Wired magazine has a cool graphic showing were in the country people are committing the three deadly sins.
Just guess where the sin of greed is most often committed. Yep the liberal strongholds. Now aint that ironic.
Apparently, the post office is receiving a 4 billion dollar bail out. Part of the problem:
It’s a practice called “standby time,” and it has existed for years — but postal employees say it was rarely used until this year. Now, postal officials say, the agency is averaging about 45,000 hours of standby time every week — the equivalent of having 1,125 full-time employees sitting idle, at a cost of more than $50 million per year.
After I read that I immediately thought to myself, a union has to be involved. Only unions can force concession that result in such prodigious waste. Imagine my surprise:
But a thicket of union rules prevents managers from laying off excess employees; a recent agreement with the unions, in fact, temporarily prevents the Postal Service from even reassigning them to other facilities that could use them.
You want to ruin a self sustaining business? Unionize the work force.
If the federal government can’t even fire employees that have no work to do, honestly how are they going to bring down the cost of health care? Arguing that the federal government can reduce health care cost by taking control is like saying machine guns pained pink taste delicious. In other words, it makes no fucking sense.
This is actually done pretty well.
Over at Big Hollywood, Micheal Wilson makes a great point:
The actors and comedians in the PSA could literally buy health insurance for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of uninsured Americans. And they don’t even have to wait for the government to take their money at gunpoint. They can just do it. And they should. It’s clearly being positioned as a moral issue, so is it immoral for these folks to hoard money while children are suffering?
Well, the answer is “no.” It’s their money. And I think Will Ferrell should be able to keep as much of his dough as possible, even if he uses it to buy a mini-zoo in his back yard for exotic animals like a white tiger or Pygmy horses. If he chooses to buy me and a hundred thousand or so of my fellow uninsured Americans some insurance, it would go a long way toward establishing credibility. It would also prove that we don’t need government to force Americans to help each other.
He goes on to argue:
The President keeps talking about “service” when he really means “government forcing you to do things.” I have debated health care with every one of my liberal friends who is willing to engage. And I always ask them the same question when they support the government-run plan. It goes like this: “I don’t have health insurance. Will you buy it for me for just one year?” I ask the question seriously. I mean it. I’d happily accept the gift from someone who wants to help. But they always backpedal. They always refuse.
While most on the left don’t realize this, by refusing to be charitable, and relying state coercion, liberals undermine the moral status of their political position. Its moral to help someone in need with your own resources, its immoral to forcibly take those resources from the same person to help someone else in need. It’s called stealing, and most liberals are unaware of this implication in their argument.
Tiger Hawk has this to say about the press coverage of the so called violent protests of the tea party protesters versus the actual violence of the anti corporation protesters of G20 summit.
Glenn Reynolds makes an excellent point about the highly variable twisting of media hankies over “violence” at demonstrations. A few clowns shout at a “tea party” and the media starts worrying about the resurgent Klan, but the left literally attacks the police at the G20 protests and nobody says anything.
There are two possible explanations for this different approach of the media to edgy demonstrators of the left and right.
First, the mainstream media are completely in the tank for the Democrats, and want to help them push the talking point that the tea-partiers are both extremists and typical Republicans (neither of which is generally true).
Second, the left benefits from the soft bigotry of low expectations: People expect leftists to act like thugs at these gatherings as they have for 40 years, so when they do again it is the same-old same-old. The striving burghers of the right, however, have never done this before, so it is news.
Both explanations are probably true to some degree, but which one dominates?
If you ask me this is pretty clear cut example of political ideology dictating editorial content of news media.
I took a lot of crap from several of my readers for supporting the policy to keep detainees retained indefinitely at Guantanamo bay. Many of those readers heavily criticized Bush and supported Obama in part because of his commitment to closing it down. Now that the Obama administration is has to wear man pants it looks like they are backing down from shutting Gitmo down.
With four months left to meet its self-imposed deadline for closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Obama administration is working to recover from missteps that have put officials behind schedule and left them struggling to win the cooperation of Congress.
Now that this issues has gone through both a republican and democratic administration, its probably safe to assume that their really are dangerous terrorists being detained at Guantanamo and their is no sufficient legal recourse to deal with them. Therefore, the most prudent policy is to keep them detained indefinitely. By the way, kudos to the Obama administration for deciding to make the hard decision of keeping Gitmo open despite having to take significant pressure from those on the left.
Capitalism is awesome.
Stephen Von Worley calculated the longest distance you would have to travel to get to a McDonalds in the continental US and found:
Between the tiny Dakotan hamlets of Meadow and Glad Valley lies the McFarthest Spot: 107 miles distant from the nearest McDonald’s, as the crow flies, and 145 miles by car!
Apparently no matter where you are in the country, you about a two and half hour drive to McDonalds. To be honest I think this would of been interesting if the longest distance happened to be shorter than 145 miles. If you could always be a one hour drive from a McDs no matter where in the continental US, now that would truly be an awesome achievement.
Palin recently gave a speech in Hong Kong. According to the New York Times:
“She didn’t sound at all like a far-right-wing conservative. She seemed to be positioning herself as a libertarian or a small-c conservative,” he said, adding that she mentioned both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. “She brought up both those names.”
Hell Yeah! If Palin trends towards libertarianism in her bid to be the next president, she totally has my vote. She would be the perfect antidote for all these terrible economic policies Obama may be able to push through. Four years of of Obama seems worth it if we get eight years of fiscal conservativism.
You have to admit she’s smart. Realizing she has a weakness in foreign policy she goes out into the world to give speeches.
I like Will Ferrell but honestly this video shows him to be a hippocrite.
You can’t bemoan insurance executives for making millions and then collect millions yourself.
To Letterman’s question about race motivating the tea party protesters.
