Author Archives: Dick

Stymied

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Old joke:

How do you tell if a politician is lying?
His lips are moving.

What is wrong with people today?

Credit card offers packed the sale fliers today. Credit card offers jam my email inbox. Newspapers report that there is no money around to lend. Hello?

Politicians said the sky had fallen.

The news media picked it up.

The stock market dipped.

Politicians beat up the bankers.

The news media picked it up

Bank stocks slid to nothing.

Politicians said real estate tax revenues had crashed.

The news media picked it up.

The stock market tanked.

Politicians beat up General Motors. Oh, sure, they beat up all three automakers but they hammered General Motors unmercifully.

The news media picked it up

Car stocks crashed.

“Just as lower prices are drawing more buyers to the troubled condo market, federal rules are making it even harder for them to get loans,” the Miami Herald reported today.

God help us, doesn’t everyone see the pattern here? It’s no joke.

Gay Ignorance

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Missy and Biff flew to South Puffin for vacation this week.

It’s a good time to be here. Unlike Michigan’s Upper Peninsula we don’t have six inches of snow on the ground. Even North Puffin is still in the throes of yack with temps in the 30s, a day full of cold rain, and ice floes on the rivers.

Missy works for the state but lives to fish and ride motorcycles. She been a little concerned of late because Vermont Governor Jim Douglas wants to cut about 10% of the nearly 8,000 state employees to help with the state budget shortfall. She wears a lot of makeup and loves her bling. I think she might believe the gold and sparkles attract fish. And, as Dolly Parton says, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”

“I’m not worried about my job any more,” she said.

Cool, I said. Why not?

“All the State Houses can talk about is gay marriage,” she said, “and the fact Jim promised to veto it tonight.”

The Vermont State Senate rejected using a statewide referendum for a gay marriage bill because they did not want the divisive debate; they passed the “Act to Protect Religious Freedom and Promote Equality in Civil Marriage” on a 26-4 vote instead. The House gave the measure final approval on a 94-52 roll call vote. They are just six votes shy of the 100 needed to override the veto.

I never liked civil unions because they take us back to the days of segregated schools and segregated washrooms and segregated water fountains. “Separate but equal” is both deceitful and untrue. There is nothing “equal” in the comparison of a civil union with a civil marriage.

Legislatures across the land are too busy with side issues like steroid use and gay marriage to spend much time on the single deciding issue of 2009: my wife on three-fifths time and my WalMart stock dropping.

2009 is not going to be “the year that Vermont fixed the state economy (or didn’t).” 2009 won’t be “the year that Vermont passed universal health care (or didn’t).” 2009 won’t even be “the year that the United States Congress returned the Dow to 14,000 (or didn’t).”

Nope. This is going to be “the year that Vermont made gay marriage the law of the land.”

Thank goodness for that. The Vermont legislature has already shown it has no clue about running a mom-and-pop grocery let alone running a state. In that, they take after their brethren, the Barney Rubble brigade inside the Beltway.

I like Jim Douglas. I’ve known him for years and I understand he would really like to get the legislature to concentrate on the problems at hand.

Jim is wrong about the focus, though.

He should indeed veto S.115 but he needs to find something else to distract the legislature pretty quickly; the legislators won’t stay busy for more than another week overriding the veto. I recommend a year-long investigation into Mickey D’s involvement in professional football. Have you seen the size of those guys? They didn’t get that big at the salad bar.

It wouldn’t hurt to convince Congress to underwrite a nationwide study of mushroom management, too. We’re already in the dark.

BROKEN NEWS

We are in serious jeopardy. Vermont Governor Jim Douglas did indeed veto the legislation as expected but six house members who had voted against the measure last week switched sides to override that veto, making Vermont the fourth state to sanction gay marriage.

The final vote was 100 to 49

I had written that the legislators wouldn’t take more than another week to override the veto. Now the Governor needs something tomorrow to keep them out of mischief.

Anybody have any spare tea bags?

A Grand and Glorious Morning

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Sort of…

It was 80 degrees and 80 percent at 8 o’clock ante meridiem with both the thermometer and the hygrometer headed for the high 80s here in Paradise. I’ve managed to avoid firing up the air conditioning although that is getting more difficult; the house temp is reasonable even during the heat of the afternoon but the humidity keeps on climbing.

It is only sort of grand and glorious because at 2 o’clock this ayem all the older clocks with Daylight Savings Time settings and all un-updated computer systems thought the Eastern Time Zone, the Central Time Zone, the Mountain Time Zone, and the Western Time Zone should lose an hour of sleep. That is exactly what my clock radio did. I could not imagine why the radio was blaring at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning.

I like Daylight Savings Time.

I do not like getting blasted out of bed at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning.

New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson first proposed changing the clocks forward and back to take better advantage of late afternoon sunlight in 1895. The U.S. House of Representatives considered “saving” daylight in 1909, but that initial effort died in committee. Germany wanted to conserve coal during WWI and imposed the first nationwide Daylight Savings Time in 1916. The U.S. established it in 1918 as a direct result of the Great War; Congress repealed DST just a year later but put it back in place for WWII. Peacetime DST began here in 1966.

I have now reset the clock radio.

Thanks to the U.S. Congress, I’ll have to do that four times this year instead of two and I won’t be sure which devices will set themselves correctly, which still think it is 1967 when the federal Uniform Time Act became effective. I do know the ones that don’t screw up; they’re the ones with counterweights or springs and a winding key.

I like Daylight Savings Time. It would be better if we simply stayed on it.

Eminently Outrageous

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We got a chicken
in every pot from FDR.
We’ll get a moped with 110 year payback
in every garage from Obama.

General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner has been told to “resign” by Obama administration. Mr. Wagoner has served in that position for about eight years. The GM Board of Directors appointed him; GM shareholders like me accepted him.

NBC reports that a senior Obama administration official told the network that Wagoner was “asked to step down by the White House.” The Obama administration will announce the automaker’s request for additional government rescue loans, two people familiar with the matter said.

One of my correspondents has shouted that, “This…. is … an…. OUTRAGE!!!”

He’s right.

Apparently Mr. Wagoner is out because he failed to gain the concessions from the UAW that government officials had set as targets to justify further loans. Obviously, the administration has forgotten the UAW strikes that crippled GM just a year ago and the ongoing rancor the union projects.

Mr. Wagoner has a lot of faults — mostly that he is a bean counter, not a car guy — but this drive by the administration to take over GM is a backdoor attempt at eminent domain. They think by sneaking in the backdoor, they can nationalize the company without buying any land.

The legal doctrine of eminent domain allows a government to expropriate property within the law. Without the doctrine, taking property — whether your house or your farm or your business — is either a criminal or a revolutionary act.

Here’s my bottom line; if the Obamanation wants my GM stock, they can indeed buy it. Tanking the business then taking it over from behind is not just plain theft; it is cowardly theft.

Be warned.

If you own a small bank, or a farm, or a restaurant on Main Street, you could very well be next.

Oh, yeah. And rumor has it that the government-run GM new product line-up includes a license to build the Tata.

The Great Global Black Out

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Did you do it? Did you join The Great Global Black Out to celebrate global warming today?

The World Wildlife Federation targeted Earth Hour 2009 on more than one billion people in 1,000 cities worldwide to send a “powerful global message” to the world leaders who will attend the Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagenin December. Global landmarks including the Golden Gate Bridge, the Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House, and the Coca Cola billboard in Times Square all went dark in this monument to bad science.

I hope, in turning off your lights, you remembered the lights on the VCR and the microwave oven and most assuredly the light in the refrigerator. Opening the fridge for beer would definitely break the spell. After all, the Far Green (that would be the folks who dreamed up the Great Global Black Out) also want us to believe I can burn 167 KW-Hrs per month with the little LEDs and incandescent lights I have running in North Puffin.

We are safe, though. I turned all of my lights on to avoid the Pico Ice Age caused by the sudden cessation of heat-emitting filaments.

It is worth noting that the imagery for Earth Hour includes a person holding an open flame to bring light unto the darkness.

For more facts about “Global Warming” visit the Petition Project where more than 31,000 American scientists have stated unequivocally that no convincing scientific evidence ties human activity to the disruption of the Earth’s climate. Those scientists include the past president of the National Academy of Sciences.