Williams on the Subprime world

2008-01-23T08:00:00.000-05:00

I have written my thoughts a couple of times on the subprime situation. Walter Williams today has a column on the subject. Since he is a brilliant economist and I am a schlub blogger I encourage all to read it.

Belief in Markets is neither Republican nor Democrat

2008-01-22T12:22:00.000-05:00

We live in a relatively free society. We operate in a society which is run by markets. Some are tangible such as a stock market, or an auction that you may participate in. Others are less tangible, for example the housing market in your city.

It seems from watching politics that the only people that talk about the importance of markets is people of the Republican persuasion. It was not always this way, John F. Kennedy talked openly about the importance of markets.

As we come into a period of economic slowdown, it is important that all people regardless of party understand the importance of markets. Markets go up and then markets go down. This is natural. The idea that government can soften the swings of markets is an idea that is somewhat new, and I might add a fiction. As soon as you take an action that you think will fix a flaw in the market, you may influence something related that may be altogether destructive. The Federal Reserve cut its fed funds rate by 75 basis points. Obviously this is an attempt to spur economic activity. This may do exactly that. This may also cause inflation because making money more available may devalue the dollar. This is a perfectly proper action. This is an adjustment to spur private enterprise. We will see how it plays out but it is entirely appropriate.

The actions being discussed by Presidential candidates range from appropriate to downright destructive. For months candidates on the left have been discussing ways to soften the blow of the housing and banking downturns. They have discussed freezing Adjustable rate adjustments, they have discussed freezing forclosures. This of course would put even more pressure on an ailing banking industry. I have heard plans to outlaw sub-prime loans. This would be one of the most destructive actions I can think of. These loans are made to people with sub-par credit. Sub prime loans made to serious people with good reason to take this risk are perfectly appropriate. The extent that they were used was of course the reason for the problem. They were over sold by banks and over used by borrowers. Portraying these loans as predatory is wrong. It makes one party of a mutually agreed upon transaction a villain. People need to be serious about the actions they take with their money. By extension a bailout of these loans would also be destructive. The expectation would be that taking inappropriate risk and failing would be bailed out, and would reduce the seriousness that people would use in considering these loans.

The different packages for stimulus are also of concern. Many Democrats want tax rebates paid to people who did not pay taxes. This is nothing more than increased welfare. Much of the reason foreign investors don't trust the dollar is because of excessive spending. This would do nothing to improve this, in fact it would reinforce that opinion. Any stimulus package should consist of actions that increase investment that will create new jobs, expansion etc that would improve long term economic activity. Once again this is being proposed by Republicans. Democrats are proposing exclusively tax rebates. This would cause a one time blip of activity that would not sustain growth. From what we say with the previous rebates we saw most people paying down debt and saving the rebates. While solid behaviors, this does not spur economic activity.

Understanding markets is important and even vital for people that want to be our nations leaders. It should not be the exclusive province of one party. It has become that. Future expansion of our prosperity depends on serious consideration of economic policy, not goodies to the highest bidder as measured in votes.

The Religion of Change

2008-01-04T12:51:00.001-05:00

Political observers love to talk about change. At any given time it seems that every non-incumbent politician calls him or herself the agent of change. In 2006 the Democrats came to power promising to be the party of change.

The 2008 political season began last night in Iowa. I am somewhat an outside observer, as I have no candidate I stand behind at this point. It seems like the caucus goers in Iowa bought the change argument by choosing Huckabee and Obama.

Change is very popular because surveys tell us all the time that people are not happy with the direction of the country. This is always misinterpreted to mean that the party in power is the reason. These same surveys usually tell us that they are happy with their own lives and mostly optimistic about their own future. What about this, then? We are a diverse people. While the parties are split fairly evenly with most people today identifying themselves as Democrats, the coalitions in the parties are very diverse. In any year a factory worker in the Midwest may describe himself as a Republican, but then a year or two later as a Democrat. The extremes of both parties are what is static. Someone who is interested in nationalizing health care, is always going to identify themselves as a Democrat. Someone whose top issue is anti abortion will nearly always be a Republican.

The middle is what changes. We as voters need to define what change means to us. The change that Barak Obama promises is very different than the change that Mike Huckabee will promise. Additionally change for change sake is not always good. After 2006 when the House and Senate Democrats promised change, and they did to a point. They accomplished very little, but passed a lot of non-binding resolutions detailing what they believed in. In each budget bill they still pass tons of earmarks, they push the military to the point of nearly running out of money, but of course don't have the courage to cut off funding for Iraq and Afghanistan even though their number one promise to their faithful is just that. So here we are in their second year, and very little real change. That is usually the case. The reason is simple. As soon as they take office they are the incumbent and have to start defending their position that they will have to run for in either two or six years forward. They then have to not offend anyone. At that point some other politician starts planning their campaign of change.

My advice, demand to know what change means to each politician planning it. Ask yourself, can this actually happen? The democrats promised to get our of Iraq. Did they have a change with a slim two vote majority in the Senate and a Republican President? Of course not. They promised to return to fiscal responsibility and fiscal transparency. Did they have a chance? Their entire platform depends on giving more services to the people. How can they do that and be fiscally responsible? Again no chance. My last advice, lets all be grown ups. If it sounds like someone in government promising to give you services, provided by government more efficiently than private enterprise and not raise your taxes, ask yourself if this is possible. On the other side, if a Republican tells you they can solve immigration problems in one term ask yourself if this is possible. They need to give us real plans, that have a chance to be enacted that will make the problems we face better. If they tell you they have a program to be administered by government that will solve our problems, ask them if they are selling the Brooklyn Bridge as well. You have as much chance of buying the bridge than those programs being passed and working.

I have a secret

2007-12-18T12:59:00.000-05:00

Don't tell anyone, but I don't care that Mitt Romney is a Mormon, nor that Mike Huckabee is a Baptist and that Hillary Clinton is a Methodist. If it mattered I would be a Hillary Clinton supporter since I am a Methodist. I am anything but a Hillary supporter.

Much has been made of values voters ever since they were 'discovered' in 2004. This election cycle has been about all religion all the time it seems lately anyway. I have somewhat of a suspicious belief that our Mainstream media sees this as a way to make religious people look silly.

I look for a candidate that agrees with my values. There is no candidate right now that I am 100% behind, religious or not. I have very little agreement with the Mormon church on theological matters, but I will not be attending the church of Mitt Romney. If he is the Republican candidate I will have to decide if he is the proper person to lead our country. I like a lot about Romney, I don't know yet if he is my candidate, but his religion matters not at all.

I am very conservative and consider myself quite religious, but think this debate of Mormon or not Mormon to be silly and a destraction. Here is a question I find interesting: Do the candidates believe that the money I earn is mine or theirs? Do the candidates consider the best way to fix health care to be the free market or a government agency? Do the answers to education concerns lie mostly in families or the Department Of Education? Do we help poor people more by giving them incentives to climb the social ladder, or by giving them handouts? These are important to me, but I see very little of them covered in the news. I hope some citizens agree with me. Time will tell.

Akron, Ohio A case study

2007-12-18T12:36:00.000-05:00

I have written in the past at length my belief that we get the leadership and the republican government (note small r in republican) that we demand. Akron Ohio is a case where I believe this has played out.

Akron Ohio is a medium size city. A former industrial powerhouse as the rubber capitol of the world. Akron like most industrial cities has had its problems. They have a Mayor Don Pluesquallic that has been in office roughly since prohibition. (OK not quite). He is now mayor for life. The only competition he gets is occasionally from within his own party. He is a Democrat but I would object just as much to a Republican in a similar situation. We have one of those in Cuyahoga Falls which is a neighbor to Akron, and I similarly think the voters are wrong.

Recently the City Council chairman Marco Summerville was charged with felony possession of trying to take a gun onto an airplane. Mr Summervile has a gun carry permit but of course that does not entitle him to carry it on a plane. Mr. Summerville plea bargained his sentence to a misdemeanor and went on his way. I have no other grievance with Mr. Summerville other than his current legal troubles. I really don't know what kind of representative he is to his ward.

Yesterday he was re-elected as council president. Mr. Summerville has payed precious little in consequences for his error in bringing a gun onto an airplane. Let's contrast that with what an ordinary citizen might have received for a similar offense. I doubt that the plea process would have gone quite as quickly. Oh I may have forgot to mention that today the Beacon Journal reports that Mr. Summerville immediately has called for the Police chief to resign. I'm sure there is no relationship between his arrest and his call for resignation.

So the city council sees no problem with their council chairman being charged with a felony. I am going to go out on a limb and predict that his voters will overwhelmingly re-elect him when he stands for election. Like most inner cities Akron has a problem with gangs and thugs. Whenever there is a shooting in Akron there is the call for less guns. I don't happen to agree with this call but again we have a council president convicted of gun charges, and ---deafening silence.

My belief has been for some time that when the citizens hold their elected leaders responsible for crime, corruption and outright laziness something will be done. In the article I referenced earlier the Police Union chief referred to Mr. Summerville as "no friend to the Police. I quote:

''The last guy who knows what's good for the police department is Marco Sommerville,'' said Paul Hlynsky, head of the department's Fraternal Order of Police union.
Sommerville ''has never been a friend of the police department. He's made some very anti-police comments during his tenure on City Council.
''The only thing I can figure is Marco has one of his buddies in line to be police chief so he can further his efforts to influence the department. . . . To me, he's the enemy of the police officers.'''

This is of course the statement of one person and a person who may have a grudge, but in my life the Akron city government both in council and the Mayors office have been hostile to the Police department. The very department they need to help keep their inner city safe. My own name for Akron has long been Crack-ron. I grew up in Akron but now am a resident of a local suburb, because I can.

Once again, the voters get the government they deserve, because they keep re-electing it. Shouldn't we demand more of a council president than we would a local truck driver or factory worker? Akron doesn't seem to think so. I'll bet your town doesn't either, unless you are talking about some other representative, they will think theirs is just fine.

Sherrod Brown and the Big Dipper

2007-12-06T13:11:00.001-05:00

Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown misses the Big Dipper. A news report on local channel 3 tells us that the Senator wrote a letter urging them to keep the roller coaster where it is in the now closed permanently closed Geauga Lake Amusement Park.

So many problems here. Let me say that like the Senator I will miss the park. I had many enjoyable days with my parents and now my kids at this park. Recently it was also the best value in the area for entertainment. That does not preclude the fact that this property belongs to a private entity, Cedar Fair. While Senator Brown did not threaten any kind of legal or legislative action I find his using his official capacity to try to sway a private entity to change their course of action with their property, totally and wholly inappropriate.

Senator it is not you property!!! This gets to the heart of what is ailing our republic today. Politicians see their role as protecting the few over the many. By the few I am not talking about Cedar Fair. I have no love or hate for this corporation. Personally I think amusement parks are too darn expensive. That being said they are private property owners. That means something. Private property rights are at the center of what the founders went to war over, but our modern politicians think they know better what to do with other peoples property than they do. They must not be allowed to stand.

One last point about the roller coaster itself. The company wants to sell it to another park. Senator Brown thinks they should keep it where it is, at a closed amusement park. If it is sold, and refurbished maybe it can give another community enjoyment for another generation, but then there would be no press release if that happened would there?

Hillary Hoover

2007-12-06T07:55:00.000-05:00

Democrats like to keep reminding us about Herbert Hoover. In our revisionist history we all know that Herbert Hoover single handed caused the Great Depression and FDR was the savior. Now of course Hoover deserves blame, but not for the reason that the nanny state party would like.

After the stock market decline and the downturn in the economy, Hoover gathered business leaders to get them to agree not to fire people until things got better. This was a monumentally bad action. While not single handed causing the Depression it did contribute.

Today Hillary Clinton is advocating the same type of policy in the housing slump. She is advocating a moratorium on foreclosures on sub-prime mortgages and a freeze on interest rates for five years. By the way, this is supposed to fix the crisis.

Politicians of all stripes need a victim and a villain (another legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society. Government as savior. A piece for another day). Cases like this where there are no sympathetic characters don't play well for them. While there are exceptions to the generalization, we have banks in the interest of larger profits offered high interest loans to people that usually would not qualify for financing. Used as a way to increase their credit score by responsible people I believe these loans have a legitimate purpose. Banks sold too many of these to bad risks. No sympathy here.

On the other side the vast majority of these were either people who could not afford the loans or people that thought they were going make millions flipping houses. Of course when the sales of homes slowed down these people were stuck with properties they could not afford. Once again few sympathetic characters. When the government steps in to help them out, these borrowers will learn that no matter how bad your judgement is, the government will step in to save you. The banks will learn the same thing. No incentive to practice good judgement.

Besides the fact that neither side deserves to be bailed out, this will have disastrous financial consequences. The banks that issued these loans now have to absorb the losses. if prevented from moving to foreclose on these properties in default we will be forcing more strain on their balance sheets. For this sector of the economy to recover it has to get back to receiving money on solvent legitimate loans. Forcing them to tie up this money in bad loans is prolonging the sectors' recession.

The actions by Hoover helped prolong the downturn that turned into the Great Depression. I am not saying if enacted the plan by Ms. Clinton would do that, but for that sector of the economy it could do just that. It could push the duration of this housing slump out years. Presently the economy may be able to withstand the housing slump, but if actions like this stretch its duration and maybe make it worse, the economy may also slip into recession. These are exactly the wrong actions for our economy. We must demand more from our elected leaders than hollow emotional responses to problems. We need adults in Washington. Ms. Clinton clearly is not.

The Forgotten Man

2007-12-01T14:07:00.000-05:00

I finished reading this book a couple of weeks back. (Get it here) My recommendation is get it at the library, buy it from Amazon or borrow it. It is the most important book of its type of our generation.

The history of the Great Depression has been revised so drastically. We were all taught in school how FDR came in and instituted these programs, the Supreme Court tried to thwarted him and after all was implemented all was happy ever after. When looked at closer we see that recovery from the downturn that started the Depression was not realized until World War II.

The most relevant thing is the similarity to today. The most destructive thing that happened in the Depression was the attack on wealth. Taxes were structured simply to target income and wealth. The government made success an enemy. Class warfare was born as political tool. This is very relevant to today. Since Government intervention became such a large part of the plan special interest groups were born. There were always groups that aligned with parties in power, I don't mean to imply that wasn't so. Prior to this period though, the government did not hand out support to one group over another. Throughout our history since then, the spoils of won elections were power and goodies to friendly groups. My person opinion is that Roosevelt and his advisers did not set out to create this way of life, it developed over time.

I do not intend to portray Democrats (Progressives) of that era as conniving disingenuous schemers. I truly believe they believed that government regulation and intervention would be the boost that the average person needed to get over the hump toward success. Careful analysis though shows us that just as today when you set out to help poor people by forcibly taking others' property you hurt the very people you set out to help. You see, the rich are not going to be hurt by higher taxes. They are rich after all. What they will curtail is the actions that help society. They stop putting their capital at risk. Instead of starting or expanding a business, they put it into safer investments. Instead of loaning money to a start up corporation they may invest in government bonds that are tax free.

The relevance to today comes in the things that the Democratic party is planning if they win the White House and both houses of Congress. In the Depression the government decided that electrification was not progressing fast enough. Through the TVA and other such projects they went into competition with private enterprise. There were many companies making great en roads into spreading electricity. Over time these companies either went out of business or changed their business direction. This was tragic. When the crash came one of the few expanding sectors of the economy was energy. Being in direct competition caused them to not invest and be in direct competition with government.

Our equivalent to this is health care. Many companies today are investing in more imaginative health insurance plan. Flexible Savings Accounts are a way to do this. Some companies have gone to high deductible lower cost insurance that only covers high dollar procedures. The savings is turned back to the employees to be spent on day to day medical procedures. With a little loosening of the government lock other market based solutions could come forth. Opening up heath insurance across state lines would add competition and enable dollar savings that way. The 'Universal Health Care' plans being floated in this elections season can only lead to disaster. They will put the government in competition with private enterprise even more and drive more businesses out of the market. They did just that in the nineties when they bought up all of childhood inoculations. They set the price, they set the rules, and the suppliers got out. The logical result then and in the future is shortages. We cannot let that happen. We must empower the market. Only that will make Health care better.

I encourage anyone who may read this to read this book. Follow my link above or get it from the library, but read it. Our future is at stake.

A Bit of the Blahs

2007-11-14T12:36:00.000-05:00

I have been trying to figure out why I have not been motivated to write recently. Like most parents I am a busy person. That has always been true, but for some time I have always found
time to write my thoughts. I'm sure my thoughts are not important to a great many people but they are somewhat therapeutic to me.

I think it may come down to subjects. I mostly write on politics and religion and economics with a heavy concentration on politics. I find myself very disenchanted with politicians. I wonder how many people are with me in that way. I have taken to calling them cult leaders. They spread beliefs that government agents can magically make people's lives better.

I also have come to the belief that there are no candidates that represent my views. Being a fiscal free market conservative I can find candidates I agree with. Being a social pro life conservative I can find candidates that agree with me. Being an integrity minded person there are candidates that fit that as well. Very few candidates have a satisfactory mix of all of those things.

Unlike the mid nineties there are not a lot of candidates that espouse all of these things. For elections there usually comes now choice. For President any of the candidates on the Republican side are preferable to any of the choices on the Democratic side. That doesn't mean that I am excited about any of them.

On issues I find myself writing the same piece nearly every time with a few variations. I feel like I am lecturing the public, which of course is not my intention. Free market economics is a passion in my life. (I may add I am not an economist just interested).

I will in the future continue to look for subjects that interest me, but probably will stay out of the realm of party politics. It just isn't interesting to me anymore. The pursuit of 'my team' over 'your team' just isn't interesting nor productive. The issues behind those parties can be though. Those will be the issues I will tackle.

Perfected Jews?

2007-10-15T16:54:00.000-04:00

I have been away for a bit of time, because my wife had surgery and I have been busy.

The latest Ann Coulter controversy has me in a quandary. Two things I have written about a lot coming together. First Ann is outspoken as usual. I have written before that sometimes I think Ann goes too far. This time I don't think she went too far as much as she explained her point, in a rather clunky way.

I have also written before that I just don't understand the hostility on the left to people who espouse religious belief in public. In this case secular people and left leaning Jewish people (note no right leaning Jews were offended at all at least in a public way) are deeply offended that she used the phrase perfected Jews. I don't know if that is the best way to describe a Jew who has come to believe in Christ as Messiah, but it is a way of describing it.

My confusion comes from this, Christians have a belief, called the 'great commission'. This is not new. It comes from Jesus himself. To quote the bible where it appears:
"And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, "All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." Amen. (Matthew 28:18-20) "

Christians have followed this to various degrees since that date. Some Christians have followed it in evil ways. The Inquisition comes to mind. I don't think Ann Coulter has designs on being a modern day Torquemada. We have all been exposed to a Christian who makes a nuisance of himself (or herself). I personally don't believe this is what Jesus had in mind. It is my belief that it is our job as Christians to introduce non-believers to Christ. Jesus is the one through the holy spirit who brings them to Jesus.

That being said, Ann Coulter did exactly that. She spoke that Christians believe everything Jews believe with the New Testament in addition. The true controversy comes in at this point. The people I have heard and read that are offended by this seem appalled that she would insinuate that Jews are not perfected. First of all her use of perfected does not insist that Christians are perfect, it simply infers that belief in Jesus as the Messiah completes the Old Testament, Jews don't believe that, so there we are. How exactly is that offensive? No one creates petitions to prevent vegans from appearing on network chat shows. They daily insist that we all need to be vegans. Same with feminists. Same with University presidents who invite murderous dictators to Columbia.

Others have brought up that some people that listen to her might be driven to violence against Jews. We of course had the same argument made about the Passion of the Christ. These incidents never came about predictably. This also brings a question, who does Ann Coulter speak for? She is a well known pundit. She is not a politician, she represents no one. If we read Ann are we required to take part in some anti Jewish acts? Of course not. What silliness!! I think Michael Moore is an embarrassment. No one is trying to silence him. Same with Keith Olberman, (although when he gets to zero viewers even he may be silenced).

This is more of the same behavior from the left. They want the absolute right to declare anything a prominent conservative says to be offensive and declare that they no longer have the right to breathe free air. Am I exaggerating? Most leftists want Rush Limbaugh banned from Armed forces radio. The lefts continuous efforts to reinstate the fairness doctrine, and the list goes on. Just a short time ago Barry Manilow would not appear on The View because **gasp** there is a conservative on there!! (He doesn't feel comfortable that the show is mostly liberals, not entirely liberals). What are they afraid of? I continue to be confused. Debate is healthy, so is religious tolerance, even from those who believe they are already tolerant, they love anyone who is not a religious conservative. If they were truly honest I believe they would admit that the conservative part is much more offensive to them than the Christian part. Just my opinion as usual.

Unions and government have sold out workers Part II

2007-09-28T16:11:00.000-04:00

I recently have written two pieces very critical of unions. I want to delve a little into why I am so critical. I am not some raving anti-union bigot. I am simply a free market capitalist. I believe this is very important to our future. I don't believe we can ever go back to a time when the free market totally rules in America, but I believe we need to go back in that direction.

We have a situation in our country that is quickly becoming a crisis. Too many citizens do not have a hunger. I don't mean that in a food and nutrition sense, I say this in a sense of drive. A large majority of us do not have to wonder where our next meal will come from or where to rent payment will come from. We have a good life and we are satisfied. Our children have developed a sense of entitlement. I know this well because my kids seem to have this sense of entitlement.

No entities have had more to do with our sense of entitlement than the Federal government, unions and primary and secondary schools. Competing in the world seems to be a secondary concern to these entities. Unfortunately competing is the primary concern of the rest of the world. The people of India, China, Indonesia are ready and anxious to compete.

A user on Youtube.com has a video called 'Shift Happens'. This video shows a lot of information that should get every one's mind looking in the right direction. On the other hand we have politicians running for Santa Claus and making sure young people never have to compete. Just look at this story from Reuters where Hillary Claus want to give every child a $5000 bank account for college, just for being born. This is nothing short of obscene pandering!!

I am a computer developer. Every day I see so many areas that I need to learn or get better at. I work in an exciting world, but I know as much as anyone that I cannot afford to get behind. My hope is that everyone will see that world and act accordingly. As the people overseas are getting better and better, our people are getting fatter and lazier (yes I include myself in this group). Our founding fathers would be appalled if they saw the work ethic our young display. My fear is they would call for a new Constitutional Congress.

What are my recommendations? Unions and interest groups focus on groups. We must change our focus. Our individual identity is much more important than our group. Only through pursuing our individual excellence can we come back to the prominence our country deserves, and each of us can achieve. Group focus will continue to drive us behind our competition in the world.

Along with our desire to focus on groups, we seem to have a desire for guarantees. We value security rather than risk. Of course risk is scary, but must be explored. The more we demand guaranteed outcomes, the more we will continue to lose. We can only achieve true freedom, through risk. To get security we must give up elements of our freedom. We do this by ceding our economic freedom in exchange for government redistribution of resources.

The most damaging thing the desire for security does is take away our edge. There is a decreasing desire to incur risk, because we don't have to. Society is taking care of us. This takes away our very survival skills. To young people who have never had to excel to get ahead, this is cruel. It takes away the feeling of accomplishing something that is truly difficult. Don't you remember being in school, thinking you could never get a math problem? We all used to have that experience. When you finally figured it out, wow!! what a feeling!!! Don't take that away from our children. Encourage them to strive for true inginuity. Their role models should be Bill Gates, not Paris Hilton. That is my thought anyway.

Unions and government have sold out workers

2007-09-27T12:36:00.000-04:00

I wrote recently about the GM strike. As everyone else I am glad to see the strike amicably settled. Time will tell if the plan to have the union manage the retirement programs will help return GM and ultimately the other two companies(since they will eventually have contracts based on this one) to competitiveness. This of course is the important point, but the unions like to call the agenda one of fairness.

Unions and guilds have been around for a very long time. This is part of history. The modern union came into being a grew around the time of the first Progressive, Teddy Roosevelt. Of course in those days progressive had a different meaning than today. The workers of that era had a very good claim to needing some sort of cohesive representation. They worked like slaves for very low wages and horrible working conditions. That is not arguable. They had a moral right to want change.

As I look back I don't see the need for representation, I see a lack of competition. This of course could not be solved in a short period so the modern labor union was born. Not long after that the progressives in government saw 'unfairness' in the economy as a whole. People like Franklin Roosevelt saw the suffering of ordinary citizens as something that could be fixed by government regulation. The New Deal was born. Good intentions or not the government now became an entity that could be swayed to help. Along came interest groups. So many suffering people, but still scarce resources. How to divide up the pie? In the minds of the Progressives markets could not be trusted to be fair.

Along the way unions became very powerful, based on the argument of fairness. Travel and communication improved. World competition was greatly injured in World War II. Everyone in America had good times. Union workers could now enjoy the good life. The could share in the prosperity that they saw the executives enjoying. Both management and labor saw a trend that they saw no end to.

Along came the sixties. Foreign competition started to improve and American industry started to get old. Market share started to drop. Under a market concept adjustments would have been made, to keep the industries profitable. The unionized industries could not make wage and benefit changes without going to the unions. At the same time the Federal government progressed in their drive to help struggling people. The Great Society was born. A lot of taxes were needed. These came from already struggling businesses and already struggling workers.

We know that in a competitive environment increases in prices can only be passed along to consumers so far as the competitive markets would allow. Since foreign, sometimes subsidized companies were not increasing prices, our industries could not. These businesses needed ways to stay competitive and needed to reduce prices. Businesses moved to lower cost areas in the south. As the big northern cities started to see reductions in their revenue stream, instead of doing what consumers would do, cutting back their size, they increased a phenomena called class warfare. Now the very businesses that employed their citizens were not being called greedy, evil, money grubbing. (To be sure some of these people were all of those things, for exhibiting the same behaviors that governments regularly exhibit). Remember as business's market share, rarely did salary or benefits to unions workers decline. When such a thing was proposed, we got strikes. These hurt the companies, the workers, and the consumers.

After travel and communication improved more of these plants moved offshore. More and more people are put out of work. Along the way suffering people came to believe that they had a legitimate claim to other peoples money. Federal largesse became the rule. The thought of getting additional education, or starting a business for themselves never occurred or other ways to help themselves didn't occur to a growing percentage of people. Along the same period education got worse and children don't learn about economics, and government like they should. So here we are today, with an uneducated electorate who largely have no idea how supply and demand work, have no idea what our founders believed to be important, but can tell us everything about Brad and Angelina, and Brittany.

We are reaping what we have sewed. Government and unions have not been in conspiracy together, but through similar beliefs, they have given us the same sad outcomes. This condition is reversable, but not until we start to teach people why govenment and unions are selling our their future.

Is John Edwards Running for King?

2007-09-27T07:14:00.000-04:00

Someone tell John Edwards he is running for President and not king. He made a statement that he will tell the Congress, the Cabinet and the Vice President that if they do not enact universal health care by 2009 they will lose theirs.

Congress is the only body capable of doing that. Remember the President does not spend a single dime, and if no bill comes to his desk, he can't do a single thing. The best thing he can do is use the bully pulpit to shame the Congress into acting. Hopefully they won't have the votes.

The problem here is that John Edwards seems to see every campaign stop and every candidates forum as a closing argument, where you can say pretty much anything you want and it is free time. No need to be particularly accurate just blather.

Edwards spent six years as a Senator, so he knows how the government works. This makes it worse. He knows there are lots of people out here saying "You go John!!!'. He is preying on their emotions and using their worries about health care to be a major demagogue. This is sick!!

Hopefully he will never be elected, but continues to be the most entertaining candidate. It would be Dennis Kucinich if he weren't so darn annoying.

Why GM Must hold the Line

2007-09-25T20:45:00.000-04:00

The United Auto Workers are on strike and seem to be dug in for the long haul. I personally believe they are hurting their own workers. The auto makers have moved many plants offshore and it is my belief a bad settlement will make them move even more. More and more auto workers will be out of work, and even more bitterness will ensue. The union wants guarentees of job security. Those of us who work in the real world know this is not possible. If my company loses customers and cannot pay me, I have no job security. This is a given in the work world. It needs to be accepted by union workers as well.

Unions in our present world exist for the purpose of forcing companies to pay above market wages and benefits at the end of a rhetorical gun. I have stated this before and believe it to be true. The argument from the union leaders is always the same, "The company has not bargained fairly". Bargaining fairly is always equivalent to giving the union everything they want. I ask a simple question, if all the workers were replaced, would qualified people be able to be hired and trained in a short time for less compensation? I believe this to be true. What that tells me is that they are paid above market wages and benefits currently, and are demanding more.

Union workers are this is all about fairness. The fact is this cannot be used as a measure because fairness is a relative term and measure. Is it fair that they make much more than other factory workers that are not in a union? I personally choose not to get into that because I for one believe it to be irrelevant. Every worker should get as much he or she can, but should be determined by the free market and not how well your negotiator can convince the other party that they will suffer.

The auto companies also have no point of sympathy with me. They have put themselves in a horrible competitive situation. They need to address this and now. The longer they put it off the more likely they will be to have horrible financial consequences. They have expensive long term commitments to present retirees. They must pay these and they must not try to avoid them. They must however make changes to future retirees. Morally they need to honor the people close to retirement. The younger workers are another matter. They must make changes and require them to contribute more to their own retirement and benefits. If that is not acceptable, they can make other employment decisions. The rest of the labor market contributes much more to their own retirement and health insurance. Auto workers should not be privileged beyond other workers. The sooner this happens the sooner we will begin to slow the loss of manufacturing jobs. (A corporate tax cut would also help, but that is a different piece).

The foreign auto companies do not face nearly the fixed expenses the American companies do. This is not just salaries, it is due to retirement, health benefits, resolution of grievances and litigation to name just a few. These costs prevent the companies from truly improving quality and making a competitive product.

The workers feel that they are singled out to give back with nothing from management. I agree with them. Unfortunately cutting executive compensation will not help significantly due to the vast size of the companies and probably hurt their ability to draw good executives. What can and should be done though, is to tie executive compensation closely to results. Companies have tried to do that in the past with some good results. The metrics have to be closely and carefully defined though. Just tying it to stock price or bottom line profit can result in short term gains that can produce long term disasters. It is a difficult thing they need to do, but essential.

This strike may be a long drawn out expensive endeavor. It may also save the American auto industry. It could also break it.

I'm still confused

2007-09-14T12:19:00.000-04:00

I have written about the radical atheists before but I am still confused. Of course I am talking about Kathy Griffin. She calls herself a radical atheist. Of course that is her right. I still don't know why these folks are so offended that the rest of us believe in an all powerful and loving God.

It doesn't change my life one bit that she does not, other than I do worry about her soul, but again how does that affect her? Christians admit to to being imperfect and accept imperfection in others. Of course there are exceptions, there are people who profess Christianity who are just boorish. Every group has these.

As for award shows, let us think about acceptance speeches. While there are some people who thank God or Jesus. I would say the majority of these shows are more likely to make what I believe to insufferable remarks about global warming, how President Bush is stupid, how President Bush is evil or some other such remark. While I find these to be silly and offensive, my actions involve, not watching them. Maybe our atheist friends should think about that.

I want Obesity Offsets

2007-09-10T12:47:00.000-04:00

I have written before about carbon credits (in a not so friendly manner). OK this is with tongue firmly planted in cheek that I write this. Think about other areas that purchasing offsets can help.

I have a long battle I wage on obesity and am losing. What if I pay for efforts for anti obesity PSA's, or maybe contribute to diabetes organizations. Shouldn't that offset my 'Fat Footprint'?

How about Senator Craig. Shouldn't he be able to get an 'I am stupid enough to think my bathroom exploits would remain a secret offset'? He could give money to lobby that all arrests to men who do creepy things in bathrooms a secret.

Maybe the Cleveland Browns (yes I am an embarrased fan) could get incompetant Quarterback offsets.

I could go on like this for hours, because the who concept of gazillionaire politicians and celebrities to tool around in Gulf streams and SUV's and pay for carbon offsets is galactic stupidity, but isn't it time for the rest of the world to call them on it? I really thought by now this practice would be totally embarrassing to them by now, but they still do it.

Maybe it is time for someone to nail 95 thesis to Al Gores door, with a carbon copy to John Edwards!

Will the Left continue to Repeat their Mistakes of the Past

2007-09-10T12:33:00.000-04:00

In the communist era we had two groups had helped the communists very much. The follow travelers who were true believers sometimes in the open and sometimes not. There were also the useful idiots. These were people who were not communists but through their actions assisted the communists. We forget about these people because very few people are outright communists in the world today, save Castro and Hugo Chavez.

Today as we get another tape from Osama bin Laden we are reminded of this era. To listen to the rhetroric in many spots he sounds like someone from MoveOn.Org. While I don't believe the people from Moveon for the most part hate America and want to see us destroyed, but their rhetoric plays right into the hands of the Bin Ladens of the world who do want our civilization destroyed. I don't think there will be any fellow travelers in this battle. I can't see any life long lefties converting to Islam, (that would sure cut into their cocktail parties) but their hatred of everything that traditional America believes in plays right into their hands. As we hear more of the tape, think about where you have heard of these speeches before, the American left, both the Democratic party and the Greens and other hard left organizations. (As usual this does not imply that all Democrats or Greens want to see America destroyed. I reference the left. Many democrats are centrsts and not hard left leaning people, just like not all Republicans are conservative. It feels so tedious to always point this out but someone may read this that haven't read other things I have written and not understand what I mean by the left).

We must remember our hatred of a single or multiple pieces of public policy can not get in the way of fighting true evil. Bin Laden just like the Communists and Nazi's before them represent true evil and will use anything to accomplish their aims, and if that means utilizing the rhetoric of poltical organizations to accomplish it they will do it.

Time To Define Compassion

2007-09-07T21:11:00.000-04:00

Dictionary.com defines compassion as:
com·pas·sion /kəmˈpæʃən/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[kuhm-pash-uhn] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun
1.
a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering. –verb (used with object)
2.
Archaic. to compassionate.

In out present day world we see compassion displayed in many ways. Most are very legitimate. We have people who selflessly spend many hours of their lives doing for others. We have people that give huge sums of money. Bill Gates is one of these people. Great admiration is due all of these people.

The people I want to talk about today are the ones who use compassion as an argument to further political agenda. I am not saying that these people are not sincere, on the contrary I believe the vast majority of them are. They truly believe their actions will help the people that they are lobbying for. Most often I believe their actions make themselves feel better, but it doesn't help others. I believe they are wrong. My opinions may be controversial. I do not intend them to be offensive, but no doubt some will see it that way. That is regrettable. If you read this please read it in the way it was intended, an alternative way of thinking intended to help.

There are so many examples I want to take just a couple. Inner city poor people are victims of this syndrome. Many of these people, but certainly not all are in their predicament because of bad personal choices. One of the most destructive choices we see is young women who have children in high school or shortly afterward. It is considered compassionate to sign the young woman up for many government programs and she and her future child become a virtual ward of the state. The intention of this of course is so she can use the help to assist her in getting her education, and try to get a leg up on beginning her life on her own. Personally I don't see how this can be compassionate. This young woman of course can have the baby killed in the first three months as it is her right to do by a thing called Roe vs. Wade, also not compassionate.

The alternative that far too few women choose is adoption. I see this as one of the most compassionate things she can do for her unborn child. The child can be given a family that most likely will have a mother and father who are prepared and capable of giving the baby a home. What the young woman has to look forward to is long hours trying to make a living, maybe going to school and in the spare time trying to find some time to love her baby. This time often gets left out. I believe each of these women try their level best to be a great mother. It is just too big of a job for one person. This is seen as compassion. If the multitude of government programs did not exist, many more of these young women would make the choice that benefits their unborn child, adoption. That would be compassion. The baby gets a home and the woman gets the chance to pursue her life and dreams.

One more area I want to talk about for this piece. Government support. Political people on the left and right have very different ideas about what is compassionate for the poor. People on the left believe that government programs are compassionate. People on the right tend to believe that charity programs, often faith based charities are compassionate. My view of course is that government programs are cruel. People who may be down on their luck, or habitual get a one size fits all program that gives them subsistence, not a living. Again, some people use this as a chance to get their lives back on track. Far too many get trapped into a life of subsistence. This inevitably leads to bitterness and despair. It is a bureaucracy, not help. Faith based charities offer people a new outlook. They offer a meal, comfort and often real life help. I believe this is compassion. People who live on government support know they won't get rich, their lives won't get very much better. In time this leads again to despair. People who are helped by charities may or may not get a better life, but they are told they can make a better life by people who genuinely care. The people in the government side also care, but are overloaded, and limited by what they can give. This is not compassion. The despair I spoke of before inevitably takes away survival skills. This is cruel in my way of thinking.

Even if everyone saw my way of thinking tonight, pulling the rug out from under people could not and should not happen. Too many of these people have no idea how to support themselves. Additionally not all government programs should be taken away. People who are not physically able to work need to be helped. Other such circumstances as well. Gradually taking away the duplicated programs until the able bodied start to be able to take care of themselves. I see this as compassionate. I don't believe it is easy, but I do believe it is necessary. As a society we need to looks at what works, not what feels good.

I for One am Bored With Larry Craig

2007-08-31T12:31:00.001-04:00

This is a scandal that profoundly affects a single Senator and his family and his constituents. Why then is it story number one for a week? I think that is because it gives the MSM and the TV and radio talkers a subject to bluster about. From the left this proves once and for all that Republicans are hypocrites. From the right it is no big deal, if you compare it to perjury by a President or the exploits of Barney Frank.

There is talk of him resigning. I think it is the right thing for him to do, but not because he may or may not have played footsie with an undercover cop. It is the right thing to do because he violated the trust of his constituents. He put his own job security above the reputation that his voters entrusted to him. He made himself a target of possible blackmail (although this is not charged) and extortion.

He also kept an important detail from his family and staff. This shows serious lack of judgement. All history shows that he was a good Senator and good to his constituents. That does not override the dishonesty he showed in this incident.

If he does not resign, should he be removed? I don't know about that. If we as a society held leaders to account then maybe. We have proven many times that we do not have any desire to hold public officials accountable for their actions. The voters return Ted Kennedy to office dutifully every six years. The voters returned Barney Frank after admitting to basically running a gay brothel out of his apartment. (The key offense being the virtual brothel not being gay). In Ohio we didn't require any accountability to Bob Taft for ethics violations. Washington D.C. elects Marion Barry every time he runs. He is a walking indictment. The list goes on and on. With precedent being what it is, he probably should not be removed. That does not mean he should ever hold office again.

As I write this I am reminded of what I have written many times in many forms, and that is, we get the leaders we deserve. If we don't hold them accountable, why should they be accountable?

Oh well lets move on.

Union Thugs with Mac Books

2007-08-25T13:07:00.000-04:00

This is a piece I am somewhat tortured over. I know several teachers and professors and they are all very fine people. For reason of my personal experience, let me say I am very pro teacher, but very much anti-teacher union.

Labor unions exist in this country to force employers at the end of a rhetorical gun to pay above market wages. This cannot be denied. The beginning of organized unions had people slaving in mines for horrible wages. This also cannot be denied. They had the moral right to organize, that much is true again. The overall effect of the union movement though, is less than successful for society as whole. It flies in the face of all economic laws of supply and demand.

The unions I will focus on in this piece of course are the teacher unions. Unions always say they want the employer to bargain fairly. When I first heard this expression as a kid it sounded fair to me. Add to that the fact that my father was a union worker it seemed a no brainer. As an adult I learned about economics and learned to think beyond slogans. I have come to understand the bargain fairly means giving them whatever they ask for.

I was somewhat disgusted this summer because the school district my son attends was faced with a possible strike. Happily it has been settled prior to the school year. At least two times my sons teacher from the last school year sent us emails telling us the 'status' of the talks. The status was of course colored to the opinion that the teachers were being hosed as usual. Now I am no lover of school boards, but they did not have the luxury of sending me emails telling us of the status. This would have been bargaining fairly to me. In reality I didn't want to hear from either side. Both sides are professionals that we pay to do an important job, namely educating our most precious asset, our children. Taking sides with either of them to me is fruitless. To me they just need to get it done, without trashing each other in the media. I also have come to resent the local news crews going out to find a cute blond haired kid telling us how horrible it is that their beloved teacher doesn't get to make as much money as they would like.

The laws of supply and demand tell us that the higher the supply of something, the less you will be able to charge. This works with cans of soup, with gallons of gasoline, with professional baseball and football players, we but we are to believe it is unfair to have this apply to teachers. In northeast Ohio where I live there is an extreme glut of teachers. Many can't find jobs because the population of most communities are laying off teachers, due to lower populations. Still this being known more people keep going into the field, why is this? I believe a number of reasons, first and foremost I hope they enjoy teaching children. Remember I am not anti-teacher. Second there is the knowledge that once they get a job there is a good chance that they are going to have that job for as long as they want it. Tenure and the union rules make it nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher. Teachers in most markets also enjoy phenomenal benefits. This is true of most union jobs. When you factor the paid benefits into their salaries it can increase their overall compensation by tens of thousands of dollars. For K-12 teachers there is also the fact that they have summers off. This is great for teachers with families.

The thing that grates on my nerves is when I hear of people complaining they don't make enough money. Economics tells us that if the price is too low for a product suppliers will not come into the market. The fact that more and more young men and women come into the market tells me the overall compensation including enjoyment, pay, benefits etc. must be adequate. We all wish we could be paid more, but if we feel this enough, we can change careers. I did just that about fifteen years ago and am very glad I did. This doesn't seem to occur to union workers, and government workers. This is a shame. Maybe they could use a primer in economics.

When did Activism become Narcissim

2007-08-23T20:50:00.000-04:00

I have been absent for a while. Partially from laziness, partially because nothing in the news has caught my eye. It is sort of the lazy time of the summer. My baseball team (the Indians) are not playing well, but are in first place. My fantasy team is about to be knocked out of any chance for the playoffs. Oh well you can't win every year.

So without compelling day to day subjects here is a general one that has been gnawing at me. It seems that conspiracy theories, both political and not, are prevalent. Extremism is so common in all beliefs. What used to activism in politics has been replaced by something else. I call it narcissism.

Throughout the history of our nation political disagreements have been normal. Some of these have been aggressive. The tales are endless. This is healthy. At the end of the day though, the founders and in every period save the Civil War period, we as a nation have been able to come together as one nation.

What is different today? We have important issues. Every period had important issues. The early years had our leaders trying to do something that had never been done before. Those are important issues. The post civil war years saw us trying to put our nation back together. That was difficult. The Progressive years of Teddy Roosevelt and William Taft saw a subtle shift in the role of government. These again were important issues. Most of the last century saw of battling and arguing over whether or not to go to war. Very important issues.

When I try to analyze what makes today different, I see a period like none before. That difference is narcissism. Never before have so many people not had a belief in something bigger than themselves. Call it secularism, call it atheism, call it what you want I call it narcissism. Now mind you I do not mean to imply that those of faith are not narcissistic. I put myself in that same category many times.

I believe in past days, we would fight over issues, we would vote and sometimes our side lost. In previous times, we would argue, fight and cajole. When it was said and done the losers would lick their wounds, and prepare to battle the next time. I see it a little different in modern society. When a side loses, be it political or non, we see bitter accusations of anti-American motives, accusations of conspiracy, or people calling each other evil, and other such hateful expressions.

Why is it different now. I of course do not know for sure, but my theory is that our narcissism will not allow us to believe that the mainstream of our country could possibly disagree with us. Since more than ever before we tend to see ourselves almost God like, we believe that every one else that disagrees with us cannot be right, they just can't. That belief in hand they see any actions to prove that as justified. It becomes an obsession. Look at Hollywood. Whatever it takes to make them happy is OK. Today seven years later, even with their blessed New York Times telling them otherwise, some Democrats believe George Bush stole the election of 2000. Today even though there is no evidence of it anywhere, a small active portion of the right is convinced George Bush is trying to create a North American Union similar to Europe. The examples of this go on and on. Let me stress again disagreement is American and healthy, obsessive belief in fairy tales is not. I have my own obsessions. I too fight my own narcissism. I try not to pass it on to my children.

My answers? Take it a little easy. If you are secular or atheist, consider that those of us who do believe are not three headed monsters, we just believe in a faith, whether it be Christian, Judiasm, Islam etc. If you are of faith, talk to an atheist, consider the same, they are not from outer space, we can believe ardently that the other side is wrong, but we must believe they are just as American as we are. Argue, argue passionately, just don't shut out reality. If an issue doesn't go right, try another plan, don't make up fairy tales and straw men to explain what went wrong. We will all benefit.

Do Ideas Follow Money?

2007-07-21T10:08:00.000-04:00

The free market stipulates that money follows opportunity, not the other way around. This came to mind the other day when I was reading an amazon review of a book I was considering. The book is The Forgotten Man A New History of the Depression by Amity Shlaes. I have not read the book although I did purchase it, and I know nothing of the person Bill Edley who describes himself as a "Former Illinois Legislator".

In his review he starts out with "Funded by a corporate elite Think Tank". The phrase "funded by" and then some organization is supposed to tell us that that person is not independent by beholden to some entity. Those of us that understand and follow economics know that that is not possible except in people that are already corrupt. We may have a few of those people in public life but I don't believe that is the norm.

The reviewer does not tell us what think tank funded her, which I believe is telling in itself. Even if he did and it is true what is the harm of that. Think tanks are what they say. They are paid to think of solutions and policy. They are funded by people that agree with them. Free market believers fund free market think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. Liberal think tanks include American Progress Action and The Rockridge Institute.

I want to stress here, these people on both sides have no power to legislate, no power to regulate. They do have some influence on legislators, but again this is not because of money it is usually because the legislators agree with them. What is wrong with them funding projects they agree with? I say nothing, it is the market at work. The more successful a think tank is depends on how many projects they come up with that encourage people to give them money. That sounds like market economics to me. The problem here is too many people have been conditioned to believe that money in politics equals corruption. The sponsors of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill in Congress signed by President Bush went beyond inferring that many times. We now have enough time gone by to see that this law did nothing to curb money, to the contrary it increased money in politics. Instead of the money being given to candidates it now goes often to 3rd party entities called 527 groups. The best know being MoveOn.org and on the right The Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, although the latter existed primarily as an anti John Kerry group where the former is a left wing action group. Left wingers at this time dominate this market. Personally I would rather have the money going to candidates. They are beholden to someone, the people who elect them. MoveOn.org is only beholden to their contributors. While there is free market at play, the national interest may or may not be. This is the case with all 527's I don't mean to disparage MoveOn alone. They ideas do that all by themselves.

This belief is a fundamental misunderstanding of how money works in markets. This is not surprising given the misunderstanding we see daily in the media. A real life case in point of money not changing policy is Enron. Ken Lay was a major contributor to President Bush before and after he was elected. When Enron got into trouble President Bush was asked and refused to bail out the company. It has always been my believe that a President Gore would have bailed it out. I don't believe that money would have been a factor, I believe he would have done it to try to help our the people that lost their jobs. I believe if that had happened it would have set a bad precedent. Once again money ahead of ideas does nothing.

I will read this book and when I finish I will give me thoughts on it even though I am not a legislator nor an expert on the Depression.

An Election Based on Clarity

2007-07-16T21:28:00.000-04:00

The last election has been debated at length. The change of power from Republican to Democrat has been labeled many things. One of the most important things that happened is that the ruling elites (Democrat elites) now feel increasingly comfortable telling us what they believe.

For years the leftists in the leadership of the Democratic party, were socialistic in their beliefs but were a little shy about telling the country how they believed. Their pronouncements were usually to friendly crowds. When the spotlight of national cameras was on them the message was decidedly centrist.

This year the message from the Presidential hopefuls is decidedly left. Part of this is because that is where their money comes from. MoveOn.org, and the Michael Moore crowd seem to be a major part of the Democrats funding now and are demanding action. The money men are already edgy that Congress is still funding the war.

All of the candidates are openly advocating for national health care of some kind. All are pushing hard to pull out of Iraq. All are explaining some sort of 'leveling of the playing field' which equates to bringing the middle class and wealthy down to the level of the poor. All of these are decidedly left wing ideas. Call it socialistic. None of these people are socialists, they don't advocate for taking of private property or other Marxist ideas, but they certainly see government as the white knight. I have never seen them so bold.

What this means is that the Republicans should have an easy sell. Explaining why socialism is a bad thing is not that difficult. The problem here is that I'm not sure how many Republicans believe that any more. A good percentage do to be sure, but they are not vocal enough. This is why it makes for an interesting election. I have believed for all of my years following politics that if capitalism is run against socialism it is a no-brainer. Now that it seems to be happening, I am a little concerned. We need a few capitalists to even it out. What lies in the balance is our Republic. Another bad loss can put us drastically in the area of a European socialists Republic. That is not exactly the end of the Republic, but take it from me, what I saw in Canada last week, I don't want to live under.

What I learned on my Summer Vacation

2007-07-14T10:36:00.000-04:00

This week I packed up the family and went north. We went on vacation to Toronto and Niagra Falls. We experienced the normal family vacation things. The kids whined, the wife spent and spent and spent, and I sweated (yes the first part of the week was very hot).

It has been eight years since my wife and I have been to Canada. It is a nice place to visit, if you have a lot of money. The unfavorable exchange rate (2.5 cents when we got there) makes it very hard to make ends meet since the cost of living, at least in the areas we were is much higher than in Ohio. It always was, but in the past the favorable exchange rate made it easier to tolerate.

Along the way we nearly got to experience the health care system that many of our politicians want to give us. On Tuesday my daughter fell on her wrist and was in great pain. I asked at the front desk of the hotel about where to go for health care. They told me there were several clinics nearby but if an x-ray was needed we could only go to hospital. He warned me that since I was from the US I would have to pay cash which I expected, but also that the standard wait in the emergency room was about 4 - 8 hours. That I also expected. In our good fortune there was a man checking in that had some experience with emergency first aid and took a look at her and assured us it was only a sprain and with some ice and Motrin would be fine soon. He was correct and two days later she didn't feel it at all.

Contrast that with what would happen here . Of course someone out of the country would still have to pay cash, but here they would be able to go to an urgent care center, there are several in our vicinity. This would make it much cheaper than going to a hospital. Whether at an urgent care or at the hospital the wait at the worst is going to be 2 - 3 hours. This experience backs up what I believe will happen if we let the socialistic politicians carry the day.

Lets look into the future a bit. If the Dem's win and pass a national health care initiative I believe it will be much like Canada's. Everyone will gave a basic health care package. Beyond that private employers can and will provide more. You can bet the employers that are not providing care today will not be providing care then. The government provided plan will put price caps on drugs, which will mean of course that the older drugs will be provided with no problems, but any new drugs that will save lives but are expensive will not be available to this plan. The net effect will be that the wealthy and middle class will still be getting much better care than the poor. This of course will be a rallying cry for the class warriors and they will work on making the government plan more and more inclusive. For that to happen more and more will have to come out in taxes. This will cause less and less businesses to expand here, to move here and to in source here. Our economy will slowly shrink and become much closer to socialism that it is not.

Don't let Michael Moore fool you. National Health care is not the way.

Misapplied Principles

2007-07-03T12:48:00.000-04:00

Political enthusiasts like to use principles to describe their positions. It simply sounds better to say you are following a principle than to say it is best for my political side. This like many of misapplied words degrades the state of political discourse in our society.

I am referring of course to the decision made by President Bush to commute the sentence of Lewis 'Scooter' Libby. People are already using the reasoning to oppose it by saying lying under oath is always wrong. Conservatives including myself used the same reasoning to explain why President Clinton should have been impeached and convicted.

Liberals that herald principles to explain why this is wrong but President Clinton was not so much wrong. Likewise conservatives en masse think what happened to Libby was wrong from the beginning but the impeachment of President Clinton was completely correct. Liberals don't agree with impeachment and conservatives don't agree with the conviction of Libby. Who is correct?

Well in a word everyone. First of all we are all wrong as well. Using principles to explain a political position in this case is a weak case to make. First of all, the cases are not similar. Clinton clearly lied to avoid being held liable in a civil case. Libby was being investigated for something that was never a crime, the prosecutor knew the answer and whether Libby knew his statement was wrong is not clear. The overwhelming point I am making is that there is no principle at stake here, it is a debate of a political issue. While President Clinton did lie, did it rise to high crimes and misdemeanors. That has been debated to death and the winning answer to my mind is that reasonable people can disagree. Reasonable people cannot disagree about something that truly is a principle. Should Libby have been convicted? Once again that is truly up to debate. Principles are not debatable.

Political topics should be argued and argued passionately. Principles are more static (although never completely static. They can change over time). Lying is bad, Murder is evil, Honesty is to be practiced to the best of our ability. These are principles.

For my belief there is a perfectly good argument to be made to commute the sentence of Lewis Libby. There is even a case to be made to pardon him. Likewise we there is a reasonable case to be made either for or against impeaching Clinton. Right or wrong the voters did not buy the Republican case for it and punished them in public opinion and at the ballot box. Ultimately that is where these political issues are best decided.

What's Next?

2007-06-28T12:55:00.000-04:00

The voting is going on as I write but it seems for now the immigration bill is going to be defeated. I wrote previously that I am against it in its current form. This vote therefore is a success in my eyes.

We must look to what is next. Illegal immigration as an issue cannot and will not go away. Conservatives and conservative talk radio was instrumental in defeating this measure. This means that Republicans in congress and conservatives in the media are obliged now to come up with something. Just stating "enforce the laws on the books" is not enough. The draw for illegals is jobs. It is simply too difficult for employers to vet prospective employees for legal status and the penalties for those who knowingly hire illegals is too soft. This must change. What to do about the illegals already here is a huge question. It simply is not possible to round them all up and send them back logistically. What also about the kids they leave behind? Many of them are citizens. Do they stay here? Do we deport citizens? (of course by law that can't happen).

It is time for us in the conservative movement to step up and be for something. We are increasingly against everything. In the next congress this issue will come up again. We must pass something. Voters will not give control back to the Republicans until they show the voters they aren't the same bunch they threw out last year.

You may ask why if I was against this bill am I critical of conservatives and republicans in congress? It is simple. It is the rhetoric that I hear every day.The Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan prodigies are taking the stage. If I had to guess what would fix the problem two things would help. Increasing the penalties and making it easier to identify illegals. Conservatives in this camp are also against any attempt to issue national ID cards and some are against putting more pressure on business through higher penalties. Increased enforcement which we clearly need costs money. We conservatives typically do not like increased government spending. The fact remains none of the things I just outlined are possible outside of a comprehensive bill unless we get 60 conservatives in the Senate, because Democrats will not vote for a bill only stocked with enforcement measures. Republicans will not vote for anything that only 'normalizes' current illegals. That being known we are left with the current system that simply isn't working.

So, the question I put forth is still out there, Where do we go from here? This is one that I just don't have the answer to. This problem did not occur over night and will not be fixed with one comprehensive bill. Americans come up with innovative solutions. It is time for that to happen. It is also time for some leader in the public sector to come up with a solution and not just be against everything.

Random Thoughts about the Paris Hilton Stories

2007-06-28T07:40:00.000-04:00

America loves celebrity. I have never understood the extent America loves celebrity. My wife is probably tire of me asking "Why do I need to know what (blah blah blah fill in the celebrity) is thinking today?" Every time I go the grocery store I see the usual stories about Jennifer Aniston, Angelina Jolie etc etc.

Paris Hilton is probably one of my least favorite celebrities. The reason is that at least the actors have done something to be famous, they have been in well watched TV shows or movies. This girl is famous as far as I can see for being born to rich parents and being pretty. None of which she had anything to do with. (OK she was in a TV show with another vapid famous offspring). The message she sends to young people is that accomplishment and excellence are not as important as looks and who your parents are.

Hollywood shows follow these people around like puppy dogs. So we have a rich girl who goes to jail. She says she has found god and she will change her life. I hope she is telling the truth. Only time will tell. I am somewhat doubtful because she is what she was raised to be, a spoiled rich socialite. To suddenly turn on a dime and be something else who truly be a miraculous event. I do believe God can do anything so it is possible.

Larry King had her on his show. (Will it surprise anyone that I did not watch it?) Ms. Hilton has a chance to show young women all over the world that accomplishment and intelligence is more important than celebrity. I personally think she is trapped in the system that created her. If she does do this she won't be interesting to the hoards that follow her like the proverbial puppy dog. They will move on to someone else interesting. I am not sure ms Hilton can live with that. I do wish her well though. I sent a night in jail twenty years ago for DUI and it did teach me a lesson. Hopefully she will learn hers.

The constitution Relies on Checks and Balances

2007-06-27T12:37:00.000-04:00

The American Constitution is to my reading the most effective, governing document ever penned. This has always been true. It's beauty is in the checks and balances it employs, the Congress checks the Executive and Judicial branches and each of them likewise.

There is one check that is not being employed effectively I believe. That is the check the voting public has on the Executive and Legislative branches and the Judicial in that our representatives pick the judges at the federal level. Currently activists, you might say the extreme of both sides of the picture are absolutely convinced that the elected officials aren't listening. A small but vocal part of the left wants to impeach the President and Vice president (of course making the very liberal Speaker Pelosi President). The right stops just short of calling for armed revolt over the impending immigration bill that has not even been passed. In fairness I also am against it, but am not as rabid as many I have heard.

I will not argue about the premise that the leaders aren't listening. I think that has been true for quite a while. My question is why does this surprise any of us. In any election a vast majority of people don't bother to vote. We return nearly all of incumbants to office. Any man in the street interview shows us that far too many people are more interested in the comings and goings of Paris Hilton than they are of the future financing of Social Security, Medicare and health care. People can tell you about these celebrities but can't pick out a picture of the Vice President. People are not fulfilling their responsibility to be informed and vote accordingly. By saying this I do not call for everyone to agree with me just to make their voice known.

There are two sides to this. I believe more people need to vote. Along with this though, if you are going to vote blindly I would rather you not vote. The problem here is there are many people that are trying to just get by and all of their time goes to supporting themselves, and their families, both in time and money. Staying informed is sometimes difficult and the little news they get comes from the mainstream media which is not dependable to do much besides fill us in on Brittany Spears and her latest hair do (or lack of one).

Here is my advice, those of us who follow politics closely and passionately. Take it easy!!! It ain't life and death. Play with your kids. (This advice goes to me as much as anyone). Those who don't follow politics, pay attention a little. Both parties are in a bad way now and could use some oversight from us. Pick the creeps out and get rid of them! You don't have to know each issue inside and out, just learn a little about the major issues of our day. President Bush is often wrong. The same goes for Hillary Clintonor the other liberal leaders. That doesn't make either of them evil, just wrong. The earth hasn't fallen off its axis under President Bush and it didn't under President Clinton. You and I run the country, not them. lets make sure they work for us. Currently they don't, they work for their own self interests.

Be happy, Be Moral and Be Complete!

Immigration and the Activists

2007-06-26T12:36:00.000-04:00

The long discussed Comprehensive Reform bill to combat illegal immigration is coming to a cloture vote today. This bill is deeply flawed as is the subject.

As happens so often the activists seem to be running the debate. As I look at it I am not sure there is any bill that can make a majority of people happy. That is because the issue is so passionately felt, there are so many gray areas of the issue and the activists have clouded the issue so badly.

Personally I mostly fall into the category of the people who want a comprehensive package, but unlike many of them, I don't believe the current bill can be enforced to the extent it needs to be. The left largely believes in open borders or greatly liberalized borders. The reasons behind this run from the human compassion argument to flat out politics. The right is very divided. They range from what I have expressed as my view to the outright no immigration and send them all back view. There is a lot of room in there.

In this case it seems like President Bush falls closer to the left than the right. Traditional allies don't always hold true. Talk host Glenn Beck is someone I traditionally agree with most of the time. He seems lately to be in the Lou Dobbs insanity crowd. Michael Medved has come out full fledged in favor of the bill although he admits it is flawed but fears that the future may see a much worse bill passed. I happen to believe in this case a bad bill can be worse than no bill. I don't mention some of the more well known talk hosts because they are so predictable.

So where do we go here? I personally hope they defeat the cloture vote. There is enough wrong that this should not go to law. For the future though I believe the longer we wait the hope of getting an enforceable bill will decrease. As we approach the Presidential elections nothing can happen. Our 'leaders' will not risk taking a position on a controversial bill. The nutty anti-immigration activists (I only mean the very extreme) will pummel anyone on the right who supports any bill that 'normalizes' the current illegals.

We have to look at the present situation as unacceptable. There is no incentive for illegal immigrants to go back or join the law biding community. There is no way for them to come out of the shadows. I don't believe Congress can come up with a solution. Maybe the answer is small steps rather than a grandiose comprehensive bill. The risk here is that in a very divided congress all sides want something. Stiff penalties to employers without 'normalizing' current illegals working will not get support from the industries that depend on illegals and therefore the representatives that are friendly to them. Any attempt to give current illegals a way to come out of the shadows will not get the support of the extreme right. Since many of them have powerful microphones that doesn't stand much of a chance.

My prediction is this. The immigration bill will die, nothing will be done until after the next Presidential election and then the outcome will decide which way it goes. If both sides of Congress remain closely divided, I don't think any president will be able to get a bill through. That may or may not be a good thing. I wish I knew for sure which.