Random Thoughts

Save money, close the restaurants!

I never watch Oprah, though I realize many people do. She has tremendous power. People listen to her and obey in ways that are really rather scary to those of us who are more independent minded.

Recently she had Suze Orman on her show. Now, I know who Suze Orman is, and some of the time I agree with her financial advice (though the woman’s manner grates on me like nails on a blackboard).

Right now though, I think she’s a flippin’ idiot. Here’s what she urged viewers to do:

1. Do not spend money for one day

2. Do not use any credit card for one week

3. Do not eat out in a restaurant for one month

What a great idea, especially not eating out for a month. If everyone did that, just think of the wonderful impact it would have on the restaurant industry. Hey, those restaurant workers, including Eldest Daughter the pastry cook, don’t really need their jobs, do they?

Yes, this is sarcasm, in case you can’t tell.

I think it’s a fine idea to cut up the credit cards entirely, I’m all for that, but not spending any money for one day? So Eldest Daughter ought not to take the bus to work as she normally does, because she’d have to spend $2.00. She could drive to work instead, but not park her car because that would cost money too. I guess she ought to just stay home. Which she’ll do permanently if everyone follows Suze’s plan. She works for a restaurant: No customers for a month = no job.

None of this for you for an entire month.

What a flippin’ idiot. Did Orman even think of the ramifications of such a challenge? Of course the media picked it up and parroted it with even less thought than Orman gave in issuing it. Usually a boycott of an entire industry comes about as a result of the industry doing something horribly illegal and/or immoral. What did the restaurant industry ever do to Suze? Fail to seat her in a timely manner?

Is this about good economic sense, or simply “feeling good?” I suppose Suze feels real good with the money she’ll be paid for her appearances and books during the month her listeners go without dining out.

Here’s an idea: Everyone should go for a month without spending any money on anything produced by Suze Orman. I like the sound of that!

I’m not the only one baffled by Orman’s inexplicably poor advice. I imagine the entire restaurant industry, already struggling in this rough economy, doesn’t appreciate her help very much either.

Of Sullys and Sulemans

Not blogging much right now, for several reasons. I’m finding politics, the economy and anything to do with California government and the Federal government extremely depressing. Really depressing. I mean, the last thing I want to do is read a dozen more stories about it, much less follow two dozen links to even more stories about it. It sucks, and it’s not going to get better any time soon. So writing about it seems both abysmally depressing and rather redundant.

And 3-D life has been pretty time consuming. I’m busy working on a piece of fiction that I’ve set aside for far too long. Youngest Son has had several massive school projects and my own university homework has filled in the few gaps remaining. I haven’t had much time to read up on anything that’s not related to those three areas. So yeah, no politics from me today, unless something unexpected and unpredicted happens. Hey, it’s still America, anything is possible.

When time permits, I’ll post my thoughts on the sociopathy of Octomom, and what sort of future her spawn can expect under her tender care. She embodies the narcissism that led us to where we are politically and economically as a country. It’s a stark contrast to the best America offers.

…Sully and Suleman, the pilot and “Octomom,” the two great stories that are twinned with the era. Sully, the airline captain who saved 155 lives by landing that plane just right—level wings, nose up, tail down, plant that baby, get everyone out, get them counted, and then, at night, wonder what you could have done better. You know the reaction of the people of our country to Chesley B. Sullenberger III: They shake their heads, and tears come to their eyes. He is cool, modest, competent, tough in the good way. He’s the only one who doesn’t applaud Sully. He was just doing his job.

This is why people are so moved: We’re still making Sullys. We’re still making those mythic Americans, those steely-eyed rocket men. Like Alan Shepard in the Mercury rocket: “Come on and light this candle.”

But Sully, 58, Air Force Academy ‘73, was shaped and formed by the old America, and educated in an ethos in which a certain style of manhood—of personhood—was held high.

What we fear we’re making more of these days is Nadya Suleman. The dizzy, selfish, self-dramatizing 33-year-old mother who had six small children and then a week ago eight more because, well, she always wanted a big family. “Suley” doubletalks with the best of them, she doubletalks with profound ease. She is like Blago without the charm. She had needs and took proactive steps to meet them, and those who don’t approve are limited, which must be sad for them. She leaves anchorwomen slack-jawed: How do you rough up a woman who’s still lactating? She seems aware of their predicament.

Any great nation would worry at closed-up shops and a professional governing class that doesn’t have a clue what to do. But a great nation that fears, deep down, that it may be becoming more Suley than Sully—that nation will enter a true depression.

I know we’re still creating Sullys.

Eldest Son received this morning the assignment he requested from the USAF; they’re making him a navigator as he’d hoped. He’ll be attending the USAF Academy this summer for some specific training. Upon graduating from university next year, he’ll enter the Air Force, and God willing, he’ll have the career he’s dreamed of since childhood.

I hope in whatever path his career takes him, Eldest Son never has to deal with a flock of geese and an engineless plane full of passengers. I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever though, that Eldest Son’s character is being shaped by forces similar in some ways to those which shaped Sully’s, and his personal standards, his ethics, are equally high.

My late father was a navigator in the US Navy. That my baby boy would grow up to do something similar is both poignant and ironic.

I wish my father was here to talk about it with me.

Eldest Son with other members of his flight.

My family is far, far from perfect, but we have not turned out any Sulemans.

One doesn’t have to look far to find the source of that particular narcissistic evil. And yes, I do think she’s evil. More on that later.

When we fail to recognize what Nadya Suleman truly is, what she is doing (and it’s far more than reckless reproduction; that’s simply a tool she’s using), then we risk not just enabling her, but producing more like her. And that would be depressing indeed.

The Malfeasant Falcon

Yep, I am proud of my son (seen at :20 and :41). He does make an awfully good Nerf gangster. Maybe if the USAF thing doesn’t work out…

UPDATE: For the less literary/legal reader,
mal⋅fea⋅sance [mælˈfizəns]
Noun, Law.
The performance by a public official of an act that is legally unjustified, harmful, or contrary to law; wrongdoing (used esp. of an act in violation of a public trust).

And SPU’s mascot is the Falcon. So yeah, the title is a clever pun on the Maltese Falcon; the film noir feel is obviously a tie in to that classic movie as well. Them boys is smart.

Same old new deal

We keep hearing that we’re facing a reprise of the Great Depression. Well, we don’t have 25% unemployment. Yet. And people are leaving California rather than heading there in droves. But it behooves us to recall the realities that led to the Great Depression vs. the myths of its genesis.

In the late 1920s, cheap and easy money fueled a tremendous increase in margin trading and a proliferation of “investment trusts” that offered little in the way of dividends or demonstrable earnings per share, but still promised phenomenal capital gains. “

…the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations — in disregarding market signals at every turn — were jointly responsible for turning a panic into the worst depression of modern times. As late as 1938, after almost a decade of governmental “pump priming,” almost one out of five workers remained unemployed. What the government gave with one hand, through increased spending, it took away with the other, through increased taxation. But that was not an even trade-off. As the root cause of a great deal of mismanagement and inefficiency, government was responsible for a lost decade of economic growth.

It’s deja vu all over again.

Essential and engaging reading for anyone wondering if the US Government ever learns from its mistakes:*

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan.

It’s deeply disturbing and wildly ironic that the Dems in DC are determined to force a crap sandwich down our throats, as if it’s going to help our economy any more than Roosevelt’s New Deal crap sandwich did in the 1930s. People are getting desperate though, and afraid, and when that happens, they’ll eat anything. Especially if the government says “Eat this, quickly, right now, if you don’t, you will all be doomed.”

First the government indirectly creates a crisis. In the case of the Dust Bowl, it began with the Homestead Act and the encouragement of settlers to plow up and plant crops on 100,000,000 acres of prairie. By artificially controlling the price of grain, the government encouraged overplanting on a devastating scale that in less than a generation turned this healthy ecosystem:

into this:

Once the damage was done, and a full-blown environmental catastrophe unleashed, the government attempted to address the problem in ways that were both counterproductive and laughably inadequate, requiring massive amounts of money and intrusive government involvement. The dismal current state of US farming, economically, environmentally and ethically with its CAFOs and agribusiness corporations can be traced directly back to FDR’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration.

Sixty plus years later, we’re watching an economic meltdown yet again, and a clueless government determined to throw money at the problem they helped create in the first place.

If you want a clearer understanding of how the current crisis was precipitated, and the government’s role in it from the start, Investor’s Business Daily reprinted this column from the American Thinker.

The narrative is of another failed socialist experiment, this time a massive federal effort imperiling the whole U.S. banking industry.

Read that article, and then go read Egan’s book on the Dust Bowl. If we can’t learn from these events, next time it will be your grandchildren and mine who repeat history.

*The short answer is “Hell no.”

Confederate Yankee has a brilliantly apropos analogy of this situation, pig farmers and all.

Kill the babies, save the terrorists

I don’t even know what to say to this, other than WAKE THE HELL UP. What did you THINK abortion was?

A Florida woman is suing an abortion business for forcing her to witness the “murder” of her daughter, who allegedly was “swept” into a biohazard bag to “suffocate and bleed to death.”

Should the case result in a determination there was a live birth and homicide, it could have national implications because of the issue of care that abortionists are required to provide to babies who survive abortions. While he was a state lawmaker, President Obama opposed such rules, arguing they imposed too great a burden on the abortionist.

The case alleges:

As a direct and proximate result of the negligent conduct of the Defendants, Plantiff Sycloria witnessed the live birth and suffering of her daughter as she struggled for life in pain, moving and breathing on the recliner. She witnessed Belkis Gonzalez enter the room and knock the live baby from the recliner seat where she had given birth to the floor. She then witnessed the murder of her daughter by Belkis Gonzalez before her eyes, as Belkis Gonzalez picked up a large pair of orange shears and cut the umbilical cord connecting mother and daughter. Belkis Gonzalez did not clamp the baby’s umbilical cord allowing the baby to bleed out and also threw or by some accounts literally swept the breathing live child into a biohazard bag to suffocate and bleed to death. There are reports that Belkis Gonzalez also placed a caustic chemical in the bag with the live baby.

Well, at least she was spared the “punishment” of a baby (TM President Obama).

Ann Althouse points out the supreme irony (and hypocrisy) of this case:

Shouldn’t anyone having an abortion need to visualize what is being done to the life/potential life she is destroying? To claim damages from seeing the death is to admit that you didn’t understand what you were doing when you sought the abortion. If women are to have a right to choose to have an abortion — if the decision to have an abortion properly rests with the woman, as the law says it does — then it is crucial that she understand what she is doing. This lawsuit is a claim that she did not comprehend what she was doing. If that is true, it undermines the whole basis for the right to choose to have an abortion. Choices imply competent understanding. Either women know what they are doing or they do not. Take a side.

Since when has it ever been about true choice? As if Planned Parenthood–or any abortion provider–ever presents alternatives to abortion. Why should they; it might cut into revenue. Planned Parenthood made $1 billion in income for their fiscal year ending 2007. It is all about the money. And they’re such big fans of Obama, he’s their perfect president.

Kill the babies, save the terrorists.

President Obama has expressed concern about whether the military commissions set up by the Bush administration are the proper way to go forward in pursuing charges against the U.S. detainees, and on January 22 he asked all the judges supervising the trials of detainees for a continuance of 120 days, so a team of administration officials could review the best way forward.

If only Obama had a fraction of the concern for innocent human lives that he has for men hellbent on killing American citizens.

As Andy McCarthy explains, we’ve returned to September 10th America.

The only question that remains is where and when we’ll suffer the next attack.

Meanwhile the circle continues…Obama…Blagovich…Chicago corruption…earmarks…it’s all adding up to a very ugly picture indeed.

It is so hard to trust the decision making ability of our President when he displays repeated bad judgment. Then again, I don’t think he cares if we trust him; he won after all. And we lose.

But he apologized.

From Little Green Footballs comes this gem:

He’s only been there for two weeks, but already Barack Obama is “tired of being in the White House.”

Probably the first President in history to utter those words.

WASHINGTON (AP) - On the rockiest day of his young administration, President Barack Obama did what surely made him happy for a while.
He left.

With little notice, the president and first lady Michelle Obama bolted the gated compound of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in their tank of a limousine on Tuesday. They ended up at a Washington public school, greeted by children who could not care less about the collapse of a Cabinet secretary nomination.

“We were just tired of being in the White House,” the president candidly told the gleeful second-graders at Capital City Public Charter School.

“We got out! They let us out!” Mrs. Obama said as the kids and their teachers laughed.

I’m tempted to suggest they not go back, but that would leave crazy Joe Biden in charge. There are worse things than President Obama; “President Biden” would be one of them.

Speaking of people rising to their highest level of incompetence: You think Obama could nominate someone who actually isn’t a tax cheat? Nah, I though not.

Years ago, I worked for a CPA. We had a client who chose not to pay certain business-related taxes.  The CPA urged her to file, and warned her what the consequences would be should she fail to do so.

Somehow I doubt that Tom Daschle, and Nancy Killifer and Timothy Geithner prepared their own taxes without the help of a CPA. And I seriously doubt that their CPAs failed to warn them about the perils of failing to file.

Geithner claims he uses TurboTax to self-file. Sure he does. If he did, it’d tell him he needed to file on that income he failed to claim. I’m assuming that he was capable of entering the basic data. If he wasn’t, if he was that incompetent, what possible qualifications could he have to be Treasury Secretary? He can’t even handle his own money, much less that of the entire country.

Doesn’t it just make you want hand him your hard earned tax dollars?

Me neither.

Not paying your taxes for four years is a mistake that is “commonly made?”

Really. I suppose if you’re a Chicago politician, it’s just business as usual.

Don’t bother to stand on ceremony

I enjoy Sting’s music, but this just isn’t right:

It’s long-standing tradition that just before the chief executive enters a room for a speech, he is announced: “Ladies and Gentlemen – the President of the United States,” is the standard introduction spoken by a staff member of the White House Communications Agency.

But this morning when Mr. Obama entered the East Room to address an audience about the economy, there was no announcement. He just walked right in – announcing his own presence with a hearty “Hello, everybody – good to see ya.”

On Day One of his presidency, everywhere Mr. Obama went they played “Hail to the Chief” for him – but not since. In fact the U.S. Marine Band’s duties at the White House over the last 10 days appear to have been dramatically downsized.

Instead of the usual contingent of trumpets, tubas and drums, a single piano player now provides musical interludes before and after the president’s appearance.

And the tunes have little connection to the military marching music of John Phillips Souza that is the usual accompaniment to presidential appearances. These days the pianist’s repertoire includes Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” and Sting’s “Desert Rose.”

“He’s not a ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ kind of guy,” says press secretary Robert Gibbs of the new president.

I suppose I ought not to be surprised. Why should he have any respect for the formality of the office? It’s depressing, but typical. If he’s not going to act presidential, it makes it easier to view him as Not a President.

So be it.

If he’s Not a President, perhaps he’s the far left’s answer to Chairman Mao as  Noel Shephard at Newsbusters points out:

Printed in a size that easily fits into pocket or purse, POCKET OBAMA is an anthology of quotations borrowed from Barack Obama’s speeches and writings, intended to keep the momentum going for those inspired by his message of hope and change. The portable book serves as a reminder of the remarkable ability of this man to move people with his words, a primer for readers who want to examine the substance of his thought and reflect on the next great chapter in the American story.

His captivating oratory has earned comparisons to John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and this collection presents words that catapulted his remarkable rise to the American Presidency and set a true course for the future. Includes themes of democracy, politics, war, terrorism, race, community, jurisprudence, faith, personal responsibility, national identity, and above all, his hoped-for vision of a new America. POCKET OBAMA is essential reading as we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin the work of remaking America.

Change the color of the cover to red, and there you have it…mandatory reading for the masses.

How can there be an historical book of quotes when he hasn’t even been in office a month yet?

Minor details, pffah.

MataHarley at Flopping Aces reveals the reality behind Obama’s approval ratings:

It’s a game of math only. The trick is it’s all about an average. Ask seven questions… (five most wouldn’t have an intelligent clue about…) and you get a 63.57% average for an “approval rating”. Does that number sound familiar? Now how about if they asked the two questions Americans cared most about? Gitmo closing, and overseas abortion spending? It’s an average approval rating of 39.5 %.

What, you mean everyone doesn’t applaud all of his decisions? Maybe they need to read the Little Blue Book of Chairman Obama.