Clipping blog

---

• Clearing the Browser Tabs – Springtime Tuesday Edition
• The Delivery Presents – CPAC and Public Relations, Football-Style
• Could You Use $4000? Too Bad We Don’t Work for President Obama’s Favorite Car Company
• Guess Who’s Okay With Big Financial Regulations? Big Finance!
• NASA’s Idea of Winning the Future is Less than Inspiring
• Clearing the Browser Tabs – The Internet is Important Monday Edition

Clearing the Browser Tabs – Springtime Tuesday Edition Posted: 14 Feb 2011 09:51 PM PST Monday was the day Winter lost its hold on us. Sure, it’ll be cold for just a little while longer, but Winter is beaten and, believe me, it knows. The temps approached 70 degrees yesterday, with a high warm sun and plenty of springtime breezes that became Winter’s last gusty rages as the day wore on. More importantly, Monday was the first day that pitchers and catchers could report to Spring Training, so you know the first crack of the bat is right around the corner. I have quite a few friends in the Midwest and Northeast who will be very glad for spring to finally arrive. I believe I’ll be pretty happy about it, too. And now, links! Haley Barbour’s days as a dark horse 2012 candidate may just be over if this story gets into wide circulation. Then again, if the update in Ed’s post on the story is true, maybe not. Atlas Shrugged is heading to the big screen this year and the first trailer is at Big Hollywood. I saw this at the CPAC Blog Bash and, I admit, I wasn’t terribly impressed. Then again, I never have gotten all the way through the book. Want to see what Cuba’s vaunted health system is really like? Get hurt while you’re there. China is now the world’s second-largest economy. Don’t worry, though, they still aren’t half as big as the United States, and they won’t catch us anytime soon. The article isn’t bad, though it does contain a few real factual clunkers, such as the assertion that President Obama is cutting “billions” out of our “growth”. Dear God, how could anyone think this is an appropriate jersey for adult male hockey players? It’s not even appropriate for a fake cartoon hockey team full of Rainbow Brites. Now this is a big solar flare. Speaking of flares, did you know that Jupiter has its own auroras? It does, and they’re really large.

The Delivery Presents – CPAC and Public Relations, Football-Style Posted: 14 Feb 2011 09:12 PM PST I should have posted Episode 77 several days ago, but for reasons that mostly involved getting ready for CPAC, it completely slipped my mind. That’s a shame because, I think, it was a heck of a pre-CPAC show. It can hold up nicely as a post-conference show, so be sure to listen, but I wish my memory hadn’t been so darned slippery when I needed it to be otherwise. You’ll like the interview with Lisa DePasquale, the woman who puts rides herd on the whole event. She’s a neat person to know and I’m pleased to introduce you to her, if you didn’t know her already. The second half is a solid object lesson on how not to handle a potential public-relations nightmare. The National Football League has gotten sloppy over the past few years with its fan service and the backlash could cost it an appreciable percentage of its base. I’d rather that didn’t happen, so perhaps the league can get in touch. I’m not terribly expensive, you know! The Delivery - Episode 77 This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Could You Use $4000? Too Bad We Don’t Work for President Obama’s Favorite Car Company Posted: 14 Feb 2011 08:23 PM PST On the surface, it should be good news when a company is doing well enough that it can pay out almost $190 million dollars in bonuses to its rank and file salaried employees. If the directors are good with it, the creditors are in good shape, and the company is doing well, employees ought to sometimes get a piece of the profit action. That’s good business. It’s not good business, however, when the company is celebrating one good patch among years of ruination and the money they’re “sharing” with their employees is money they scammed from us. DETROIT | General Motors Co. will pay more than $189 million in profit-sharing to 48,000 U.S. hourly workers and millions more in performance bonuses to salaried employees, according to company documents obtained by the Associated Press. GM will pay most hourly workers more than $4,000 each as compensation for its strong financial performance last year, said a person briefed on the bonuses. The payments come less than two years after the automaker emerged from bankruptcy protection with the help of a huge government bailout. They're more than double the previous record payment of $1,775 in 1999, at the height of the boom in sales of sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks. [...] GM made $4.2 billion in the first nine months of 2010 and is expected to soon announce a fourth-quarter profit. The company needed a $49.5 billion government bailout to survive a mid-2009 bankruptcy filing, and the government still owns 25 percent of GM's stock. Chrysler, which needed a $12.5 billion bailout, plans to pay bonuses as well. The government owns about 9 percent of Chrysler stock. This is not GM’s money to give out. It belongs to us. We did not approve the loan or the stock purchase — Democrats passed the whole bailout scheme to benefit their union cronies over our objections. Before General Motors gives out a single dime in frivolous bonuses, it needs to sell off all the stock owned by the government to private investors and pay off all its government loans, with interest. Until then, it has simply stolen our money and we should treat the company as the den of thieves it is.

Guess Who’s Okay With Big Financial Regulations? Big Finance! Posted: 14 Feb 2011 12:58 PM PST Tim Carney has a post today about how an influential chunk of the financial sector has decided not to help repeal the ridiculous Dodd-Frank financial services legislation in place. I suppose that makes sense from their point of view. They are certainly large enough to absorb regulatory costs that will cripple smaller companies and their massive campaign contributions buy them access that others will never have. Besides, when their cost of business goes up thanks to the new laws, they’ll simply pass the costs on to us. That’s how business works and how big companies eventually come to love totalitarian government. Sprawling laws like Dodd-Frank ensure that they won’t have to compete against smaller, hungrier companies and ensure that their voices are the only ones heard when it comes time to actually enforce the regulations. The cozy relationship between big business and government is not brand new, but lately it’s been increasingly open and shameless. One of the valuable things our new Republican House can do is drag that relationship out in the open where we can all see it, then end it.

NASA’s Idea of Winning the Future is Less than Inspiring Posted: 14 Feb 2011 11:14 AM PST Remember when the people who ran NASA aspired to great things, like putting men on the moon and exploring the vasty blackness of our final frontier? These days, it takes much less to get then excited. Witness the headline of today’s big press release: NASA Announces Plan To Win The Future With Fiscal Year 2012 Budget Hoo boy, there’s some serious ad astra stuff going on there! I think we can say that “Win the Future” has officially jumped the shark. When an agency that should be all about the future uses the phrase to talk about its budget, we can safely say that it means nothing at all. We will never win the future with a government budget. Heck, we won’t even win the present with the bloated carcass called a budget the administration dragged in front of Congress today. It’s sad that, in my lifetime, our government has gone from winning the space race without a focus group-approved Presidential motto to losing the space program with this limp slogan.

Clearing the Browser Tabs – The Internet is Important Monday Edition Posted: 14 Feb 2011 10:20 AM PST So I had this plan Friday evening that could not have been more clever had it been a burlap bag full of weasels. I was going to stay home from CPAC on Saturday and blog about the speeches from the warmth, comfort, and reliable internet connection of my own home whist watching the events on C-SPAN. It was genius! How could it go wrong? Then, around 3 PM, my internet connection went down, and is still down as I write this on Monday morning. Verizon is supposed to have a tech out some time before 2 PM today (well, now bumped back to 4 PM. This is not promising). and I hope the problem if fixed so I can get my evening writing done. I’m going to put some faith in Verizon. I hope it is not misplaced. So today’s post is going to be a bit more link-heavy than usual, because there are some posts from Friday and Saturday that I want to share, even though some of them may be just a touch stale by now. And now, links! I admit, I’m intrigued by Richard Dreyfuss’ new civic project, though I’m less inclined to believe that he’s anything but an unrepentant progressive. Duane Lester got a good interview with him, so take a look and judge for yourself. Haley Barbour raised his profile significantly with his CPAC speech. Andrew Breitbart explained why asking questions gets him into so much trouble with the left. Moe Lane got a good interview with Al Cardenas, the new head of the American Conservative Union (the group that is behind CPAC). Before Allen West tore the roof off the sucka with his keynote speech, he stopped by blog row and gave everyone there a little preview. Another day, another biased article from the Politico. This time, the victim is Herman Cain. Stacy McCain jumped on the article as well. When the shills at Think Progress try to out-ambush an experienced and very skilled ambush reporter, hilarity ensues. Jennifer Rubin went to CPAC and saw pretty much only establishment candidates. Mitch Daniels made a definite impression, as did the charming Mary Katharine Ham. The new media revolution in the conservative movement continues apace. And the winner of the CPAC Straw Poll was…exactly who you would expect it to be. What wasn’t expected, however, is Ron Paul’s ejection from the board of the Young Americans for Freedom group. Carol of No Sheeples Here explained why that is big news.

You are subscribed to email updates from The Sundries Shack To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610