Monday, August 31, 2015

The Left will nominate a Socialist

Whether Hillary Clinton survives her current email-gate woes, or if Joe Biden jumps into the race, or even the grouchy, curmudgeonly Bernie Sanders prevails, liberals will have no choice this time around but to run on socialism.

We all know that Obama is a dyed-in-the-wool, dues paying avowed socialist, and accordingly so is his second banana.  Joe Biden will lead the country down the road to ruin and bankruptcy with at least another four years of sour economic policies that punish achievers with ever increasing taxes, and then turn around and hand out freebies to an ever increasing dependent constituency.

Hillary, with absolutely no doubt, is a raging socialist in her own right, and will wage a war on capitalism with a purple vengeance and wreak virtual havoc on an already downtrodden economy if (God help us) elected as President of the United States of America.

The only honest socialist in the bunch (if that is even possible) would be Bernie Sanders.  He is openly and unapologetically a practicing card-carrying Socialist, with a Capital "S."  Of course he hates the meanness and unfairness of capitalism, and will ensure that not one American has a dime more than any other American: otherwise, things would be unfair.  

Running on the tenets of socialism is problematic for the Left. First and foremost, Americans don't like to think that they live in a socialist country.  They just don't.  I don't know why this is, because Americans sure elect a LOT of socialists to public office.  

Secondly, socialists/liberals still need a humming economy to generate enough taxes in order to re-distribute them from those who pay them to those who take them, and if they inflict full-blown high octane socialism into the economy, we will turn into Greece faster than a bottle of Scotch disappears within the Kennedy compound. And believe me, that's fast.  And accordingly, there go those taxes that were scheduled for re-distribution, right down the ol' crapper.

Uber-liberal journalist Chris Matthews asked Debbie Wasserman-Schultz a few weeks ago on "Hardball" if she could explain the difference between a Democrat and a socialist.  And Debbie, a true-believer in all things socialist, could not come up with a single difference.  Not one.  But this is not what Democrats want to convey if they want to win in November, 2016.  Of course they want things to BE socialist, but they would never succeed in CALLING their philosophy and policies socialist.

It must be tough to be a Democrat these days.  


Sunday, August 23, 2015

Dumbest ideas making the news

There are lots of dumb ideas floating around, and some are dumber than others.  My pick of the dumbest of the dumb ideas follow:

1.  Pay everybody $70,000.00 annually.  Of course, when Dan Price of Gravity Payments decided that everybody would be happy if all his employees received $70K a year, liberals everywhere declared him brilliant, a thought leader, and his model would be the stuff of Harvard case studies.  3 months later, almost nothing is working out like Dan Price figured it would: his brother who was a principal of Gravity Payments sued the company, many of his clients withdrew their accounts, and lots of higher skills employees quit because the janitor who dropped out of 3rd grade was making the same pay as those who slogged their way through MBA's at the University of Washington.  Who saw this kind of backlash coming? Well, just about everybody who isn't a brain dead liberal did.  Duh. 

2.  Make a deal with Iran.  Yes, it is a brilliant move to remove sanctions against the world's leader in exporting terror, freeing up oil sales on the world market, allowing about $150,000,000,000 (that's 150 BILLION dollars annually) to flow into the mullah's coffers; money to fund world-wide terror in perpetuity.  And in an effort to stall the mullahs getting a nuclear weapon, allow only Iranian inspectors to verify nuclear free military sites and report to the world that they are indeed in compliance of the accords.  What kind of morons would do this?  Well, that would be the Obama administration, the smartest people in the world.  Right. 

3.  Hillary Clinton decides to use private email servers in her position as U.S. Secretary of State instead of the mandated, relatively secure government servers.  Of course, Hillary is touted as the worlds' smartest woman.  Now the fact that she used these unsecured private servers to process classified TOP SECRET intelligence reports has surfaced.  And these servers were physically located in an unsecured, solitary bathroom in Denver, when we were told by this extremely smart woman (worlds' smartest woman, or so we are told) that she had U.S. Secret Service agents standing guard over these servers night and day.  Right.  The world's smartest woman sure didn't think any of this through.

Lots of dumb ideas out there, ladies and gentlemen.  Lots and lots. I could go on, but I won't.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

"Wheeler Dealers" guys really bad at math

The cable show "Wheeler Dealers" aired on The Discovery Channel's affiliated 'Velocity' channel features two Brits, a tall skinny guy (Edd China, the mechanic) and a short fat guy (Mike Brewer, the used car salesman) buying classic cars that need work, fixing them and flipping them 'for a profit.'

I haven't missed an episode, and "Wheeler Dealers" has been around for over a decade now.  And each and every episode, I end up yelling at the screen once they start adding up their costs on each project to figure their 'profit.'  Their math is so rotten, it drives me nuts.

A typical episode has Mike flying over to the U.S. from the U.K, kicking the tires on several candidates on, say, a Chevrolet Camaro.  He then beats the guy down to a low ball price, and ships the car back to merry old England.  Edd gets his wrenches out (or 'spanners', as loyal British Subjects call them), does his thing on the clunker and presto, chango: the car looks like it just rolled off the show room floor.

Here's the rub: when calculating the profit, there are just so many large costs that are completely ignored when adding up what they spent.  They only include the cost of the car, the cost of any parts they purchased, and any vendor costs such as chroming and specialty work, and if purchased from a foreign country, shipping costs only, that's it.  What they DON'T add in are the following:

* Labor.  This is a biggie.  Edd works his butt off putting these pieces of crap back into working order, and not a dime of his massive efforts are calculated. Some of these jobs Edd takes on take him weeks and weeks.  He is an accomplished mechanic, and should bill his time out at approximately $80 and hour or so, but he works for nothing, apparently.  And then there's Mike's time and energy spent running around finding these cars, tracking down parts, and never including a dime of his efforts.  This line item is huge.

* Overhead.  Edd has quite the nice shop, with every imaginable tool needed for virtually every obscure job, to include computers for tuning, an overhead hydraulic lift, and all manner of hand tools and often expensive systems.  Not a dime of the rent, mortgage payment, maintenance, etc. or any other cost of this is included in their "profit." And advertising, nothing is mentioned of the cost of marketing these cars. Not one penny of any of this huge overhead these guys have invested in their operation is considered at all.

*Additional labor.  Edd at almost every job calls over his mate (or 'friend,' as we say across the pond) Paul to give him a hand on some of the more cumbersome efforts, or when more than one guy is required.  Paul apparently works for free as well, I never see an invoice from Paul when it comes to adding up the costs.

*Travel costs, shipping costs, etc.  Lots of plane tickets, hotel bills and gasoline/trailer costs are completely ignored.  Edd carts cars off to the paint shop about every other episode, returns to the shop with his trailer and truck.  Once the car is done, he drags the trailer and truck back to the paint shop, picks up the finished car and returns to the shop.  Not a dime of all of this is recorded. These thousands of dollars per car can add up to big money, but these lunkheads never account for a penny of it.

So when comes time for Mike to boast and crow of a huge profit, don't believe a word of it.  Just double the costs they have admitted to, and you will have a more accurate idea of what it costs to bring a piece of crap that was heading for the crusher back to life.

And I still look forward to every episode.  So that I can yell at Mike and Edd some more.  

I love this show.  I know it certainly doesn't sound like it, but I do.

Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Note to Obama: legacies are for others to assign, not you

There he goes again, legacy building.  Barack Obama told us 7 years ago that he was intent on bankrupting the coal industry. Well, the other shoe has finally dropped, and he has issued yet another edict from on high that coal fired power plants better start shuttering their doors sooner rather than later owing to new strict environmental standards on greenhouse gas emissions.

Barry is starting to rush things, as he knows he only has another 15 months or so to wreck America to his liking, and establish the transformation of the country from the world's only super power to a third world banana republic.  Barry likens this transformation as one from a fossil fueled polluting country to a renewable, fresh green country.  Right.  And still, there are not enough windmills or solar panels that can be stapled or glued onto a Boeing 777 to get it even an inch off the ground.  

One thing Barry hasn't accounted for, however, is that his legacy is not subject to the political winds of today.  It will be determined in the fullness of time by others, and others who are not deterred by which way the current political winds are blowing.  History has a way of diluting such influences, and objectively looking at results, not the spin issued by the current regime.

Barry thinks that history will have determined that he saved America from a depression of epic proportions since he inherited a full blown economic disaster...created by his own party and its desire to give free houses to bums and losers who could never, ever service a mortgage on even a dog house, much less a McMansion.

When these fake mortgages went bust after the fake occupants with their fake paychecks came into full view of the lenders, Democrat policies of a house for every beggar blew up in all of our faces. And yet Barry, ramming through massive government spending programs of Keynesian origin, thinks he saved the day when future historians will determine the truth.  And that truth will not be flattering to Barry's legacy.  

Barry will think that his legacy will be one of a peace maker, the president who ended two wars and brought our troops home. Again, the future historians will look at this quite differently: Barry will be hung with losing two wars, one which had already been won (Iraq) and one that was winnable (Afghanistan), and creating the new Holocaust of ISIS.

Barack Obama's legacy will be one of legend.  But not the way he thinks.  Rather than America's greatest president, Barry will come down in history as the most damaging, dishonest and God-awful president the country has ever seen, or ever will see.