Selasa, 13 Desember 2011

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Santa Claus, The Tooth Fairy, and Millionaires Who Hire People: Harry Reid’s Mythical Trifecta

Posted: 12 Dec 2011 04:48 PM PST

It’s been a while since Senator Harry Reid (D – Under the Nearest Bridge) flat-out lost his mind, but today, he erupted with a tirade against Republicans and “the rich” that ought to disqualify him from holding a job more complex than dishwasher ever again. Here’s what he said:

The Republicans say the richest of the rich in our country, even those who make millions every year, shouldn't contribute more to get our economy back on track. They call our plan, time after time, a tax on job creators, and I say so-called "job creators." Because I say that, Mr. President, every shred of evidence contradicts this red herring. For example, there have been many outlets, but I'll concentrate on one. National Public Radio went looking for one of these fictitious millionaire job creators. A reporter reached out to the business groups and a tax lobby in the Republican Congress hoping to interview one of these millionaires. Days ticked by with no luck. Many of our job creators are like unicorns, they’re impossible to find and don’t exist. That's because only a tiny fraction of people making more than a million dollars, probably less than one percent, are actually small business owners and only a tiny fraction of that tiny fraction is a traditional job creator.

Well, Senator Reid, let me introduce you to Bill Gates. He’s not exactly a millionaire — Forbes reckoned his net worth at just south of $60 billion — but I figure he’ll do for the purposes of handing your skinny tail to you on a platter. Gates founded a little software company in 1974 called Microsoft that this year employed almost 91,000 people, roughly 55,000 in the United States alone. On average, his company grew by 1,527 employees every year for the past 36 years. Gates was a college dropout when he founded Microsoft, not a rich layabout or a United States Senator.

Is he a unicorn, Senator Reid? Is he a myth?

How about Larry Ellson, who is third on Forbes’ list with an estimated net worth of $33 billion? He founded Oracle in 1977 (with two others) and the company now employs roughly 108,000 people. That means over 34 years his company added 3,176 on average employees each year. Ellison was also a college dropout.

Now, I’ve seen recent photos of Ellison and unless there’s some worldwide media conspiracy afoot, he both exists and is not a unicorn. What say you, Harry Reid?

Now, let’s reach out from the facts just a bit into reasonable conjecture. I know that we’ll probably lose Senator Reid along the way because this part does involve some small amount of thought and a recognition of the way the real world works, but let’s try it anyhow.

Not all of the wealth Gates and Ellison created went to their employees or toward the construction of giant golden money bins. In fact, lots and lots of that money went to suppliers, manufacturers, advertising firms, artists, and all sorts of other people who didn’t work for Microsoft or Oracle but for new companies that started because of what Microsoft and Oracle were doing. The economic activity that Gates and Ellison generated trickled down to others who used that money to start businesses of their own. I have no doubt in the world that several of those people are millionaires today because of the groundbreaking entrepreneurship of Bill Gates and Larry Ellison. And they all employed people. How many? I don’t know that anyone can say, but I’m darned sure that it’s more than Harry Reid’s estimate of “a tiny fraction”.

Now let’s take a look at Reid himself. He’s been in Washington since 1987 and has been a government employee or an elected official his entire working life. His net worth, estimated by GovTrack, was between $3 million and $6.7 million in 2007. How many people did he employ with all those millions he “earned”? Heck, if he hired one other human being who wasn’t paid by the American taxpayer I’d be shocked. This buffoon doesn’t know the first thing about earning a living that wasn’t taken from the pocket of another American by the IRS.

If Harry Reid had a shred of decency, he’d resign right now, but he’s a leader of the Democratic Party, and they’re not exactly known for their intelligence or slavish devotion to reality. The best thing we can do is make sure that his cloud-cuckoo-land worldview says as far out into the fringe as we can push it. I’m sure the Flat Earthers, Masonic conspiracy buffs, and Faked Moon Landing folks won’t mind the company.

UPDATE: Guy Benson took a brickbat to Reid’s inane drivel over at Townhall with more facts — which is another category of things Harry Reid has never met.

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Senin, 12 Desember 2011

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The Delivery Presents – We Can’t All Get Along But Can’t We, You Know, Try?

Posted: 11 Dec 2011 06:42 PM PST

I didn’t try very hard to hide the overall theme of Episode 124 (which I misidentified as Episode 123, for reasons I can only chalk up to being really tired). I’ve noticed lately how easily normally good people have leaned into full-on jerkitude, and not just about politics either. Of course, the election season has a lot to do with it, but Christmastime seems to bring out more than its fair share of people who derive great satisfaction from bashing the things that make other people happy.

I’m tired of it, so much so that I’m willing to give all the jerks their very own month. The details are in this week’s podcast. Feel free to add your own touches to my new celebratory month. Maybe if enough of us rally behind the idea, it’ll become official and we can have a Christmas free of skeletal Santas and Flying Spaghetti Deities.

Though I didn’t mention it in the podcast, the idea for Jerkuary came in part from this very good blog post by my friend April. Take a second to read what she has to say. We’re working off the same page of civility.

The Delivery - Episode 124

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Clearing the Browser Tabs – The Mondo Blogo Edition

Posted: 11 Dec 2011 06:05 PM PST

As you may have noticed, I’ve neglected The Shack over the past week or so. My schedule has changed a bit over the past few days, with work duties taking a far more prominent chunk of time and a choral concert season that culminated today in the first-ever concert for the Acapella Vocal Ensemble (my new choir). I’ve collected a whole heap of stories about which I’ve wanted to write, but lacked the time to develop into stand-alone posts.

So, as is my wont, I’m going to put them all into one whopper of a Clearing the Browser Tab post (the craze that’s sweeping the blogosphere!).

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Selasa, 06 Desember 2011

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The Delivery Presents – To the Moon, Listeners!

Posted: 06 Dec 2011 08:12 AM PST

If I had an Official Show Assistant, Episode 123 would have been posted last week, when it should have, instead of today. This is my fault, of course — The Delivery is still a one-man operation when it comes to everything but the fantastic production work of SMP Mike — but there are weeks when things do pile up. This past week was one of those weeks. I’ll do better.

It’s been a long time since a book entranced me as much as Apollo by Catherine Bly Cox and I couldn’t help but spend some time in the second half talking about space and rockets and the shame I feel that we don’t seem very interested in either one these days. The book is the story of the Apollo program, focused on the men who build the amazing machines that took us to the moon. I’ve never read an account of our quest to reach the moon told from that perspective before and I find it intensely interesting. There is much about our early space program I didn’t know and the more I read, the more I want to learn. Then again, I’m a space science geek and this stuff is to me what food pellets are to your average lab rat.

The first half is all about education, specifically the education that public school students should get but aren’t, thanks to teachers and administrators who see schools as a place to go to work instead of a place where they prepare children to be intelligent and productive citizens of the greatest nation on Earth. I have to thank the New York Times for unintentionally showing us just how bad things have gotten.

And how about a bonus podcast tidbit or two? Andrew Lawton invited me to co-host Strictly Right with him this week while Ben Swenson is on a brief break. I’ve been a fan of the show for a while now and was delighted to sit in for Ben. We talked the 2012 race, and the candidacies of Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain. I got to do my very first “It Must Be A Liberal” segment and dropped a Van Halen reference, which inspired the show art. I had a blast. Go listen!

The Delivery - Episode 123

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Senin, 05 Desember 2011

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Stripped-Down Grannies, Curly Bulbs, and What’s Next?

Posted: 05 Dec 2011 07:10 AM PST

Mark Steyn wrote about the same TSA stories I noted over the weekend and his conclusion, well, I couldn’t have written better.

One reason we're the Brokest Nation In History is because the great moronic security bureaucracy of the United States devotes untold resources to criminalizing the law-abiding – as I often have cause to reflect when being finger-printed and eyeball-scanned every time I fly back to the US from abroad. In my case, that's because I'm a legal immigrant and making you feel like a punk who's held up the liquor store is part of the price the bozo bureaucracy exacts for a Green Card. But why US citizens born and bred put up with this nonsense is another matter.

US airport "security" serves no serious purpose except to accustom free-born peoples to behaving like a compliant bovine herd. America is now a land where 85-year old grannies are strip-searched without probable cause. You're extremely naive if you think that, once government acquires a taste for that, it will remain confined to the airport.

And so it has not. In less than a month, on January 1, your government is going to take some of your light bulbs away from you. First, you won’t be able to buy 100-watt incandescent bulbs, then go the 75-watt models. By January of 2014, Washington will take away even 40-watt bulbs. You’ll have to settle for compact fluorescent bulbs or terribly expensive LED bulbs. Mind you, consumers do not want these light bulbs. We did not ask to be shoved into buying them. We do not want the normal incandescent bulbs to go away. Many of us will be hoarding them.

But Congress, in its massive heaps of stupidity, has decided it knows what is best for us. So, starting next year, you lose another piece of our freedom — admittedly a small one — and the government intrudes just a little bit more into your daily affairs. Are you tired of being pushed around by your government yet? All the little indignities starting to become a bit too much? No?

Just wait. They will, and by then you might not have the power to take your life back. Today, it’s a TSA scanner and a couple government goons who strip grannie to her skivvies. Next year it’s something else. The year after that, well, let’s hope that the election in 2012 changes a couple things beyond who our President is. Let’s hope we scale Big Daddy Government back to something that serves us instead of the other way around.

Another Reason the Candidates Should Shun the “Donald Trump” Debate: Eason Jordan

Posted: 05 Dec 2011 06:15 AM PST

I still have not figured out why the Republican Party allows its candidates to attend “debates” wherein openly biased members of the MSM spend two hours firing loaded questions at them or trying to goad them into gutting each other over silly nonsense. Still, we’ve had 14 debates and save for one (the Heritage/AEI debate), each of them has done little more than plump up the opposition research folders for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

Now, it seems, some of the candidates are going to walk into a debate that couldn’t be more clearly marked as a trap if it had a big neon sign hanging over it with flashing arrows and air horns. For this debate, hosted by the conservative news outlet Newsmax and televised by the ION cable network, we will get famed attention whore Donald Trump as our moderator and former CNN news exec Eason Jordan as Executive Producer.

You remember Eason Jordan, don’t you? No? Well, let Michelle Malkin remind you.

Former CNN head Eason Jordan is the disgraced journalist who admitted in a 2003 New York Times op-ed piece titled "The News We Kept to Ourselves" that he deliberately and intentionally whitewashed Saddam Hussein's atrocities and regurgitated Hussein propaganda for a decade in exchange for access. Let me underscore that: In 2003, after the U.S.-led Coalition invasion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein, Jordan confessed that CNN had deliberately reported Baathist propaganda during the Saddam era because it was more urgent to keep their Baghdad bureaus than to tell the truth about that brutal regime.

Former CNN head Eason Jordan is the disgraced journalist who suggested our U.S. troops were wantonly targeting journalists for murder at the 2005 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Here's a refresher on the scandal and a reminder that, as reported on this blog, none other than Democrat Rep. Barney Frank, liberal political commentator David Gergen, and former Democrat Sen. Chris Dodd all confirmed/condemned the slander. He resigned from CNN in February 2005 as a result of the blowback.

I spent a lot of time on Easongate in 2005. It was a scandal that should have rocked the world of major media, the sort of story that would have dominated the headlines if Jordan has been the head of Fox News. Instead, most news services ignored it. Those that did report on the story did so as a “he said/he said” issue else they castigated the blogger who originally reported Jordan’s slander. In the end, Jordan resigned, and we got the very best look at how the MSM protects its own no matter what heinous things they may say or do.

And now the GOP is going to let Jordan produce on of its debate. In what world does that make a lick of sense? Newsmax ought to know better, and if it doesn’t drop Jordan from the production, we ought to shame it then shun it. That goes for the candidates as well. I know that a couple of the candidates, Newt Gingrich for one, have already agreed to do the debate. They should pull out of it and name Jordan as a prime reason for doing so. I would be very disappointed in Gingrich if he stayed in once he learned that Jordan was involved.  The man is not fit to work on any respectable news event, as a reporter, a producer, or even a janitor. He cozens tyrants and hates our soldiers.

Is that too strong? Too bad. That is his history and he’s given us no reason to believe he’s changed one whit. I’m tired of the right’s insistence that we treat the MSM like they have our best interest at heart. They don’t. They are four square on the side of the progressives who have nearly destroyed our economy and we owe them no deference at all. We conservatives made Eason Jordan an example once. It’s time we did it again.
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Minggu, 04 Desember 2011

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The TSA: Keeping You Safe from Teenagers’ Purses and Little Old Ladies

Posted: 03 Dec 2011 12:11 PM PST

Why do we allow the TSA to continue to exist? This is a serious question, folks. There isn’t a person alive who can name one terrorist the TSA has caught, not one plot the agency’s automatons have thwarted with their rigid adherence to rules built by brainless bureaucrats. On the other hand, your next airplane trip will be completely free of young, pregnant women with plastic ornamental guns on their purses.

Vanessa Gibbs, 17, claims the Transportation Security Administration stopped her at the security gate because of the design of a gun on her handbag.

Gibbs said she had no problem going through security at Jacksonville International Airport, but rather, when she headed home from Virginia.

“It’s my style, it’s camouflage, it has an old western gun on it,” Gibbs said.

But her preference for the pistol style didn’t sit well with TSA agents at the Norfolk airport.

Gibbs said she was headed back home to Jacksonville from a holiday trip when an agent flagged her purse as a security risk.

“She was like, ‘This is a federal offense because it’s in the shape of a gun,’” Gibbs said. “I’m like, ‘But it’s a design on a purse. How is it a federal offense?’”

After agents figured out the gun was a fake, Gibbs said, TSA told her to check the bag or turn it over.

By the time security wrapped up the inspection, the pregnant teen missed her flight, and Southwest Airlines sent her to Orlando instead, worrying her mother, who was already waiting for her to arrive at JIA.

Did you catch that little “After agents figured out the gun was a fake…” bit? Here’s a picture of the purse, with the hard-to-tell-if-it’s-fake gun firmly affixed to it along with the dastardly would-be terrorist teenager who carried it.

Instapundit called the TSA’s actions “pathetic”. He’s pulling his punches. This is an agency that routinely humiliates us for no better reason than it can, whose agents are locked into “proper procedures” that allow them a tyrannical level of control over anyone who wishes to fly on an airplane. And believe me, if you don’t think those agents who use that power to the hilt aren’t enjoying themselves, then you know nothing at all about human nature. It’s not enough to have power; you have to use it.

You know, like they used it on this frail 85-year old woman when they pulled her aside and strip-searched her without even a shred of evidence that she was dangerous to anything but a bowl of tapioca pudding.

When Zimmerman reached a security checkpoint, she asked if she could forgo the advanced image technology screening equipment, fearing it might interfere with her defibrillator.

She said she normally gets patted down. But this time, she says that two female agents escorted her to a private room and began to remove her clothes.

"I was outraged," said Zimmerman, a retired receptionist.

As she tried to lift a lightweight walker off her lap, she says, the metal bars banged against her leg and blood trickled from a gash.

"My sock was soaked with blood," she said. "I was bleeding like a pig."

She says the TSA agents showed no sympathy, instead pulling down her pants and asking her to raise her arms.

"Why are you doing this?" she said she asked the agents, who did not respond.

The TSA says “proper procedures were followed”. Of course they were — that’s the problem. The United States of America should never have a government agency with a policy that allows its agents to strip-search an innocent grandmother. Yet we do.
So what are we going to do about it?
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