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  • How We Are Ruled

    George Rebane

    SEIU These pages, along with my Union columns, have shined a light on the government employee crisis that is already in the oven.  Every time I have reported on the abuses of government employee unions, government employee pay, and the approaching unfunded liabilities train wreck, there arose an obligatory and automatic hew and cry from the leftwing gallery.  They denounce not only the facts as presented, but also that someone would dare expose the matter to light.  Name calling and ad hominem attacks are the norm, no reasoned counters are offered.

    The actual situation is worse than what I have characterized.  Steven Greenhut of reason.com has compiled a major article – ‘Class War’ – on the unadulterated crap that is now routinely shoveled down the throats of the taxpaying public.  This is not good.

    H/T to Russ Steele for the heads up on Greenhut’s piece.

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  • Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

    George Rebane

    NCARRA100129 

    Today President Obama assembled the Republican members of Congress and presented a very reasonable case for the two parties to work together to achieve the Objective Du Jour – jobs.  It was all for the good of the country, no one could deny it.  And then he popped out the “party of No” line, inviting the Republicans to do something more than just be obstructionists.

    But, of course, Republicans have been giving legislative alternatives to Obama’s progressive programs all along.  The reason that many in America still swallow the Party of No line is that the MSM (save Fox) has not reported on the Republican alternatives and just focused on the No parts.

    Returning to jobs – the Republicans this morning pointed out again to Obama that, according to Obama’s own models and the CBO, the Republican alternative of a broad-based tax cut to the Democrats’ $787B ARRA stimulus (Nevada County’s involvement shown in my weekly plot) would have cost half as much and created twice as many jobs.  Obama didn’t want to field that question and kept talking about working together in 2010.

    For anyone with a bit of sense, the politics behind this Kumbayah ceremony is not hard to understand.  The Republicans have witnessed the bum’s rush to socialism that happened last year.  It was possible only with the Democrats’ super majorities in both houses.  The bum’s rush will resume in spades if the Democrats come out of November 2010 with their majorities intact.

    So for Republicans, job one is to increase their numbers in Congress in an attempt to return the country to bi-partisan centrism.  This will not happen if they roll over and just play nice with Team Obama, at the end of which the Chief Organizer and his congressional gnomes will remind the electorate that all these benefits accrued under the now tried and true progressive management.  As they have in the past, the Democrats would, of course, return the favor were the shoe on the other foot.  That’s the reality of bipartisan politics.

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  • Still in Shock (updated 1feb2010)

    George Rebane

    ObamaSoUspeech It took better men than me to digest Obama’s State of the Union.  All I can do is sit here and shake my head.  While having a filibuster-proof Congress and shoveling payola to his own party’s scumbags, he actually accused Republicans of obstructionism and playing politics with his grand agenda for the ‘American peepuhl’.  Readers wanting a more cogent report on what happened in the House chambers last night should visit sites like the Heritage Foundation.  Or maybe they should visit some progressive blogs (here) or the NYT.  Or better yet, wait until his words are chiseled in stone and erected in some Washington DC grotto as the beginnings of an anticipative memorial to the great man.  First Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and then Mmm, Mmm, Mmm Barack Hussein Obama.

    Now don’t throw a hissy fit on the anticipative part.  The man got the presidency with the anticipation that he could benefit from the first ‘earn while you learn’ program reserved for promising Chief Executives.  And that after getting a pass in the two senatorial seats that he held.  Across the pond, the Nobel committee threw in the Peace Prize on the same premise.  Maybe year two will be better.

    Then again, maybe not.  We now find out that he’s also a slow learner – to think otherwise would be to accuse him of being evil.  I mean, as he stared down the Supreme Court justices, he actually made us all believe that he didn’t know the laws prohibiting foreign institutions and enterprises from contributing directly or indirectly to influence American elections.  From a careful perusal of the speech, one can conclude that his advisers told him to bet on the prospect that, in the aggregate, the American voters are dumber than he is.  Oi!

    [1feb10 update] RR is always grateful for constructive criticisms and suggestions for improved content.  H/T to a regular reader who recommends the following more succinct and focused summary of the President’s speech.

    BushsFault

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  • Steve Enos Files Brown Act Complaint

    George Rebane

    RR reader, critic, and former Grass Valley city councilman Steve Enos has filed a complaint against the City of Grass Valley citing violations of the Brown Act.  Steve’s email to me this morning summarized his concerns and the nature of his complaint.  With his permission, the following is extracted from his email and the copy of the filed five-page complaint Download EnosComplaint_26jan2010.

    … Please feel free to post on your site about this and post my full initial complaint.

    Also understand that the City and Cookson failed to disclose any of this in advance of the Council meeting. I contacted the City last week and made the initial complaint about violations by Cookson and long running violations of by (sic) City since April 2007. This should have been disclosed in the staff report for Tuesdays item and it was not. No public disclose (sic) by the City or Cookson in advance of the Council meeting, none in the staff report and no discussion or disclosure at the meeting.

    Will our electeds ever understand that they work for us, the people? Will they ever understand the critical importance of a transparent government? Will they follow the Brown Act that clearly states the requirements and benefit of informing the public as they conduct the people's business? …

    Steve also stated that The Union is “working on this now” and that Jeff Pelline has a post with comments on the complaint.  Having said that, I think the word is out.

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  • ‘From P-books to E-books’ to iPad

    George Rebane

    IPad2010 Today Steve Jobs of Apple brought out the long-awaited iPad.  It is the gizmo that Apple hopes will become the way we will do most of our information gathering and online communications.  Well actually, the iPad does even more as you can read from their brag sheet here.

    I have been predicting the demise of the dedicated ereader since Amazon recently introduced its Kindle, and now a bunch of others have jumped into the same frying pan.  Today we see that it didn’t take long for the dedicated ereaders to be eclipsed by galloping technology, because the iPad delivers ebooks as just one of the many other things that it also lets you do.

    We may think of this as all new stuff, but it really isn’t in the sense that all of the functionality of such gizmos was anticipated and described way back when.  When?  At least in the seventies when Ted Nelson was talking to everyone about something called Xanadu.  He’s the visionary who gave us the words ‘hypertext’ and ‘hypermedia’, and the descriptions of how they would work.  Too bad he was a bit eccentric, ahead of his time, and missed out on the big bucks.

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  • At the Birth of Pork

    George Rebane

    Did you ever stand on the bank of a mighty river like the Missouri and contemplate its majestic and massive flow?  There it appears mighty and unstoppable in its progress to the ocean where it is swallowed up without a trace.  And then your thoughts turn to how such a behemoth starts from a hundred sources somewhere in faraway mountains. 

    If you trace one of its tributaries up to the very trickle that emerges out of some crevice on a scenic mountainside, you can stay or divert that trickle with one hand.  It is these numberless trickles which unite into the mighty flow that carves the broad valleys that go on for hundreds or even thousands of miles.  And being at the start of something that big has a special feel to it, you are witnessing the birth of what will eventually become an earth changing force.

    Pork Washington DC is also at the mouth of such a mighty and unstoppable river of cash known as ‘set asides’.  This river springs from unknown sources through the working of little known forces dispersed all across the width and breadth of our land.  We also call this mighty flow of appropriated cash by its simple working name ‘pork’.  And we know that when pork passes the Potomac, it also disappears, dispersing into the ocean of local projects, uncountable, yet each one carefully fashioned or chosen to provide succor to its elected sponsor.

    Standing on the steps of the Capitol, we may seek to replicate our quest for origins and ask whether we could trace the flow of pork to its very source.  This will be a harder task than tromping up some hillside following an ever narrowing creek, for we know that the headwaters of pork are also countless, unmarked, and work in quiet spurts that are hard to detect and harder to time their unannounced moments.  In plain talk, you have to be lucky to be there at the precise instant to actually witness that first little spurt, not apparent to all, that starts the flow which builds into the mighty, constant, and unstoppable flood of pork.

    Well folks, yesterday afternoon I was lucky enough to bear such witness.  I may have been the only one paying enough attention to detect the little sliver of fatback that popped up right there in the middle of a town hall meeting in Grass Valley.

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  • Ex Plures Duos (updated 28jan2010)

    George Rebane

    RaggedFlag For the last thirty years or so we have been awakened by NPR’s morning program.  Locally that means listening to KXJZ 90.9 from Sacramento.  The format starts with inter/national news and then California news slanted toward our part of the state.  Both news programs seem to be politically pretty vanilla.  Oh, every once in a while the particular choice of a word – e.g. ‘claimed’ instead of ‘said’ – is thrown in there to indicate political preference.  And we also note what happenings are prominent by their absence.

    But the real show starts at ten after the hour.  Around here we sometimes call it ‘comedy central’ when set pieces on various issues and topics are covered in five and ten minute segments.  Monday mornings liberal commentator Cokie Roberts is invited for a little Q&A.  This morning she was analyzing President Obama’s recent rocky road and calmly identified as “obstructionist” last year’s Republican efforts to influence legislation, and lamented that all those wonderful programs have now been put on the slow road.  No mention was made of the Republican alternatives or the Democratic lock-out of dissent.

    Then the Administration’s new emphasis on job creation was cast into a two way straightjacket – creating jobs requires government stimulus, but government stimulus increases the deficit.  An economist from the union sponsored Economic Policy Institute outlined the quandary and lamented about opinion polls showing that the foolish public wants both more jobs and lower deficits.  Given the only two arrows in this man’s quiver, it could not be done.  Again tough luck for the President.

    The casual listener is left commiserating with the President, never being told that there is a third arrow – lower taxes on businesses and investment returns.  For the left this is a non-starter that does not even need to be mentioned in such discussions lest some light bulbs turn on in radio land.

    Over the years the NPR listener is left with a distinct set of ground truths such as ‘it’s really the government’s money and they let you use some of it for a while’ and ‘government is the country’s wealth creating agent’ and ‘government creates the jobs that grow the economy’ and … you get the idea.

    This is just one example of how America is really two countries in one.  One that has more or less fixed conservative values and mores, and another that has ‘liberal’ values and mores that are more compliant or “pragmatic” to current needs.

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  • The Moral Economy of Scale in Murder

    George Rebane

    RegimentedYouth 

    RR reader, critic, and contributor Steven Frisch has a well developed and worthy of debate world view.  He posted a comment to some statements I made here regarding the history of death by government and, by implication, its portents for America.  Steve took my brief explication of 20th century state sponsored/executed mass murders to task, concluding with –

    Murder is murder, by anyone, in anyone’s name, in the service of any ideology, regardless of the perceived threat from opposing views. I guess I wonder why someone would contend that Hitler was a third rate killer? Why would it matter to you to point out that Stalin or Mao killed more? Does it diminish in some way the evil of Hitler? Why compare? I am not sure that a moral economy of scale exists in murder.

    Murder is the unlawful taking of human life, and knowing the history of mass murders carried out by the organs and institutions of state is important.  It is important to know the several such murderous destinations and the many paths which have led to them.  But most important of all is to recognize early and identify reliably the common element or idea that launched nations on such journeys of death.

    “… why would someone contend that Hitler was a third rate killer?”  Because he was, and mass murderers and mass murders are the more horrible the more ‘massive’ they are.  We organize societies in recognition of this truth.  Given fixed resources which could save either a million lives or ten million lives, to which effort would we apply them?  With one bullet left, who would not aim at the maniac ready to kill ten rather than the shooter able to kill only one?  It would be immoral to countenance preventable death, and the more so as the number of preventable deaths is ignored in our decision.

    “Why would it matter to you to point out that Stalin or Mao killed more? Does it diminish in some way the evil of Hitler?”  Pointing out the magnitude of Stalin’s and Mao’s crimes relative to Hitler’s does matter.  And yes, in a relative sense, it does diminish Hitler’s atrocities.  But the heart of the matter is what drove each national leader to those acts of mass murder on scales that stagger our understanding.  Acquiring this knowledge is critical to informing our future.

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  • Tea Party Patriots Under Cover of Night

    George Rebane

    TPP100123 Tonight we made it to a gathering of the local Tea Party Patriots (aka teabaggers) in the Grass Valley Elks Lodge.  I estimate that over three hundred of Nevada County’s rightwing extremists packed themselves into that hall.  It was advertized as a celebration of the movement’s success here and across the country – fifteen million of us out there now.  For cover, the TPP leaders had arranged for a band, no-host bar, free fat pills (aka desserts), four of the county’s Supes in attendance, and they even had Congressman McClintock there to speak.  It would have fooled most people.

    TomMcClintock But everyone knew better.  What we were all there for was to collect our monthly pay-off checks from the fat cat corporations that were bankrolling the organization.  For the last year we’ve done our best to make it look like a grass roots affair.  But early on, the feds led by Speaker Pelosi and Homeland Security Administration’s Napolitano saw through the whole thing and blew the whistle on us. Now we have to come up with all kinds of silly excuses to get together so that we can get paid and be given new marching orders.

    Russ Steele and I were there with our wives, wine glasses in hand, applauding the speakers and trying to make it all look normal when who but cartoonist Bob Crabb walks up and sits down next to me.  After exchanging a couple of panicked glances with Russ, I decided to engage Bob with some small talk seeing as how all three of us now worked for The Union.  I thought I was doing a good job, but Bob kept glancing around.  It was only a matter of time until he would spot the big fat manila envelope with the checks, and the clipboard with the sign-off sheets that were quietly passed from table to table.

    If he did see it, he didn’t let on.  Bob’s a cool character, he’s been there and done that, and he knows better than to talk while the flavor lasts.  I guess we’ll know when his next cartoon appears in the newspaper.  All we can do now is hope for the best.

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  • Our New Subsidized Economy

    George Rebane

    Speaking to us while still wearing his kneepads from the meeting with the feds (Pelosi and gang), Governor Schwarzenegger reminded us that California gets back only 78 cents on every dollar it sends to Washington.  Then why don’t we instead just send them 22 cents and call it even?

    NCARRA100122 

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