Gas Bandit's Political Thread V: The Vampire Likes Bats

Damn right we should. This is one of the few times I agree with him. It's shameful how much we lack in transportation infrastructure. Our buses suck, or trains suck, and then only real way to get around is hop a pricy flight or drive, and gas isn't cheap anymore. I like how I can hop a train in China to almost anywhere and buses to other cities are plentiful. In S. Korea I went from Incheon airport in the north to Mokpo in the way south, by bus in 4 hours. In Japan you can high speed rail your way from Tokyo to Osaka in two hours and getting around the country in Korea/Japan/China is easy to the point where having a car would be nice, but by no means is it necessary. Heaven forbid I don't have a car living in the US though.
That's how I feel as well. We were supposed to be getting some rail here in Ohio thanks to that government program, but our new governor basically threw all the plans away once he arrived in office because he felt it was wasteful spending... despite the fact that the federal government was shouldering a good deal of the money for it. This is mind boggling when you consider Ohio is getting some new casinos in the next few years and the increased transportation options would have made getting to them trivial.
 
Yeah..I mean...people point to Amtrak and say it's a horrible failure, but perhaps if there were more options and more places to go, people would be more willing to take a train.
 
And to give an example of WHY we need unions still: Honeywell Specialty Materials wants to gut healthcare benefits for their workers... despite the fact they've had 42 people die of cancer related complications in the last ten years. That's on top of the 27 workers who've managed to survive cancer.

The worst part about this is that they've had a serious leak in the meantime, but are refusing to let a union member to take part in the inspection (which they are legally obligated to do), which is giving rise to rumors that they are trying to hide more problems. Definitely some shady business on the part of Honeywell in any case.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Here's an early look at Barack Obama's chances of being re-elected in 2012. TLDR: It's going to be tough for both major parties.

Virginia has officially asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step into the legal battle over ObamaCare.

Obama's National Labor Relations Board has been more aggressive lately in cracking down on businesses that fire employees during union organizing drives.

Senator Tom Coburn has put out an excellent report on waste, fraud and abuse in federal job training programs.

Instead of watching for terrorists, the new TSA will be watching the clock, determined to get home the instant a shift ends.

The TSA has yet to release radiation inspection reports for its X-ray equipment -- two months after lawmakers called for them to be made public.

Move over Osama bin Laden ... we now have even bigger terrorist threats to worry about.

Take a look at what the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States has in mind for our own country

Will investing in clean energy harm the economy? I'll bet you already know the answer, but here's an explanation as to why.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie lashed out at his Democrat state legislature yesterday for paying nothing more than lip service to his calls for rolling back government employee pensions.

Obama's "tough budget cuts" in pictures.

Sheila Jackson Lee, the incredibly dense Congresswoman from Houston, is at it again! Take a look at the Super Bowl commercial that has her race-baiting panties in a wad.

Now we have to worry about "thirdhand smoke"?

16 freshman lawmakers declined their government health benefits. So how's that going?
 

GasBandit

Staff member
TSA chief John Pistole says he would be "willing" to fire TSA employees en masse should they go on strike or cause a slowdown in operations. My opinion: Talk is cheap.

This remains the essential purpose of labor unions to this day: to get "more". More than what? More than "market".

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer will not be on Obama's Christmas card list. Now her state is suing the federal government for its failure to secure the border and enforce immigration laws.

When it comes to the fiscal disaster in California, there is no one that knows it (and tells it) better than Victor Davis Hanson.

House Republicans want NASA to stop using its taxpayer funds to study global warming.

Take a look at how our federal ethanol mandates are affecting supply and demand.

Here's an example of central planning versus the market economy, when it comes to energy in this country.

Reason Magazine takes Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to task over her comments about the "war on drugs."

Ron Paul supporters walk out of Rumsfeld tribute at CPAC.
Added at: 15:33
Also: The reason for Mubarak's change of heart on stepping down revealed -

 
When it comes to the fiscal disaster in California, there is no one that knows it (and tells it) better than Victor Davis Hanson.
Started off strong listing the state's problems, finished in a clueless manner assigning a vague sense of blame for the "California mentality" (which comes off as code for "them darn liberals and their different views"). We'll fix our problems without following the advice of a pompous windbag, thank you very much.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Started off strong listing the state's problems, finished in a clueless manner assigning a vague sense of blame for the "California mentality" (which comes off as code for "them darn liberals and their different views"). We'll fix our problems without following the advice of a pompous windbag, thank you very much.
Actually, it seemed to me that he did a pretty good job of delineating exactly what the "California Mentality" is (and much more politely than many, including me, would have, which could be summed up by "you do not shit where you eat.").

California uses more gasoline than any other state and has the most voracious appetite for electricity. But Californians also enact the most obstacles to producing their own sources of oil, natural gas and nuclear power. State referenda and the legislature have made it the hardest state in the nation to raise taxes and the easiest to pass costly new laws.

The state's mineral and timber industries are nearly moribund. At a time of skyrocketing food prices, more than a quarter-million acres of some of the wealthiest agricultural land in California's Central Valley lie idle due to court-driven irrigation cutoffs - costing thousands of jobs and robbing the state of millions of dollars in revenue.

Home prices stay prohibitive along the upscale coastal corridor from San Francisco to San Diego, even as millions of acres of open spaces there remain off limits for new housing construction.

...

California does not ask its millions of foreign immigrants to come with legal status, speak English or arrive with high school diplomas, but then is confused when its entitlement and legal costs skyrocket. Billions of dollars in remittances are sent from California to Mexico - but without the state being curious whether some of the remitters are on some sort of state-funded public assistance.
 
As I see it, California has 4 major problems:

1) We made ridiculous pension deals with prison guards, government workers, and so on. We're paying out the nose for people who are in some cases getting more than they ever made in actual salary, or cheated the system to boost their pension.

2) The way California makes laws and approves projects is stupid. Every 2-4 years there's a plethora of laws for voters to pass with lofty goals, unclear explanations, and no way to pay for them. Hanson touched on this in his article. Morons around here love to pass things because they think it sounds cool or whatever, but don't actually think about the costs and effects of enacting these laws/projects.

3) Our state legislature sets new highs (or low) in incompetence. They're big fans of expensive stop-gap measures to pay for the previously mentioned ridiculous laws and pensions, so we've been borrowing heavily for the past 15 years or so to cover our debts. Which makes the debts bigger.... and bigger... and bigger... (etc). Imagine someone goes to a loan shark to pay off a bank debt, and when he can't pay back the loan shark he goes to another loan shark across town. What's happening now in Cali is what happens when word spreads to all the loan sharks, and no one wants to help anymore.

The best example is something that just happened: The state legislature approved the sale of 11 government buildings, including the one currently being used by the State Supreme Court, and planned to immediately lease the space. So we would sell buildings we need, only to rent them from the new owners. This would get the state 1.2 billion in cash right now and cost billions in the long run (a study compared it to borrowing at 10.5% for the next 35 years). The legislature's response was basically, "Yeah? That's someone else's problem." Thankfully this boneheaded move got blocked by courts until our new governor called a halt.

4) We throw money at education, but it's going to the wrong places. A recent study suggested that less than half of education funds goes towards the classroom. More than half is estimated to go to administrative salaries, food services and facilities, "consultants", professional development for administrators and non-teachers, and so on. What they found was that the amount of money per student does not relate to student performance, but the percentage that goes to the classroom does.

(By the way, when Hanson writes about how California teachers are some of the highest paid in the country, he's forgetting to account for the cost-of-living in Cali. We actually don't make much for the area. If I had my same salary but lived in Kansas I would be doing quite well, but around here it's pretty weak.)

------

Every thing else is horseshit being spewed from people who think they know better despite not living here. Picking on Californians for their "philosophy" is low-hanging fruit for conservatives. It's a cheap and easy shot to take against a state full of people who disagree with them (while ignoring the vast numbers of conservatives in the state at the same time).
Oh, and nothing serves as a better boogeyman than the evil Mexicans, so of course we can blame them too.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Obvious low taxes and small government has allowed Texas to weather this recessi- On No He Didn't
Kinda not such a gotcha when I posted that same story days ago.
Added at: 14:04
The Conservative Political Action Conference was going on for the past couple of days in DC. Each year they do a poll, a presidential preference poll, and this year's winner was ......... Ron Paul.

How will Obama convince Americans that he is serious about our fiscal crisis while still trying to implement ObamaCare? The answer is that he can't.

George Will's latest column: The GOP's defense budget mystery.

Here's an Investors Business Daily editorial on why businesses aren't choosing to "get in the game" as President Obama has asked them to do.

Charles Krauthammer explains some inconvenient truths about the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

The Washington Examiner debunks the leading myths surrounding ObamaCare litigation.

A columnist in USA Today describes Obama as a "wizard of all things to all people and master of warm healing."

Wyoming residents would be able to carry concealed guns without a permit under a bill that has cleared a legislative committee.

The weather isn't getting weirder ... and it's not because of global warming.

Daily Mail Nanny state alert! Police in the UK are telling residents to remove wire mesh from their windows as burglars could be injured.

A trailer has been released for Atlas Shrugged the movie.
 
I see we have a new contestant for the state crazy crown. Arizona is going to have to ramp it up if they want to compete with requiring every adult to carry a firearm and now this.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Let's start with this one from CNSNews: "If the federal budget released by President Barack Obama today is implemented, it will double the national debt over the next 10 years. The current national debt is $13.56 trillion (end of FY 2010). By the end of 2021, that debt would rise to $26.3 trillion under the White House budget." It increases spending dramatically.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor called on Democrat leaders to join Republicans in making cuts to entitlement programs and federal agencies.

Our federal debt now equals our entire economy. But don't worry. This isn't going to have an effect on broadcasts of reality TV or your favorite SportsBall championship in the foreseeable future.

The Cato Institute's Daniel Mitchell says that if we want to fix our budget, we need to bring back Reagan ... or even Clinton.

As states and local governments seek to trim costs in a difficult economy, the unions are struggling to defend pay and benefit packages negotiated when times were flush.

Time to get rid of the subsidies for NPR and PBS. Why should the government fund competition with the private sector? If these broadcasting ventures are viable, they can be supported voluntarily by the people.

Obama wants 5,100 more IRS agents.

Wall Street is no longer trying to fight financial reform, but has moved on to trying to get the most favorable regulations.

Wisconsin unions are mobilizing to fight Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to remove nearly all collective bargaining rights for government employees. And luckily, Ohio seems to be on the same path ...

The United Auto Workers union is looking to "reclaim" the "concessions" that its workers sacrificed during the auto bailout ... thanks to your tax dollars.

Arizona lawmakers are considering a proposal to require hospitals to confirm whether patients are in the country legally.

One Postal Service employee used his government travel card at adult entertainment establishments more than 50 times.
 
Yeah, I gotta admit that I'm sick and tired of the Reagan revisionism the Right seems keep fronting. The Reagan years weren't all sunshine and lollipops and he was damn lucky to get out of his term without any jail time.

 
Yeah, I gotta admit that I'm sick and tired of the Reagan revisionism the Right seems keep fronting. The Reagan years weren't all sunshine and lollipops and he was damn lucky to get out of his term without any jail time.
It happens with every president not named Nixon. The younger Bush will be hailed as a stalwart defender of freedom and morality in a few years (it's already started on Fox), followed by the visionary social leadership of Obama (a.k.a. "the man who ended racism in America"). I guarantee it will be something like that.
 
Obama was going to go down in history as an icon the second he hit office, no matter what he did once he got there, and it IS a milestone to be sure. Still, I sometimes wonder if he'd have had the same impact if he hadn't been following the president with the lowest approval level in history...
 
R

rabbitgod

I see we have a new contestant for the state crazy crown. Arizona is going to have to ramp it up if they want to compete with requiring every adult to carry a firearm and now this.
Damn it, there's only so much I can do!
 

GasBandit

Staff member
As part of a supposed crackdown on online child porn by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Cyber Crimes Center (the so-called “Operation Save Our Children“), a domain belonging to the DNS service provider FreeDNS was mistakenly seized, along with 84,000 innocent subdomains, which included many websites of small businesses. It stands to reason that having a giant federal notice of seizure alleging your involvement in the distribution of child porn plastered on your homepage isn’t very good for business. It took the government two days to restore the seized sites, and an additional three for the menacing banner to disappear entirely. The Department of Homeland Security, in a press release, did not acknowledge the 84,000 elephants in the room, choosing instead to discuss the 10 websites they seized that were actually promoting child porn.

FCC Commissioner Michael Copp says that the decline of "real journalism" justifies federal involvement. Wait, what?

If the Federal government were scaled down to the size of the average US household, here's what its finances would look like ...

As the battle of budgets begins, the chances of a government shutdown are on the rise. Steny Hoyer says that if this happens, the Republicans will be to blame.

Our leaders are so good at kicking the can that it's almost uncanny. Barack Obama is no exception.

Senator Rand Paul says the latest spending proposal from House Republicans does not cut enough from the federal budget.

Guess which government agency will get a budget increase under Obama's plan? The union-controlled National Labor Relations Board.

Are Republicans going all wobbly on spending?

In the open race to replace retiring Senator John Kyl, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio is leading the polls.

The Department of Homeland Security does not intend to put a single additional mile of the U.S. border under "effective control" in either fiscal year 2011 or 2012.

Americans who bought homes in 2008 using the government's tax credit will be required to start repaying the credit beginning with their 2010 tax return.

Should teachers be allowed to blog about their students? Take a look at the brouhaha one government school teacher has caused.
 
Hey, I'm with ya blotsfan. It's going to take a lot for Arizona to come back from this deficit. Maybe pistol duels at dawn as a requirement to settle all disputes.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Lawmakers talk cuts but defend pork.

Have you heard about this brouhaha happening in Wisconsin right now? The quick version of the story is this ... the Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker needs to balance his budget. The state faces a $137 million budget shortfall. So part of his solution is to get the government employee unions in line by removing their collective bargaining rights. Here are some more details.

When shown a list of 20 areas of federal government spending, a majority of the public supports cutting only six of them and these do not include the big ticket items that comprise most of the federal budget.

How the government should spend taxpayer money over the next seven months? On menopause, condoms, malt liquor and video games? Your tax dollars at work.

The Obama administration continues to defend its assertion that by the middle of this decade our annual spending will match our annual revenues and we will not be adding more to the national debt.

Democrats are claiming that Republican spending cuts will cost America jobs and tip us into deeper recession.

It's the evil conservatives who throw out all the hate speech, right? Yeah ... right. Listen to these Palm Springs Progs talk about hanging Justice Clarence Thomas ... and his wife.

Has Obama set a GOP entitlement trap? I guess we will find out soon enough.

The House finally cut $450 million for a second, alternate engine made by General Electric for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter after an epic lobbying battle.

How many IRS agents does it take to enforce the government's new tanning tax?

The most important number in Obama's budget is that he is proposing $5.7 trillion of spending in 2021, about $2 trillion more than is being spent this year ...

Along with directly boosting EPA funding for greenhouse gas regulation, Obama's budget also calls for $25 million in funding for state global warming regulation.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was in Washington yesterday to slam both parties for their irresponsibility in not addressing the country's shaky entitlement programs.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott announced Wednesday that he's rejecting $2.4 billion in federal funding for high-speed rail.

Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, says that the individual insurance mandate in ObamaCare has nothing to do with individual liberty.

An Obama administration official confirmed that four states -- including Florida, Tennessee and Ohio -- have been granted waivers from the regulatory requirements of ObamaCare.

Opinion piece: It is high time that American liberals rediscovered the Founding Fathers ...

A member of Congress wants to end the military's sponsorship of NASCAR race teams, saying it's a waste of taxpayers' money.
 
The big thing about the Wisconsin fight over bargaining rights of the unions is more important than it might appear. Currently there are 35,000 people protesting at the state capitol. The states Democratic Senators at the capitol have all fled the state to prevent a quorum, which stops the Republicans from moving forward with the bill.

Governor Walker has sent police officers to attempt to round up the Democratic Senators, and has hinted at bringing in the National Guard.

Walker can balance the budget without resorting to strong arm tactics and removing the rights of the workers to bargain for their health care and pensions. This is about making a precedent and removing the only good thing left about the unions- the ability to make gains for the workers.

The real kick in the pants? 2/3rds of the corporations in Wisconsin pay no taxes. None.
 
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