My Blog

Category: Politics

  • DNC Proudly Displays Russian Ships

    On the last night of the Democratic National Convention, a retired Navy four-star took the stage to pay tribute to veterans. Behind him, on a giant screen, the image of four hulking warships reinforced his patriotic message.

    But there was a big mistake in the stirring backdrop: those are Russian warships.  …

    These were the very Soviet-era combatants that Nathman and Cold Warriors like him had once squared off against.  “The ships are definitely Russian,” said noted naval author Norman Polmar after reviewing hi-resolution photos from the event.  “There’s no question of that in my mind.”

    Naval experts concluded the background was a photo composite of Russian ships that were overflown by what appear to be U.S. trainer jets.  It remains unclear how or why the Democratic Party used what’s believed to be images of the Russian Black Sea Fleet at their convention.

    via Navy Times.

    Vladimir Putin must have made a very nice campaign donation to Obama for America.

  • Inner City Kids and a Catholic School

    God Bless John Kass:

    When Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis led her members out on strike this week, she said real school would be closed.

    “Negotiations have been intense but productive,” she said. “However, we have failed to reach an agreement that will prevent a labor strike. Real school will not be open (Monday).”

    Real school? You mean that public system where four of 10 students don’t graduate?

    Since real school wasn’t open, I was compelled to visit an unreal school.A South Side school where 100 percent of the students graduate, and 100 percent are accepted to college. A Roman Catholic all-boys school that draws from poor and working-class neighborhoods, a school where there are no cops or metal detectors, no gang recruitment, no fear.

    An unreal school that is mostly black, but with a smattering of whites and Latinos, and where every student who sees a stranger in the halls goes up to the newcomer, introduces himself, shakes his hand, looks him in the eye and calls him Mister.

    via Chicago Tribune.

    It is unethical and criminal that our children are forced into failing schools when they have the real opportunity to have an excellent education.  Vouchers would make real Obama’s rhetoric of every child having a fair chance.

    Kass exposes the reality of the situation:  this has nothing to due with educating children… it’s about politics.

    For shame.

     

  • Everything (the GOP does) is Racist

    Or at least so says the Left.  Bill Maher is only the latest:

    HBO host and Obama donor Bill Maher has accused journalists like NBC’s Tom Brokaw of encouraging the birther movement by failing to label it as racist.

    In a blog post endorsing Chris Matthews’ recent on-air attack against RNC chairman Reince Priebus during MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Maher accused Brokaw and other reporters of stoking the coals of birtherism by championing “‘balance’ over objectivity,” citing Brokaw’s attempt to defend Mitt Romney’s remark about his birth certificate as an “awkward joke.”

    “How did [birtherism] grow to the point where half of Republican primary voters believed it? It wasn’t just the silence of Republican leaders, it was the failure of people like Tom Brokaw to just dismiss it as racism from the beginning,” Maher wrote.

    via DailyKenn.

    Sometimes the best way to show the absurdity of a position is through comedy.  Meet Bob.

    [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1o0ooNn8Qc?rel=0]

  • How to Help Black Kids Graduate? Vouchers!

    Since CTU is out on strike, this appears to be timely.

    Educational choice is the civil rights movement of our generation.

    Then look at a breathtaking new study from researchers at the Brookings Institution and Harvard University. Brookings fellow Matthew M. Chingos and Harvard government professor Paul E. Peterson tracked 1,363 New York elementary school students who, starting in 1997, had received vouchers worth up to $1,400 a year through a New York City scholarship fund. Those students had their choice of any private school, religious or secular, in New York.

    Result: African-American students who had used the vouchers were 24 percent more likely to attend college, and more than twice as likely to attend selective four-year colleges, as their peers who had not won the voucher lottery in a random draw. The hard numbers: 45 percent of the African-American students with vouchers graduated and attended college. That’s compared to 36 percent of otherwise similar students who hadn’t received the vouchers.

    Those vouchers didn’t give a similar boost to white or Hispanic students, but did help African-Americans close the customary graduation gap between black and Hispanic students, the researchers reported.

    via Chicago Tribune.

    Poor kids on the South and West sides of the city are stuck in failing schools and Rahm, Obama, and the rest of the Democratic cabal aren’t going to do a damn thing about it.

  • Double-Dipping Payments from the “G”

    As many as 117,000 Americans simultaneously collect unemployment benefits and federal disability each year, a form of double-dipping that investigators say costs taxpayers $850 million annually and should be ended.

    To understand why such “double-dipping” constitutes fraud, please note the following general requirements for each program: To receive unemployment insurance benefit payments, claimants must state that they are able to work. To receive disability insurance benefit payments, claimants must state that they are unable to work.

    via Townhall.

    The article actually points out that because of the significant increase in the number of people on disability the “current projections indicate that the Social Security trust fund for disability will be fully depleted in 2016, just four years from the present.”

    The data appears solid.  Where is the MSM on this story.  Is this not a significant issue in this election cycle?

     

  • Big Money in Freon Smuggling

    I love stories like this; Government run amok.

    The chief executive of the century-old company from America’s heartland shifted nervously on the witness stand here as he tried to explain how a trusted senior vice president had been caught on a wiretap buying half a million dollars in smuggled merchandise, much of it from China.

    But the contraband purchased by Marcone, a St. Louis-based company that claims to be the nation’s largest authorized source for appliance parts, was not counterfeit handbags or fake medicines. It was a colorless gas that provides the chill for air-conditioners from Miami to Mumbai, from Bogotá to Beijing.

    Under an international treaty, the gas, HCFC-22, has been phased out of new equipment in the industrialized world because it damages the earth’s ozone layer and contributes to global warming. There are strict limits on how much can be imported or sold in the United States by American manufacturers.

    But the gas is still produced in enormous volumes and sold cheaply in China, India and Mexico, among other places in the developing world, making it a profitable if unlikely commodity for international smugglers.

    So in 2009, Carlos Garcia, the Marcone vice president, generated big business for his company’s growing air-conditioning operation by selling smuggled foreign gas to repairmen at rock bottom prices in a promotion called Freaky Freon Fridays, drawing on a brand name that many use as a synonym for coolants.

    via NYTimes.com.

    Two great quotes:

    International efforts to curb the use of HCFC-22 are faltering for dozens of reasons, from loopholes in environmental treaties to the reluctance of manufacturers to step up development of more environmentally friendly machines.

    and,

    Many air-conditioning manufacturers have even figured out how to sidestep the 2010 ban on selling new machines containing HCFC-22, by offering unfilled air-conditioning compressors that service workers swap into existing units and then fill with the gas, creating refurbished machines that are as good as new.

    Ya, kinda like the war on drugs.  Big brother steps in and basically screws up the entire marketplace.  Businesses position themselves around the law and the only result is products are now more expensive to the consumer… slowing the whole economy.

    This notion the folks in the U.S. are rich and can afford the more expensive machine while folks in Mexico get to use HCFC-22 because they’re poor creates conditions ripe for a black market.  Same goes for the carbon credit swap in the Kyoto Treaty.  It’ll never work.

    None of these kinds of restrictions ever work.

  • Teachers’ Unions vs. Children

    When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.
    — Albert Shanker, former president of the United Federation of Teachers

    I wrote about this before, how the truth is that CTU, WEAC, and all other teacher’s unions have a fiduciary duty to the union members.  The union cannot do anything which would advance the interests of non-members (i.e. children) to the detriment of the members (i.e. teachers.)

    This is a very simple legal principle that most educated people easily understand.

    Of course there’s the greater philosophical discussion that should take place as to whether of not unions of government employees are to anyone’s benefit.

    The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.
    — F.D. Roosevelt, in 1937 to the National Federation of Federal Employees

    The idea being that when private sector employees collectively bargain they can overplay their hand only to their own detriment as well and to the detriment of their employer.  Another company will be the beneficiary of the higher wages (and cost of goods/services) of the first.  This is not true in government where there is no competition.

    Anyone seeking more and more from the public coffers should be considered with extreme skepticism.

  • Illinois – 4th Worst Legal Climate for Business

    Illinois, along with California, Louisiana, Mississippi and West Virginia, are among the worst states in the country for businesses because of their legal climates, according to survey of corporate attorneys released Monday.

    Two Illinois counties did not fare well in the survey by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s institute for legal reform, either. Cook County was named the most unfair and unreasonable jurisdiction, and Madison County was named the sixth most unfair county.  …

    Illinois’ ranking this year, 46th among the 50 states in terms of the fairness of its litigation environment, compares with previous rankings of the 45th worst state in 2010 and the 46th worst in 2008.via Chicago Tribune.

    So we’ve been terrible; no one’s done anything about it so we’re still terrible.  I see.  Hey Gov. Quinn, Anybody home down there?

    We have the worst pensions in the country and and a unfair and unreasonable legal environment.  It’s no wonder that businesses don’t want to be here.

    Add to that mess that fact that:

    Chicago, the city that brought us deep-dish pizza, Oprah and “da Bears,” is also home to the nation’s highest tax burden for travelers.

    via Chicago Tribune.

    So if you’re a business here you know that it hard to do business with other businesses because it’s expensive to travel here.  This is also a huge burden on tourists… who used to come here in droves until downtown wildlings become common-place.

    Rahm has a full plate.  Maybe he should get busy trying to solve a few of these problems instead of non-stop fundraising for Obama.

  • U.S. Department of Education: 79% of Chicago 8th Graders Not Proficient in Reading

    Seventy-nine percent of the 8th graders in the Chicago Public Schools are not grade-level proficient in reading, according to the U.S. Department of Education, and 80 percent are not grade-level proficient in math.

    via CNS News.

    Very… very… sad.

    Teachers make over $60/hour.  Get awesome benefits.  Not getting the job done.  On strike demanding more money.

  • How Mitt Wins

    Yesterday I read something over at Hillbuzz that got me thinking:

    Today I want to think about just who are the people who will be voting for Obama in November and see how that compares to the people who voted for him in 2008. I don’t believe anyone who DIDN’T vote for him last time liked anything about him and will be voting for him THIS time. I also don’t believe the people who sat the last election out because of John McCain will be staying home again.

    via Hillbuzz.

    So I spent a few minutes and created the table below.  It only has states that Obama won in 2008.  I left out states where Obama took >60% (except for Illinois b/c I was just curious.)  It’s sorted by the percentage of voters in that state necessary to jump from Obama to Romney in order to flip the state.

      Raw Votes Percentage    
    State Obama McCain Obama McCain FlipVotes FlipPercent
    North Carolina 2,142,651 2,128,474 49.70% 49.38% 7,089 0.16%
    Indiana 1,374,039 1,345,648 49.85% 48.82% 14,196 0.51%
    Florida 4,282,367 4,046,219 50.91% 48.40% 118,074 1.26%
    Ohio 2,940,044 2,677,820 51.38% 46.80% 131,112 2.29%
    Virginia 1,959,532 1,725,005 52.63% 46.33% 117,264 3.15%
    Colorado 1,288,633 1,073,629 53.66% 44.71% 107,502 4.48%
    Iowa 828,940 682,379 53.93% 44.39% 73,281 4.77%
    New Hampshire 384,826 316,534 54.13% 44.52% 34,146 4.81%
    Minnesota 1,573,354 1,275,409 54.06% 43.82% 148,973 5.12%
    Pennsylvania 3,276,363 2,655,885 54.47% 44.15% 310,239 5.16%
    Nevada 533,736 412,827 55.15% 42.65% 60,455 6.25%
    Wisconsin 1,677,211 1,252,393 56.22% 42.31% 212,409 6.96%
    New Mexico 472,422 346,832 56.91% 41.78% 62,795 7.57%
    New Jersey 2,215,422 1,613,207 57.14% 41.61% 301,108 7.77%
    Oregon 1,037,291 738,475 56.75% 40.40% 149,408 8.18%
    Michigan 2,872,579 2,048,639 57.33% 40.89% 411,970 8.22%
    Washington 1,750,848 1,229,216 57.34% 40.26% 260,816 8.54%
    Illinois 3,419,348 2,031,179 61.85% 36.74% 694,085 12.56%

    This means if 7,089 people in North Carolina who voted for Obama last time vote for Romney this time then Romney will win NC. Regardless of whatever the polling says.

    If Kevin DuJan at Hillbuzz is correct, it’s pretty safe to say that North Carolina, Indiana, Florida, Ohio, and Virginia should all go Romney.  In these state Romney needs <2% of voters to flip.  That should not be a problem.

    Should that happen, Romney will have 265 or 266 electoral votes depending on how Nebraska splits.  You can see the map here.

    That means that Romney must also win, Colorado or Iowa or Wisconsin or Michigan, or Romney must win at least 2 votes from Nebraska AND New Hampshire.

    That my friends is how Romney wins.