The Ikonoklast

It's Yuge!

noreply@blogger.com (ikonoklast) — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 01:22:00 +0000

The campaign is over and the election has been won--nearly. I write this the day before the Electoral College meets to finalize the results of the 2016 election of our next President. Yes, it will be Donald Trump, a fact that is both a heartening victory and an enormous relief. I sincerely doubt there will be more than a small handful of Electors who defect from their sworn obligation to vote for Donald Trump as the 45th President of our Republic; it would be their own political suicide as who would ever again trust them in any office. Certainly not on the flimsy accusations and innuendo proferred without proof by the Progressivists.

I started out being open minded about Trump--I grew to maturity in New York City and was well aware of Trump long before he took to the national stage in The Apprentice. He was glamorous, larger-than-life, brash, egotistical and yet undeniably effective in the field of building and real estate. I remember my beautiful late wife's quip to a visitor who saw from our apartment windows one of his towers rising. "Oh, that's Donald Trump's latest erection."

I remember vividly the appalling debacle of the Wollman skating rink in Central Park that lay unused and un-repaired for six long years under a moribund (Democrat) city government until Trump fixed it in six months and under budget. The Radio City rink is a small and expensive skating venue. Wollman was where everyday New Yorkers and their families skated.

So I started out skeptical but interested. Uncontrolled immigration had me worried sick; an endless supply of new, cheap workers for business and the next several generations of Democrat voters in the

making is what I feared. Neither Democrat nor establishment Republican wanted it stopped. The nattering classes at the myriad Conservative think tanks and idea magazines were utterly deaf to any nay saying about it (except Kevin Williamson at NRO who famously wished the white middle-class would die). The end of America as a productive colossus and home to a thriving middle class was a vision that haunted me.

Democrats tout themselves as the party of the poor. They are correct. Poor people are desperate, frightened and open to becoming addicted to government largess. Does it surprise anyone then that Democrats pursue policies that shackle job production at home and then champion the mass importation of poor from abroad? They want as many Americans as they can to be poor and needy because they stand ready with other people's open wallets to fill those needs.

My hesitation to be a full-throated supporter of Trump early on was that I was unsure of his motives. I went into this election cycle with only two absolutes, both negative. No to Marco Rubio, in return
for his Gang of Eight betrayal; and "Hell No" to Jeb! Bush, for his stance on immigration, but also because I detest the idea that politics in America become the preserve of a few elite families. There is a word for government that becomes the hereditary occupation of a few families and it's "aristocracy." (That same logic applies to Hillary as well, but she had other and more copious negatives.) Besides, the Bush family have supplied Republicans chiefly with disappointment in their last two times at bat. We owe them NOTHING. And despite the Texas patina, they are really still Connecticut Yankee liberal Republicans and elitists in outlook. I doubt they are on speaking terms with any individual with a net worth of less than $10 million except for servants. Not exactly the best stewards of middle class American hopes.

I thought Trump's run might be simply a publicity stunt or an ego trip. But there he was, articulating policies I found myself nodding in agreement with; echoing the doubts I've had this last decade about the future of this country I love. The more I listened, the more convinced I was. And he was attracting more and more people to his message; pragmatically, he might just have a shot. He worked at it, tirelessly.

Rick Wilson accidentally reveals his favorite hobby.

And he took fearful hits from the Democrats, from their co-conspirators in the media and from what I called the Karl Rove Wing of the Republican Party, what has since been dubbed the "donor class." Those are the "right" enemies for someone who wants to revitalize America. He took them, shrugged them off and kept going. That impressed me. This was no ego trip; no one works this hard for simple thrills. When he began to lose real money from cancelled contracts because of his stated positions and still kept going, I was convinced. Money and success obviously mean a lot to his view of himself; to give those up so willingly meant there was something else that was driving him.

So I began to defend him on Twitter and in the comment sections of articles. When we went into primary season, he did well in Iowa, but Ted Cruz had staked out that heavily-religious state and worked it extremely well. But Trump didn't do badly either. The catfight between Cruz and Trump started getting really rough and so it was in the venues I mentioned. The attacks and counter-punches were harsh and brutal, I won't rekindle those fires herein. I gave as good as I got; maybe a little better.

That's not to say Trump didn't give me the occasional cringe with some of the things he said; he did. I didn't agree with more than a few of his utterances. But I'm from Queens like Donald; I get what he was doing maybe better than some others: he was fighting a maneuver war. He knew the media would be in the tank for Hillary and that they would want to hang some all-defining label on his policies and on him. Hang it and then dismiss him, calling in left-wing yet putatively "objective" professional talking heads, clandestine Hillary allies, to "analyze" and then belittle the labels they had assigned him. That's what has worked against establishment types like Romney and McCain and would really work on the Millennials coming of age for the first time who had been raised in the fact-free zone of modern education under the Obama regime's Education Department. Labels define how they see others. But Trump wouldn't co-operate. You had to tune him in each day to find out what he was saying. And in doing that, and using Twitter more than any other Republican would ever think to do, he talked right over the heads of the media and directly to America; and the media were so stunned they unwittingly helped him do it.

The rallies astonished and emboldened me. He would address overflowing crowds of thousands
talking off the top of his head for 90 minutes, actively getting people on his side with the chants and even using hecklers to his advantage. Openly belittling the enemy amongst them: the media. No teleprompter, no focus grouped scripts; when Hillary did that she came out with the phrase that may have knocked more undecideds into the Trump camp than anything: "Basket of Deplorables" became the war cry of the forgotten electorate.

Well, they remember us now.

(more later)

Where HAVE you Been?!?

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin @The Ikonoklast) — Mon, 06 Jul 2015 16:10:00 +0000

I know I haven't been around in the last few . . .well. . .four years. I was way off dealing with life issues, many of them owing to The National Mistake that now inhabits the White House. But I haz returned and I have big plans for this here blog.

I haven't spent the time absent without benefit: I have been reading, reading, reading; history and philosophy and politics and yes . . . even more economics.

I'll be redesigning the blog, although it will still be largely a black background with white text. And redesigning . . . well, having someone design . . .a new logo for the site. And I will be adding music and perhaps a weekly call in show to the site--but I promise you it won't be like the blog talk radio shows you may be used to.

Meanwhile, I leave you with this for the nonce.

How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Twelve.
One to screw it in.
One to excoriate men for creating the need for illumination,
One to blame men for inventing such a faulty means of illumination,
One to suggest the whole "screwing” bit to be too "rape-like",
One to deconstruct the light bulb itself as being phallic,
One to blame men for not changing the bulb,
One to blame men for trying to change the bulb instead of letting a woman do it,
One to blame men for creating a society that discourages women from changing light bulbs,
One to blame men for creating a society where women change too many light bulbs,
One to advocate that light bulb changers should have wage parity with electricians,
One to alert the media that women are now "out-lightbulbing" men,
One to just sit there taking pictures for her blog for photo-evidence that men are unnecessary.

A REPLY TO MY CONGRESSMAN, FRESHMAN RICHARD NUGENT

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin @The Ikonoklast) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 05:01:00 +0000

After a long break, I'm back! Mwah!

-----------------------------

At a recent Town Hall meeting, I submitted a written question about energy policy and Sheriff Rick's office wrote me a reply regarding HR 49 - American Energy Independence and Price Reduction Act. The bill was introduced by Rep. Don Young (R-AK) and will deal with topics such as drilling for oil and gas in ANWR.

The one aspect I am not crazy about is provisions for revenue to be set aside into an alternative energy trust fund, and I set forth my reasons in my reply below.

(Interested readers can find the text of the Bill here.)

------------------------------

Dear Sheriff Rick,

Thank you for your letter to me of August 26 regarding energy policy and HR 49. On the whole, I am pleased that Republican members of the House (at least) are taking our future energy needs seriously. The one thing that you mentioned that I oppose is the provision to establish the ANWR Alternative Energy Trust Fund.

Government subsidies to private concerns are not based on sound policy, on science and engineering or on economics. They are based on politics, pure and simple. Creating a government-run fund to finance alternative energy is just a misuse of badly needed revenues that will, inevitably (and make no mistake about the certainty of it), be used to provide funding to the favored recipients of whichever legislator has the most political pull in Washington or to whichever President is in power. I'm all in favor of using whatever sources of energy may be reasonably used, but they must make economic and engineering sense on their own, not with the US government's wallet appended. As a graduate student of economics, I learned the old canard known as the "infant industries" argument that has been used in history to justify ruinous tariffs and ridiculous subsidies and bailouts (Chrysler even tried a variety of this when it sought loan guarantees in the 1980s). Just recently, Solyndra LLC went bankrupt after having received a $535 million dollar loan guarantee and a billion dollars in private equity largely based on that guarantee. Not coincidentally, George Kaiser, the principal Solyndra investor, was a large contributor and a bundler for Barack Obama (See this article.) Solyndra was not the only bankrupt alternative energy company in the news this month;, there was also Evergreen Solar ($43 million from the state of Massachusetts) as well as SpectraWatt (here).

But the poster child for bad energy subsidies has to be ethanol. Ethanol, which many in the green movement now descry as causing more harm than good, takes something like three gallons of fossil fuel (for the farm equipment, for the trucks to move it, for the energy to distill it, etc.) to make just four gallons of ethanol. It also raises food prices, since corn is a primary animal feed and this artificially raises the price of corn. (This year's "Arab Spring" uprisings may have been as much about hunger from rising food prices than about any latent yearning for better government.) But no one seems to be able to stop it because there are too many people making too much money from it, the news media has fallen in love with the idea as a solution to the mythical menace of anthropogenic climate change, and the lobby even hired former General Wesley Clark as a spokesman for themselves. And there are plenty of Republicans from farm states who will stand up in the well of Congress and argue for the subsidies.

The TEA Party movement was based, in part, upon the realization by everyday Americans that the US Government has become captured by the fantastical myths and emotion-based belief systems of the Left and that we just can't afford it anymore. We must be cold-eyed realists about the direction of this country if we are to save this Republic we love. Realistically, oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear power are going to be the major sources of energy for this nation for the foreseeable future. If alternative energy has a future, freely-determined market forces will be the driver of any new technological development. American ingenuity is legendary and the idea that government subsidies are needed to spur technological innovation is ridiculous. How many subsidies did Silicon Valley need to produce their technological revolution? Businessmen are pragmatists; if they see the government ready to underwrite the risk of new technology, they'll be only to happy to lobby fiercely for their share of the taxpayer's money. Let's shut that window firmly once and for all.

Thanks for writing, I enjoyed your presentation at the Knights of Columbus in Spring Hill, and thanks for keeping the faith.

---------------------------

UPDATE

I had to add this, it's just hysterically funny! We need more ads like this!

Roger Williams for Congress - The Donkey Whisperer

An Open Letter To The Speaker.

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin @The Ikonoklast) — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 08:56:00 +0000

to the Honorable John Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives, 112^th Congress.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you, and through you, all the Republicans of the House who heard the call of Americans like me and stood firm on starting the process of cutting the atrocious level of Federal spending. This was not an easy thing for you and for them, as you were all vilified by the Democrats and their pets in the media, the blogoshere, academia, the Leftist think tanks, and the Twittering ninnies throughout the nation.

Schumer's lips hardly move as Reid talks

I know the numbers are not large compared to the size of the gargantuan Federal budget, but to take a phrase away from the Progressives, "it's a good beginning." You changed the terms of the debate. Whereas for too long the difference between Democrats and Republicans has been "Spend Huge Amounts vs. Spend Somewhat Less," you and all the Republicans that supported you in the House and Senate have reversed the direction of spending altogether. And you got Reid to agree to debate Obamacare in the Senate, something he hated to contemplate as it will force Democrats to stand and declare again their support for this hateful program and opposed to the message the November 2010 election clearly heralded, thereby marking themselves indelibly for recall in November 2012.

I know that there are two more major fiscal battles coming this year, and I am with you, as are many Americans who also do not want to see us become a second-rate world power in debt-peonage to China and the oil emirates. We are at a moment in history that is nothing less than a tipping point in our fate as a nation and I for one want the America of my earliest years back. And I want it back better than it was.

This is a battle against a trend that has been ongoing since FDR and the New Deal, a trend not just in spending, but in the ideology of spending, in the nature of our government and a citizen’s relationship to that government. Thanks to a thoroughly-corrupted educational system, children are not even taught about the nature of our federal republic and so are utterly disarmed in the debate about the future of our nation. I hope this is the beginning of the road back, away from that sewage field called "Progressivism."

I'm 54 years old and I am in this fight for the long-term. I may not live to see the end, but I'm here while I still have breath to argue and strength to write, help organize, speak out and do whatever is needed to restore my country to her unique promise and destiny.

Thank you and God bless you all.

Now get some sleep, you'll need it.

Very truly yours,

Kevin - The Ikonoklast

--------------------------------------------------

High-Speed Rail anyone?

I also sent this to Rep. Rick Nugent, my Congressman and Senator Marco Rubio. I did not bother sending it to Senator Bill "ASTRO BOY" Nelson; why bother, it would do no damn good.

Mid-Week Rants and Election Woes

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin @The Ikonoklast) — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 04:01:00 +0000

"Give us what we want & we'll go away!"

I don't know when it was that my country went from a nation where most people believed in working hard and doing for themselves, in supporting their nation against all foreign threats and believing in the basic decency of one's fellow citizens to a nation where that is considered a sign of unhealthy extremism. "Extremism" itself is an interesting expression. It implies that there is some undefined benefit in being balanced equally between two polar opposites. Conceivably, it is a modern expression of the ancient Greek axiom of "moderation in all things," truly I don't know.

But it's modern use has been to pull the country steadily to the Left during my lifetime. And it was going on before I was born, too. Listening to my favorite cabal leader, Schumer the Tumor, in a verbal ping-pong match with Matt Lauer, you begin to worry whether the great mass of Americans will fall for this cynical spinning or not. For The Tumor to claim that a $33 billion cut in spending is a reasonable compromise from the $100 billion figure that the Republicans initially wanted is pathetic. Even the $100 billion number was a token gesture measured against total spending, but a behemoth such as our government doesn't turn on a dime; it was enough to get it started in the right direction. $33 billion will be treated as a rounding error by the Democrats in our government's inexorable spending climb.

What has happened in America is that with each small victory of the Progressives, the baseline for normal has been pulled steadier and steadier to the left. But the Progressives never stop. Take Schumer's favorite hatred, private ownership of firearms. In the course of my life, whenever legal firearm ownership has been restricted a little further, someone like Chuck pops up after the smoke clears and expresses the opinion that "it's a good first start." No matter how far we've already come, "It's a good first start," relentlessly tugging that baseline to the left, redefining what the center is by shifting the mean. Ronald Reagan famously remarked that "I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The party left me."

Schumer's eyes glow with satisfaction and malice and hate at the thought of the shutdown being blamed on the Republicans and that segment of the electorate he despises most of all: The Tea Party. They are anathema to Schumer, a real grass-roots movement not afraid to challenge the growth of the Progressive state Schumer wants for all of us. THAT to Chuckie is the most un-American of things, to rebel against your duly-elected (from NYC) civil masters, to question their guidance and thwart their will. He and the toady media have done their best to gin up hatred for this movement of average Americans practicing simple adversarial politics in a supposedly democratic system. And they've been helped by the union bosses, angered at having their banquet of taxpayer-funded dues disturbed and threatened.

"If you won't contribute . . . ."

Schumer, as I have said before, is a major mover and shaker within the policy-making side of the Donkey party. Inside it, he is considered a shrewd calculator and strategist and a true believer in the Progressive vision. In public view, he has limited utility and he knows it. His face and voice and expressions are so marked by the twisted hatred in his soul for what we all think of as traditional America that they only bring him out in the light of day when they are desperate, and the Donks are. All you need to know about what Schumer thinks of middle-America you get from his ideological offspring, Anthony Wiener, who is Chuck Schumer without an inner monologue. But now, he's in his element. If the Donks feel the average American has blamed the shut-down on the Pubbies, he will smile and sink back down into the swampy waters he is most at home in, his eyes and nostrils above the surface, waiting in ambush like the crocodile he is.

Mr Obama, of course, has tried to keep his skirts as far away from the mud of actually governing as possible. Incredibly, while the country teeters back and forth, he junkets around the globe. I hope GE appreciates all the business he is getting for them that they won't pay taxes on (OK, but I HAD to get that in). Seriously, that's what you have a VP for, although given Biden's verbal gaffes, sending him on a diplomatic trip might end with the European Union declaring war on us. But Mr Obama apparently enjoys all the trappings of holding the most powerful executive office in the world. Except for that messy, annoying bit about actually governing.

All clear, Captain Obama!

I shouldn't be surprised at the depth of ignorance, intolerance and sheer irrational hatred coming from the Left, but I am sometimes taken aback by it. Spend any time in the Twittershpere and you will see some of the most hateful messages being posted. I'm not dismissing the occasional ignorant remark on the part of the right-wing crowd, but the Left is an order of magnitude worse in sheer vitriol and emotionally-laden fantasy. America is on a downward slide into bankruptcy and there is no one big enough to bail US out. No, not China; China has 1.3 billion people and a billion of them still live in near poverty and increasingly resent it. China needs every resource it can muster to fund it's own development. Don't look to the IMF, we're their principal contributor. And yet for the first time in a generation a political movement seeks to turn the ship away from the iceberg and half the passengers have joined with the crew to keep us bow on to destruction.

Albert Shanker

It isn't even possible to discuss political differences with most on the other side. Public education has been in the hands of the Left since the mid-Twentieth century, and the top levels of the teachers unions are utterly controlled by Progressive true believers. It filters down, not always in a doctrinaire way, but in a subtle manner, what subjects you emphasize, which get short shrift. And many of the damn teachers are products of that educations system, so we have a second, third and fourth generation of people teaching our children about our Republic who don't have the slightest idea what they are talking about. They don't teach limited government. They don't tell students the differences between a direct democracy and a federal republic, because I don't think they know. They are certainly not inclined. When you are teaching history from Howard Zinn's bloody book there is no reason to wonder why.

So you get slogans in return for arguments. Political discourse has become one long barrage of imprecations against corporations and wealth, tirades against Judeo-Christian religious principles, vague and not-so-vague suggestions of corruption. A great consuming terror that if a government program disappears or changes, chaos and destruction will follow. People shout about rights being denied who have no conception of what the word even connotes. Self-evident inconsistencies go unreported by a largely compliant media. No, by an advocacy media.

Most of all, they don't understand that one of the most precious principles we have is the rule of law. But the rule of law is only as good as the men who uphold it. To the Donks, there is no other consideration except winning elections. There just isn't, and anything done to win that election is justified in the name of . . . righteousness. Absentee ballots that magically appear that somehow carry votes for only the major contested election, ignoring all other contests. The sneering contempt in the act shocking in it's smug confidence. A parade of last minute voter registrations. The rank-and-file Donkeys bray and catcall and cheer, like it's got no more significance than a baseball game.

But it does. For if the Donks prevail with Kloppenburg and the recall of Republican state senators in Wisconsin, reverse everything that Governor Walker has tried to do to stop the downward spiral of his state, the booby prize they will get will be layoffs and bankruptcy, and that will happen whether there's a Pubbie, a Donk or a Martian in the Governor's mansion.

And ya know, I don't think the Koch brothers will be one bit worse off.

Timing is everything

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin @The Ikonoklast) — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 20:04:00 +0000

My Mommy says . . . .

I must be psychic. I posted a blog entry that dealt with my buddy, my old NYC pal Charles "Fauntleroy" Schumer; leading Donkey strategist, guiding light, bomb thrower and Momma's Boy. One of the things I mentioned was that he perpetually throws around the sobriquet "extreme right-wing" whenever he speaks about even the mildest, most centrist political opponent, and the next day he gets caught on tape pretty much agreeing with me. He's been doing it for decades. He has NEVER in his entire life held an honest job; although a Harvard trained lawyer, a member of the Bar, he has never practiced law. This is a guy who got a perfect 1600 SAT score, went to Harvard as an undergraduate and then on to the Law School. He's extremely bright, he ran for the New York State Assembly right out of college and won at age 23, and he has never, not ever, lost an election. He has been in Washington since 1981, and for you Donkeys that means thirty years.

Hence, Schumer the Tumor, the persistent cancer that continues to grow on the American body politic. He won't go away folks; Chuckie can't DO anything else. Like Quaddafi, like Saddam, like Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe--there is no AFTER for The Tumor, no Plan B, no Part II. Truthfully, he doesn't much want to go away. If he wanted to be a Governor of New York, he would have run already. But Schumer knows his perfect place: making laws at the national level. Telling YOU, people who live in disparate parts of the US, how to live, what to eat, how many and what sort of firearms you can own.

He's the quintessential effete, urban Progressive. He hears the call, he knows what he must do. And . . . he knows he has to fool most of you into accepting what he wants. He's been a champion on Obamacare, he's switched sides three times on the financial crisis, he's big in consumer product regulation. And of course, the Senate Judiciary Committee, where that "right-wing extremist" Molotov cocktail gets used frequently. After all, when you are gutting the Constitution in the Legislature you cannot afford to have some judge with an unhealthy affection for that ancient document scuttle your plans.

Schumer is pretty hawkish on defense, but you have to appreciate the delicacy of that position. First, he's from New York City, Brooklyn to be specific. He still lives there with his family. As a fellow City boy, I cannot adequately convey the utter shock, horror and outrage that natives felt when those murderous animals flew planes full of human beings into buildings full of human beings. Schumer was married at Windows on the World, a great restaurant at the apex of the North Tower of The World Trade Center. My wife took me there to celebrate my MBA, but I worked across the street for Bankers Trust for years and it was my favorite place to take visitors for the panoramic views of New York and the harbor. [BT got eaten by Deutsche Bank and my building was itself later a casualty of the WTC collapse, declared uninhabitable and finally succumbing to fire some years after] I went to a small, all-male Jesuit high school in Chelsea. Xavier is coming up on it's second century and 25 alums were listed as casualties of 9/11. If my life had zigged instead of zagged, I could have been up there watching a passenger jet speed headlong into my desk.

The second thing you have to understand about Schumer on defense is Israel. Schumer is Jewish, much of his original and current core constituency are Jewish. Support for Israel is the sine qua non of politics in NYC and for a Jewish politician, well it comes with the briss. Support for our staunchest ally in the Middle East is something I can enthusiastically get behind, I've been to Israel, it's a wonderful country. I have no doubt his position is sincere, he gets a little heated when talking about it. In speaking of Palestinian Arabs in Gaza, he told an audience that "Palestinian people still don't believe in the Jewish state, in a two-state solution, they don't believe in the Torah, in David . . . . you have to force them to say Israel is here to stay." So much of his support for the War on Terror is informed by those two points.

And being meddlsome with laws is just in his nature.

This is Schumer's niche in life, he's happy doing what he does. Well, "happy" may be too extravagant a term as Chuck Schumer usually looks so sour it's as if he were weaned onto solid food by sucking lemons and never quite recovered from the experience. Chuck Schumer smiling is a terrifying sight to behold, the kind of expression a prison warden attending a state execution might give the condemned as he whispers "this is gonna hurt." He's the Democratic Policy Committee Chairman and he is at the apex of his power in Washington; if you doubt for a second that he is one of the leading figures championing the aggressive stance of the Donks in confronting the drive to reduce federal spending, then I have some wonderful beachfront property in Japan that I can get for you at a bargain.

I'm a Payload Specialist

I started this series of posts about Bill Nelson, the Senior (and next ex-) Senator from Florida and let me reiterate the connection: ASTRO BOY and Donks like him are important for men like Schumer to shove their Progressivist world view down your unsuspecting maws. They provide cover. I caught Nelson on C-Span the other night speaking in the Senate. I managed to stay awake. That men's-store-mannequin spouted every Donkey platitude about who they are protecting and who the real villains in America are, how the everything is going to be wonderful.

For example, he whined on about oil companies not paying royalties to the US for oil from leased Federal lands. Well---Bill---if memory serves, you had a 60-seat majority in Congress, a majority in the House and a President in the White House for two damn years. Why didn't YOU do something about it?

Nelson also trotted out the now-standard Donkey diatribe against corporations that don't pay taxes. YAWN. Ditto for this one too, Bill, where where you and your fellow Donks? On a junket paid for by GE, maybe, one of the biggest tax avoiders of all but also former owner of a few lovely broadcast networks that just happen to support the Democrats in almost everything they do?

Is there anyone out there who doesn't understand that whatever taxes a corporation has to pay it passes along to it's customers in the form of higher prices. I guess there are. No, competitive pricing won't help you; taxes are imposed across all competitors so they will ALL raise their prices. Or some will go out of business and you will have fewer choices and, oh yes, the survivors will raise prices because they can!

But that's the dirty little secret:: The Donks in Congress and the White House KNOW all this, so when they rail on about raising taxes on corporations and the great unwashed cheers and thrusts fists in the sky, they are really setting themselves up to be the ultimate taxpayer. The Donks in Congress have just wiped off their fingerprints.

Yes, I do moisturize . . . .

Folks in Florida, remember what Nelson says. Remember in whatever state you live the next time you are tempted to vote for that nice person with the Jackass button on their suit lapel. The 2010 elections knocked off a lot of the moderate Donks, leaving the screedy shrill ones like Maw Pelosi in place. But for all intents and purposes there are NO moderate Democrats in Congress anymore. They cannot vote that way with the hard lefties in all the senior positions.

Remember what all those who did not buck the Progressives said when there was time to do something about it. Remember and think for yourselves.

Now, now, I know best!

My memory works just fine. I remember what has happened in the world during my life and what I thought about it at the time. I need no one to help me remember history through the prism of political spin. I remember who promised what, who tried to call attention to problems, who shouted them down and why. And I'll tell you that the problems we are facing TODAY have been brewing for years, that there were plenty of warnings, that many of the Donks in power now were around then and screaming against solutions.

And here's a little video that does a GREAT job explaining it for those that are numerically impaired.

More On Nelson

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin @The Ikonoklast) — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 04:31:00 +0000

[For the first part of this story, go here]

I know some readers are going to think I am am picking on Bill Nelson far in excess of what he himself deserves. He's a good guy, he's a family man, he rode on the Space Shuttle, he's personable. He's the man every guy strives to be and every woman wants to marry. A leader, a lawyer, a legislator. From his campaign website:

From time to time, Bill gets asked where he gets the energy and determination to stand up and keep fighting. He says it comes from being an optimist and believing things will get better for all people. It's an optimism that comes from faith, from family and from his belief in individual responsibility. It's why Bill Nelson is optimistic for the future of Florida and our nation.

That's just so beautiful! It's so hopeful, so positive. It belies anything a person who observes him and thinks clearly and for himself would deduce from Nelson's conduct in office; but Geez, don't you just wish it were true!

See, this has always been my problem with the Donkeys; and it's their secret weapon; one of their most powerful. Individually, the Donks can sometimes come off as salt-of-the-Earth, fairly conservative people in their personal outlook, demeanor and lifestyle. They go to Church, they may hunt or fish, they read to the vision-impaired and they show up at Habitat for Humanity. They never miss a State Fair, and make sure the press knows what soup kitchen they'll be working in next Thanksgiving. They fit into their communities, they have to to get elected. The problems start when they get to Washington.

Get lost, bitch, I'm on the phone.

For most of my life, the Donks have been moving farther and farther to the left. Self-important Senator from New York, Charles Schumer (The Tumor), is a leading strategist behind many of the DNC's policy and publicity initiatives [not to mention my personal choice for Biggest Momma's Boy in Congress] and regularly trots out the "extreme right-wing" label, no matter how mildly centrist the object of his vituperation, more so even than Van Jones uses "racist." Neither label has any particular meaning except to rouse somnolent Donks who wait to hear the right boogey words which impell them into action. Think of them as Manchurian Constituents, ready to board buses and shout slogans and carry signs thrust into their hands when they hear certain phrases that have been programmed into their small brains.

So you vote for the mainstream guy, but you get the rabid Equine. He's the beard the Party wears to gain a majority. You vote for Bill Nelson, you get Schumer the Tumor. You vote for Bill Nelson, you get Harry Reid. You vote Nelson, you get Barbara Mikulski. You get Dick Durbin. You get Barbara Boxer. When he gains enough seniority, you'll get Al Franken, too.

This is the Howard Dean Donkey Party. It isn't going to change. Well, it will, but the days of the more centrist Democratic Leadership Council are long gone. It's getting more and more left-wing. For those of us who watched the Democratic Primaries in 2008, there were tell-tale clues. The Eastern hard left Donks were chafing under the more Centrist Clintons and their pet DNC chairman, Terry McAuliffe. But the Clintons brought in the donations as no one else in the party at the time could, so the Clintons called the tune and the rest of the party capered about obediantly. That doesn't mean they liked it.

Dean is another story. Dean can, through a TV screen, palpably radiate his insane hatred for Republicans and by extension, for the American traditionalism and values they represent. You could cook a Cornish game hen in the radiance of Dean's venomous tirades when he unleashes them.

Weiner goes on the attack.

[And speaking of politicians that go rabid from time to time, every Pubbie's favorite Democrat-to HATE-Anthony Weiner. Would it surprise you to learn that Weiner learned from the Master, the aforementioned Chuck Schumer? Weiner was an aide to Schumer when The Tumor was in the House, trying to have gun dealers in Wyoming regulated as though they were selling to recently-escaped convicts in Rego Park or drug merchants along Woodhaven Boulevard. After serving on the City Council in New York, Weiner ran for Schumer's House seat in 1999 as The Tumor was trading up to bring his own special brand of poison into the World's Greatest Deliberative Body. Weiner has never gotten less than 59% of the vote in 5 elections, so that's why the little putz is always so smug. I come from Queens, Jackson Heights specifically; I know the area Weiner represents. Gilbert Gottfried could get elected there, bad taste jokes and all.]

"Ja think I'm a cowboy!"

When Mr Obama came along, and showed he had a talent for putting money together and for putting a highly-effective grassroots coalition in play and using the Internet as well, out went the centrists. I knew Mrs Clinton's was done in January 2008, when Ted Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama. Ted's signature issue throughout his career had been health care, which is also strongly associated with Hillary and wasn't with Obama at that time. Maybe Ted never forgave her for screwing it up so badly during the Clinton years, which she undoubtedly did, leaving the Republicans in charge of both the Senate and the House during most of the final years of his life. Kerry-the-Sailor-Man had already endorsed Mr Obama. Others followed suit. Maybe the entire caucus resented her for Bill Clinton's turn to "Triangulation" as an act of self-preservation, saving his own Presidency by essentially abandoning the Congressional Democrats. The Donks had won big in the 2006 mid-term elections, a sign that the country was turning away from the political center. Hillary was toast, and the Donkeys were in full gallop Leftward for the general election. The Donks had had their fill after sixteen years of Clintons.

The leftward lurch of the US continued through the 2008 elections, helped along by the economic downturn, mortgage banking implosion, TAPR and Detroit bailouts and calls for subsidies for many industries as long as the subject was on the table. When Republicans start tossing around collectivist cures to economic and societal woes, they are going to lose out to the party that always prefers socialist solutions.

The Donkeys do have a critical weakness that victory in politics brings out. The Party leadership and their camp followers in the media, in academia, in the blogosphere and in the left-leaning nonprofits are horrifyingly, excruciatingly, condescendingly elitist. Not in the Old Money sense of the word, but a self-appointed elitism based on acceptance of the model and forms of Progressivism. They are just smarter than anyone else. University trained, good grades in all the "right" subjects, a solid career in public service or it's close private analog. Aware of the tragedies and foibles of their unenlightened fellow humans, they hear a call the unworthy are deaf to, a sublime summons to organize mankind for the sake of mankind. Even if it's against the will of mankind. So for the greater good of mankind it is necessary to hoodwink mankind. They know they are worthy, they are special, they are better because they hear that call and others do not.

So generally speaking, the Donks begin to steamroller their visions. Whether the Bill Nelson's of the party are truly with them ideologically or not doesn't matter. They had better toe the line, to vote as the party demands. Having a political party at the national level at all means you are going to have to accept compromise as a fact of life and vote en masse when your leadership makes a case for it; that's life in politics. But when the Leftist Donkeys take the bit in their teeth that dynamic changes, and the more moderate Democrats become true party "backbenchers," with radicalized, redistributionist reformers out to remake this "zero-sum" world. And the Republicans become, well "What Republicans?"

The rank and file Donks and the rest of the public would probably rebel if the full extent of the corrective surgery were revealed. So they obfuscate, they generalize, they retreat behind carefully crafted phrases that seem to fall from the lips of every Donk caught out where a reporter can question them, simulatenously and verbatim; bromides that reveal nothing except the inner goodness of the speaker and his Party.

They went too far post 2008. No jobs materialized from that orgy of pork and debt known as The Stimulus Package. Businesses surprisingly (to anyone who did not study the 1930s and New Deal), un-patriotically, did not expand and hire more employees in the wake of new taxes and new regulations being tweeted and emailed from Speaker Pelosi high above Planet Earth in her US Government Gulfstream.

And then The Horror began. A self-organizing group of people aghast at the extent of government growth being promulgated started to show up at what the Donks thought were going to be routine dog-and-pony Town Hall meetings about the health care proposals and ask unplanted questions.

Moreover, they demanded answers and just would not be shut-up, put off or put down. And the more the elitists tried to dismiss them, the more they came back and with greater intensity. The elites made the mistake of writing it off to racism, or fear of the unknown, or religious intoxication, anything but what it really was. A spontaneous, grassroots rebellion against everything the Progressives hold dear, everything the leadership of the Democrat Party has become in the last several decades.

And anyone who kicks Arlen (Scottish Law) McSpecter around earns a warm spot in my heart.

More to come . . . .

ASTRO BOY comes out of the closet . . . shoves reporter in.

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin @The Ikonoklast) — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 03:19:00 +0000

It wasn't enough that Senior (soon to be "ex-") Senator from Florida Bill Nelson abrogated all responsibility to the future of the nation by voting against HR 1, the Continuing Budget Resolution for Fiscal Year 2011. Maybe he thinks that, since he'll be 69 in September, he shouldn't have to worry about the future. He's got his; between what he earned as a Yalie lawyer, whatever business interests he has (and he does, rest assured) and his retirement from stints as a Florida state legislator, US Representative and now Senator, he'll be ok. You may not be, but he will. Maybe his lack of concern for the future is because he knows 17 percent of Florida's population is over age 65 (vs. 13 percent in the entire US) and probably doesn't care about tomorrow either. [A bet I wouldn't take, they have children and grandchildren] Or maybe it's because only 80 percent of adults have a high school education, 22 percent have any college degree and 23 percent report speaking a language other than English at home. (All of the above here.) It could be a cynical calculation that the people who have voted for his nice-guy-aw-shucks demeanor over and over and over are just too stupid to realize what an absolutely useless tool he has become.

Or perhaps always was.

"Fly me to da moon . . . ."

If you go to Bill Nelson's official Senate webpage, you can see some of the committees and subcommittees he sits on. Nelson is Chairman of the Science and Space Subcommittee (duh!) Nelson sits on the Aging Committee (also duh!), Intelligence Committee (no, that's too easy), Commerce Committee, Finance Committee and Budget Committee. There's utterly no excuse for Nelson to be as nonchalant about the financial crisis the US Government finds itself in with the perspective those committee responsibilities force upon him. Yet he is.

For example, Nelson has bragged continuously that he opposes drilling for oil and gas off the Florida coast. What that does when replicated in state after NIMBY state is to drive drilling rigs out into the deepwater where blow-outs are harder to handle. While Nelson could have represented Floridians who suffer from having to pay more to drive to their jobs, he becomes a thoughtless doorstop blocking discussion of a comprehensive energy policy for the largest energy market on the planet. It raises the amount of money we ship out of the country (which get's lent back to us at interest). It raises the cost of gasoline (although there's more to that story-later). It empowers many regimes that have either been the most fair-weather of allies or outright hostile enemies.So what does Bill do? He joins in with a bunch of the most left-wing Senators in writing to the Commodities Futures Trading Commission bemoaning the actions of speculators. His co-authors are:

Joining Nelson on the letter are Sens. Maria Cantwell ( D-WA ), Barbara Boxer ( D-CA ), Al Franken ( D-MN ), Jeff Merkley ( D-OR ), Patty Murray ( D-WA ), Robert Menendez ( D-NJ ), Mark Begich ( D-AK ), John D. Rockefeller IV ( D-WV ), Carl Levin ( D-MI ), Barbara Mikulski ( D-MD ), Sherrod Brown ( D-OH ) and Bernie Sanders ( I-VT )

The Usual Suspects when something has to be done that left-wing elements in America don't want done (though most people do).

Nelson has been a big supporter of high-speed rail though. Long after Florida's Governor Scott (and Jeb Bush before him) dismissed the boondoggle Federal subsidy for high-speed rail that would have generated cost overruns on construction and operating losses while running that Florida taxpayers would have to cover (but it would create lots and lots of public sector union jobs!!), Nelson was trying to make rain with it. Nelson was pestering Amtrak to get involved. How bad does it have to be when Amtrak sidesteps it?

Now Bill Nelson is feeling the steam from the hot water the Tea Party is boiling to brew up some more upsetting election results in 2012. Nelson and his good buddy Biden are tossing reporters into closets to limit what they see and report at Donkey fundraising functions. I'm sure you've read it, it's a story that is so rich, it's gone viral on blogs and in the Twittersphere. It's also illustrative of how Machiavellian the Donks have become, and especially the piranha pool surrounding the Obama Administration.

Last Wednesday, Joe Biden attended another fund raiser held in Orlando at a private home (rich Donk, so read palatial estate). There was one pool reporter allowed to attend to record the event and distribute his reportage. According to the Orlando Sentinel:

Not looking for sympathy here, but the life of a political reporter isn’t all champagne and canapes. Consider our man Scott Powers, who was sent over to the Winter Park home of Alan Ginsburg this morning as the designated “pool reporter” — aka scribe — for the fundraiser where Vice President Joe Biden is appearing on behalf of U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.

Turns out the veep hadn’t arrived, but about 150 guests (minimum donation $500) were already in the house. So to prevent Scott from mingling with the crowd, a member of Biden’s advance team consigned him to a storage closet — and then stood outside the door to make sure he didn’t walk out without permission.

Scott e-mailed us this photo from his temporary prison. “Sounds like a nice party,” he wrote.

So exactly who was there that the reporter was not supposed to interview and report about? What was discussed that inquiring ears might overhear?

Another take comes from Shane D'Aprile

"I need to make 8 points . . . ."

Vice President Joe Biden said Wednesday that if Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) loses his reelection race next year, it means President Obama and the Democratic presidential ticket won't win the key battleground state, either.

Headlining a fundraiser for the Democratic senator in Florida Wednesday, the vice president said the success of the presidential ticket in 2012 is directly linked to Nelson, telling supporters "as goes Bill Nelson in Florida, so go Barack Obama and Joe Biden in Florida," according to a pool report.

Biden was in the state to attend two events for Nelson on Wednesday, the first of which was a $500 per plate lunch attended by an estimated 150 donors.

"He's a truly, truly decent guy who has the absolute respect of his colleagues, and I've heard that from both sides of the aisle," Biden said of his former Senate colleague.

Actual footnotes from Biden's speech.

The vice president's visit marks the second high-profile event to benefit Nelson already this year. The Democratic is a top GOP target in 2012.

Earlier this month, Obama headlined a joint fundraiser in Florida, benefiting both the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Nelson's 2012 campaign. (empasis added)

If you think the goal was to raise the $75,000 the patrons paid for that lunch, that just covered the catering bill. Probably. It was a pretty pricey repast. According to what Drudge:

They were busy noshing on caprese crostini with oven-dried mozzarella and basil, rosemary flatbread with grapes honey and gorgonzola cheese and bacon deviled eggs, before a lunch of grilled chicken Caesar and garden vegetable wraps.

Not so for Powers. A "low-level staffer" put Powers in a storage closet and then stood guard outside the door, Powers told the DRUDGE REPORT. "When I'd stick my head out, they'd say, 'Not yet. We'll let you know when you can come out.'"

And no crustini for Powers, either. He made do with a bottle of water to sip as he sat at a tiny makeshift desk, right next to a bag marked "consignment." Powers was closeted at about 11:30 a.m., held for about an hour and 15 minutes, came out for 35 minutes of remarks by Biden and Sen. Bill Nelson, Florida Democrat, and then returned to his jail for the remainder of the event.

At an event in Tampa with Biden and Nelson, a reporter from the St. Petersburg Times made the following observation:

Drudge and the blogosphere are lighting up over news that Joe Biden's team shut Orlando Sentinel reporter Scott powers in a storage closet so he couldn't talk with supporters at a $500-per-head fundraiser at the Winter Park home of Alan Ginsburg. He was the pool reporter for the event, and apparently the Veep's staff felt he should have no access to the mingling donors and only be allowed out when Nelson and Biden showed up. Nice.

I was the lone pool for a Biden-Nelson fundraiser later that Wednesday afternoon at an Embassy Suites in Tampa. No closet for me, though I was kept stored in the lobby during the prelimaries. As as the main event started I was escorted toward a single chair in a corner, cordoned off by a roughly three-by-three velvet rope square. A Biden's staffer seemed too embarrassed to make me sit in it, though.

But this is the "Most Transparent Administration" in history. Yup, they sure are.

And the results are in . . . .

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin @The Ikonoklast) — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 17:30:00 +0000

Today's email brought me responses from both my frosh Pubbie Congressman Rick Nugent and the next-ex Senior Senator from Florida, Bill Nelson.

Since I posted the contents of my letters to both of them, I thought it fair and illustrative to post the replies from each. I know they are canned and not personal, but it's interesting to note how the staffs' of each elected official approach exactly the same topic.

Let's start with Sheriff Rick:

Thank you for contacting me with your budget proposal. My job is to be your representative and voice in Washington and without hearing your ideas, I can't do that.

Our country is in dire straits right now. The financial problems facing our country are on the verge of crippling our entire economy. Many people don't realize the full extent of the problem. This year, we are running a $1.7 trillion deficit. Our entire discretionary budget – including the entire military – is only about $1.3 trillion. In other words, if we got rid of every single government agency from the Department of Education to the Department of Justice and on top of that decided not to have a military anymore, we'd still be running a $400 billion deficit. Unfortunately, balancing the budget isn't as simple as just cutting back around the edges.

For years, this problem has been swept under the rug by the media and by politicians in Washington. What we once thought was a crisis twenty years off is in fact already happening now. The President's own budget projects that interest payments on the national debt will be as big as Medicare by 2014 and bigger than the entire defense budget by 2018. Most people don't know that.

This is not just about saving the economy for our children and grandchildren anymore. This is about saving our economy now. If we do not fundamentally rethink our finances in Washington, everything we have come to expect will be at risk in a short period of time.

The House has started that process. Instead of debating how much to increases spending as we've seen over the last many years, we're now debating what and how much to cut. That is a fundamental change from just a few months ago.

As you know, after over 90 hours of debate, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1, the Full-Year Continuing Appropriation Act of 2011. H.R. 1 cut billions of dollars from all types of discretionary spending and amounts to the single largest budget cut in our nation's history. Unfortunately, despite all his rhetoric about cutting the budget and his commitment to fiscal responsibility, President Obama threatened to veto the bill if it ever reached his desk.

The attitude taken by President Obama and Democrats in Congress, who voted against H.R. 1 unanimously, is completely out of touch with reality. Despite the fiscal situation we are in, they increased the non-defense, discretionary part of the budget by 23% in the last two years. Right now Congress needs to be following in the footsteps of the American people. The average citizen cannot print more money when they run out of funds, they must tighten their belts. And that is what the federal government should be doing.

We cannot fix the budget without your help. As I see it, it's your money we're talking about, you should have a say in how it's spent. To that end, it doesn't matter if you're calling, emailing, writing, or stopping by the office to visit, just keep in touch. The more people we get engaged, the better our ideas will be.

Sincerely,
Richard Nugent
Member of Congress

Straight for the issues, no waffling. Now here's Astro Boy's reply to me:

Thank you for sharing your views on the Federal budget and your support for the spending plan set forth by the House of Representatives in H.R. 1, the Continuing Budget Resolution for Fiscal Year 2011.

I voted against H.R. 1 because rather than blindly slash programs without taking the time to examine the consequences, I believe what we need are responsible solutions that can reduce the deficit and, at the same time, ensure economic opportunity for the middle class.

I have long been committed to getting Federal spending under control, going back to my support for a balanced budget in the 1980s. Last year I voted for an across-the-board cap on discretionary spending through 2014, and recently voted to ban earmarks for three years. Furthermore, I am a cosponsor to the Reduce Unnecessary Spending Act (S.102), which would establish a streamlined procedure for Congress to vote on discretionary spending cuts proposed by the President, much like a line-item veto.

Ultimately, I believe if we come together in a good-faith effort, and let go of partisan hang-ups, we can break this impasse. Even though we may disagree on this specific bill, I believe we share a common goal in reducing our overall debt. Please know that I will continue to look for common ground across the political divide that meets the needs of Florida and our nation.

Sincerely,
Senator Bill Nelson

"Res ipsa loquitur" is the Latin expression lawyers use, "the thing speaks for itself." Except for ommitting a footnote to his web site, that's all he had to say about the future of this nation.

[BTW, Yalie lawyer Nelson gets a huge percentage of his campaign financing from--"anyone . . . anyone . . . Bueller!"--yes, law firms.]

I love this part: "I believe if we come together in a good-faith effort, and let go of partisan hang-ups, we can break this impasse." Whenever Donkeys are in the majority, they talk about "will of the people" and "mandates" and steamroller their policies through. But on the Wednesday following an Election Day defeat in any race, they dust off "bi-partisan" and sentiments to that effect. The truth is, I think if the Senate did not stand for re-election in staggered one-third increments, the Pubs would be in the majority there, too. Astro Boy knows he's vulnerable here in Florida, so he's making nice noises, sounds that were utterly alien to his throat until last November's Object Lesson in humility.

I see something in Astro Boy's future, a vision for 2012, a sign and a portent of things to come . . . .

The Comparisons Are Striking

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin @The Ikonoklast) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 03:12:00 +0000

Hey guys! Target acquired, there's Qaddafi!

Somewhere in the world, pigs are flying. Don't ask me where, I cannot tell you. Nor am I able to say whether they rocket through the air unaided like Krypto the Superdog or whether they have suddenly sprouted white, feathery avian wings to soar through the azure firmament, each a small, chubby Pegasus in flight. I can only assert that they do, that they must!

I know this because something unprecedented is about to happen, a thing I thought impossible, and thus in need of signs and portents to harbinger its coming. I am about to write something positive about Hillary Clinton.

I can hardly believe it myself, so poleaxed am I by this utterly alien desire. But intellectual honesty is a quality we on the conservative side should cherish, encourage and practice. Leave the Left in its tornado of random feelings to rage and emote. Some of us have to act the adult in the room.

Even a Wisconsin ~~SEIU thug~~ public school teacher could probably discern that I am alluding to the ongoing crisis in Libya and our belated response to Quaddafi's murderous madness. The rumblings from Libya started in mid-January, but were overshadowed by the attention the media was paying to Egypt. And at first Quaddafi was exercising restraint in confronting the demonstrations and the stonings of government office buildings. But anyone with half a brain knew that if Mubarak could turn his tame goons on the protesters, Quaddafi had the potential to be nightmarishly worse.

"It's a quarter to 3 . . . ."

I worried about what Mr. Obama would do. I don't see him as the kind of president who concentrates his policy-making on foreign affairs. I've always seen him as more focused on the domestic agenda [more on this as time goes on].  But in the life of nations as in the lives of men, we often face exactly the challenges we are least prepared by temperament or experience to confront. Biden was wrong; well, actually he's frequently wrong, so I should be more specific. Biden was premature in his prediction that Mr. Obama would face an international crisis within six months, and the extra time Mr. Obama has gained does not seem to have helped his preparedness to meet the test when it finally rolled up to the White House portico.

He dithered a bit when open hostilities broke out. [The Left hates that term, they prefer "careful consideration;" much the way Benedict Arnold might prefer his actions be described as "strategic realignment."] I'll take the Administration at their word about concern for Americans still in country, so far as I am able.   But they tarried in doing so. Things in Libya got hot, and hotter, and then blistering. The Chinese, the British, the Germans all sent warships as security for their evacuation efforts that took place on February 24 and 25 (and subsequently for the larger groups). Our warships didn't arrive until a week later, and after our citizens were largely gone from Libya. The remarkable thing about the delay being that we've had ships in the vicinity covering the Egypt crisis for weeks, so it was more about logic than logistics. Finally, a month later Mr. Obama announces that Quadaffi has had his day and it's time for him to go. I'd say we've left the territory of "consideration" and are in the very close vicinity of "dithering."

Frankly, I think Mrs Clinton would have handled it a little better were she in the Oval Office and not the KY Guy (and I am not referring to Kentucky). Hillary is not even my eighth choice for President, but she's had firsthand experience in world affairs that Barack "Present!" Obama had never bothered to obtain while he was helping ACORN to get out the vagrant vote and enduring two decades of racist rants that he apparently didn't hear at Trinity United Church of Christ. I can understand Mr Obama's desire to run away from comparisons to GW, but Mrs Clinton would not have let the pot simmer over as long as Mr Obama has just for appearances' sake.

[Hillary has never cared a whit about appearances as she understands her Equine constituents have a bottomless capacity to accept whatever they are told if framed as partisan rhetoric, and everything can be framed that way.]

Hillary Clinton had eight years in the White House, was abroad in a diplomatic capacity as First Lady, served in the Senate for eight years before becoming Secretary of State. Say what you will about her taste for clandestine strongarm tactics (shhhh! don't say "blackmail") when applied domestically, it's almost refreshing to see her employ the same dirty tricks in the international arena in America's interests.

Apparently, Mrs Clinton has had enough of the "careful consideration." In a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer datelined March 16, 2011, Mrs. Clinton announced that she would not return as Secretary of State in an Obama second term; nor in any other role, nor would she seek the Presidency herself.   I know, I know, politicians can always be talked into doing something they desperately want to do "for the good of the nation" and "at the call of the people." But I have the sneaking suspicion she means it. She's not retiring, a politician with her history really can't retire; they just eventually become irrelevant to everyone else's plans and their calls stop getting returned. That won't happen to Hillary for a long time.

[I have a mental dialogue in my head now between Bill and Hillary wherein Bill keeps asking her to consider something to keep her busy and away from home: "Gee, I'm sure we could talk Obama into a Federal judgeship, maybe even the Supreme Court, no more campaigning and that's a job you could have for the rest of your LIFE!"]

You SUCK!

In the end, the hesitation, deliberation, whatever you want to call it, didn't much help Mr Obama. The Arab League, lobbying group for the Thugs On Our Side have done their utterly predictable flip only to flop the other way, playing both sides of the Arab Street. [Frankly, the way sentiments and pronouncements flow in that part of the world, I don't think there is an Arab Street, just an interconnecting network of Arab Traffic Circles.] Paying more attention to the resolutions of the United Nations (Parliament of Thugs) than the US Congress has got his Lefty base up in his face, with prima ballerina Dennis Kucinich first up in the spotlight, taking his theatrically sad-faced moral outrage in front of as many cameras as he can find.

And he was not the only one in Congress. And I have to admit, watching that fat fool Michael Moore turn on Obama and demand he return the Nobel Peace Prize is hilarious. As to the Peace Prize, well easy come, . . . .

Time for the baby to grow up

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin @The Ikonoklast) — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 09:51:00 +0000

A little bit more on the NPR scandal, now that it's worked it's way through the twittering ninnies that constitute the Mainstream Media. The major arguments I've been perusing go like this statement from Oregon Democrat Congressman Earl Blumenauer:

"As traditional news outlets lay off reporters and offer less coverage of important topics, public broadcasting is filling the gap, bringing critical news and information to communities across the country," Blumenauer added. "What's more, public broadcasting stations are the only source of free programming that educates our children rather than the many commercial stations simply trying to sell them products. Our communities, our workers and our children would be the true victims of any cuts to funding for public broadcasting."[1]

Road apples . I'll be the first to tell you that Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon and other commercial television shows aimed at children are designed to hold kids' attention long enough for the high-pressure ads to brainwash the wee ones, who will in turn hector their parents for yet more toys. So what? Before you think I'm being too coldly capitalistic, go take a look at the Sesame Workshop. You know, the Big Bird people. You don't think that has become an enormously profitable enterprise with all the deals they have made over the forty-plus years since Oscar first popped out of his garbage can? "Well," you say, "Sesame Workshop is a non-profit organization. Says so right here." Someday, I'll get into that topic, but for now let's say that being a not for profit company does not mean "lacking lotsa cash." They have revenue streams from lots and lots of grubby, moneymaking enterprises paying them for the right to fashion toys, games, books, live shows, etc. around their lovable characters. That's over and above the fees they are paid by PBS stations to broadcast the show.

Doom! DOOM!

[Actually, I recall a very edgy Nickelodeon cartoon show, Invader Zim, that I liked and it regularly made fun of exactly the scenario I described above. Although it was pulled for ratings declines, I harbor the sneaking suspicion that a network or advertising executive finally watched the show and saw Vasquez clearly lampooning broadcasters like Nickelodeon and their sponsors.]

Being organized as a non-profit does not mean you are dealing with poor, dedicated idealists who would much rather live out some pure existence than prostitute their values to serve commercial ends. They may in fact be idealists, and some non-profit corporations may be in dire financial circumstances. However, being a non-profit just means you don't pay income taxes on what's left over from your revenues after you pay all your expenses and that you don't pay dividends to stockholders. One way you keep non-profits from not showing a profit is that you pay your executive staff VERY WELL. And whom do you think makes that call? Some of the most highly paid people in the world work for 501(c)3 corporations. And many of those entities get government funding.

And why are we conservatives so upset with the non-profit media outlets? Well, going back to the Brian Montopoli article I quoted above:

Eric Deggans, the media critic for the St. Petersburg Times who also contributes to NPR, said in an interview that he believes NPR makes a concerted effort to be fair in its news coverage. (Deggans stressed that his connection to the network made him less than impartial.)

"When it comes to their opinion shows and their commentary shows and stuff like that, they're focused on kind of a college educated audience," he said. "And they have a very tight focus on who their listenership is, and they're creating shows that speak to those people. I think sometimes people see that focus and they translate that into a liberal bias."

Put another way, we're ignorant and STOO-pid. Sound like anyone else you know of connected to the world of public broadcasting? And unlike Ron Schiller, Deggans IS on the content side of NPR. I live in the Tampa Bay area, the St. Pete Times is a local paper here and is not known for it's right-wing views.

The simple truth is that non-profits are ideologically-driven enterprises, and there is NOTHING wrong with that in my eyes. But they attract people motivated by those ideals and those people in turn seek out others similarly inclined. Ron Schiller did not get his job at NPR just because he liked the salary and the dental plan. He clearly bought into the mission statement. And the people who hired Schiller no doubt wanted to make sure he would fit well within their corporate culture. When he left, he was headed for another non-profit (and yeah, I know it was more about finding work in Aspen where he wanted to settle to be near a significant other, but he didn't go to work for a department store in Aspen). The condemnations of Schiller's candid opinions recorded by Project Veritas coming from his former colleagues as atypical examples of the attitudes of public broadcasting staffers reeks of sanctimonious hypocrisy. The circumstances are more akin to the scene in the film The Dirty Dozen wherein Lee Marvin chides Charles Bronson about his shooting of a deserter: "You only made one mistake: you let someone see you DO it!"

NOW he tells us!!

I defy anyone at NPR, PBS, or CPB to produce a single individual on the content side or in any part of their organizations that is in fact a real conservative. In fact, I think conservatives would object to working for these organizations for idealistic reasons of their own.

What?! David Brooks? Puh-leeze!

But there is another issue, one of fundamental fairness. It's one thing for a private, profit-making network to target a given demographic. That's a business decision and a risk they take that it will ultimately be profitable, that they will attract their target audience and that advertisers will want to reach that population segment. For all the sturm und drang liberal pundits and political opponents stir up about Fox News, people watch it of their own free will and advertisers choose to buy time. It's the same for the utter lunatics over at MSNBC, who do not even pretend that they are anything but rabid partisans of the Democrat party. It's the same story at any commercial network. [And while I'm on the subject, the accusations leveled at Fox's alleged bias only demonstrate to me that journalists have become so self-satisfied with their liberal preconceptions that they lack any perspective of what constitutes fair reportage.] When a public broadcaster skews its content to suit a narrow demographic, it is forcing the rest of the nation to subsidize the audience they serve. They cannot claim that they do it to target a favorable segment of the population for maximum ad revenues. The only other reasons are that it suits the world view and political aspirations of its producers and its viewers. If they are the kind of bi-coastal, university-educated, affluent professional that Eric Deggans alludes to above, then I see no reason why they should not bear all the costs of supporting public broadcasting directly, rather than coughing up the occasional funding-drive donation for bragging rights and a tote bag.

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING SECTION CONTAINS NUMBERS AND MATH.

Well, let's talk a little about the finances for CPB, NPR, and PBS. I used the 2009 statement for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as that was all that was available. The PBS and NPR annual reports for 2010 includes the 2009 numbers, so I'll work with 2009 for all three entities.

Both NPR and PBS are essentially content providers or coordinators, they provide the radio (NPR) and the television (PBS) stations with a stream of programs that can be broadcast. NPR gets most of it's money from the network of 910 local radio stations in the broadcast system, which pay NPR for the programming it provides. NPR gets some of it's funding as grants from corporations and foundations, donations, income from its investments, and merchandising, about $60 million in 2009. Neither NPR nor CPB indicate how much is specifically from CPB, but NPR's web page indicates CPB is among the grant makers. NPR does not operate any radio stations itself, but it does operate the satellite distribution system for its programming. NPR also has a separate entity known as The NPR Foundation, a $250 million dollar endowment that distributes its income solely for the benefit of the NPR operating entity, although there are restrictions on certain amounts. [Ron Schiller was both President of the Foundation and also Vice President for Development (non-profit-speak for "fund raising") at NPR.] In 2009, the Foundation distributed $15 million to NPR, roughly ten percent of NPR's total revenue that year. NPR's revenues from member stations were $2.7 million for dues and $63 million for programming fees. There is one final item identified as "Distribution Services" which totaled $11 million in 2009, and this is for fees paid by the member stations for use of the satellite network it operates. Therefore from it's total revenues of $152 million in 2009, $77 million came from member stations (about half).

[In 2003, NPR and The NPR Foundation were the recipients of one of the largest single monetary donations to a cultural institution when the late Joan B. Kroc, widow of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc, left them $225 million. Part of the bequest was put into the NPR Foundation to increase the endowment, much of it was used to expand operations and reduce fees to member stations. So Super Size with pride, you ignorant fatties! How's THAT! Michelle Obama?][2 and 3 and 4]

PBS was the most weaselly of the three organizations' websites, in terms of being all pomp and puff and very cagey about where it puts the numbers and the details about its operations. In fact, other than the audited annual report (not easy to find), which tends to give out gross numbers and no details, they are not forthcoming with anything approaching the level of information that both CPB and NPR do. According to the CPB report [backed up by Wikipedia] there are about 354 television stations it funds, presumably the bulk are PBS stations. PBS distributes programs to the member stations, but does not have a central production facility of it's own. It commissions some productions; co-produces programs with other entities, including some of the larger member stations (eg, WGBH in Boston, WNET in New York City); and buys programming from entities such as the Sesame Workshop or American Public Television. In addition to colleges, some PBS member stations are owned by state or local governments (and get funding from them) and others may be organized into statewide "subnetworks."[5]

About three-fourths of the radio stations in the NPR network are operated by colleges and draw part of their support from the schools. Many NPR stations are also co-located and jointly operated with PBS television stations, but thanks to PBS, I can't determine how many nor whether they are also at colleges. The individual public radio and television stations may also get grants from corporations and foundations. I have no figures in that regard as my focus was on the Triumvirate.

[Here in Tampa, WUSF is both a PBS TV station and an NPR radio station, located on the campus of the University of South Florida (Go Bulls!) Additionally, USF has acquired a second radio station, WSMR, which it plans to use as an NPR station servicing the Sarasota area.][6]

In 2009, PBS received $200 million from member stations for programming and other services. Grants and contributions (including unspecified CPB grants) were $55 million, royalties and video rights of $55 million, $16 million in other services, losses from investment activities of -$53 million and something identified as "Imputed value of donated broadcast rights" of $229 million, for total revenue of $503 million in 2009.

However, the imputed income is an accounting adjustment for the value of programming ultimately acquired by PBS but paid for by direct grants from other entities. Think of it this way: Someone buys a car and gives it to you as a gift. You spent no cash, but you got something of value, so you recognize the value of the gift as income that year. Whether to include this in their total revenue or not is problematical because I do not know how much of the third-party money was from CPB, or from member stations who get funding from CPB. To be conservative, I'm going to treat it all as non-CPB money. Therefore, from total revenue of $503 million, member fees constitute $200 million or forty percent.

[Oh BTW, perusing the expense side, how about the $41 million PBS spent in this category: "Promotion – Represents institutional and program promotion and press efforts intended to increase awareness of the value of public television . These activities provide public television stations with a broad array of promotional support, including on-air promotional spots, print and radio advertising, press support and the coordination of public television’s educational message and positioning." (emphasis added) I smell some $avings][7-pg.13]

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is the recipient of the large direct grant from the Federal government among the three entities, $400 million in 2009. There were also Federal grants labeled "Radio Interconnection" of $27 million and "Digital," of $35 million, which were targeted for specific upgrades to the both radio and television broadcast technologies. CPB also had investment income of $9 million, Dept. of Education grant of $1 million, and refunds of prior grants of $12 million, for total revenue in 2009 of $484 million.

For 2009, the CPB gave direct grants to radio stations of $59 million and to television stations of $203 million. $20 million was used by CPB to pay General and Administrative expenses. If one omits the non-recurring Federal grants for system upgrades, and assuming that everything besides G&A expenses is spent in support of public broadcasting, then $402 million of the CPB's revenue for 2009 is available for operating expenses.

If Congress had de-funded CPB-that becomes $2 million.

Put another way, if the 2009 revenues for NPR and PBS are combined, $152 + $503, the combined revenue of both public broadcasting network operators is $655 million. Remove $400 million and that total becomes $255 million, a reduction in funds of sixty-one percent.

[WHEW!]

Some little Lefty will bawl that I'm messing with the numbers and I should stick to the operating grants. But hear me out: CPB uses most of it's funds to support public broadcasting in one way or another. Operating grants to NPR and PBS are one thing, but all of the rest of its funds are used in some way to support the endeavor of public broadcasting, upgrading infrastructure, producing programs, etc. If CPB is not there to provide the funds, some other entity will have to provide it. Or the funds must be done without. And activities will decrease.

I've tried to be as conservative as I could with numbers and footnotes, as I am not familiar with the finances and do not have access to relevant details. The public broadcasting Triumvirate of PBS, NPR, AND CPB have very convoluted funding arrangements, so it's often hard for outsiders to discern exactly where money is coming from and where it's going. But pull funding from CPB and it's like you have have turned the water source off at the main and all the taps within the structure have suddenly, simultaneously gone dry.

Ok, they still have corporate and foundation grants, funding from various state and local governments, revenues from sales and licensing deals, so it's not quite dry; but the system as constructed cannot survive. This is the dirty little secret that the public broadcasters don't want you to see and why they have gone into high gear to head this freight train off at the switch. It puts the lie to their assertion that government funding doesn't matter to them.

This was a longer effort than I thought it would be when I started, but I had to finish it to make my points, and I'm glad I did.

One more thing. The advocates for public broadcasting have been making the rounds talking about how the member stations of public broadcasting are often the only source of community information in rural areas. This is utter nonsense and based on a false premise. In 1967, when the Public Broadcasting Act was passed, the idea was to have a network of over the air broadcasters of radio and TV scattered across the land. This model is 44 years old and hopelessly dated. It's stagnant and needs to be rethought in light of the technological advances since 1967. There was no penetration of cable, no satellite TV, no satellite radio, no fiber optic connections, cable and telephone carriers weren't competing to deliver the same services. There were three major television networks and some local channels, not the plethora available to every home these days. Hell, we no longer even broadcast over the air the same way since the FCC mandated digital broadcasts.

As for being the information source for rural areas, that is a big-city stereotype about country folk being poor ignorant, helpless hayseeds who need the guidance of sophisticates from the urban East and West. Even thirty years ago, people in rural areas were using six-foot parabolic dish antennas to access television from satellites that far exceeded local over-the-air offerings. Today, there are competing providers for the small, fixed-dish satellite services that vie with cable for the variety of their programming.

And what about the idea that these three entities are the only sources of non-commercial (and presumably unbiased) reporting? Well, I have a question. What about C-SPAN? Those three channels actually let you see what Congressmen and Senators say (if you can stand it), rather than letting Nina Totenberg play carefully edited snippets and then tell you what it means. And they show events that appeal to both the political right and left, talk with authors who have written books from every point of view, host panels that discuss current events and take calls from viewers. Who funds C-SPAN? No, the big difference between C-SPAN and the Triumvirate is that C-SPAN is raw and public broadcasting is very, very carefully polished.

There are so many changes in communications technology since this model was created in response to that outdated law. Mandatory broadcast spectrum changes have opened up subchannels for carriers in the digital spectrum. High def radio. And let me not forget, the Internet. So many ways to deliver content. PBS and NPR themselves have widgets for smart phones. No access?

Why not develop a regional strategy for reaching rural areas? Why support 910 radio stations and 354 TV stations? Use regional hubs, deliver the broadcast over cable nationally. Does HBO need 350 facilities to deliver its programming to anyone who wants it? Or use the subchannels available to digital broadcasters (which PBS already is, to target children and such). In my area, one of the two PBS TV stations, WUSF, has gone all digital even carried on cable; it's only available on my one digital tuner, the televisions with basic cable don't get that station. That sure doesn't fit into the 1967 model. Make a deal with SiriusXM for special access to public broadcast content, make it less costly than a regular subscription. After all, they already have fund drives for "subscribers" on NPR and PBS, so make it a formal subscription.

Resistance is f-u-t-i-l-e!

Ah, but maybe that's the problem: the Progressivist model that public broadcasting was designed around is one where everyone pays regardless, your only choice is whether or not you accept the "benefits." At it's core is an authoritarian mindset, never mind the fluffy Muppets on the cover. The more libertarian notion of paying for what you use is anathema to that way of thinking. It has to be "free," which really means "no charge to access." In my books, $400 million in Federal dollars is a pretty expensive "free."

You need local reporters? Why not let them work from home, send them on assignments as needed regionally? If small hand held cameras or even Skype set-ups are used by the major networks, why not public broadcasting? Rent studio space as needed.

Consolidate facilities. WUSF radio, the college-based station I mentioned above, recently bought WSMR, another station south of Tampa Bay and they are converting it to NPR to service the Sarasota area and to help them change format for WUSF, one station classical and the other jazz when not broadcasting NPR conent. Fine, but they are also keeping separate studio facilities rather than stream content to a local broadcast antennae from their existing facility, saving the operating cost of another location. Why?

Last but not least-accept advertising. You don't have to be NPR all day. There are cable networks that share channels according to the time of day. Why not public broadcasting?

In other words-ADAPT!

But they don't think that way. Because we consistently allow them to avoid it. It isn't because they cannot meet the same needs with different strategies. It's because they prefer it the way it is.

An Open Letter to Senator Bill Nelson of Florida

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin @The Ikonoklast) — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:21:00 +0000

I don't know how much impact this will have on Senator Astro Boy, but one has hopes.

Stop! Stop! Stop, Astro Boy!

March 14, 2011

Dear Senator Nelson,

I wanted to write and let you know my support for the Republican initiatives to reduce the level of Federal spending from the ruinous levels of the last few years. I do not find it a dire state of affairs that the utterly reasonable proposal to return to 2008 levels of spending be enacted. But I am dismayed that a steady stream of Democratic Senators and Congressional Representatives get up in their respective chambers to belittle all the "drastic" cuts proposed by Republicans without making any suggestions of their own. Other than to raise taxes, which only a moron would suggest in the current economic climate.

As a man with an undergraduate degree in finance and an MBA in economics, as well as a life long interest in politics and history, it seems to me that Mr. Obama is making exactly the same errors FDR made under similar circumstances during the Great Depression. In his early years, Roosevelt used his bully pulpit to talk up a redistributionist, welfare state agenda, seemingly hostile to both wealth and business interests. And he was rewarded with an economy where investors were unwilling to participate at the risk their investments would be confiscated or taxed out of profitability. The temporary reduction in unemployment from 11 million in 1933 to 7 million in 1936 lasted only until the NRA was ended by the Supreme Court. Unemployment rose again to 11 million in 1937. In fact, nothing FDR did economically ended the depression; it was the war that did that.

Tell your caucus colleagues that we are at a pivotal moment in history. Even if they wanted to adopt dubious New Deal solutions, FDR did not have the current monumental quantity of accumulated Federal debt to deal with. We do.

And for the record, high-speed rail is another boondoggle that the voters of this state already rejected under Governor Bush. How many times must we keep banging our heads on that wall before we realize it hurts? Use your office to force the Interior Department to approve drilling licenses, offshore, onshore and in ANWR. They are sitting on permits for coal mines, too. The Obama administration is stealthily promulgating a policy of raising energy costs for all Americans in order to make the so-called "alternative" sources relatively cost-effective. Anyone who listened to him in 2008 heard him promise he would, and it was one reason I did not vote for him. But this hurts all Americans and you need to decide if that's the kind of thing you want associated with you.

VOTE FOR THE BUDGET CUTS!

Thank you,

Kevin

Well, as long as you insist, Mr. Schiller. . .

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 07:36:00 +0000

Ron Schiller

An Open letter to my Congressman, Rick Nugent of Florida, Republican Class of 2010, formerly Sheriff of Hernando County, replacing the estimable Ginny Browne-Waite. Sheriff Rick is a member of the Tea Party Caucus.

Dear Sheriff Rick,

Talk about timing. With sad sack Harry Reid mewling in the well of the Senate about the importance of continuing to fund public broadcasting, we now see that this is yet another effort to protect a core constituency and supporter of the Democratic Party with the tax dollars of all Americans--including Republicans. Along comes the Ron Schiller video sting. OOPPS!!

If, in the words of NPR's own fund-raiser, the company would be "better off in the long-run" without federal funding, I see no reason the US Government should not accommodate his most candid analysis. This is the perfect opportunity to push this particularly bitter pill into the open mouths of braying Donkeys.

But not just NPR's direct Federal monies. They smugly assert that they get only a small portion of their funding from Washington directly, and this is true when narrowly construed. But it's a shell game that this old accountant sees through. NPR is a production company that sells it's programming to public radio and television stations throughout the country. That's where it gets almost all of it's operational cash. And where do the public broadcasters get much of their funding? From the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And you know where that money comes from.

So please Sheriff Rick, do what you can to de-fund these monstrosities. They can get advertising money and private foundation grants (note: no grants from Federal monies to private foundations though; these guys are tricky, relentless and most of all, they feel ENTITLED to do anything to further their cause as Conservatives and Libertarians are all stupid, white gun-toting, racist tea-baggers and anything they do in fighting us is morally justifiable). It isn't just NPR and CPB against us, Sheriff, even if you discount the openly partisan loons on MSNBC. The parent NBC is just more subtle about it. Dan Rather ran his long career aground in a desperate, sloppy, clearly partisan drive to hurt Mr. Bush with those false Air National Guard memos, and remains unrepentant today (in fact, he spoke out in 2009 in favor of the Federal government subsidizing news organizations when the banks and auto makers where lining up for largess). Ms. Couric is no admirer of Republicans. The one news network that allows Republicans to discuss their positions on a level playing field with Democrats is vilified as an extreme right-wing mouthpiece. Well sir, for once the mask of respectability slipped off the smug face of Liberal journalism and I say we make the most of the opportunity, while the public eye is on them and before everyone forgets about it and goes back to following Sheen tweets.

De-fund CPB and NPR.

Very truly yours,

Kevin

Gee, I know it's been a while . . . .

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 07:05:00 +0000

Once upon a time, I wanted to use blogging as an outlet for my restless brain. But I have a problem. I'm a bit lazy. And at times, easily distracted (can't say whether or not it's ADHD as I've never been diagnosed. Could be.) Moreover, I am in complete agreement with the following:

"I hate writing. I love having written." Dorothy Parker.

Had I taken up the virtual pen diligently then, by now I would be regarded as quite the prophet.

For example, I drove everyone I knew crazy in 2005 (the year I started this), when I announced flatly that the 2008 Presidential election campaign would not hinge on the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. Coming out of Mr. Bush's second-term campaign, people looked at me as though I had lost my mind. Kerry-the-Peacenik had been eclipsed by Kerry-the-Sailor-Man, the Fightin' Patrician, and his secret, Christmas-time missions to Cambodia at the behest of President-elect Richard Nixon a month before Dick took the oath of office. That Tricky Dick was so Machiavellian!

[Have you ever noticed that LBJ is the one President all the other Democrats never want to be associated with? Ok, besides Carter; but Jimmy is still alive and still behaving like a bad-tempered Blanche Dubois battling a thirty-year episode of constipation. But when a Liberal mentions Viet Nam, they almost always skip over Johnson and zero right in on Nixon. Like Akhenaten of ancient Egypt, the priests of Liberalism chisel his name out of all the historical records, never to be spoken of or have tributes to his memory. Poor Lyndon; I doubt there will ever be a super carrier named in his honor.]

Iraq was in the news, it was commonly known we would not be out of the country or even winding down by 2008, so of course the campaign would once again be about the war!

Nuh UH, not me. I told my friends that the 2008 Presidential election would be about jobs.

I had been observing the changes in work life in my little corner of the corporate professional world in the last decade and was disturbed by the trends I saw and read about. I noticed that in the run-up to Y2K, and the gargantuan efforts to review all the legacy computer code that had been written since the dawn of the digital age, corporations had discovered that, like manufactured goods in the Seventies and Eighties, modern service-level jobs could be done vastly more cheaply in foreign lands. The simultaneous expansion of the Internet, fiber optic and satellite communications, and desktop assets had rendered eager English-speaking workers in lower wage nations as close as the guy in the next cubical for everything except a quick visit. "Outsourcing" had been the wave of the Nineties; the new fad was "Off-shoring." And for those companies that didn't "Out" you nor "Off" you, they were still not finished with you.

"Multitasking" became a buzz word (buzz concept? buzz idea?) that spread through the hive-mind of the corporate world, appearing in articles, advertisements, job descriptions and resumes. Work teams that lost a member often learned that job duties were being re-distributed amongst the remaining team and that the open position would not be filled. "Do more with less," we were told, "We need you to multitask." Job descriptions became cut and paste affairs. And the work day expanded. Managers, in conferences all day, became available for status updates at 4:00 pm or later and the handy Blackberry let them blast an e-mail to the whole team before leaving the conference table, just in time to dash any hopes of dinner with the family at a reasonable hour. The explosion of functionality in hand-held mobile devices meant that simply because you were watching Jay Leno didn't mean you couldn't respond to a few e-mails. After all, it was the middle of the day in Mumbai.

And everywhere I looked, there was an atmosphere of tension, of fear. Not a great, shivering terror. But a subtle fear, like a slight bad odor in the air conditioning you only whiff at certain moments and the HVAC guys swear has no cause they can find. An underlying tension in the way people work, a feeling of fragility in the fabric of their circumstances. The momentary, millisecond of defiance forming on their faces when yet another random task is assigned to them, something that might once have been given to the "admin" person in the group before those people became rare in modern corporations, followed by the downward glance and slight head nod of acceptance and capitulation. The constant dread that, despite all efforts to be an endlessly-busy, loyal, compliant drone, somewhere far away in the corporate HQ someone who has never been out to this facility and never looked at the work flow as it really exists (not the chart everyone knows is a joke) will put some formulas into a spreadsheet and calculate that the Manila office is getting ten new positions at a fraction of what the company currently pays for the same quality of work. Of course the quality is the same! And if it isn't, we'll pretend it is and then I can get my productivity bonus. Death from above, via Excel.

And people who were let go might find a new job. This was at a time when the published unemployment rate figures were low, remember. But I had a sinking suspicion that the figures missed something: how often people were RIFed from an $80K a year job and accepted a $60K one instead. Or whatever those figures would be in the prevailing wage. It's something I must research and may write about later, but I suspect the phenomenon was more common than full-employment statistics would convey. Full employment, but diminished means.

And the question I began to ask my colleagues over drinks some evenings was "What CEO wants to pay the wages they all want to see in the incomes of their customers?" You know the answer: the other guy.

And while "prevailing wages" in the manufacturing and service sectors were morphing from a local phenomenon into a world-embracing idea that included areas of extreme poverty, prices remained strictly local. Everyone wanted to pay Mumbai, but charge Manhattan.

I know, "So sad; too bad! That's Capitalism, baby." And I DO know, for once upon a time I studied Economics diligently. Once it became possible, once it was demonstrated successfully even a single time, it would spread through the corporate world faster than you could say "Harvard Business Review." And I know that it was a transitional phase. A stimulus that would lead to a societal response. That is the nature of things. What I suspected was that this time, the reaction from the people most impacted by the change would be expressed politically, in whom they chose to elect, rather than each individual family trying to adapt to the circumstances. They would tilt away from the Republicans and towards the Democrats because the Donks stock in trade is "Got a problem? Government can help!" Middle America was fed up, already working a second job to supplement the two incomes that weren't getting the bills paid, they wanted help and no one was listening. I figured the first Democrat contender to shut up about the war and start talking about jobs and incomes, not as a side issue but as the mainstay of his or her administration, would steal the primaries and then the general election.

[I always thought that the popular backlash against the Kennedy-McCain immigration bill in 2007 was at least partly because of the fears enumerated above. It's not the same thing I know, and defeating Kennedy-McCain did not do anything to staunch off-shoring, but I think it created among people NOT affected by direct competition with low-wage illegal immigrant workers a resonant feeling of sympathy and an outlet for anger for the pressures they did feel.]

I was wrong about the major issue of the election being jobs, to an extent, because I didn't see just how irresponsible mortgage lending had become. I worked for JP Morgan Chase at the time Bear Stearns fell in March, which I think of as the first shock in the crisis that really bloomed in the Fall. But I was right as well: The mortgage crisis is really a jobs crisis first, not caused by the insolvency on Wall Street and the ripple effects throughout the economy, but exacerbated by it. People lost jobs and companies curtailed hiring after Fall 2008 as the effects deepened, but declining incomes are what started off the mortgage crisis. People with well-paying jobs can pay their mortgages and don't need second mortgages or sub-prime rates. Areas with stable employment levels don't suffer steadily declining property values and stay "above water." More on this another time; this is a blog, not a book.

When the bailouts started and got widespread support on both sides of the aisle, that sealed McCain's fate. When both Pubbies and Donks find virtue in welfare statism, people turn to the party that had always spouted socialistic answers.

That's not to diminish Obama as a politician; his singularly blank resume throughout all his offices has proved no detriment to his career. If Bill Clinton was the "Teflon President," then Mr. Obama is the "KY Guy:" so slick, he's in before you realized he was trying.

Good to be back!!

Meditations on Terri Schiavo and The End of Life

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 08:33:00 +0000

The case of Terri Schiavo is one that touches my own life in a deep and hurtful manner. I have nothing but sympathy for all the parties concerned and I do understand what emotions are flying through the families.

When I was a young man, I met a bright and vivacious woman of many accomplishments who happened to be 21 years my senior. Despite the age difference, we fell in love. We did not marry until for five years, a few months after she finally achieved a PH. D. (which she added to four other post-graduate degees she had accumulated). We became the typical Manhattan workaholic couple, each of us laboring hard in our respective fields. We traveled and planned and loved each other, children being the only thing that we never managed. But we had each other. And an embarrassing quantity of cats.

In 1994, she developed post-operative pneumonia after some elective surgery and was in a coma for five days in New York Hospital. When she came out of the coma, she stayed in the hospital another five days before coming home. She was weak, she required constant care for the first few months, and I am grateful that my mother was able to attend her during the day. She slowly regained some of her health, but as they say in her native Tennessee when discussing shotgun wounds “you may get better, but you’ll never get well.” She was very active, but after that she was never as strong again. New York City was taking it’s toll on her breathing, and so we decided to move to Florida after searching for alternative locations to live. She was able to retire on disability from her university position, and in 1996, we built a home just north of Tampa.

We lived here for a few years and she enjoyed gardening, amateur theatre and meditating. She was fanatical about getting flu shots and getting medical attention. In January 2003, she developed bronchitis and was hospitalized for 7 days. But she still suffered after her release and in March, she asked to be taken back to the hospital and she was admitted through the emergency room, suffering from pneumonia.

I cannot help that what follows sounds like a diatribe against the medical profession, I have developed a bottomless reservoir of rage against the doctors here in the Sunshine State after that experience, for the care she received here was miserable. She was then old enough for Medicare and health insurance from her former employer covered what Medicare did not, and she had tertiary catastrophic medical insurance as well. And yet she had to beg for care. She was attended by our family physician, by an infectious disease specialist (the spouse of our family doctor who had been called in for consultation, not coincidentally), and a pulmonary and respiratory specialist she had seen for years. The nurses were hardly the Florence Nightengales of television drama, but sullen and indolent whiners complaining about their lot in life, their pay, their schedules, the doctors, and resentful of every moment they had to spend away from the pastry box at their station. The hospital moved her from room to room three times in four days without explanation, and when one nurse asked her why she was writing everyone’s name in her dayplanner, my wife replied that she was going to write a letter of complaint when she was discharged and wanted to get all the particulars correct. The next day, while she was out for another test, the information was torn from her planner.

She raised hell with the director of nursing and was moved again, to a private room this time, with more sympathetic nurses assigned to her. But it was too little too late. A day later, she was moved to intensive care as she had only ten percent of her normal lung capacity and her heart was beating 180 times a minute to support her life. They placed her into a medically-induced coma for two weeks and started her on a ventilator with 100 percent oxygen.

For two weeks I stood vigil and consented to the eventual tracheotomy they had to perform, which broke my heart as she was a singer with a lovely voice. When they brought her out of the coma, she displayed signs of motor difficulty indicative of a left parietal lobe stroke, which a CT confirmed. They had apparently been pumping her full of anti-clotting medicine after their inept insertion of IVs had caused clots to form in her arm. She was not subject to clots, did not have any cholesterol problems before the “care” she received from these devotees of Asclepious. To this day, I believe the anti-clotting medicine precipitated the stroke, although they certainly would never admit it.

She ceased to produce urine in the catheter, and they called in a urologist to insert it, which he did with much complaining. I could hear him from the hall outside her cubicle in ICU. By the time her stay in this hospital was finished, she had eighteen doctors of various credentials attending her. They asked to do a test on her for which she would have to be taken to the operating room, to see what was wrong with the kidneys. They were going to inject some dye in her to help trace the flow of blood. She had some kind of seizure in the OR and became unresponsive after that. And she was not the only one to become unresponsive.

I cannot adequately convey the things that pass through one’s mind seeing the person you love stare mindlessly at the ceiling, her lovely, intelligent gray eyes without a thought in them. Words fail. Despair, horror, grief, guilt, anger all combined in a cocktail shaken with generous portions of prayer and a faint dash of unreasonable hope and served over the ice in your belly. The staff, doctors and nurses, began to eye me with the unmistakeable look of soldiers in enemy territory. The family doctor altered his hospital rounds to times when he knew I could not be there, out of keeping with his work habits to that point. A neurologist consulting on the case walked past me like I was invisible when I saw him coming out of her room, despite my calling out to him. Another neurologist screamed at me when I questioned him too closely. On the whole, the lot of them behaved like puppies who know they have messed the carpet and are avoiding the inevitable reckoning. The only conversations we had, incessantly it seems, were about discontinuing life support. One of her regular physicians, the respiratory specialist, insisted that she would not want to live like this. As if he knew. Or cared.

You see, I did know. In 23 years of living with this amazing woman, we had had this conversation a few times. You do that when there is such a difference between the ages of the two partners. She believed in life. Always. She was loathed to weed her flower garden because weeds were living things, too. She planted the seeds from every piece of produce we consumed. Stray animals were instantly adopted. And when we had prepared our wills two years prior, she had refused a living will. Moreover, she had refused to be my healthcare surrogate, stating that she would never turn off my life support as long as my heart could be made to beat. Hope to her was a tangible thing, part of the fabric of her being. I had to have our lawyer designated as I did not want to exist only technically alive, the basic needs of existence provided by others. She was not pleased with my decision.

But this information had no impact on the staff. They harangued me constantly about DNRs and cutting off her life support. She had to be dialyzed and their favorite suggestion was for me to stop dialysis. All the stuff Michael Schiavo has been heard to say about slipping peacefully into a coma and quietly dying, I heard that a hundred times about cessation of dialysis. One would think that it were a boon to the terminally ill to suffer unaided kidney failure.

And yet, no one could explain exactly what was wrong with her kidneys.

While all this was going on, they were trying to get her out of their ICU. They contacted a rehab facility to find her a bed there, but they could not move her while she required both dialysis and a ventilator. In total, she spent eight weeks in ICU and every hour I was there, I got THE LECTURE until I finally told them all I would get a lawyer if they didn’t stop. I knew her mind, I knew what she wanted, and I was carrying out her wishes. In truth, I also lived on hope.

One morning, I got a call from the night shift nurse. The dialysis was no longer possible, her catheters had occluded with clotted blood and they would have to move them. Again. A snippy nephrologist was conferenced in with the nurse and he told me that he had decided not to move the catheters, that dialysis was not effective anyway. By now, she was pumped so full of fluids that her skin began to split and weep. He cut me off, shut me down, and if he had been standing in front of me at that moment I would have been hard pressed not to knock him on his ass and kick him in the crotch.

The problem was that I just could not trust the people who were caring for her, they were such cheer-leaders for her demise. I began to suspect they wanted me to bury the evidence of their ineptitude. I felt that their advice was self-serving at best. And then there was the cost, of course.

What you need to understand about Medicare if you do not already know is that Medicare limits contractually what can be charged by any care provider for specific services. Not just what the provider can charge Medicare, but what can be charged at all. As I said, my wife had secondary and tertiary catastrophic insurance, the last with a limit of two million dollars. But all the services the hospital was providing were limited by the Medicare Diagnosis Related Group structure (DRG). What this is, in layman’s terms, is a comprehensive list of all procedures from all medical specialties and each one has an attendant fee to be paid to the provider. Medicare determines what will be paid and pays between eighty to one hundred percent of the fee. Private secondary insurance will pay the other twenty percent where needed, but only according to the DRG table. Catastrophic insurance will pay other things not included in the DRGs, but in my wife’s case, this was moot. When I finally saw the full bill for my wife’s stay, it was about seven hundred thousand dollars. But Medicare would only allow an amount less than two hundred thousand to be collected for those same services. They were losing money in a big way every day she stayed there and they were desperate for it to stop. They could not get rid of her as long as she was dependant on both a ventilator and dialysis. Her death would have stopped that cash hemorrhage

I had by now lost hope and was haunted by the terrible suspicion that she might be aware of some of what was going on, suffering horribly. You could not tell from her lack of response, though. I spent my time with her sitting near her bed, reading, her hand placed on top of mine. I kept her favorite stuffed animal tucked in next to her, I sprayed her with her favorite perfume and kept classical piano music cds going from a portable cd player (which the hospital helpfully would not let me plug in, the cord not having a third grounding prong, forcing me to keep a supply of batteries about). I talked to her, her friends and family visited, but no one got her to respond. The videos of Terri Schiavo tracking a balloon break my heart, I would have rejoiced to get anything more than the blank lifeless stare she returned.

When the doctor terminated dialysis, I looked at her poor, fluid-bloated body, wrapped in gauze to contain the leakage from her skin, her lifeless eyes, and reluctantly decided not to force the issue of dialysis. I had not seen the hospital bill at this point, and was not aware how bad this was for them financially. My concern was her suffering. I tried to get the local hospice to help me take her home for what I thought would be her final week to fulfill an oft-stated wish she had to die in her own bed and ran into another excess of institutional compassion. It seems that the ventilator was considered lifesupport and the hospice refused to provide care for her unless it were replaced by a tracheotomy collar, a small device not unlike an oxygen mask. This would mean that she would struggle for every breath as the mask would provide oxygen but not breathing assistance, which she was now dependant upon. Instead of the five to seven days that it would take for her kidney problem to put her into a full coma and kill her, it would probably be only two or three days of agony before her heart gave out. And it was not an issue that they could not do it, that they did not have the skilled personnel, they readily admitted that they did. It was just against their policies to do so. Whenever I hear Matt Lauer touting the compassion of hospice on television, I remember the institutional coldness and stubborn insistence on policy that would have my wife gasping herself to death.

But my wife fooled them all. Without warning, her kidneys began working again after six weeks of inactivity. I began to hope again. So did the hospital; they saw a ray of hope that they could shunt her out of their ICU and into a rehab hospital. Within three hours of being notified of an available bed, she was transferred 50 miles away to the nearest facility. Eighteen doctors had to sign off and it was done in three hours, while it took them three full days to get me the results of a CT scan.

Ten days later, on Mother’s Day, I was at her side when I noticed that she was nodding her head in answer to something a nurse was saying to me. Just ever so slightly. I was overjoyed! I thought a miracle had happened. She answered with nods to various questions. She shook her head “No” when I asked if she was aware of how much time had passed, and “No” to whether she recalled anything that had happened to her while she was in ICU. She remembered going in there and then nothing after the coma was induced. I was so grateful for that. I told her that I loved her, and that I would care for her and that I wanted her to get well and come home. When they pushed me out the door I was on the phone to her family and we were all overjoyed.

She died the next day.

I got the call on the highway, while driving 70 miles an hour, from a nurse who had ascertained exactly where I was and what I was doing before blurting it out. I very nearly ran off the road. Ten minutes later, I did the hardest thing I have ever had to do: pull that sheet down and look at her lovely eyes, now lifeless, her skin mottled blue. She had gone into a respiratory crisis and it had been too much for her. I cried like a baby, without any self-consciousness about it. The hospital called me that evening and wanted to know how soon I could get her body out of there.

Since she had passed away under doctor’s care, no autopsy was required. Is that ever a misbegotten rule! I paid for one to be done, and it showed that she had developed a hematoma in her abdomen from a laceration of her urethra near the bladder, a place where it was likely caused by the athletic insertion of a catheter by a frustrated urologist several weeks prior. The nurses had made me aware that there was a large hematoma in her abdomen from causes then unknown, but did not think it was safe for an attempt to find and repair the cause. That it might have revealed that she was injured by a doctor at their hospital probably never crossed their minds. Medical professionals I have consulted see nothing wrong with her kidneys from the findings of the autopsy report.

Because of recent changes in medical malpractice law here in Florida, none of the lawyers I consulted were willing to sue the physicians involved. I do not blame them, they are in business to make money. I have not given up; I will get justice for her one way or another in the future.

Her family was very supportive of the decisions I had to make during her stay in the hospitals and remain so to this day. They are wonderful people whose love and support have enabled me to survive when my purpose for living had stopped.

Since then, the physicians of Florida have been busy again. They pushed a constitutional amendment onto the ballot in 2004 that dramatically limits the amount of fees malpractice attorneys may receive when they prevail in lawsuits, further eroding the viability of such legal action. One attorney told me he would have to spend sixty thousand dollars in costs to bring my case to trial, with no guarantee of collecting anything from a jury probably made up of seniors who reflexively salute anyone who calls himself an “MD.”

[Attorney’s retaliated with two amendments of their own, giving greater access to doctor’s medical records and revoking the licenses of any doctors who lose three malpractice suits. All three amendments passed with at least 70 percent of the vote. "A pox on both your houses" seems to be the principle at work here.]

All this has been rekindled by the Schiavo case, which was coming to it’s first climax back then. I honestly do not know how I would have felt if my wife had remained in that state for years without improvement. As it was, she was in far more critical condition than Schiavo and I was desperate to keep her alive, to bring her home in any condition, to give her some chance at more life. The despicable and callous treatment my wife received has colored my attitude for the worse about everyone who practices medicine, especially those that gravitate to Florida.

I predict that medical care will get worse in Florida, because doctor’s do not police themselves, contrary to their incessant prating. Floridians have lost an important tool to redress the damage that is done. I further predict that the climate will change as care gets worse, that the restrictions on malpractice suits will be rolled back in a few years. I do not think that we will lose practitioners on balance, as more will take the place of any who leave. Doctors like good weather, too.

As for my wife, I hope someday to see her again in the place where she has gone. I hope she did not suffer too much during her final months. I hope she understands that I did the best I could to fulfill her stated wishes. In the meantime, I have much work to do.

Musings on Peace.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 18:02:00 +0000

Last night (21-Feb-05), I watched Deepak Chopra on The O'Reilly Factor and I was struck once more by what an ass he seems to be. It's not just that he is a pompous prig with a messiah complex and one of the most irritating voices I have ever heard, but rather it is the nature of his message that so irks me. It's a message that I have heard from others with equal righteousness (and better voices) and has generated no less annoyance in me.

Essentially, Chopra is a peace promoter. Peace is Good! Peace is Wonderful! War is bad! Duh! Of course war is bad, Dr. Chopra! No one will tell you that faster than a seasoned warrior (which I freely admit I am not). The astounding simplicity of the message is not what twists my underpants in a knot, though. Chopra compared the terrorists to the war on terror saying that in both cases the participants on each side must "dehumanize" their opponents in order to kill them. He takes exception to Mr. Bush's referring to Al-Qaeda opperatives as "evil-doers," as though planning and executing the live cremation of thousands of people qualifies them for Nobel consideration. They are evil-doers! They might not see it that way, but so what? Since when does their self-image constitute a claim on our forebearance? A threatened people must be accorded the right to act in their own self-defense. No other choice is possible on this Earth, in this existence.

But not for Chopra. To people with Chopra's attitude, it takes two to make a war, and both sides should be held responsible for the conflict. Implicit in that position is the notion that war is the worst fate mankind can endure. But is it? It's not good, but are there not more terrible things to endure. Would an Afghani who had lived through the Taliban agree? Would any of the peoples who had survived in Nazi-occuppied Europe concur? Or their bretheren from the former Soviet satellites? “War has become a habit. We reach for it the way a chain smoker reaches for a cigarette, promising to quit but somehow never kicking the habit.”

Non-violence is a noble pursuit and those that choose that path for themselves are welcomed to it. But the key word here is "choice." Chopra resides in a culture which tolerates his choice, even honors him for it. But who made that choice possible for Chopra? Those who sacrificed to defend freedom, with their lives in all too many cases. Those who fought made that choice possible. Chopra merely excercises his right to that choice paid for by better men than he, men he now equates with those who recruit others to to strap live explosives to themselves and travel on public conveyances before immolating themselves in a manner designed to kill as many strangers as possible.

It does take only one side to make a war. The Kuwaitis can confirm that for those in doubt. Chopra may deplore the invasion, but his way offers no solution save endurance. Existence on the higher plain of human potential loses it's attraction when a sweaty Republican Guard soldier can entertain himself with the women of your family at his own discretion. Chopra and those of like mind are powerless to make a society in the face of a regime determined to impose it's will through terror and violence. Chopra loves to quote Ghandi and no doubt draws inspiration from the liberation of India from British Colonial rule. But the British were a far sight more civilized than either the Soviets or the Nazis. It was possible to embarrass the British with their own standards of conduct. A more savage occupier would not care about the non-violent nature of Ghandi's followers and would respond to peacful protest with Tiananmen-like brutality, and do so with a clear conscience.

Chopra lives in a world made for him by others he would not emulate. Inevitably, those that will not fight to defend their way of life risk losing it to a determined enemy willing to use force, and we are not in short supply of the latter.

Deepak Chopra is a luxury of a militarily strong society. One with an annoying voice.