Obamamania

In my opinion, the biggest issue in this campaign is the looming failure of the social safety net, how to manage its fall, and how to manage the consequences. I try to keep an open mind about things, and looked at Obama’s website.

Quote
Barack Obama’s Plan
Restore Fiscal Discipline to Washington
Unquote

Sounds good to me. Don’t see anything about addressing Social Security, Medicaid, or Medicare, but let's keep looking. These are all cut and pasted from his website:

* Obama will embrace the Millennium Development Goal of cutting extreme poverty around the world in half by 2015, and he will double our foreign assistance to $50 billion to achieve that goal.
* Obama will cut income taxes by $1,000 for working families to offset the payroll tax they pay.
* …climate change plan will invest in America's highly-skilled manufacturing workforce and manufacturing centers…
* Obama will also provide assistance to the domestic auto industry to ensure that new fuel-efficient vehicles are built by American workers.
* The Obama plan will increase funding for federal workforce training programs and direct these programs to incorporate green technologies training,
* Obama will also create an energy-focused youth jobs program to invest in disconnected and disadvantaged youth.
* Obama will also extend the Production Tax Credit,
* Obama will invest in rural small businesses
* He will improve rural schools and attract more doctors to rural areas.
* Obama will also increase the minimum wage and index it to inflation to ensure it rises every year. [note: Union pay and government contracts are tied to the minimum wage.]
* Obama will create a 10 percent universal mortgage credit to provide homeowners who do not itemize tax relief.
* Obama will create a fund to help people refinance their mortgages and provide comprehensive supports to innocent homeowners.
* Obama will double funding for after-school programs,
* Obama will reform the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit by making it refundable and allowing low-income families to receive up to a 50 percent credit for their child care expenses.
* Obama will also make the federal government a model employer in terms of adopting flexible work schedules
* Obama will create Early Learning Challenge Grants to promote state "zero to five" efforts
* Obama will quadruple Early Head Start, increase Head Start funding and improve quality for both.
* Obama will also provide affordable and high-quality child care to ease the burden on working families.
* Obama will reform NCLB, which starts by funding the law.
* Obama will address the dropout crisis by passing his legislation to provide funding to school districts
* Obama will double funding for the main federal support for after school programs, the 21st Century Learning Centers program, to serve one million more children.
* Obama will create new Teacher Service Scholarships that will cover four years of undergraduate or two years of graduate teacher education
* Obama will also create Teacher Residency Programs
* To support our teachers, Obama's plan will expand mentoring programs that pair experienced teachers with new recruits.
* He will also provide incentives to give teachers paid common planning time so they can collaborate to share best practices.
* Obama will make college affordable for all Americans by creating a new American Opportunity Tax Credit.
* Obama will develop domestic incentives that reward forest owners, farmers, and ranchers when they plant trees
* Obama will invest $150 billion over 10 years to advance the next generation of biofuels
* Obama will double science and research funding for clean energy projects
* Obama will also create an energy-focused Green Jobs Corps to connect disconnected and disadvantaged youth
* Obama will establish a federal investment program to help manufacturing centers modernize
* Obama will create a Clean Technologies Venture Capital Fund
* Obama will significantly increase the resources devoted to the commercialization and deployment of low-carbon coal technologies.
* His plan will provide retooling tax credits and loan guarantees for domestic auto plants and parts manufacturers
* Obama will create a competitive grant program to award those states and localities
* Obama will pursue a major investment in our utility grid
* Under the Obama plan, full-time workers making minimum wage would get an EITC benefit up to $555, more than three times greater than the $175 benefit they get today.
* Barack Obama is committed to signing universal health legislation by the end of his first term in office
* Barack Obama will establish policies to help Americans currently facing foreclosure through no fault of their own.
* Barack Obama has re-introduced the Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families Act
* Barack Obama would expand the highly programs like the successful Nurse-Family Partnership to all low-income, first-time mothers.
…Late term democracy.

Movie Review: Death Sentence

When I think of the hundreds of thousands of dollars I’ve been taxed over the past decade and what I’ve gotten in return from my government, I get angry. So when I saw a Kevin Bacon movie at the robovideo, that protrayed him as an angry white-collar guy with a shotgun, I paid my dollar.

Bacon plays the model father who gets pissed when a gang (white guys) cuts his son’s throat and is pronounced dead by a caring doctor (black guy). After going to the police (black lady), the perp will only get 3-5 years and Bacon takes the law into his own hands, killing his son’s murderer. The armed gang then threatens Bacon’s whole family with death.

Despite knowing that the gang is heavily armed, Bacon decides to guard his family with a baseball bat, and they are slaughtered in the living room. Bacon survives his wound and gets really angry. He brings cash into the underworld, and meets seedy people telling them he needs to buy guns (Bacon is hysterical at this point, grrrrr, guns bad).

He pays $5k for three pistols and a shotgun and then kills everybody. He should have bought a couple AK-47s with 40 round clips; he would not have needed to reload and would have saved $4k.

I’m disappointed that Kevin Bacon made such a stupid movie.

The NFL Is Racist

Gene Upshaw, NFL Player’s Association

The recitation of the Declaration of Independence piece before the Super Bowl was nice. But the document was misquoted as “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men, all men, all men are created equal” (the original reading didn’t have men of African descent repeat ‘all men’ three times).

If the NFL is so committed to preaching about equal rights, why don’t they reserve some of the minority coaching and front office quotas for Mexicans? What about Hispanics? No jobs for them under the NFL's institutionalized racism.

And, for the record, the NFL is taking a rhetorical flourish our of context. Jefferson on Africans:

“Their inferiority… is not the effect merely of their condition of life…It is not their condition…but nature, which has produced this distinction.”

“Their griefs are transient…their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.”

Jobs Report

Ding Ding Ding. The government reports a ‘loss’ of 17,000 jobs last month. Panic.

But look closer:

Construction Jobs: Down 27,000
Manufacturing Jobs: Down 28,000
Professional and Business Services: Down 11,000

We’ve been steadily hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs for a long time. You know, those jobs that create value and bring money into the economy.

Have no fear though:

Retail Jobs (Walmart): Up 11,000
Education and Health Services (mostly government entitlement programs): Up 47,000
Bars and Restaurants (All American Burger): Up 19,000

Just wait until Moody’s downgrades the government’s credit rating. We’re not electing a President this time, we’re electing a scapegoat.

Iraq

"We've lost 126 soldiers since we've been here. One hundred twenty-six of my soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice," said Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of Multinational Division Central, in a Jan. 23 briefing with military analysts. "And I'll be [darned] if I'm going to advocate giving up ground that they died for. We are just not going to do that. The place will go back in a heartbeat."

"If you've got an area that you've taken away and you walk away from it, 96 hours later the enemy is back--and he's intimidating the population (and) he's killing innocent people," said Lynch. "So we just have to manage this transition very diligently."

Translation: We need to police this population forever to save face.

General officers have a fiduciary duty to give their civilian commanders honest feedback, vigorous feedback if necessary. Our military leadership is failing this country.

Fall some forces back to a couple of remote bases to discourage the Chinese and Russians from making an oil-grab, and just send everyone else back home. The Iraqis do not want freedom and would not recognize it if it stared them in the face. Water in Iraq needs to find its own level. It won’t be pretty, but these people have been given their chance.

Thoughts and prayers with the forces walking the streets and their families. The ones making the sacrifices in this whole mess.

Economy

Paulson states that the economic fundamentals going forward are solid. Paulson has an agenda, and I can’t figure it out. But the fundamentals are not at all solid; in fact, they are unprecedented in modern history:

1. Two-thirds of government money is spent on social programs and we now live in a one-man, one-vote democracy. Our system of government will surely bankrupt itself within a generation.
2. Workplace rules and regulations have pushed our manufacturing base overseas. High tax individuals are already starting to follow factories.
3. Money will continue to be printed to keep the banks afloat. This will cause commodity inflation, specifically mentioning food and fuel.

The thing to watch is the US’ credit rating. Moody’s has already given the government a warning. When the first downgrade eventually comes, things will accelerate.

Property rights will be secure in the aftermath of any collapse. The power structure is intact; the dependent classes are fractured along ethnocentric lines. The middle class could get a lot smaller.

Great Britain

Back in the day all English Freemen were entitled to vote. But Henry VI thought that this diluted political power to too great an extent for stability, so voting rights were restricted to freeholders of land with a worth of over 40 shillings in 1429. This system worked for over 400 years. It was cruel for many but Britain grew to dominate the world.

In 1832, things started to change. First, the 40 shilling level was reduced. Then people with liens on their land were given the green light. The Scottish electorate jumped 1300%. Further steps were taken in 1842 and 1867, and the British electorate exceeded 5 million. Then came the women.

In 1928 the electorate more than doubled to 22 million and the natural compassion of the female gender led to a much more humane society, offering social benefits to one and all. The quality of life differential between England and the third world, coupled with lax restrictions on immigration, attracted immigrants from around the world, a political power base that voted consistently for more wealth redistribution through higher taxes.

By 2007, 200,000 taxpaying British professionals were leaving each year, being replaced with 500,000 new immigrants. In 2011, the British government lost its worldwide credit rating, the social safety net collapsed, order dissolved, and a bloody wave of violence swept over Britain.

Following mass interments and deportation of Muslims and other recent immigrants not meeting work and independence requirements, the 'Henry VI Voting Rights Act of 2015' was passed by the interim military tribunal and signed into law by General Smith.

And now for something completely different: Happy New Year.