Day 269 – Jackass for Clunkers

Last year, I traded in my “clunker” for a used sedan with 50% better mileage. The condition of the car was pretty poor, so instead of trying to trade it or sell it, I sold it for scrap. It was worth $400. With the collapse in scrap steel prices, it’s closer to $200 now.

When I bought my clunker, it was most likely a trade-in from somewhere else. The life cycle goes like this. In order to sell a new car, a dealership will offer maybe $1,000 for any piece of junk. They then sell it off to another dealer. Then I end up buying it for over $1500.

So why are dealerships taking a fraction of the value of a car now? The government is paying for it with the stimulus slush fund. In fact, that $1 billion wasn’t quite enough and another $2 billion was added. So every household in America is paying a $30 tax so that people who can afford to spend $10,000 or more in a bad economy can get an extra deal.

A lot is made about the supposed failure of trickle down economics. So instead of giving money to “the rich” in tax breaks so they (as mostly small business owners) can hire more people, they give money to the upper middle class so they can buy new homes and new cars and not hire anyone. This is the perfect example of how to create a jobless recovery.

The car scam is a perfect example of how this administration doesn’t understand the first thing about economics. They thought setting aside a little money would help people who wanted to green up be able to. But now, everyone is taking free government money while they still have a job. People are turning in the junker in the driveway they never use for a new SUV in the garage. This won’t help the environment, adding all that scrap into the system. It won’t help the auto unions. Inventories are high and companies are already producing the minimum number of cars to stay afloat. When this program ends, auto sales will drop like a stone.

And Jackass wants to save money on health care? Really?

Day 268

I understand that during the beer summit, Jackass brought out glasses of water and turned them into alcoholic beverages.

Day 267

Six percent.

The vote difference between Jackass and John McCain was 6% in the general election. It is similar to the margin of victory between Bush and Kerry in 2004. Jackass outspent McCain 10 to 1 and the Democrats had a sizable war chest thanks to Howard Dean’s mercenary tactics. This was no landslide.

Today’s talking point is that the Republican party has an all-time low membership and is in worse shape than the Democrats. The reality is that the Republicans only lack a coherent message. Independents are turning, well, independent. That constituency doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Newt Gingrich needed less than a year to develop a message that led to Republican victories.The party lost by ignoring those principles, not by embracing them.

The administration has been calling the Republicans the party of no. I would say they are the party of no more. They want to stop the out of control spending with no understandable plan. There was an anti-government sentiment that led to the elections of 2008. It is even stronger now and there are no Republicans in charge.

Day 266 – Change You Can’t Believe in

Scott Rasmussen on CNN said that the polls indicate that the honeymoon is over. That’s probably about right. Jackass is heading below 50% in approval ratings and has an approval index of about -10. The star has fallen to earth.

Pitching hope and change was not difficult last year. Clintons or Bushess ran the country for the last two decades. People were feeling the effects of a bad economy and John McCain was an ally of the president. Jackass was friends with nobody we knew. All his affiliations with criminals were considered unfair to bring up as it might have cost him the election. Thanks, mainstream “news.”

Now, his inexperience is catching up with him. He’s the guy at the strip club who spent his last dollar. Everyone loved him while he was giving it away, but now the bar tab is due and his friends aren’t so friendly anymore. Relying on disgruntled people for votes only works until you’re elected. Invariably, they become disgruntled with you next. The wheels are in motion. The question is how far will he fall?

Day 265

How long until Sarah Palin’s approval ratings exceed Jackass?

Day 264 – Sarah, no time is a good time for goodbye

This is why local elections matter.

Sarah Palin resigned for most of the reasons speculated about in the media. The insults of her. The insults of her husband. Speculation about her children. Personal attacks and off-color Letterman jokes. She was losing popularity in her state and would face an ugly re-election fight in 2010. A presidential run would have been impeded as governor of Alaska. And then there are the ethics charges.

I think the latter is the key to this. Alaska has been a bastion of corruption for years. Palin fought against it and made a number of enemies of both parties in the state. Her legislature decided to get back at her by making dozens of complaints proved false involving anything where she left the state. She was even charged with starting a legal defense fund to fight the ethics charges brought against her.

This is MoveOn 101. Monstrous billionaire George Soros made sure after the election of 2000 to bring the fight to the states. If you buy a candidate who controls election returns, you have a very good chance of a close vote going your way. Early instant voting was riddled with fraud. In Minnesota, ballots were counted based on political demographics. ACORN workers used a temporary address to vote in swing states like Ohio instead of foregone states like New York.

There were many calls to “let Sarah be Sarah” during the campaign. I suspect that’s what she’ll be now. She’ll be criticized in the media right from the get-go and they will be out of insults by 2010, like a bandage ripped off in a moment. At the same time, Jackass will face a protracted dribble of scandals right up until the Congressional elections that will burn through the Democratic Congress like Hellfire. Palin will be there supplying the fuel.

Day 263

This really does seem to be a presidency of diminishing returns. Tomorrow, Sarah Palin will be out of office and the Democrats who went after her will be out of a job in their upcoming elections. Who does the White House go after now? Cops didn’t work. And Dick Cheney? How is he the enemy now that he’s out of office? The biggest leaks have been over things he DID NOT even do, but things he talked about.

Should be fun to see what secret deals this Jackass made. And believe me,  they will come out.

Day 262

This country isn’t racist, Barack Obama is.

Axelrod was probably geared up against any charges of black racism. Democrats think that the Republicans will use the “race card” at any opportunity. McCain stayed above that, possibly to the detriment of his own campaign. Only a few conservatives like Sean Hannity brought up Reverend Wright, the adulterous head of Obama’s “Christian” church of black nationalism.

The groundwork was prepared anyway. This candidate was bi-racial. He was world traveled, so much so that his citizenship is in question. Most importantly, he was post racial, a bridge to moving past the racism of the past and erasing decades of liberal white guilt. What’s the cure for racism? It’s black president.

I described the first 100 days as a perfect storm of liberal economic policy. This week is a perfect storm of presidential failure. Is it any wonder the climb in the stock market coincided with the failure of an August passage of unfunded Obamacare? Then, on his make or break speech night, the big story is the cop hating, racist analysis of a minor incident. He’s the Ice-T of the 21st century.

This is fundamental. Many Obama voters may actually believe in their own subtle racism. But they were hoping to be absolved of it by voting for this president. When he told the country that there is still racism at the hands of stupid white cops, they died a little inside.

This Jackass is now the angry black man. While Americans are comfortable with a black president, they are not comfortable with a black president who doesn’t like regular white people. From all indications, the president likes rich, educated white men, but disdains working class, hard working, gun toting rednecks and cops who teach classes on racial sensitivity.

My advice to Republicans is let it lie. This will work so much better as a campaign ad a year from now. He knows what he did. America knows what he did.

Day 261 – Of Gods and Devils

As a thought experiment, I was always fond of Pascal’s wager. To put it simply, French philosopher Blaise Pascal proposed that being a Christian and following the rules of Christianity not only was a good bet if God exists, but there was little to any downside in living a Christian life.

As with any thought experiment, your mileage may vary. Distilling the essence of God’s plan is what’s important to me. When you get down to it, there are rules, but there is also forgiveness. To have forgiveness, you must have free will.

Stephen Hawking has stated that God may be the sum total of all the laws of the universe. If I may digress into scifi fandom for a moment, J. Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5, while not religious, used the term “the universe” in such a way that God could have been used interchangeably.

Lack of specific faith has been a byproduct of this creeping form of determinism. If God doesn’t actually do anything, why bother thinking about Him? This brings to mind another Frenchman,  Charles Baudelaire. He quoted “the devil’s best trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist!”

Christianity and certain other religions have a method to deal with people who fall short. People struggle because the struggle itself has value. The Founding Fathers of this country were good Christian men (if not always good Christians). They believed that we are endowed by the Creator with the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These rights belong to us and cannot be separated from us. They can be taken away, but they always belong to us.

Even if you believe that God is the order of the universe, there is still the possibility of evil. Evil is what seeks to defy the laws of the universe and of man. Taking away our individual liberty in the service of the collective makes us less than human. Instead of being a pawn of a deterministic universe, a person can become a slave of a fundamentally flawed oligarchy.

When I think of faith, this example comes to mind. Let’s say that God decides to directly intervene in the lives of everyone on Earth. He starts by making it impossible for anyone to commit a crime. Let’s say the punishment is swift, painful and universal. Criminality would drop precipitously. Still, would the criminal mind be affected? Do people stop committing crimes because they want to or because they are always caught? What happens if God moves on to other behaviors that are undesirable? We would have a population that lives in fear. Eventually the fear would give way to oppression and desperation.

When J. Michael Straczynski created the epitome of evil on Babylon 5, he created a race that traded power for loyalty, used people as the main computers of their ships and implanted biological minders into their allies. The “good” guys weren’t much better, but they only genetically enhanced people and blew up planets outright.

The worst countries in the world rule by a lifetime oligarchy. They control the means of production. They have minders all around. The seek the pacification of the collective. It’s peace at a very high cost. It seems that the countries with freedom are growing tired of the messiness and disorder of freedom. The freedom to do the wrong thing is considered worse than being forced into doing the “right” thing. The question is, why bother doing anything if you have no choice in the matter?

Day 260

I decided to watch a little of the Lardball on Hardball on MSNBC. Since what he says is gibberish now, I tried to work out his tactical plan. Chris Matthews thinks he’s a political genius, even though he was bamboozled by a political infant because of his irrational hatred over one of the smallest casualty wars in US history.

Today, it was a cursory set up about how this press conference could change the whole game. Those low approval numbers have only to do with the fact that the public hasn’t had their hopey changey fix yet.

Next, was an interview with Rudy Guiliani, hated by Democrats and Republicans alike. Matthews suggested he play VP to Sarah Palin running as president. That may have been the first day in 2009 Chris hasn’t instantly insulted Palin.

And the redefinition kept coming. There was a segment about how Hillary Clinton could still run in 2016 as long as Obama keeps his pimp hand strong and has a legacy to offer. Chris went so far as to say that Obama owes he political life to the Clintons. Where was this guy during the Democratic Convention?

And finally, when your Messiah is in trouble, make Jesus look like a bastard compared to Barabas. Matthews spent parts of the hour talking about the “Republicans” questioning the president’s citizenship. He pulled out his “birth certificate,” which was merely a printout of a pdf of what may or may not be a scanned original. I could make a fake BC into a pdf in a few hours. Freedom Fairy could probably do it even faster. One guy did it to CBS when he scanned a fake National Guard memo as a pdf.

I’m going back to Glenn Beck.