Barack Obama accepts his party’s nomination for President of the United States tonight. He says America is better off because he has been in charge.
This is “better off”? Are they nuts?
Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne took over the reins at what is now Fiat-Chrysler and has run it without Mr. Obama’s administrative interference.
Fiat-Chrysler is showing a profit, paid off the $6 billion “bailout” loans early, and has cars that buyers want rolling off the lines. Oh yeah, and they have great advertising.
One of a long series of changes made by new-G.M. CEO Daniel Akerson was to appoint Joel Ewanick as chief global marketing Officer. Mr. Akerson is one of several board members whom Mr. Obama appointed. Mr. Ewanick “resigned” in the latest management shuffle at the top of the nation’s only government-owned automaker.
GM has a falling stock price, is showing a loss, owes billions in “bailout” loans, and has cars that no one wants rolling off the lines. Oh yeah, and their ads suck.
Great way to run a country.
On this day that we rest from our labors, 23 million Americans don’t have labors to rest from.
Actually, that’s a bad number. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that “Both the number of unemployed persons and the unemployment rate were essentially unchanged in July. Both measures have shown little movement thus far in 2012.”
142,220,000.
243,354,000.
The bottom number is what the BLS calls the “civilian noninstitutional population” (no, I don’t know how we institutionalized 68 million people, either). The top number is the number of people employed, the “civilian labor force.” What we really know is that 12,794,000 people are collecting up to 99 weeks of unemployment benefits and the rest, 87,340,000 men and women, young and old, either don’t have, don’t want, or can’t do a job.
“President Obama is creating jobs!” my liberal friend Fanny Guay said.
Good spin.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has an anonymous source — popularly believed to be Al Sharpton — who whispered that he has proof that Mitt Romney never paid income taxes for the past 110 years.
Really good spin.
Sen. Reid again refused to release his own tax returns, even as he continued to demand that Gov. Romney make his own public. Rev. Sharpton, by the way, has a new tax lien to pay; he still owes $359,973 to the IRS for 2009 personal income tax. He also owes a total of $3.7 million in city, state and federal taxes, including penalties, dating back to 2002.
My new friend Ashley Proctor has been out of work in Madison, Wisconsin, since the Scott Walker cuts eliminated her job at Wisconsin Community Services.
“Losing my job is partly Gov. Walker’s fault,” Ms. Proctor said, “but it’s really the Koch Brothers who got him elected!”
That would be the same Scott Walker pranked by a left-wing blogger who posed as David Koch in a call to the governor. The blogger published that Gov. Walker was gonna take the money. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) later claimed that the Koch Brothers bankrolled Gov. Walker’s campaign to the tune of $8 million.
Great spin.
politifact.com rated Rep. Wasserman Schultz’s claim False. So did the New York Times.
Meanwhile, Darcy Burner, a candidate for Congress in Washington state echoed Ashley when she said, “Our democracy has been bought and sold by people like the Kochs.”
“So basically the Koch Brothers are the George Soros of the Right?” Rufus asked her.
Ms. Burner wrote an app that helps good travelers boycott Koch Brothers’ products while shopping.
“Oh, wait,” Rufus said. “They’re like Soros except for being on the Right and in that they make their money by manufacturing stuff? So she wants us to boycott the poor schlubs who are actually working???”
Ahh, George Soros. “The Man Who Broke the Bank of England” did it by short selling more than $10 billion in pounds sterling which devalued the pound and in a few days put more people around the world out of work than Bain Capital did in all the years Gov. Romney was there.
In 2005 the French Court of Appeals convicted Mr. Soros of insider trading. The French Supreme Court confirmed the conviction the following year.
Even left wing darling Paul Krugman wrote about Mr. Soros, “[N]obody who has read a business magazine in the last few years can be unaware that these days there really are investors who not only move money in anticipation of a currency crisis, but actually do their best to trigger that crisis for fun and profit. These new actors on the scene do not yet have a standard name; my proposed term is ‘Soroi’.”
Mr. Soros, like Democrat Joseph Kennedy before him, became busily engaged in buying approbation after looting the financial markets so they could run what Sen. Bernard Sanders (S-VT) always called the “good PACs.”
Simply unbelievable spin. Except for a True Believer
Rufus has bought and used equipment from Koch Engineering. The rest of us have probably sipped from a Dixie cup, wiped up with Angel Soft toilet paper or Brawny paper towels, pulled up socks containing Lycra and walked on a Stainmaster carpet. All told, the evil Koch Brothers Empire employs about 67,000 people most of whom have a paid day off today.
Not bad for Labor Day, eh?
My 2011 Labor Day column about how politicians create jobs is worth rereading today. You might also enjoy the 2010 Labor Day reminiscence, Milestones.
We like to think it doesn’t happen at home.
Joe Sinagra, a Republican State Senate candidate here in Vermont, bought the “dot com” named for another Republican State Senate candidate, State Rep. Norm McAllister. If you clicked on normmcallister.com, you ended up on joesinagra.com. The site has been redirected since August 2.
Oh, Mr. Sinagra hijacked Mr. McAllister for all the best reasons. He’ll tell you so himself.
But he did it.
We like to think it doesn’t happen at home.
Back in the Dark Ages when I chaired the North Puffin Republican Committee a “campaign strategist” rode in on his briefcase and advised us to buy TV ads on the local station for a race for State Rep (the seat Mr. McAllister holds now).
But there is no station, I said.
“Buy on the Burlington stations then. People here watch Burlington TV,” the strategist said.
But our spending is limited to $500, I said.
“Use soft money.”
I fired him.
Everybody I know is either in Black Rock City today, on their way to Black Rock City today, or packing to leave for Black Rock City today. OK, everybody but Rufus and Fredo “Two Fingers” Caronia.
Burning Man builds Black Rock City, Nevada, this week.
Liz Arden left Friday to get assure she would arrive exactly when The Gate opened yesterday at 6 p.m. Brockley Mann, South Puffin’s police chief, won a ticket from his radio station and is a “Burgin”; he arrives Tuesday. Ms. gekko left many hours before sunrise yesterday and should be setting up by the time you read this.
“I counted a dozen vehicles that clearly had Burners,” she said of her trip through northern Arizona and southern Nevada. “I also counted a half dozen dead javelina. Untold numbers of bits of unidentifiable critters.”
Here in Vermont, the state Highway Department scoops fresh killed deer off the highway, cleans out (most of) the glass and other bits, and gives them to the Department of Corrections. I’m thinking the inmates get more venison than the licensed hunters.
And mmmm, javelina. The other white meat. Clean up on Route 95, please!
Burning Man has ten core principles from Radical Inclusion and Radical Self-reliance to Leaving No Trace.
Anyone may be a part of Burning Man; an individual should “discover, exercise, and rely on his or her inner resources.” Perhaps most important is the commitment to leave no trace behind. They clean up after themselves and try to leave the playa in shape than before.
They have a word for that: MOOP (noun) — Matter Out Of Place.
MOOP especially applies to Black Rock City and its citizens. It can be anything: cigarette butts, bottle caps, glowsticks, fireworks, upside down art cars, excess laws. The Burning Man survival guide shows trash and recycling options for Leaving No Trace. Everything that came in gets packed out.
A lot comes in.
Americans in general have a lot of stuff and we are jealous of it. We have junk mail and catalogues and newspapers. Everyone keeps a couple of objets from d’art to d’trash that we could use to fix the furnace or make a collage. Closets overflow with really nice clothes that might be worn again. And who can resist a freebie? To have and to hold, baby.
Since the No Puffin Perspective often covers news and politics, here’s the part that makes this piece tax deductible: Today, scholars don’t even know how many federal criminal laws exist, let alone how many civil and tax and trade and regulatory mandates do. One of my clients, a Vermont attorney, has a law library of state statutes alone that fills a room.
This computer has 337,252 files listed in 45,071 folders. Of course 164,484 (in almost 34,000 of those folders) of them are for Windows 7, but still. Oh, and Rufus has more than that in his AOL inbox alone.
Burning Man is the most successful cleanup and restoration of any United States event monitored by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management although no trash disposal is provided or available on site. It is contained in one, solitary, remote, dry lake bed about 110 miles north of Reno, Nevada. We can’t all move our stuff to Nevada.
But. A little spread of radical self-reliance and MOOP cleanup wouldn’t hurt us.
337,252 files. That might be a good place to start. Right after I figure out what’s up with these shorts stacked on the living room window fan.