Category Archives: Throw Da Bums Out

Persembe Peeves

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No new taxes, right? The acting administrator of Agricultural Marketing David R. Shipman announced a new federal tax of 15 cents per tree on Christmas Trees to pay for a new Christmas Tree Promotion Board. Tree farmers sell about 25-30 million real Christmas trees in the U.S. each year

Radio guy said we should call our Congress Critter and Senators. I would but they are all ultra liberal drinkers of the Obama Kool-Aid.

The Board will run a “program of promotion, research, evaluation, and information designed to strengthen the Christmas tree industry’s position in the marketplace; maintain and expend existing markets for Christmas trees; and to carry out programs, plans, and projects designed to provide maximum benefits to the Christmas tree industry … [to] enhance the image of Christmas trees and the Christmas tree industry in the United States.”

THREE POINT SEVEN FIVE MILLION DOLLARS.

I guess we should thank our lucky stars it isn’t $3.75 Billion.

Lie to Me

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Choosy mothers may not choose Jif any more 1 .

The price Jif is going up by more than FORTY percent today, according to published reports.

Social Security checks are going up by less than FOUR percent, according to published reports.

Decades before she collected Social Security, my (very choosy) mom branded us a Skippy Peanut Butter household. After all Jif is just creamed peanuts in a jar but Skippy is peanutbutter.com.

Monthly Social Security for more than 60 million Americans will increase by 3.6 percent starting with checks issued January 1, 2012 (the Supplemental Security Income increase starts with checks issued December 31 of this year).

The San Antonio Express News reported that “the Cost of Living Adjustment ensures that the purchasing power of Social Security and SSI benefits is not eroded by inflation. It is based on the percentage increase in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W) from the third quarter of the last year a COLA was determined to the third quarter of the current year. If there is no increase, there can be no COLA. There was no COLA in 2010 and 2011 because the CPI-W, as determined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Department of Labor, for those years did not increase above the level of the third quarter of 2008, the last year a COLA was determined.”

Some recipients, may see their Social Security partially or completely eaten by the rising Medicare premiums.

Is Lie to Me Real?

Lie to Me was a Fox television series that spanned three seasons from 2009 into 2011. The show centered on human lie detection based on applied psychology including interpreting microexpressions, a Facial Action Coding System, and body language. Lie to Me was cancelled by Fox in May but probably not because people can’t detect liars.

Nearly 80% of Americans said they do not trust the government to do what is right, according to a Pew Research Center public opinion survey released in 2010. It was the highest level of distrust of Washington in half a century.

That was 2010.

A New York Times and CBS poll released last week shows now, just 18 months later, 89% of Americans do not trust government to do the right thing and 74% of us say that we believe the nation is on the wrong track. That’s higher than the highest level of distrust of Washington in more than 60 years.

There are plenty of partisan political reasons for discontent but I figure it is simpler than ideology.

Uncle Sam lies.

From Vietnam body counts to “I am not a crook” to “I did not have sex with that woman,” we have become lost in a misery of misstatements, mistruths, misdirections. Lies.

I don’t believe the statistics that show my cost of living has risen only 3.6% since 2008. Somebody monkeyed with the numbers. Somebody lied.

I don’t believe Harry Reid who said “It’s very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine. It’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers,” last week while pimping a $35 billion bailout for public employee unions. Somebody monkeyed with the numbers poorly. Somebody lied.

I don’t believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming. Lots of somebodies monkeyed with the numbers to make that case. Somebody lied.

Of course it may be entirely because that well-known inventor of the Internet, Al Gore, lied to us in order to feather his own very noble but lightbulb-intense mansion.

Unfortunately, the result of the lies is that choosy mothers can’t afford Jif and really really choosy mothers will have to give up on Skippy for the peanut butter cookies in my Halloween basket.

Labor Day? Really?

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On this day named for Laborers on which we do not Work, it is worth noting that politicians do not create jobs, no matter what they say.

I think Congress should pass the President’s job package, the one he’s been talking about for weeks, the one he will announce and may even give one or two details for, on Thursday. After all, he promised!

Jay Carney, asked if Mr. Obama’s package would drop unemployment below 9%, said, “Based on, when you’re talking about economic predictions, yes. Economic analysts, economists will be able to look at this series of proposals and say that based on history, based on what we know, based on their collective expertise, that it would add to economic growth and cause an increase to job creation.”

Uh huh. Politicians do not create jobs.

Back when she was still boss in 2009, Nancy Pelosi (D – CA) wrote about the final G.R.A.F.T. Act, “This legislation will jumpstart our economy, create and save 3.5 million jobs.” She used the phrase “create jobs” or “create really really outstanding jobs” 41 times.

Uh huh. Politicians do not create jobs.

The site michigan.gov trumpeted that, “Thanks to Governor Granholm’s 21st Century Jobs Fund, this new economy is actually taking shape… The first round of awards has already provided funding to 67 companies and projects, creating thousands of jobs…”

Uh huh. Politicians do not create jobs.

Michigan is closer to the truth. Politicians give away OPM to businesses that create jobs. “OPM” is “Other People’s Money,” something politicians think they have an infinite supply of and that We the [Other] People know is running out.

It is Labor Day and 25 million Americans are still not laboring.

It is Labor Day and we are not laboring because 0 jobs were created last month. Zero. Nada. Zip. None.

It is Labor Day and we are not laboring. Politicians will create no jobs today, either, but they will walk in parades and pretend they have.

In 2009, the White House said President Obama’s stimulus plan would bring unemployment to below 8%.

Uh huh. Politicians do not create jobs.

This column first appeared on Monday, September 7, 2009. I have updated it slightly.
You might also enjoy last year’s Labor Day reminiscence, Milestones

SODDI

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Ex-presidential candidate and Vermont’s former governor, Howard Dean told Bob Schieffer this morning that George Bush and the Tea Party caused the financial crisis.

Some other dood did it.

The SODDI defense, sometimes including “Plan B,” comes up in a criminal trial when there is no question that a murder, assault, or theft happened, but somebody else was in the room as a convenient fall guy. “Black guy, big head” actor Steve Harris liked to say in the television legal drama The Practice. The Other Dude can often remain unnamed, just a wraith who creates reasonable doubt. The real Plan B is invoked when the Other Dude gets a name.


AAA Rating

Republicans in Congress and on the street, of course, blame President Obama for all of the nation’s problems. “Hold the line,” Jim DeMint told Speaker John Boehner.Some other dood did it.

One of Rufus’ good friends, the very liberal born-again Zoroastrian musician Tom Minor, posted a Youtube video showing “How The Bush Tax Cuts Blew Up The Deficit And Debt.” It has easy to understand pictures, he wrote, “for all your friends who try and sell the BS that this debt is Obama’s fault.”

Some other dood did it.

If George Steinbrenner were still alive, how long do you think Barack Obama would last as the manager for the hated (in Vermont, at least) New York Yankees? I reckon he’d get tired of keeping power hitters Reid, McConnell, Inouye, Durbin, and Kyl, Boehner, Cantor, Pelosi, McCarthy, and Hoyer on the payroll when they couldn’t do anything but fumble.

Some other dood did it doesn’t work on the diamond.

Howard, and Jim, and Tom all missed the boat. They should have used the Shaggy Defense.

Reggae artist Shaggy’s number one hit song It Wasn’t Me portrays a man who asks his friend Shaggy what to do after his girlfriend caught him with another woman. Shaggy’s advice is to deny everything. Say “It wasn’t me,” despite all evidence to the contrary.

The Shaggy Defense described singer-songwriter, arranger, performer and record producer R. Kelly’s position when charged with child pornography after cops found a video of Mr. Kelly having sex with an underage girl. “You say that was me on camera, butt naked, face hanging out, banging on the kitchen floor? Nope. Wasn’t me.”

Worked in court.

Probably wouldn’t keep the manager or the players on the roster in the real world, though.

Citing the ongoing deficits and the unlikelihood that the current crop of politicians would ever solve them, Standard and Poor’s downgraded the United States debt from AAA to AA+ yesterday. It is the first debt downgrade in U.S. history.

I know. S&P must be the Other Dood.

Dow Dumps

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The market tanked this week as we experienced the worst single day drop and the worst weekly wash out since 2008. The Dow drained $512 points yesterday alone. 25 months and the only reason the unemployment figures dropped today is that more people stopped looking for work.

The pundits will tell you it’s not
the “Debt Crisis.” The pundits lie.

I’ll be the first (actually the 9,386th) to tell you that stock brokers, bond buyers, and currency traders still aren’t thinking much about the national debt. They’re thinking about unemployment and whether earnings are going down. Again.

“It’s the economy, stupid.”

If Mr. Obama and the Congress hadn’t frittered away most of 2011 so far engineering a Debt Crisis (and naming a post office in Peoria), they would have had time to fix the economy and get million Americans back to work.

And now they are on vacation. Again.

Oh.

Wait.

Maybe they had to engineer the debt crisis to hide the fact that they haven’t (dare I say can’t) fixed the economy.