Buying A Paper

Jeff Bezos just bought the Washington Post for $250 million and I find this really interesting. A lot of people have been buying a lot of newspapers lately, each with different reasons. This is the first to really excite me. Let’s take a look at the possible consequences and talk about Amazon.

● Is Nothing Sacred?! To start, let me point out that there is nothing sacred about newspapers or their ownership. While I’m sure they want you to believe that somehow they are pure because some of them used to be owned by families who ran them at a loss blah blah, they’re just businesses and they don’t live by some special code. In fact, the history of newspapers is that most were “partisan rags” before they became “partisan rags pretending to be nonpartisan.” That’s why you get names like “The Arkansas Democrat”... because they were established to spread party propaganda.

● Recent Buyers: Several rich people have recently bought papers for different reasons. Most billionaire buyers of newspapers buy as a vanity project and end up losing their shirts and dumping them. Some buy them for other reasons, however. Warren Buffett bought up a bunch of newspapers. His purpose seems to have been to get them to pimp things he’s invested in. That shouldn’t work, except that Buffett bought small town papers, which don’t get scrutiny, and he fired and closed lots of them, which likely created a loyalty incentive.

The Koch Brothers are apparently attempting to buy various newspapers including the “Chicago Tribune” and the “L.A. Times.” Their purpose is ideological. They apparently aren’t planning to impose a new ideology on these papers, but instead intend that conservative/libertarian viewpoints finally be heard along with liberal ones.

I’m doubtful this will work. On the one hand, I’m glad they’re doing this as we need conservatism brought into the MSM and this might do it. On the other hand, I think this is destined to failed to reach the nonaligned public because the left will smear them. They will claim over and over that the Koch Brothers are trying to control the news and they will use the Koch Brother’s association with conservatives to make the claim – along with the claims that they want to add conservative view points. The better strategy would be to entirely disclaim ideological intent and then do it through other means. Even better would have been to set up a front owner who makes himself out as a leftist, and have him push conservatism. The left wouldn’t have a clue how to handle that and you would probably be able to get a solid reputation as unbiased.

● Amazon: So what about Bezos? Let’s start with the obvious. Amazon is an amazing company. They will dominate the world one day. I have watched as they have slowly, but sure taken over everything online and they’ve done so with incredible skill. This is a company that consumers, employees, sellers, and stockholders all love... every stakeholder in the mix. This is because they are more than fair in things like salaries and royalties, and they generate intense loyalty because of it.

Indeed, the only people who hate them are the people in the industries they invade, and that is because they come in and destroy things like monopoly margins and the need for middlemen. To give you an example, published authors earn 6% on books they sell... after expenses, which can drive profits down to around 2% in many cases. Publishers and retailers keep the rest. Agents get around 15% of what the author makes for acting as a middleman. Amazon gives 70% royalties directly to authors (or 35% depending on some things). It wipes out the need for publishers and agents. Thus, consumers benefit from way lower prices, authors benefit from massively higher profits, and Amazon benefits from a strong profit margin. Moreover, Amazon does a LOT to boost sales. They are constantly tinkering to improve marketing... there isn't a week where I don't see them test something. Amazon does the same things now with music, games, and videos, and it is expanding into every other area of retail as well. This is a company with huge long term plans and is willing to invest to make that happen. And each time it expands, it brings lower costs for consumers and higher margins for producers by wiping out the middlemen. It is WalMart circa 1985.

Anyway, back to the Washington Post. I think Bezos buying the paper will be a great thing. For one thing, Amazon is amazingly creative. They are super fast as making changes to see how consumers respond. I’ve seen them test different formats on different products and go with the one that improved sales. I’ve seen them test different forms of marketing, dumping those that failed and keeping those that worked. They play with their search algorithms constantly too. They are constantly tinkering.

Moreover, they are totally consumer oriented in their thinking, which is something no one in the media is. The entire media, from newspapers to television to magazines, sees themselves as the modern version of an ancient industry that does certain things rigidly. They see themselves as being above the market and telling the people what they need to know. Amazon isn’t like that. They embrace the public and they try to give the consumer what the consumer wants, not what Amazon thinks they should want... huge difference. They are also intensely nonpartisan. This means they don’t take sides and they happily cater to both sides.

I expect that all of this means we’re going to see a lot of innovation coming to the Post. I expect they will rethink the paper to try to provide more value to consumers, particularly online. I also expect they will broaden the ideology so they reach more people. I could be wrong, but that’s Amazon’s history... “Republicans buy sneaker too.” (Michael Jordan). If I'm right, this actually could lead to change in the entire industry, a change which may dramatically shift the ideology of the newspaper industry, away from radical liberalism to “non-aligned customer service.”

It’s going to be interesting to see if that happens. I think it will though. And if it does, this could do more to change the MSM that a dozen conservative billionaire buying news channels or newspapers. I guess we’ll see.

[+] Read More...

[-] Collapse Post...

All The News That's Fit To Blog

Here’s all the news you need to know this week, all wrapped up in one tidy article. Read this and you can sleep in until Sunday! Guaaarunteeed.

● Apple: Obama just vetoed the ruling of the International Trade Commission which said that Apple could not sell old iPhones because they used a technology that infringed upon a patent held by Samsung. This seems like a head scratcher. After all, patent rights are ownership rights and if Apple wants to use Samsung’s stuff, they should pay for a license, right? But there’s another angle to this that I only read about the other day. Apparently, the technology in question was something Samsung agreed could be used as an “industry standard.” That throws a different light on this. Essentially, they agreed that their invention could be viewed as public domain and that the whole industry could build around it. If you do that, then you really shouldn’t have the right to later claim ownership of it again and demand a fee for the use of that. So I agree with Obama on this.

● Detroit: They say there’s a serial killer on the loose in Detroit. I have a hard time believing anyone in Detroit has the kind of dedication it takes to become a serial anything.

● Big Terror: We’re told that al Qaeda has something “big” planned for the coming season. I’m not entirely sure what this means, but I think Big Lots and Shoney’s Big Boy should hire more security. In all seriousness, this kind of proves that al Qaeda wasn’t wiped out by the O, doesn’t it? When Team Obama claimed they had all but destroyed al Qaeda that struck me as a total fraud the moment they said it. You can’t kill an organization like this by killing its members, by choking off its money, or by killing its leaders. Organizations like this die from indifference, not bullets, and as long as they have things they can use to whip up retarded Arabs and Africans, they will have a steady flow of morons to carry out their plans... “Yes, Jobu, Americans took your lunch money.”

Anyway, what does this tell us? Well, it tells us that all the bombings and invasions over there have pretty much been a waste. It’s time for a strategic rethink.

● Goldman Sachs: I’ve been saying for sometime that these big Wall Street banks are a menace, and that they are enriching themselves not through capitalism, but by forcing themselves into transactions as unneeded middlemen through crooked regulations. A perfect example of this has just arisen and, as of now, I commend the Justice Department for getting off their butts and thinking about doing something about it.

Here’s the set up. A few years back, our government changed the rules to let investment banks dabble in hard assets, e.g. buy actual metals rather than contracts. Goldman Sachs took advantage of this and bought a huge warehouse complex in the Detroit area in February 2010. This warehouse collects aluminum directly from makers and then ships it to purchasers when they are ready. It holds about 42% of the aluminum shipped to the US in any one year. When Goldman purchased the warehouse, it took around 3-6 weeks to turn around an order and get people their aluminum. Now it takes more than a year. Goldman claims it’s just that hard to find anyone’s order.

So people complained to the London Metal Exchange, the industry-created regulatory body that regulates warehouses. But guess who sits on the board of the LME? Goldman. Also, the LME gets funded by a kickback from warehouse rents. To “solve” this, the LME passed a rule requiring warehouses to move a certain amount of product out of the warehouses each day. But here’s the catch. They don’t say “deliver,” they just say move. So Goldman has drivers taking aluminum from one warehouse to another.

Why would Goldman do this? For one thing, they’re collecting $165 million a year in rent doing this. But that’s not the real purpose. The real purpose is to manipulate the price of aluminum by creating a shortage by keeping what is produced from reaching the market. Estimates are this scheme has increased the price of aluminum by $40 a ton. That works out to around $0.02 to $0.05 of every can of soda sold to a couple hundred dollars of every car. It is estimated that these faked delays cost consumers $3 billion a year. Companies like Coke have complained and have even taken to having their aluminum shipped directly to their plants by the makers, but they are still paying the higher aluminum prices that have resulted.

Think about that. Goldman has used a phony regulatory agency to let it inject itself into the aluminum market as an unneeded middle man, where it has injected waste into the marketplace to jack up its own profits. That has nothing to do with capitalism. It has nothing to with helping consumers or producers. This is about enriching Goldman at the expense of everyone else and using regulatory extortion to do it. Fortunately, the Justice Department is now investigating this as anti-competitive behavior. Probably not coincidentally, JP Morgan just announced they are getting out of the physical commodities business... they were about to try the same thing with copper. Goldman still owns this and other metals warehouses. Isn’t it about time someone looked at Goldman for what it is? A RICO enterprise.

● Uh, No: If you have to announce something, then it's probably not true. Zooey Deschanel decided this week she needed to deny the fact that she's stupid. She said, "I am an intelligent person." Uh, huh. The girl is a rock. And White Trash Barbie Miley Cyrus (or is it Smiley Virus?) felt she had to announce that she works hard. Yep, she's "not a ratchet white girl," which the Urban Dictionary defines as "ghetto diva." Uh, huh. Nice try girls.

● McDonalds: Leave McDonalds alone, Mofos! The left is waging a coordinated campaign against McDonalds right now. They want to unionize the place and raise wages. To do this, they’ve attacked McDonalds for not paying a “living wage” and they claim that doubling salaries would only increase the cost of the noble Big Mac by $0.68 cents. Interestingly, the study they are using was discredited because the guy who did it misread the numbers and compared only the labor costs of McDonalds corporate against the profits of the entire chain. So whoops, that $0.68 cents idea is total crap... much like Wendy’s new burger. Yeah, I don’t know, it looked so much better than it was. Sigh. Anyway, besides not understanding how to read a balance sheet, this tool also doesn’t seem to understand that once you start raising prices, consumers go elsewhere... silly commie.

Ultimately though, here’s the biggest point in this debate: No, McDonalds does not pay a “living wage,” i.e. a wage that will make you upper-middle class. No ever claimed they did, because you’re not supposed to make being a burger jockey a career choice. They’re called “entry level” jobs because they are intended for people who are just starting to build a work history. If you prove you can do that, then you move up quickly onto what is called “the career path.” That’s when you start making the kind of money you can live on. Retards.

[+] Read More...

[-] Collapse Post...

John McCain, Conservative

I'm not a fan of John McCain, never have been. The problem with McCain was always that he bailed out the Democrats whenever their worst ideas blew up on them and he provided them with rhetorical cover. But all of that changed in 2008. Since 2008, McCain has been a solidly-conservative, savvy politician. And lately, he’s one of the few conservatives acting like a conservative.
Consider these things McCain is pushing...

● Main Street Advocate: As we’ve pointed out before, Wall Street has become a predator that engages in stupidly risky trades and abusive practices while dumping its bad bets on taxpayers. Few in Congress want to do anything about it. McCain and Elizabeth Warren, however, are proposing to forbid banks from engaging in risky trading activities with FDIC-insured money. In essence, their bill would break banks back into two types: those that handle checking/savings accounts and those that engage in investment banking, insurance, swap deals, equity trades and hedge fund activities. This is something everyone should embrace because it would protect taxpayers, end a major form of cronyism, and protect Main Street banks and Main Street firms. It would also show that conservatives aren’t Wall Street dupes. This should be on every conservative agenda.

It’s not. The “conservative” response has ranged from calling McCain names to attacking Warren’s fake Indian heritage again.

● Advocate For Justice I: In light of the Trayvon Martin shooting, there have been many calls to re-evaluate the nation’s “stand your ground” laws to make sure they make sense. This is an issue that resonates with blacks at the moment. Personally, I think the laws are fine, but that’s not the point. This is exactly the kind of “after-action review” that rational people do whenever anything goes wrong. It’s also an obligation-free way to let blacks know that Republicans aren’t cavalier about the idea of people “hunting blacks,” and that they are interested in making sure the nation’s laws are just for everyone. McCain took up this banner this weekend, and he was smart to do so.

So what has been the conservative response? Ted Cruz shot down the idea because it could lead to gun control... somehow. Meanwhile, conservative pundits continued to demonize Martin and canonize Zimmerman. One group is trying to raise money to buy Zimmerman a new gun. Rush is bragging that he can use the “n-word” now.

So who’s the real conservative? The guy who wants to make sure the laws protect the rights of innocent citizens and who wants to assure the entire public that he hears their concerns... or the guys trying to smear a dead black teen.

● Advocate For Justice II: The Department of Justice has issued a “blueprint” on sexual harassment at colleges which does some pretty heinous things. For one thing, it wipes out the “reasonable person” standard and instead drifts toward the self-described victim’s idiosyncratic belief that they were harassed. For another, it lowers the burden of proof for the university to take action to more-likely-than-not rather than beyond a reasonable doubt. And it has no protections for freedom of speech. Thus, even playing a song with sexual lyrics can be seen as harassment. This is a significant violation of the rights of accused students and it is precisely the kind of thing conservatives claim they will oppose. Yet, only one person in the Congress has stood up to stop this: John McCain.

● Consumer Advocate: As I noted before, McCain has introduced a bill to let consumers pick only the channels they want from cable. Is this a big deal? Don’t know. But it does show a desire to help consumers. The rest of the conservative world has gone anti-consumer even though consumerism is the foundation of capitalism.

Here’s the point. It has been eight months since the election. The public wants an agenda that will help them. They have concerns. McCain is recognizing those concerns and addressing them in conservative ways. Yet, the rest of the conservative world simply doesn’t care. In fact, to the contrary, I keep seeing comments that basically assert that the conservative agenda is to make sure nothing passes until Obama leaves office. That is political suicide. Right now, John McCain is showing conservatives the way forward. It's time the derangement ended and the conservatism began again. Conservatives need an agenda that appeals to Americans rather than insults them, and as much as you may dislike him personally, McCain is building one.

[+] Read More...

[-] Collapse Post...

Consumerism and GM Foods

One area where conservatives have had a real blindspot is recognizing misbehavior by corporations. All an oil company has to do is scream “commies tryin’ to steal our jobs!” and any number of conservative pundits will jump to defend them. That does seem to be changing though. Let’s talk about this in the context of the “Monsanto Protection Act” (MPA) and Genetically Modified (GM) crops.

The MPA isn’t actually called that. What it is, is a rider placed anonymously into a spending resolution in the Senate. It passed both chambers very quietly, with most Congress critters claiming they didn’t even know they had voted for it, and Obama signed it. No one has admitted to placing it into the bill, but Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo) has admitted that he “worked with Monsanto” to draft the rider, and it appears the thing was put into the bill by Blunt or the late Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii). What it does is that it bars federal courts from halting the sale or planting of GM seeds even if the court finds the seeds to be harmful. This appears to be in response to a 2010 ruling by a federal court that ordered the USDA to halt Monsanto from planting GM sugar beets after the court found that the USDA approved the planting of those beets before the environmental impact assessment was even completed. In other words, the USDA declared it safe before its own scientists studied whether or not it was safe. Naturally, we can’t have courts doing things like that to stop our corporate masters!

But this is nothing new for Monsanto. They use the courts like a weapon and they are THE poster boy for “cronyism.” Consider the case of bovine growth hormone. That growth hormone is used in cows in the US because the USDA approved it. It was approved by Michael Taylor of the USDA. Before joining the USDA, Taylor was a Monsanto lobbyist. After approving it, he returned to Monsanto as a Vice President. The USDA approved it after the FDA declared it safe. The FDA reached that conclusion based on a report submitted by Monsanto about the hormone’s safety. The FDA employee who examined the Monsanto report and approved it was Margaret Miller. Before joining the FDA, Margaret Miller worked for Monsanto AND she wrote the very report she would then approve at the FDA. In other words, she wrote a report claiming this stuff was safe when she worked for Monsanto, that report was submitted to the FDA, Miller then moved to the FDA, where she reviewed her own report and approved it. Talk about a rigged game! But is there any reason to think the hormone isn’t safe? Well, Europe, Japan, Australia and Canada all ban it. Want another example of cronyism? Monsanto lobbyist, Islam Siddiqui, took a job at the USDA, where he wrote the USDA’s “organic food standard,” which allows GM foods to label themselves “organic.”

“Coincidentally,” the USDA has never denied a single application by Monsanto to use GM crops. Yet, it is interesting to note that Monsanto does not have similar success anywhere else in the world. GM foods are banned or labeled in 60 countries. In fact, Monsanto has stopped trying to change the laws in Europe to get GM crops approved because: “We’re going to sell the GM seeds only where they enjoy broad farmer support, broad political support and a functioning regulatory system.” Translation: they’re only going to sell where they can control the regulators. Hey, that’s us!

So what’s the danger?

Well, leaving aside the health question, there is this problem: GM foods are banned or labeled in 60 countries. When GM crops are planted here, there is a high risk that these crops will contaminate other fields, as just happened in Oregon – Monsanto blamed “saboteurs” (the rest of you call those things wind and birds). When that happens, it becomes impossible to separate the GM from non-GM products as they mix. Since GM products are banned in a vast number of countries, a few careless GM farmers can potentially destroy the ability of all American farmers to export their products.

That’s the concern with salmon. The FDA is in the process of approving a GM salmon created by a company called AquaBounty. Their salmon grow faster and twice as large as normal salmon. And while GM proponents typical (falsely) claim that their products are no different than selective breeding and thus “could be found in nature,” the salmon completely disproves that. This thing was engineered with genes from eels and could never be found in nature. It is a true frankenfish, and the salmon industry is freaked out about this because consumers don’t want these things and, if they escape into the wild, it will be impossible to tell real salmon from the frankensalmon. If that happens, it will kill the US salmon industry as consumers shift to salmon from other parts of the world. It’s also not clear what will happen if these mongo salmon start eating everything in sight.

AquaBounty, like all other GM food makers, not only opposes mandatory labeling, but it opposes letting others label their salmon as non-GM. Why oppose voluntary labels? Because consumers don’t want this GM stuff and the industry knows that. This is why Monsanto has given up on Europe, because their regulators won’t let them hide the GM products amidst the others and Monsanto has concluded: “We’ve come to the conclusion that this has no broad acceptance at the moment.” And they know that if companies start labeling their products as free of GM materials, then the products made from GM materials will be abandoned. Yep.

I’ve discussed this briefly in my book, but the Republicans need to latch onto these issues and stop being patsies for industry. When (not if) these things escape, we could be looking at billions of dollars in lost sales as other countries ban our foods.

Even more importantly, though, why are we helping companies hide information consumers want? Consumerism lies at the heart of conservatism because consumerism is about letting billions of consumers make their own choices. . . it IS the free market and conservatives should never support laws that seek to control consumers to protect the politically connected. Robbing people of knowledge is no different than forcing them to do what you want. It’s time conservatives grasped that and stopped believing that industry is always good. Industry is great... when it satisfies consumers. But when it uses the government to control consumers, then it’s evil. Pure and simple.

Fortunately, some conservatives are starting to get this. Mixed in with the consumer advocates, environmentalists, and food safety advocates who are opposing things like the Monsanto Protection Act are Tea Party people. Said the blog of the Tea Party Patriots: this is “a special interest loophole and a doozy at that. This is a situation in which a company is given the ability to ignore court orders, in what boils down to a deregulation scheme for a particular set of industries.” Yep.

Keep this principle in mind: companies turn to the government when they can’t win over consumers in a free and fair market place. The role of the government should always be to ensure that producers are as free as possible to offer what they think consumers want AND that consumers are free to make informed decisions about what they want. For free markets to work, you can’t just support half that equation.

[+] Read More...

[-] Collapse Post...

Laughter Is The Best Weapon

Dear Suckers, uh. . . democrats, you’ve been had. . . again. Obama just appointed Mary Jo White to head the SEC. She’s a former federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York who “has experience policing Wall Street.” Clearly, she’s gonna put a boot up Wall Street’s ass, right?! What an amazing victory for the little people. Cue the lamenting Republicans... “Boo hoo hoo, Obama’s anti-Big Bank!! Boo hoo hoo. Who will protect these vulnerable banks?!” Good grief.

Let me give you a couple facts about our jackbooted anti-Wall Street thug. These are things you won’t hear because it doesn’t fit the narrative of either party:

1. Mary Jo White was indeed a prosecutor who prosecuted securities crimes. Yep. Then she switched sides. White is currently the head of litigation at Debevoise & Plimpton. D&P is an international law firm based in New York. They have 700 attorneys and they represent some of the biggest companies in the world. In particular, they represent Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley, along with Goldman Sachs, is one of the big corrupt players who control our Treasury, the SEC and pretty much the banking system.

Imagine that, Morgan Stanley’s lawyer gets appointed to run the SEC and regulate Morgan Stanley’s trading! How can this be? Is Bush back in the White House?

2. In October 2008, the SEC’s Inspector General issued a report critical of the SEC’s enforcement chief for providing to Mary Jo White evidence the SEC had gathered against her client, John Mack, the CEO of Morgan Stanley, for insider training.

Why is this important? Because this shows that White was willing to use her contacts at the SEC to improperly help her client. This suggests that White is hardly an ideologue, but is instead a paid whore for her client. In fact, you don’t rise to be head of litigation at a firm like D&P unless you have a certain moral flexibility that favors your clients, i.e. you’re a whore.

This, of course, fits everything the Democrats and the Republicans do. This is also becoming a pattern with the Democrats. I know conservatives want to see the Democrats as crazed ideologues, but their actions say something different. Their actions tell us the rhetoric is just a smokescreen to hide a party that appoints Wall Street stooges to regulate Wall Street, crafts environmental laws to help donor companies like GE sell their products, crafts a healthcare reform bill to hand the health insurance system to insurance companies, creates fake gun control measures to drain the suckers, promises massive change in foreign policy but continues Bush’s policies, promises to jack up taxes on the rich but only raises them 3% if that -- less than they raised middle class taxes, and so on.

So, what’s the point to bringing this up? The point is simple. This is the precise sort of thing conservatives should be mocking... and I mean that term precisely. This is not something conservatives should fight by trying to hold up her nomination. Nor should conservatives try to attack her from a pro-Big Bank perspective. Indeed, doing that will only convince Democratic supporters that they were right in selecting her.

Instead, the proper approach with a nominee like this, who flies in the face of the image the Democrats try to sell of being opposed to Wall Street, is to mock their supporters. Call them suckers for believing the rhetoric that the Democrats oppose Wall Street and the Big Banks when they really pimp for them. And then walk away after you mock them.

Trust me on this, condescension stings. It’s the one form of attack that is guaranteed to raise blood pressure and get the other side upset because it makes people feel like you don’t respect them at a fundamental level. Moreover, because mocking someone presents a picture of total indifference, there is no avenue for liberals to alleviate their frustration by counterattacking conservatives. Instead, they will direct their frustration at the person who made them look like a fool... Obama. That’s human nature.

If you want to break the Democrat’s PR about them fighting the big guy on behalf of the common man, and you want to force them to actually need to follow through on their rhetoric, this is the only approach that will work. This is the only approach that is guaranteed to cause dissention in Democratic ranks.

Laughter is not only the best medicine, it’s also one of the most powerful weapons. Conservatives should learn to use it.

[+] Read More...

[-] Collapse Post...

Ha ha! Obama Sells You Out Again, Liberals

Stupidity has a great way of catching up to you. And the Democrats are nothing if not stupid. What now? Well, it turns out there’s a little known provision of Obamacare that nobody noticed which is freaking out the Democrats. What provision? You’re gonna love this.

Ok, before we continue, I want you to remember that Obama campaigned against big, nasty insurance companies to get Obamacare passed. Remember how those bad companies hurt people and deny them coverage and make coverage too expensive for people to afford? Yeah, that was the rhetoric. Woo hoo! Obama gonna git them big insurance companies! He’s my hero.

Now I want you to remember that the insurers mysteriously backed Obamacare. It’s one of those things science has no answer for, like lemmings heading to the ocean or how pigeons navigate without GPS. Oh... wait a minute... that’s right, they supported it because Obamacare forced 310,000,000 people to buy insurance. I knew it was something.

Anyway, it turns out it’s even better/worse than we thought. See, buried deep in the bowels of Obamacare, next to the legisphincter, is a little known provision that allows those same evil insurance companies to do the following:

● Charge oldsters “up to” three times (300%) what they charge their younger customers. Take that greedy, rich seniors!

● Charge smokers “up to” a 50% penalty on smokers.

“Up to” of course means “absolutely.”

Oh, and those “tax credits” you’re supposed to get to help pay for premiums can’t be used to offset the penalties. So sad. You can, however, reduce the cost of the smoking penalty if (1) you get your insurance through your employer AND (2) they offer a smoking cessation program (which I believe entails letting clowns touch your genitals every time you light up).

There doesn’t appear to be an old-age cessation program.

So here’s what can happen. Assume a 60-year-old smoker making a whopping $35,000 a year. That’s a prime Obama voter. Under the new Obamacare, this person’s premium based on age will be $10,172 a year. Factoring the “tax credits” Obamacare supposedly pays will drop to $3,325.

As an aside, those “tax credits” are a subsidy ($7,000) paid directly to the insurer by Uncle Sam... yes, the same insurer Obama claimed to vanquish.

Then the insurer adds the smoking penalty. That adds $5,086 to the bill, meaning our oldster will pay $8,411 out of pocket and Uncle Sam will pay $7,000 more to the insurer... money which could have gone to any number of good causes. Let’s hope the oldster doesn’t want a home, or food, or anything else really.

Now, the oldster can reduce the $5,086 if they like clowns, but even that is estimated to cost around $1,200 a year, and it will suck the life right out of you.

So much for Obama helping the poor, the middle class, the old, the uninsured. In fact, the only people who seem to benefit under this are insurance companies. . . and clowns.

[+] Read More...

[-] Collapse Post...

The Wisdom of the Gypsies

Last Thursday, the Senate passed a bill, introduced by a Republican, which exempts animals used as “extras” on television and film productions from the requirements of the Animal Welfare Act. Why am I writing about this? Because this is wrong on several levels and it highlights a problem I’ve had with the Republican way of thinking for a long time.

Under the Animal Welfare Act, anyone who uses animals in any commercial endeavor must follow certain health and safety requirements to protect the welfare of the animals they use. For films, this includes paperwork requirements which document the way the animal is handled throughout the production to ensure that the animal is not mistreated.

The bill passed last Thursday was introduced by Louisiana Senator David Vitter, a Republican. What Vitter wants to do is to amend the Animal Welfare Act to eliminate the paperwork requirement for anyone who uses their own personal pets in a film rather than animals obtained from a commercial facility. The thinking behind this is that presumably, someone who owns a pet has an interest in maintaining the animal’s welfare for emotional reasons and therefore shouldn’t need to prove they are “providing a caring environment for the animal.”

Ok, first, this reasoning is nonsense. Every pet owner knows people who should never be allowed to own pets. We’ve all seen animals abused, beaten, starved and abandoned by their supposed caring owners, so this idea is crap. Moreover, how do you keep this exception from eating the law itself? What keeps a director from simply claiming the animals he’s using are his pets, and then abandoning them the moment the film is over?

... but that’s not the point.

The point is that this again highlights the problem with Republicans: they do the Democrats’ dirty work.

First, why are WE helping film companies? Yes, Vitter represents Louisiana and films are big business for them, but film companies are the enemy!! The Republicans need to stop doing things to help people who hate us. If film companies want something, let them get it from the Democrats... not us. Teach them that if they choose a side, then they cannot look to us for help or favors.

More importantly, however, consider “the optics” on this. When the Animal Welfare Act passed, I can guarantee you that the Democrats all patted themselves on the back and all their liberal followers felt quite morally superior knowing that they had legislated cruelty out of existence. Smug... smug... smug... smug... smug... smug...

Now ask yourself what happens when we introduce a bill like Vitter’s bill? Well, first, we help make laws like this more palatable because we fix the problems with them. Thus, we prevent a public backlash against Democratic overreach because we are alleviating the consequences of that overreach. Secondly, and this is the real kicker, we allow the Democrats to disingenuously smear us for attacking the thing they were trying to protect. In other words, since we are backtracking on their perfect bill, they can accuse us of “hating” animals or old people or whatever the bill was aimed at, even though they know they would have needed to backtrack if we hadn’t. This is so frustrating. It lets them remain smug because we are doing their dirty work!!!

Please Republicans, stop being patsies.

And this isn’t the first time, this is just one in a long line of examples where we let the Democrats pass some feel-smug bill and then we make ourselves the bad guys while simultaneously making their feel-smug bill more palatable.

Ask yourself this. How long do you think affirmative action would last if it applied to the NFL and other sports teams, to films, to television shows, to interest groups like the NAACP, to every business everywhere no matter how small? There would be a massive backlash and the whole thing would be crushed in a wave of public outrage. So why didn’t that happen? Because while the Democrats passed a broad bill which let them smugly claim they had ended discrimination.... the Republicans did the dirty work of carving out all the exceptions which kept the public from freaking out. We made their stupidity work. And in the process, they disingenuously smeared us for hating minorities as evidenced by the exceptions we created, without which the program would have imploded.

It’s the same with bill after bill. All their environmental laws, their anti-discrimination laws, their military/government contracting social engineering stuff, their workers’ rights laws, etc. .... all of it was unworkable and unpalatable to the public, until we came along and did their dirty work and made these things function. And in return, they always disingenuously smeared us for hating whatever it was they claimed they were trying to protect.

It’s time to stop enabling them.

It’s time to make sure that Democratic laws hit as many people as harshly as possible when they pass. No exceptions. No carve outs for sanity or to save the economy.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying do nothing. What I’m saying is that if something is the right thing to do, then we do it our way and we claim credit for it. But if it’s one of their lunatic bills, then you stop making those bills work, stop saving the public from the consequences, stop saving the Democrats from the backlash. Let those bills apply far and wide and attack the Democrats all along the way. Attack them for the harm they’ve done to real people. Attack them for NOT exempting people. Attack them FOR exempting people. Attack them every single time they amend the bill to fix a problem they create. Wipe the smug off their faces.

There is an old gypsy curse: “May you get everything you wish for.” It’s time the Republicans learned the meaning of this and taught it to the Democrats and their followers.

[+] Read More...

[-] Collapse Post...

The Tea Party Effect

I’m rarely interested in what Joe Scarborough says. He’s one of those RINOs who is always finding fault with conservatives and typically whines “why can’t we be more like the Democrats?!” Leave Barack alone! Boo hoo. Anyway, he’s finally written something interesting and it’s about the Tea Party.

Joe starts his article by pointing out that all of his liberal pundit friends, all his friends in the MSM, and all the Democrats he knows keep asking him why the Tea Party is destroying the Republican Party. This is the point where Joe usually throws his hands up in the air and whines about our side. Instead, he rightly calls bullspit on this. In fact, he goes so far as to list the Tea Party’s accomplishments:

● They brought the largest legislative landslide in US history in 2010. This created the largest Republican majority in Congress since 1946.
● They grabbed six seats in the Senate.
● They elected six governors.
● They helped win 700 seats in state legislatures.
● They took Ted Kennedy’s seat, which seemed impossible.
● They led the resistance against Obamacare.
● “The energized a conservative movement battered by eight years of bloated Republicanism.”

This last point deserves clarification because I agree with Joe. By 2008, the Republican brand had become toxic. It was associated first with the Republican Congress obsessively and hypocritically going after Clinton over an affair. Then Bush came along and added questionable wars, open cronyism, the creation of new entitlements and massive spending.

Indeed, before the Tea Party came along, the GOP followed Bush’s lead and spent $700 billion bailing out Wall Street, sent the debt ($10 trillion/69.6% of GDP) and deficit ($450/7.1% of GDP) to record levels, created an unfunded $7 trillion Medicare drug plan entitlement, and fought two wars and was eyeing more. Moreover, Big Business was all over the White House, raping the Treasury time and again through subsidies, protectionist regulations, and no-bid government contracts to cronies. He also created the Patriot Act which stripped Americans of their rights and signed anti-piracy legislation which turned the courts into a cash machine for the recording industry, Hollywood, and agri-business.

Obama made this even worse, sending the debt to $16 trillion (101% of GDP) and the deficit to $1.7 trillion (11.4% of GDP), adding a $787 billion “stimulus” (read: payment to cronies), adding the $2 trillion Obamacare entitlement, adding one war and putting two more on the agenda, and adding more than 100 new major regulations at a cost of more than $50 billion a year. Obama also kept the doors open to Big Business and he tried to allow Big Business to shutdown the internet to stifle competition.

The Tea Party brought all of that to a grinding halt. Since the Tea Party came along, the spending has stopped (though it hasn’t reversed yet). Obama’s regulations are being targeted for repeal. SOPA was killed. Net neutrality was killed. Cap and trade was killed. The Tea Party is leading the charge to repeal Obamacare. The bloated and overpaid federal bureaucracy was exposed. And the public has turned against further wars, even as liberals have developed a taste for using the military to make Obama’s “whine from behind and bend-over” foreign policy look muscular.

There is no doubt that ALL of this should be credited to the Tea Party.

The Tea Party has changed the culture of the Republican Party. They are the part of conservatism that has been abandoned by “the establishment.” They are the people who bring the “small government” to the party of small government. They are the completion of the Reagan Revolution. They are the people who have upset the natural order of things in Washington.

This election will be interesting for several things. First, I genuinely see Romney as the first Tea Party candidate, even though he refuses to adopt the label, because his views on smaller, limited government, less spending and a focus on small business over Big Business combined with his attacks on cronyism, align perfectly with the Tea Party philosophy. So does his focus on economic issues. Secondly, we will need to watch to see if the Tea Party can deliver a follow-up victory to 2010. If they do, they will become the dominant party in Washington. I think they will, but we’ll see. Tune in to find out.

Thoughts?

[+] Read More...

[-] Collapse Post...