Category: Politics
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Forget FEMA, Get Walmart in There!!
In the wake of hurricane Sandy we’re hearing stories of hungry New Yorkers being forced to dumpster dive for food. This is in addition to the stories of looters dressing like Con Edison workers to get access to houses, elected officials expressing their frustration with the Red Cross, state troopers being deployed to N.J. gas stations to help keep the peace, and Staten Island residents pleading for food. It’s safe to say that the government is not really all that organized when it come to preparing for a disaster.
With all the Sandy coverage over the last week I was reminded that in 2011 the Missouri, Mississippi, and Souris Rivers all flooded in North Dakota. The town of Minot had to be nearly completely evacuated. Lest there be any doubt, homes and cars were simply washed away. Thankfully, not one person in North Dakota was forced to dumpster dive for food. … But I digress.
Where the government sucks, the private sector rocks. Here’s a few stories over the years about Walmart and strawberry Pop-Tarts:
Survival gear and canned goods weren’t the only go-to categories. “We didn’t know in the past that strawberry Pop-Tarts increase in sales, like seven times their normal sales rate, ahead of a hurricane,” a Wal-Mart rep says. “And the pre-hurricane top-selling item was beer.”
via Adweek. (11/14/2004)
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The Only Lifeline was the Walmart
Jessica Lewis couldn’t believe her eyes. Her entire community–Waveland, Miss., a Gulf Coast resort town of 7,000–had been laid waste by the storm, and Lewis, co-manager of the local Wal-Mart, was assessing the damage to her store. The fortresslike big box on Highway 90 still stood. But Katrina’s floodwaters had surged through the entrance, knocking over refrigerators full of frozen pizza, shelves of back-to-school items, racks of lingerie. Trudging through nearly two feet of water in the fading light, Lewis thought, How are we ever going to clean up this mess?
That quickly became the least of Lewis’s worries. As the sun set on Waveland, a nightmarish scene unfolded on Highway 90. She saw neighbors wandering around with bloody feet because they had fled their homes with no shoes. Some wore only underwear. “It broke my heart to see them like this,” Lewis recalls. “These were my kid’s teachers. Some of them were my teachers. They were the parents of the kids on my kids’ sports teams. They were my neighbors. They were my customers.”
Lewis felt there was only one thing to do. She had her stepbrother clear a path through the mess in the store with a bulldozer. Then she salvaged everything she could and handed it out in the parking lot. She gave socks and underwear to shivering Waveland police officers who had climbed into trees to escape the rising water. She handed out shoes to her barefoot neighbors and diapers for their babies. She gave people bottled water to drink and sausages, stored high in the warehouse, that hadn’t been touched by the flood. She even broke into the pharmacy and got insulin and drugs for AIDS patients. “This is the right thing to do,” she recalls thinking. “I hope my bosses aren’t going to have a problem with that.” …
And if that wasn’t enough:
At the urging of CEO Lee Scott, its truckers hauled $3 million of supplies to the ravaged zone, arriving days before the Federal Emergency Management Agency in many cases. The company also contributed $17 million in cash to relief efforts. Wal-Mart also demonstrated how efficient it can be. As of Sept. 16, all but 13 of the facilities that Katrina had shut down were up and running again. The company had located 97% of the employees displaced by the storm and offered them jobs at any Wal-Mart operation in the country.via CNN Money. (10/03/2005)
More recently:
Walmart and its warehouse store Sam’s Club managed to send 7,000 generators to its stores in the Northeast that were in the path of superstorm Sandy at the last minute, reports Shelly Banjo at the Wall Street Journal.
It was quite a feat, but how did they make it happen?
Thousands of truck drivers from Walmart’s supply chain have been scurrying around the Northeast to get things where they’re needed.
They’ve been constantly going between Walmart’s huge distribution centers and the big box stores.
“We kick into emergency mode,” one driver in the middle of a 14-hour shift tells the WSJ. “There’s loads of rain, store managers are anxious asking us when their next shipment of water is coming in … But we know it’s up to us to get water and other supplies to the stores and customers as fast as possible.”
Customers had emptied the shelves by Monday night, so employees from all over the region came into New Jersey to get the stores running by 7 AM the next morning.
And, like home improvement chains Home Depot and Lowe’s, Walmart has years of experience responding to disasters. It sets up charging stations and stocks up on the right items beforehand for the hundreds that come by in the storm’s immediate aftermath.
via Business Insider. (11/01/2012)
You see, this is what the Walmarts, the Home Depots, and Lowe’s do — LOGISTICS!! (It’s a lot like a UPS commercial.) FEMA does not do logistics; and frankly they’re terrible at it. After everyone’s got some dry clothes and had something to eat, FEMA comes in and passes out checks. That’s what FEMA’s good at.
Good luck to those eating from the dumpster. Maybe if you were just a little more
preparedself reliant you’d be at home under a blanket listening to the radio and having cup-o-soup and a roll instead. Maybe you will learn from this experience that the government cannot take care of you the same way that you can take care of you. Maybe. -
Mike Madigan: Speaker King
Democratic Speaker Michael Madigan has many advantages as he tries to extend his nearly uninterrupted three-decade control of the Illinois House.
His Democrats have more campaign money. His party has home-state President Barack Obama to drive the vote. Perhaps most important, Madigan drew the district boundaries for each of the 118 House contests that will play out in Tuesday’s election.
Given all that, Madigan is positioned to add to his 64-54 majority.
via Chicago Tribune.
Someday Michael Madigan’s daughter will not be the Illinois Attorney General.
Someday the people of Illinois will realize just what self serving piece of garbage Michael Madigan really is and demand that he be thrown in jail, burn his house down, and then burn the ashes.
All of Illinois’ problem can be laid at the feet of Michael Madigan. The debt, the fraud, the corruption, the bad roads, the pension fiasco, … everything. It’s been his piss poor planning for the last 30 years that has brought us to this point in time where the state is bankrupt and looking for a federal bailout.
We need to Kill the Machine.
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CPS Pays Parents for Good Behavior
Blatantly stolen from Second City Cop:
Is the lure of a $25 gift card enough to persuade a parent who’s not involved in their child’s education to get involved?
Seventy Chicago Public Schools that have struggled to engage parents are about to find out.
At Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s request, Walgreen Co. has agreed to provide $25 gift cards to parents who pick up their students’ report cards and participate in parent-teacher conferences during report card pickup days.
“This is a way, in my view, of incentivizing responsible parenting,” Emanuel told a news conference at Field Elementary School, 7019 N. Ashland.
Is he serious? “incentivizing responsible parenting?” In what parallel universe is this unmitigated ass living in? If you “incentivize” (which isn’t even a real word) bad behavior, what do you get? More bad behavior.
Every study in existence proves this. Example A is the entire welfare system – you pay someone not to work, you get a shitload of people not working. You give someone a check for pushing out babies, pretty soon the birthrate skyrockets and you have 15, 14 even 13-year-olds having babies. You know what reduced the teen birthrate back in the 1990’s? Stopping the checks.
Emanuel said he got the gift card idea during one of his morning workouts.
“That’s what happens when I start swimming. I start coming up with ideas,” the mayor said.
The mayor then approached Walgreen CEO Greg Wasson, who jumped at the opportunity to “give back” to the city where the company has operated for 112 years and now has 150 stores.
This explains part of where he keeps getting these fucked up ideas – chlorine poisoning.
via Second City Cop.
So that’s kinda entertaining. But I fail to see how giving away gift cards to parents who come pick-up report cards and sit for parent-teacher conferences is exactly creating an incentive for bad behavior. Seems like good behavior to me.
The bigger problem with this is like Chris Rock (and Barack Obama) have pointed out that we keep setting the bar so low.
Another comparison, though, is illustrated by an old Chris Rock joke: “People say Colin Powell speaks so well. What’d they expect him to say? ‘Ahmma drop me a bomb’?” There’s something incredibly condescending to think of saying that a man who has risen to the ranks of 4-star general or United States Senator is “articulate,” but it’s always meant as a compliment. In reality, though, it’s a backhanded one.
Obama is more than “articulate,” of course; he’s a truly gifted orator. And he was editor of the Harvard Law Review and otherwise has some mighty impressive credentials. It does seem, though, that the bar is set much lower for Obama than most men who would be president.
via Outside the Beltway.
Isn’t there a soft bigotry in saying that these parents need this incentive to do things that other parents do [without the incentive]?
I actually believe — from what I’m seen with my own eyes living on the West Side for 9 years — that the vast majority of parents want to help their kids get a good education. They want to be a positive influence in their children’s lives. They just simply do not know how because they were never taught by their parents.
What we need to do is help train parents to be better parents. Not throw $25 in gift cards at them and expect them to suddenly become Ma and Pa Cleaver.
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Dem Governors Force Ins. Premiums Higher
Tens of thousands of homeowners who suffered wind and storm damage this week will get financial relief from rulings by several governors that insurers must treat Sandy as a tropical storm and not a hurricane. …
“Whether they call it a hurricane or something else, that translates into the percentage I have to pay to get my apartment redone,” she said before Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Wednesday that homeowners would not have to pay hurricane deductibles. “I had no idea. It’s crazy, and it’s going to cost so much money.”Homeowners’ insurance policies in coastal areas almost always include a provision that the deductible will be higher when damage is caused by a hurricane than a lesser windstorm. The difference can be steep — in the thousands of dollars — because the regular deductible is a flat dollar amount, while the hurricane deductible is connected to the replacement value of the house.
via NYTimes.com.
Right about now dozens of actuaries at all the big insurance companies tossed a huge pile of paper in the air and started to bang their head against the wall.
The title of this story at the NYT is “Governors Promote Lower Deductibles for Homeowners” which is one way of looking at it. The other way is to say, “Governors pander for votes, interfere with the insurance system, annual premiums going to go up up up.”
You don’t get to negotiate your insurance policy terms after the fact. If you wanted a lower deductible then you could have purchased insurance with a lower deductible. If you wanted hurricane replacement value insurance then you could have bought that as well. But if you went cheap and bought the typical policy… then you got the typical policy.
So when the insurance companies start running the numbers they will figure out how much more they’re going to pay out as a result of Gov. Cuomo’s unilateral action. Then they divide that amount over all the policies in the area over 5 or 10 years.
So take your joy now. Because when you get your insurance bill next year something tells me the NYT will not be writing a story about how you can’t afford to pay it.
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Dem Voter Fraud Already Begining in Ohio
Two volunteer poll workers at an Ohio voting station told Human Events that they observed van loads of Ohio residents born in Somalia — the state is home to the second-largest Somali population in the United States — being driven to the voting station and guided by Democratic interpreters on the voting process. No Republican interpreters were present, according to these volunteers. …
A source, who wishes to remain anonymous, is a volunteer outside the Morse Road polling center. She has witnessed Somalis who cannot speak English come to the polling center. They are brought in groups, by van or bus. The Democrats hand them a slate card and say, “vote Brown all the way down.” Given that Sherrod Brown is the incumbent Democrat Senator in Ohio, one can assume that this is the reference.Non-English speaking voters may use an interpreter. The interpreters are permitted by law to interpret for the individual voting; however, they are forbidden from influencing their vote in any way. Another source who also wishes to remain anonymous has seen Democrat interpreters show the non-English speaking Somalis how to vote the Democrat slate that they were handed outside. According to this second source, there are not any Republican Somali interpreters available. …
According to the Somali Community Association of Ohio’s web site, over 45,000 Somalis live in Ohio. Only 40 percent have become citizens of the United States, and only 25 percent speak English well enough to get a job.The second source mentioned has seen voter intimidation at this same voting place. A Mitt Romney bus stopped near the voting center, approximately 30 Democrats who were outside handing out the slate cards rushed over to the bus. They yelled at the bus, and swarmed around its door when anyone attempted to exit the bus. This, from the “tolerant left.”
via Human Events.
No reason to wait until actual election day. After all, Obama comes from Chicago where we’re all told to vote early and often. No reason not to being stuffing the ballot box with illegal votes as soon as possible.
Crazy… just crazy.
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More Dem on GOP Violence
ALTA LOMA, CA — Someone keyed the word “Obama” into two cars and slashed seats in another outside a residence that had Mitt Romney campaign signs.
via CBS Los Angeles.
But wait, that’s not all you get:
Racine, WI — Before the event could get under way, though, organizers say a truck affixed with “Obama” stickers drove through the parking lot and dumped quantities of nails.
“We went outside and picked up what we could,” said Lou D’Abbraccio, holding a cup filled with nails. “But this was just wrong.”
via Mount Pleasant.
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An Intimate Photo Essay of Ann Romney
She said: ‘When I was first diagnosed with MS and my husband was taking care of me, he discovered rotisserie chicken.
‘Rotisserie chicken is every cooks best friend,’ she said. ‘You want to buy it at the end of your shopping so it doesn’t heat up the food that’s in the rest of your basket.’
via Daily Mail Online.
Again, the UK press.
Why is no American journalist carrying this story or anything similar?
Consider:
When Ann wore a stunning red Oscar de la Renta to the RNC, there was not a peep from his PR team, while we received several notices about Michelle’s DNC wardrobe from Tracey Reese and Laura Smalls respectively. When Romney wore a printed Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress, DVF’s PR team not only ignored it, but effectively distanced themselves from her saying they were “not quite sure how she obtained the dress.
The U.S. media is actively ignoring Ann Romney.
Someone try to tell me there is no media bias.
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Obama a Real Contributor to Subprime Loan Failures
President Barack Obama was a pioneering contributor to the national subprime real estate bubble, and roughly half of the 186 African-American clients in his landmark 1995 mortgage discrimination lawsuit against Citibank have since gone bankrupt or received foreclosure notices.
As few as 19 of those 186 clients still own homes with clean credit ratings, following a decade in which Obama and other progressives pushed banks to provide mortgages to poor African Americans.
via The Daily Caller.
Kudos to The Daily Caller for putting together this incredibly well researched piece about Obama being one of the lawyers who sued Citibank to make sub-prime loans.
That this story is being written in 2012 and not 2008, and by a small independent website and not by any of the major media outlets is a complete indictment of our entire media system.
I can remember when I stopped watching The Daily Show. It was shortly before the 2008 election and Michelle Obama was the guest. After she comes out, the first question John Stewart asks is something like, “Tell us something we don’t know about you?” and the crowed goes wild. It was an sardonic arrow aimed at those who were screaming to anyone who would listen, ‘What do we really know about these people?’
The truth Mr. Stewart, is we knew very little about these people. We still know very little about these people. It’s a same that the media didn’t do its job 4 years ago and any time since. So because you ignored your responsibilities for the last 4 years someone has now produced some facts showing how:
- Obama sued Citibank forcing it to make bad, sub-prime loans;
- Many of those loans failed, including nearly half of those plaintiffs in the Obama case;
- The sub-prime loan failures led to the collapse of the entire mortgage system causing the greatest economic crisis since the great depression.
Mr. Obama help create the problem he inherited.
That is what the press should be reporting.