Tea Party favorite Herman Cain has thrown his hat in the ring for the 2012 GOP nomination for President of the United States.
Be interesting if the Tea Party nominated a black guy innit. The Demorats would have to come up with new lies for the comedians to broadcast as “news.”
If any other of our presidents had doubled the national debt, which had taken more than two centuries to accumulate, in one year, would you have approved?
Dean “Dino” Russell is a roofer here in the middle Keys. Dancing about on roofs all his life has made him the most physically fit man in the Home Depot; it also gives him an overview of life. He is the third-most conservative man I know.
He also likes his role as rouser of rabble.
He sent me another ubiquitous email. You know the kind; it starts with “Did you know?” and ends with “send this to all your friends.”
This one blames President Obama for doubling the national debt — that masterpiece that we as a nation, Dino avers, have spent 220 years building from the original pence that fell out of Alexander Hamilton’s pocket. As an interesting digression, Andrew Jackson had four Secretaries of the Treasury, more than any other U.S. president; Mr. Jackson also paid off the entire public debt in 1835. That was the only time in U.S. history that this country has been debt free.
The email was wrong about Mr. Obama doubling our debt. He hasn’t quite done that. Yet.
I know a lot about public debt partly because I know how to Google but partly because it isn’t rocket science. Debts are like diets. Whether you have a spending problem or an eating problem, when you consume more than you work, somebody gets fat.
Dino’s email made 23 claims about all the bad things Mr. Obama has done from doubling the debt twice to not reading Arizona’s state law on illegal immigrants. The mail says the president joined another country to sue the great state of Arizona. The email called him out for mispronouncing Marine Corps and miscounting the states and not knowing Spanish; for putting 87,000 people out of work by using a forged document and for needing a Teleprompter; for spending “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to go to a play, to pitch the Olympics in Denmark, and to plant a tree on Earth Day; for stealing General Motors from we stockholders and firing the CEO; and making a joke at Special Olympians. He is called cheap for the gifts he gives other heads of state, subservient for bowing to the King of Saudi Arabia, and criminal filling his cabinet with crooks. He apparently won’t help white flood victims in the Midwest and has created 32 Czars.
“Every statement and action in this email is factual and directly attributable to Barrack Hussein Obama,” Dino claims. “Every bumble is a matter of record and completely verifiable.”
Erm, well, no.
The gist of the email was correct. Mr. Obama is sinking the economy. He did nationalize industry and health care. He did steal General Motors from me. He is centralizing power even more. He is almost single-handedly turning the United States of America into the Union of Socialist American States.
But the email got too many facts wrong.
President Reagan doubled the debt Carter left. Bush 41 bumped the debt Reagan left by more than 50% but Clinton did double the debt Reagan left. Bush 43 nearly doubled the debt Clinton left. Bush 43 left a $10 trillion debt against a $15 trillion GDP. Obama admittedly bumped it to $14 trillion against about the same $15 trillion GDP but he ain’t the Lone Ranger.
The email got too many facts wrong about Presidents in general.
We know Mr. Obama didn’t read Arizona’s law. Politicians don’t read laws. Let’s tar the lot of them.
Mexico did file an amicus brief supporting the Obama Administration, not the other way around. Yawn. Let’s worry about the Feds usurping states rights.
Good that Dino didn’t have any problem with George W. Bush’s pronounsations; of course, Mr. Bush knows Spanish.
Many of the 87,000 people affected by the Gulf oil spill are back at work but my wife isn’t and neither are the 15.4 million out-of-work Americans Mr. Obama promised he would help. We should tar him for that but the email didn’t go there.
I use a Teleprompter. So does your favorite soap star but the email didn’t go there. Let’s tar everyone for that, eh?
Every president spends “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to go out of town; it’s the cost we pay to keep them alive until election day but the email didn’t go there.
And so on.
The “facts” ain’t quite what the emailer would like us to believe. That’s too bad because Mr. Obama’s factual performance is so bad for the country that we don’t have to make things up.
“The email tells a story about how atrocious it is in Obamaland,” Dino said. “‘Tis better to lie in a good cause than tell the truth in a bad one.”
That’s the leftist mantra he used to deride. Now both sides believe ideology trumps facts.
It doesn’t.
I ordered a couple of items from a major online retailer who would not accept my South Puffin address because it is a post office box. I tried moving the P.O. box to the second line with the street address on the first. No joy. I tried including the P.O. box on the street address line. No joy. I left the street address. After all, they don’t mail this stuff, right?
Naturally, I popped the tracking number into FedExdotcom to see where it was this morning. The seller had handed it off to FedEx who put it in their SmartPost system. “When it comes to low-weight shipping for residential customers, consider the efficient, economical FedEx SmartPost service. By utilizing the United States Postal Service for final delivery, FedEx SmartPost reaches every U.S. address, including P.O. boxes and military APO and FPO destinations. You can even use FedEx SmartPost to ship to Alaska, Hawaii, and all U.S. territories.”
SmartPost means FedEx will mail it to me.
To the P.O. box I couldn’t include in my shipping info.
The Earth is in trouble and our carbon dioxide output is obviously to blame. I know this because Al Gore told me so.
We can fix the Earth and lose weight at the same time.
One of the oldest prepared foods and long called the “staff of life,” bread has been baked around the world for at least 30,000 years. Starch residue on rocks used for pounding plants some 30 millennia ago in Europe shows that prehistoric man ate flatbreads with no worries about carbon dioxide output.
CO2?
Yeast devours sugar, then releases carbon dioxide bubbles and small amounts of ethyl alcohol. When the kneaded dough is baked, the heat from the oven forces the yeast into overdrive, which quintuples the rate at which carbon dioxide is produced.
The released carbon dioxide is responsible for bread rising.
Former Vice President Al Gore and Live Earth founder Kevin Wall have called for a 90% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions worldwide by mid-century. “Nations all over the world are making progress in tackling the climate crisis. But too many proposals fall short of the strong, decisive action that’s needed,” Mr. Gore said in 2007.
Victor Preedy, Ronald Ross Watson, Vinood Patel report in Flour and Breads and Their Fortification in Health and Disease Prevention that “Worldwide, bread is one of the most consumed foodstuffs.”
After extensive, even exhaustive 10 minutes of Internet research, I discovered very little statistical data on worldwide bread consumption where “very little” is actually a vanishingly small number approaching, well, zero. I did the next best thing. I asked answers.yahoo.com and found that eating “a TON of bread each day” is the best answer — chosen by voters!
That seemed an order of magnitude or two over the top so I did the next best thing. I asked former North Puffin car dealer and Democratic party official, Mr. Paul “Buster” Door for his take. As a card-carrying member of the Far Green, Buster is always willing to chase assumptions around and around in his head until he comes up with an answer that sounds right.
“Well you see, Dick, it’s like this,” Buster said. “Man can live by bread alone but only the strongest do so. It is well known that prehistoric man ate flatbreads but it wasn’t until Bastet — she was that famed Egyptian foodie — invented yeast that bread sales really puffed up. The market expansion of bread swelled pretty much unencumbered for centuries but it suddenly plummeted in 18th Century Europe, particularly in France. The good news is that worldwide growth of yeast breads has risen back to a high of more than a pound per person per day now world-wide. And that’s why Frenchmen are 2.4 inches taller than they were in 1789.”
“Don’t forget,” Rufus added, “a pounder of beer is the equivalent of a pound of bread!”
The total population of humans is currently estimated to be 6.92 billion. “That’s on planet Earth,” Buster confirmed.
Earthlings release some 25 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually. Plants like rice, wheat, and corn eat some of it but there is plenty left for free floating hyperbole in the atmosphere. That works out to about 6.9 million tons per day.
“A pound of bread is mostly hot air,” Al Gore who should know said. Fresh bread is baked daily in every nation, in every state, in every city, in every hamlet in the world. The production of that 3.46 million tons of daily bread releases something slightly less than 1 million tons of carbon dioxide each and every day.
And that doesn’t take into account the energy required for the great bakery ovens nor the fuel burned to truck the bread from bakery to store.
Mr. Gore and Mr. Wall have called for bakeries to buy carbon credits until engineers can develop commercial methods to eliminate the emission of this dangerous greenhouse gas from bread production.
“We’re looking at salt breads using salts recovered from water desalination plants in Qatar right now,” Mr. Wall said. “The technology is very promising.”
It is worth noting that each and every person in Qatar releases 44.8348 tons of carbon dioxide annually, more than twice the per capita output of Americans. We need to eat more bread to catch up!
Except we can’t.
The new Gore-Wall diet embraces a balanced intake from all the food groups but bans bread.
That’s it. Don’t eat bread. Save the planet. It’s only good science.