“Socialism Ain’t so bad…..”
Yeah, that’s the response I received from one of my riding buddies when talking about the potential GM bailout. I was against it, while he was for it. His rationale was what would happen to all the workers for GM? The conversation bled into different areas such as what “what about all the people with no healthcare, Frank?” Then the remark came about “socialism ain’t such a bad thing”.
You see what we have here is the slow bleed towards communism. I have been preaching this for at least the past 5 years. Lets take GM as an example. They are a huge conglomerate car company that is 30 years behind the proverbial times. They make cars that get the poorest fuel economy out of all the manufacturers, they look and feel cheap, and as a company they have relied heavily on truck and SUV sales. They have never tapped into the actual car market correctly. The SUV bubble burst when gas went up to $5/gal this year and their market share decreased in sales because people no longer want guzzlers. The Democrats solution is to give GM $60 billion dollars so they won’t go out of business, while people like me say let them go out of business and reform in another entity. Market forces are the way companies should live and die, and they should not be interfered with by the federal government. GM failed to make efficient cars while the Japanese and German companies have been producing 40mpg+ cars for 30+ years. Also what should be added to this equation is the force of the labor unions. These guys are making $75/hr to screw bolts into the door hinges. For the record, and as a comparison, Toyota makes a profit of $2000 per vehicle while GM loses $1200 per vehicle. This math does not work if you see what I mean. What is a $60 billion dollar bailout going to do for GM over the long haul? Although I am against a bailout, if it were insisted upon, it would be a good idea to have a plan before giving the company a blank check.
This leads me back to my initial cry about my friend who claims that socialism is not so bad. It is bad, because it refuses to let the market quell itself. It’s not the taxpayers job to bail out private entities, or to ensure employment for the people that work for those entities. We are going down a long and dark road if we begin as a nation to give absurd amounts of money to companies that neither deserve it, or will use it properly. It’s time to say goodnight to failing companies like GM and let someone new come around with the right ideas.
posted by Frodgie at 6:28 AM
What if 'SNL' mocked Michelle Obama?
Perhaps the only institution in America whose approval rating is beneath that of Congress is the media.
Both have won their reputations the hard way. They earned them.
Consider the fawning indulgence shown insider Joe Biden with the dripping contempt visited on outsider Sarah Palin.
Twice last weekend, Biden grimly warned at closed-door meetings that a great crisis is coming early in the term of President Obama:
"Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. ... Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said … we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."
A "generated crisis"? By whom? Moscow? Beijing? Tehran?
This is an astonishing statement from a chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee who has access to the same intelligence as George Bush. Joe was warning of a crisis like the Berlin Wall of July 1961, where JFK called for a tripling of the draft and ordered a call-up of reserves, or the missile crisis where U.S. pilots like John McCain were minutes away from bombing nuclear missile sites in Cuba and killing the Russians manning them.
Is Russia about to move on the Crimea? Is Israel about to launch air strikes on Iran's nuclear sites? What is Joe talking about?
If one assumes Joe is a serious man, we have a right to know.
Instead, what we got was Obama's airy dismissal of Joe's words as a "rhetorical flourish" and a media – rather than demanding that Joe hold a press conference – acting as Obama surrogates parroting the talking points that Joe was just saying that new presidents always face tests.
Had John McCain made that hair-raising statement, he would have been accused of fear mongering about a new 9/11. The media would have run with the story rather than have smothered it.
Contrasting McCain with his hero, Joe declared a few weeks back, "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and ... said, 'Look, here's what happened.'"
Nice historical reference. Except when the market crashed in 1929, Hoover was president, and there was no television.
Can one imagine what the press would have done to Sarah Palin had she exhibited such ignorance of history. Or Dan Quayle?
Joe gets a pass because everybody likes Joe.
Fine. But Joe also has a record of 36 years in the Senate.
Has anyone ever asked Joe about his own and his party's role in cutting off aid to South Vietnam, leading to the greatest strategic defeat in U.S. history and the Cambodian holocaust? Has anyone ever asked Joe about the role he and his party played in working to block Reagan's deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe, and SDI, which Gorbachev concedes broke the Soviets and won the Cold War?
In the most crucial vote he ever cast – to give Bush a blank check for war in Iraq – Joe concedes he got it wrong.
Is Joe's record of having been wrong on Vietnam, wrong in the Cold War, wrong on the Iraq war, less important than whether Sarah Palin tried to get fired a rogue-cop brother-in-law who Tasered her 10-year-old nephew to "teach him a lesson"?
"I've forgotten more about foreign policy than most of my colleagues know," says Joe humbly. Given his record, it is understandable Joe has forgotten so much of it.
Saturday, the New York Times did a takeout on Cindy McCain that delved back into her problem with prescription pills. Yet when Hillary's campaign manager, Mark Penn, brought up Obama's cocaine use on "Hardball," he was savaged by folks for whom the Times is the gold standard.
The people apparently had a "right to know" of Bush's old DUI arrest a week before the 2000 election, but no right to know about how and when Obama was engaged in the criminal use of cocaine.
The media cannot get enough of the "Saturday Night Live" impersonations of Palin as a bubblehead. News shows pick up the Tina Fey clips and run them and run them to the merriment of all.
Can one imagine "Saturday Night Live" doing weekly send-ups of Michelle Obama and her "I've never been proud" of my country, this "just downright mean" America, using a black comedienne to mimic and mock her voice and accent?
"Saturday Night Live" would be facing hate-crime charges.
How do we know? When the New Yorker ran a cartoon of Michelle in an Angela-Davis afro with an AK-47 slung over her shoulder, New Yorker editors had to go on national television to swear they were not mocking Michelle, but the conservatives who have so caricatured Michelle and the Messiah.
Is there a media double standard? You betcha.
posted by Frodgie at 5:56 AM
