Upcoming recession? Nope, Obama will see to it that doesn't happen

Seasonally adjusted gross domestic product (GDP) results came out for first quarter of 2014: our economy shrank 1%.  As we all know, the technical definition of an economy in recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth, and I can all but guarantee you that this will not be allowed to happen by the Obama administration, no siree Bob.  Not before the 2014 election in November, not a chance.

Just like they cooked the books on the unemployment figures to make sure they dipped below 8% in time for the 2012 elections (they plummeted to 7.7% just prior to Americans casting their ballots, remember those bogus numbers?), Obama will fudge the numbers to ensure that we don't get that second negative quarter in a row.

Not only will he fudge the numbers, he will make sure that the bogus numbers look so good, we will all be amazed at the turnaround in the second quarter of 2014, all the while seeing the roles of the number of Americans no longer included in the labor participation rate increase from the 91 million mark to perhaps 100 million, maybe more.

But we will be guaranteed by this administration that there will be no recession on their watch.

Take that to the bank.  

VA 'death list' scandal: this is our future, folks

An honorably discharged U.S. Army veteran walks into the VA Hospital closest to where he lives to deal with a chronic medical problem he has been ignoring, but now ignoring it is no longer an option.  He is greeted by a grumpy receptionist after waiting in the lobby for maybe 15 minutes.  Not too bad, but this is as good as it gets for this guy.

The grumpy receptionist shoves a stack of forms for the guy to fill out, and demands two pieces of photo I.D.  He only has his driver's license on him.  'Tough,' says the grump.  'Go get one more.  NEXT!'

The guy comes back later on that afternoon with an additional photo ID, waits another 15 minutes to speak to the same grumpy receptionist.  When he is finally 'greeted', she acts like she had never seen the guy before in her life.  He explains that he had been in earlier, and was only missing an additional piece of photo ID.  The grump then shoves the exact same pile of forms to the guy, who tells her that he already filled them out earlier.  The grump threatens to send him to the back of the line unless he shuts up and fills out the damn forms.  Again.

And so it goes.  This is our government at work, and in this case its in the health care industry.  Wherever the government interacts with the public, this is the way things work.  There is no joy, no patience and no common sense.  It is government at its worst.

Obamacare now looms over us.  While the government is not yet directly involved in the actual care, but rather only the paperwork, we are in for an initial shock as to the nature of government workers in their natural habitat: a cubicle where they are immune from criticism of bad performance, exempt from common courtesy and entrenched in their position to the point that they are virtually free from performance accountability.

Just wait until Obamacare is perverted inexorably into government paid health care providers.  What you will have then is what we all see in the Phoenix VA hospital.

Monsters who care not a whit whether their charges live or die, monsters who only care about their performance bonuses and incentives, doing the right thing be damned in their pursuit of a few bucks.

We all see what these government workers chose to do to these poor retches who wandered into their lobbies, seeking treatment to potentially life threatening conditions: they chose to put their care into limbo, fudge the books and subsequently collect their bonuses for meeting performance objectives while these veterans languished on phony waiting lists and then ultimately perished.

This VA scandal is the tip of the iceberg, I am afraid.  We are all in for this kind of poor service once Obamacare morphs into what we all know it will: another government office just like the DMV or the VA.  Full of low performing scumbags who doesn't really care whether you live or die.

This is our future, folks, unless we open our eyes.

Nixon resigned for MUCH less

Richard M. Nixon was forced to resign the presidency in 1974 by a rabid media who were outraged at his Watergate transgression: does anyone other than dumb ol' Fredd remember what this God awful, unforgivable CRIME that Richard Nixon committed was?

Anybody?

I remember it like it was yesterday.  Richard Nixon's ONLY "crime" was this: lying to the American people regarding his knowledge of the Watergate break in AFTER it occurred.

That's it.  That was the unforgivable sin that Richard Nixon committed that worked the press into a rabid frenzy.

Given Obama's weekly and even daily lies about all things major and minor, poor old Richard Nixon's sins seem almost quaint.  We now know for a fact that Obama lied about the facts of terrorists overrunning our embassy and embassy annex in Benghazi, Libya in 2012, and not just once.  He lied over and over.  And his administration sent surrogates out on a daily basis to lie and lie again.

This president has lied about so much now, it is expected of him.  He lied about taking public matching campaign funds in 2007.  He lied about being the most transparent administration ever.  He lied about reducing the deficit by half in four years.  He lied about closing Guantanamo Bay.  He lied about Fast and Furious.  He lied about the IRS scandal (not a smidgen of evidence, he says), and he lied about nearly everything that matters to the American public.

Then he lied about the major selling point on the hated Affordable Health Care Act (Obamacare): 'if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.  Period.  If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.  Period.'

And now the smoking gun has been revealed by the release of a White House email from communications director Ben Rhodes: distract the public from a wider failure of policy by pointing to a video.  Lies, lies that are certainly high crimes and misdemeanors.

The stuff of impeachment.

Richard Nixon was forced to resign for a single offense far less offensive than Obama's crimes.

If this smoking gun comes and goes without some sort of serious and major blow back against Obama and the Democrats politically, we are lost as a nation.

David Gregory: this century's version of "Network's" characater Howard Beall

With the death of Tim Russert, 'Meet the Press' anchor and successful political commentator several years back, this highly rated Sunday talk show was then taken over by uber liberal socialist, David Gregory.  Since then, the ratings of Meet the Press have been sliding into the basement.  Now its ratings are completely awful, and NBC execs, rather than fire this raging Marxist, have hired psychologists to treat David Gregory and even go so far as to have these shrinks interview his friends and his wife.  These NBC poobahs are convinced that if they find out why people don't like David Gregory (HE'S A RAGING MARXIST WHACKO, GUYS!!"), then they can alter his delivery to suit their audiences' tastes, and turn ratings around.

NBC execs are bound and determined to keep this raging Marxist in place, a liberal whose crackpot communist philosophical views anger at least half the nation on a weekly basis.   Gregory will in the short term at least remain as host of Meet the Press, God Awful ratings be damned.  The shrinks will fix things.

Right.

This plot is straight out of a 38 year old Hollywood script: "Network."

Decades ago, this movie was released that gave us the phrase 'I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

"Network," starring an aging William Holden as an over the hill network executive and Faye Dunaway, the young fresh upstart mover and shaker in the news business, depicted a fictitious TV network that was suffering ratings blues, and took steps including murder and sensational madmen TV anchors to  bolster their sagging ratings.

Peter Finch played the madman Howard Beall, who in the throes of awful ratings, announced one day on the set that he was going to kill himself on live TV.  The execs in the studio were aghast, and then when the following day they noticed that the ratings went ballistic on their news hour, with the entire nation tuning in to see what happened next, young Faye Dunaway ran with it.

Howard Beall then was the hit dujour, and his ratings saved the network in the short run (no, he did not kill himself on live TV, as it turns out). He just started ranting and raving about everything in general.  Then, in the fullness of time, Howard's rants and raves started to sour with the public, and Faye Dunaway wanted to can the creep.

Here's where the plot thickens: the owner of the network, a super rich shadowy figure portrayed by Ned Beatty (Mr. Jensen), stepped in and insisted that Howard Beall be kept on the air, regardless of ratings.  Mr. Jensen liked the morose, bad news that Howard Beall continued to spew, as in his view this was the philosophy he supported, and was good for his business ventures overall.  Jensen did not care a whit whether Howard Beall's newscasts LOST money, he was to be kept on the air regardless the ratings.

The way the writers ended 'Network' was to assassinate Howard Beall.  I wonder how NBC will finally pull the plug on David Gregory?

Stay tuned, film at 11......

The 'revenoo-ers' are coming for you, too

I would guess that nobody under the age of 50 will read this post, as all of those young whipper snappers are all committed heart and soul to their Facebook pages and have human contact only via 140 characters or less on Twitter.

Accordingly, I will jack up the font and address this for those of us who need cheater glasses (at least) in order to read it.

Most of you probably remember John Rose's old cartoon "Snuffy Smith" (a spin off of an even older cartoon, 'Barney Google'), where a poor backwoods Appalachian moonshiner and his wife, Weezy, scrapped a living off of the land where they could, and Snuffy would cook up some corn squeezin's with his still.

Snuffy was constantly on the alert to roaming 'revenuers' or as I like to spell them as did Snuffy as 'revenoo'ers.'  These revenoo'ers were from an unnamed federal agency, probably back in Rose's day the Department of the Treasury or perhaps the IRS, and now are represented by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

In any event, these revenoo-ers were constantly trying to smash Snuffy's still, and Snuffy was constantly shooting back, protecting his property from these over reaching revenoo-ers.

Now we are seeing a modern day Snuffy Smith, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, fending off the power of the over reaching federal government in the form of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).  

These BLM revenoo-ers have unilaterally decided in 1993 that some desert tortoises on this land that was used by this rancher to graze cattle were threatened by this grazing, and the BLM withdrew his previously granted grazing rights.  When asked why this decision was made, a simple statement was issued that the tortoise and its habitat were adversely affected, and that grazing rights were no longer allowed.

The tortoise is threatened?  Sez who?  Sez the BLM.  When asked for the data supporting this decision, none was ever provided.  This data has been requested for decades now after this 1993 unilateral decision to protect this threatenened tortoise, and these requests have been ignored to the present day.

And this seems to be how things work now.  An unaccountable, unelected bureaucracy makes decisions that impact Americans, and no recourse or grievance is allowed.  No sir.  Just do it, peons.  The U.S. government has spoken.

Hopefully we wake up, and see just what is going on in Nevada currently.  On the surface, a guy is ignoring the law.  A law made up out of whole cloth, voted on by nobody, and accountable to nobody.  What kind of law is that?

If we stand back and allow the BLM to win on this, by upholding this 'law' and crushing this little rancher, then the precedence has been set.  

They came for Cliven Bundy's cattle.  The revenoo-ers can come for you, too.  

Utopian fools put themselves at risk in a dangerous world

We still read in the domestic U.S. newspapers (for those Luddites who still cling to those inky, awkward paper relics) of traveling Americans, religious missionaries and ex patriots taken hostage, imprisoned or outright executed by hostile foreign groups, and in general of retribution inflicted onto Americans in foreign lands by those who hold ill will towards all things Western.

These incidents are far too common, and do not fall into the 'man bites dog' category of news.  It is now the norm, for Americans to suffer at the hands of foreigners when in foreign lands.

One would think we should expect bad things to happen to those brave yet foolish Americans who travel abroad to lands that harbor grudges against the United States.  These hostile foreign nations do not go out of their way to protect visiting Americans because they truly believe that America is the source of all of their woes: they believe that America is hogging all the natural resources their country produces, that the U.S. rewards their enemies by lucrative trade agreements, and that the U.S. in the past has bigfooted all of their aspirations and goals in its imperial drive to dominate the world.

And still these brave yet foolish Americans travel to hostile lands.  And their families are shocked and outraged that bad things happen to them in hostile foreign lands.  I don't understand this shock and outrage.  Common sense dictates that one does not put themselves into dangerous situations when virtually everyone knows that danger awaits those who venture into these hostile environments.

These brave yet foolish Americans I speak of are those who have Utopian dreams of a loving, caring global community, where we all sit around our international campfires, arm in arm, ukuleles strumming melodic chords as we all sing 'We are the World,' and John Lennon's idiotic ditty 'Imagine.'  These deluded morons buy property in foreign lands, thinking that the world is a safe, loving place, when in reality the world is a nasty, dangerous place where American notions of freedom and liberty are demonstrably NOT embraced everywhere.  Then when these fools' land is taken by these hostile, foreign governments, and they flee for their lives, they are dumb struck that this could ever happen.  Idiots.

These Utopian notions of a loving global community are simply NOT embraced everywhere.  In fact, these Utopian notions are embraced virtually NOWHERE, other than on paper here in the good ol' U.S. of A. Nowhere else.  Nowhere.

'But Fredd, but Fredd,' you curmudgeonly grump, 'what about our allies, such as Norway, Sweden, Japan and Germany, Fredd?'

While these Western countries are relatively friendly towards U.S. interests, I would not posit that they share our notions of freedom and liberty.  All of them, each and every one of them, holds contempt for Americans and our values.  Norwegians and Swedes consider Americans as barbarians owing to our belief in capital punishment. Japan holds such contempt for Americans that many Japanese will refuse to sit at a table in a restaurant that had hosted an American before them until such accommodations were thoroughly cleansed and sanitized. They consider us a lower species than themselves.  You think I am making this up.  I am not.  Ask anyone who has spent any significant time in Japan.  Germans still harbor resentment towards Americans over WWII hostilities and the subsequent 'occupation' of their lands by a significant U.S. military presence.  Ask anyone who has spent anytime in Germany, and has downed a liter or two of suds at the Hofbrauhaus in old Munchen with a native Bavarian.  The truth of our comity will come to the surface, to the surprise of many Utopian Americans.

In a world of anti-American sentiment, the only truly safe places to travel for U.S. citizens without fear of being taken hostage or otherwise harmed simply because of our ethnicity are other English speaking countries: Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.  That's it.  The list is short.

Everywhere else you travel, the cold hard truth of the world is that your safety is not high on the list of priorities of any host country.  In truth, contrary to the Utopian dream of world love and peace, most foreign country views of Americans are negative, and if harm befalls a U.S. citizen, nobody in that country will lose a moment's sleep worrying over the poor idiot's plight.  In reality, most foreigners will rejoice.

Travel to these hostile places (virtually everywhere English is not spoken) at your peril, Utopians.  John Lennon was and is wrong.  "Imagine all the people. Living life in peace.'  It will never happen.  Ever.  Pretending such idiocy will come to pass will only put your life in peril.

The fate of the Malaysian flight 370 should not shock anyone.  It was not all that long ago that the Malays were a pack of cannibals feasting on missionaries.  Now along comes civilization and these former cannibals now get Boeing 777's.  There is outrage and shock that the Malay government has bungled, botched and goofed up the whole affair.  The fact that this flight may have taken 293 souls to their doom should not shock or outrage anybody.  Civilization may have given these primitives jets and western suits for their leaders to wear, but putting your life in these people's hands is just asking for bad things to happen.  But that is the Utopian way: everybody is good, and everybody should love each other and good things will happen.

Utopian morons, take heed.

Obama's new minimum wage: $10.10/hour - the dumb 'helping' the dumber

During Obama's state of the union address last week, one of the most discredited, damaging and outright stupid political snake oil initiatives has been trotted out yet again to 'help' the downtrodden: Obama proclaims that jacking up the existing federal minimum wage from the current $7.25/hour - already $7.25 per hour too high - to a dizzying $10.10 per hour will help the poor.

Bunk.  It will make more people poor, on the whole.  Some people will benefit in the short term from this mandate, but in the aggregate we will all be worse off in the long run.

When I say that the existing federal mandated minimum wage of $7.25/hour is exactly $7.25 per hour too high, that is because it is inarguable that the true, exact and immutable minimum wage is exactly $0.00 per hour, and this figure is exact to the 1/100th of a penny.  Zero, nada, zilch per hour is what somebody makes when an employer just doesn't have the means to justify hiring an employee in the U.S. today.

But Obama and his Utopian dreamers in the faculty lounge dismiss the reality of the situation, and they will mandate paradise on earth, and in this case, legislate a minimum hourly wage standard of $7.25 per hour, or if Obama gets his way, $10.10 per hour.  What this mandate (either one, the old minimum or the new, doesn't matter) in effect results in is increased unemployment, or more people earning the true minimum wage: nothing per hour.

A wage or salary is nothing more and nothing less than the cost of labor.  The price of labor.  Everything worth while in this world has a price, and the prices of the means of production are all relatively well known: the means of production, as economists call them, are in effect land, labor and capital.  Each has a price. A well established price at any point in time.

Economically, if a price for something is too high, people will balk at paying that price.  They will find alternatives that meet their satisfaction, rather than pay too high a price for something.  Say, for example, some beach front property in southern Florida next door to Donald Trump's Mira Lago compound goes up for sale for $1,000,000 for an adjacent acre to the Donald's digs.  Whoa, you say, I'm not going to shell out a cool million just to say I live next door to the Donald.  Forget that, there's another piece of property down the road, that is only going for $825,000 an acre.  I will be fine with that.

And so that kind of behavior goes for virtually any transaction in America.  Economically speaking the higher the price of anything, all else held constant, the lower the demand for it.  When Obama or any Democrat squeals for higher minimum wages, they are squealing in effect for higher unemployment.

An employer will simply not just sit still and eat this increase in the cost of their payroll.  They can do many things to cope with this new mandate, and among the alternatives are: eat it, let the increase come out of their profit margin.  Not likely, as employers are in business to make a profit, not just to employ people.  They can perhaps pass on the cost to the consumer of their product: also, not likely.  That's not the way things work in our economy, because if they jack up the cost of their product over that of their competitors, they will lose market share.  And when they lose market share, they lose profit margin.  See above, employers don't like that to happen.

What is most likely to happen, is that they will just do with one less employee: if they had three employee's at $7.25 per hour before Obama's new $10.10/hour mandate, the odds that they will simply fire one of the three employees is high.  How is that better for these minimum wage employees?

It's fine with the two remaining employees.  It's a disaster for that third employee who just lost his job, thanks to Barry, and subsequently earns the true minimum wage: bumpkus per hour.

It is just that simple.