Let's say you're in the middle of explaining your new idea to a colleague. Before you can finish they make a sarcastic remark about your idea that totally derails your train of thought.
I call that getting "snide-tracked."
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Winter Wonderland
O Canada! I flew in from Charlotte to Montreal via Toronto tonight. I'm always amazed at how formal and high strung the customs folks are. They're very stern! I thought Canadians were kind, easy going folks. But every time I come in I get the 3rd degree and they don't seem interested in any tomfoolery!
I'm sitting in my hotel room at the Aloft hotel at the Montreal airport (YUL.) The roads around the hotel are pretty clear but the snow is piled up as high as 6 to 8 ft on the edges of the parking lot. If only the kids could see it!
Friday, January 09, 2009
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Antoher Liberal Conundrum...
Barack Obama was swept into the Presidency by (the promise of) a wave of change. He was able to build excitement throughout the nation for a complete change of course from the preceding 8 years of sheer hell. (By the way, please disregard the first 6.5 years of unchecked real estate appreciation.) So, change is what the people want and change is what he will deliver.
He even convinced voters in NC to get on board that train of change. All good. In fact, record numbers of new voters registered including people who for one reason or another decided not to vote in previous elections (uh-oh.) These people do apparently watch a lot of television.
They voted along party lines, thinking that all democrats represent change, and all republicans represent a failed system.
You know who ended up in our Governor's seat? A candidate who has been in the capitol for 22 years! Who lost? A maverick Mayor from Charlotte who would have shaken up the legislature, fought for lower taxes, and directed some much needed attention to the western part of the state.
They weren't for change after all.
And that's another liberal conundrum.
He even convinced voters in NC to get on board that train of change. All good. In fact, record numbers of new voters registered including people who for one reason or another decided not to vote in previous elections (uh-oh.) These people do apparently watch a lot of television.
They voted along party lines, thinking that all democrats represent change, and all republicans represent a failed system.
You know who ended up in our Governor's seat? A candidate who has been in the capitol for 22 years! Who lost? A maverick Mayor from Charlotte who would have shaken up the legislature, fought for lower taxes, and directed some much needed attention to the western part of the state.
They weren't for change after all.
And that's another liberal conundrum.
Auto industry bailout
Well here is the first battle of our next President's term. Yes, I know his term hasn't officially started yet...not sure if he knows that.
The US auto industry, which has been pillaged for decades by union slimeballs, is finally almost out of cash. They had a good run, in fact, during the 1990's era of cheap gas who didn't have an SUV? In fact, I still have a Suburban, one of the kings of the guzzlers. That's a long story in itself. Suffice it to say it was poor judgement along with poor timing. We drive about 50 miles a week in it. But let's separate the car business from the truck business.
The truck lines have kept Ford and GM afloat for years. It's the car lines that are the problem. They've been getting hammered by the foreign versions which boast more appealing design, more thorough engineering, more efficient performance, and frankly more solid build quality and reliability.
In most businesses you either improve your product, cut your costs, or go out of business. The threat of going out of business is what forces the first 2 options. Why should the auto companies be immune to that possibility?
I know the impact such companies have on affiliated businesses and jobs. But I believe those will not be greatly affected. Why? Because foreign companies are making their cars here now! I see this as an opportunity for the foreign manufacturers to have access to all of those side industries and labor.
Where will this have the most impact? In Michigan of course and upon the union members who are sucking at the teat of the auto companies. Who supports the unions? President-elect Obama.
I smell trouble brewing.
Let the car companies go bankrupt. Let the unions fizzle. Then let new companies rise from the ashes. Then a new crop of workers who appreciate their jobs and hopefully don't want to drive their companies into the ground will arise.
Don't reward poor performance and corruption at the taxpayers expense!
The US auto industry, which has been pillaged for decades by union slimeballs, is finally almost out of cash. They had a good run, in fact, during the 1990's era of cheap gas who didn't have an SUV? In fact, I still have a Suburban, one of the kings of the guzzlers. That's a long story in itself. Suffice it to say it was poor judgement along with poor timing. We drive about 50 miles a week in it. But let's separate the car business from the truck business.
The truck lines have kept Ford and GM afloat for years. It's the car lines that are the problem. They've been getting hammered by the foreign versions which boast more appealing design, more thorough engineering, more efficient performance, and frankly more solid build quality and reliability.
In most businesses you either improve your product, cut your costs, or go out of business. The threat of going out of business is what forces the first 2 options. Why should the auto companies be immune to that possibility?
I know the impact such companies have on affiliated businesses and jobs. But I believe those will not be greatly affected. Why? Because foreign companies are making their cars here now! I see this as an opportunity for the foreign manufacturers to have access to all of those side industries and labor.
Where will this have the most impact? In Michigan of course and upon the union members who are sucking at the teat of the auto companies. Who supports the unions? President-elect Obama.
I smell trouble brewing.
Let the car companies go bankrupt. Let the unions fizzle. Then let new companies rise from the ashes. Then a new crop of workers who appreciate their jobs and hopefully don't want to drive their companies into the ground will arise.
Don't reward poor performance and corruption at the taxpayers expense!
Monday, November 03, 2008
Things a liberal robot might think
I am a loyal and devoted liberal Democrat.
I believe Republicans are bad and their policies are evil.
I believe Republicans are narrow-minded fascists.
I do not agree with their choices.
Colin Powell is a Republican.
And Colin Powell endorses Obama.
So Colin Powell’s choice must be bad.
But I think Obama is a good choice and I am a liberal Democrat.
Therefore do I agree with a conservative Republican?
Illogical, illogical, must compute!
I believe Republicans are bad and their policies are evil.
I believe Republicans are narrow-minded fascists.
I do not agree with their choices.
Colin Powell is a Republican.
And Colin Powell endorses Obama.
So Colin Powell’s choice must be bad.
But I think Obama is a good choice and I am a liberal Democrat.
Therefore do I agree with a conservative Republican?
Illogical, illogical, must compute!
Friday, October 31, 2008
Vote Your Conscience, but get all the facts first
This column by Dr Krauthammer is a convincing argument for McCain. I noticed he didn't mention anything about Gov Palin though.
McCain for President, Part II
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, October 31, 2008; A19
Last week I made the open-and-shut case for John McCain: In a dangerous world entering an era of uncontrolled nuclear proliferation, the choice between the most prepared foreign policy candidate in memory vs. a novice with zero experience and the wobbliest one-world instincts is not a close call.
But it's all about economics and kitchen-table issues, we are told. Okay. Start with economics.
Neither candidate has particularly deep economic knowledge or finely honed economic instincts. Neither has any clear idea exactly what to do in the current financial meltdown. Hell, neither does anyone else, including the best economic minds in the world, from Henry Paulson to the head of the European Central Bank. Yet they have muddled through with some success.
Both McCain and Barack Obama have assembled fine economic teams that may differ on the details of their plans but have reasonable approaches to managing the crisis. So forget the hype. Neither candidate has an advantage on this issue.
On other domestic issues, McCain is just the kind of moderate conservative that the Washington/media establishment once loved -- the champion of myriad conservative heresies that made him a burr in the side of congressional Republicans and George W. Bush. But now that he is standing in the way of an audacity-of-hope Democratic restoration, erstwhile friends recoil from McCain on the pretense that he has suddenly become right wing.
Self-serving rubbish. McCain is who he always was. Generally speaking, he sees government as a Rooseveltian counterweight (Teddy with a touch of Franklin) to the various malefactors of wealth and power. He wants government to tackle large looming liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare. He wants to free up health insurance by beginning to sever its debilitating connection to employment -- a ruinous accident of history (arising from World War II wage and price controls) that increases the terror of job loss, inhibits labor mobility and saddles American industry with costs that are driving it (see: Detroit) into insolvency. And he supports lower corporate and marginal tax rates to encourage entrepreneurship and job creation.
An eclectic, moderate, generally centrist agenda in a guy almost congenitally given to bipartisanship.
Obama, on the other hand, talks less and less about bipartisanship, his calling card during his earlier messianic stage. He does not need to. If he wins, he will have large Democratic majorities in both houses. And unlike Clinton in 1992, Obama is no centrist.
What will you get?
(1) Card check, meaning the abolition of the secret ballot in the certification of unions in the workplace. Large men will come to your house at night and ask you to sign a card supporting a union. You will sign.
(2) The so-called Fairness Doctrine -- a project of Nancy Pelosi and leading Democratic senators -- a Hugo Chávez-style travesty designed to abolish conservative talk radio.
(3) Judges who go beyond even the constitutional creativity we expect from Democratic appointees. Judges chosen according to Obama's publicly declared criterion: "empathy" for the "poor or African American or gay or disabled or old" -- in a legal system historically predicated on the idea of justice entirely blind to one's station in life.
(4) An unprecedented expansion of government power. Yes, I know. It has already happened. A conservative government has already partially nationalized the mortgage industry, the insurance industry and nine of the largest U.S. banks.
This is all generally swallowed because everyone understands that the current crisis demands extraordinary measures. The difference is that conservatives are instinctively inclined to make such measures temporary. Whereas an Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Barney Frank administration will find irresistible the temptation to use the tools inherited -- $700 billion of largely uncontrolled spending -- as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to radically remake the American economy and social compact.
This is not socialism. This is not the end of the world. It would, however, be a decidedly leftward move on the order of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. The alternative is a McCain administration with a moderate conservative presiding over a divided government and generally inclined to resist a European social-democratic model of economic and social regulation featuring, for example, wealth-redistributing growth-killing marginal tax rates.
The national security choice in this election is no contest. The domestic policy choice is more equivocal because it is ideological. McCain is the quintessential center-right candidate. Yet the quintessential center-right country is poised to reject him. The hunger for anti-Republican catharsis and the blinding promise of Obamian hope are simply too strong. The reckoning comes in the morning.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
McCain for President, Part II
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, October 31, 2008; A19
Last week I made the open-and-shut case for John McCain: In a dangerous world entering an era of uncontrolled nuclear proliferation, the choice between the most prepared foreign policy candidate in memory vs. a novice with zero experience and the wobbliest one-world instincts is not a close call.
But it's all about economics and kitchen-table issues, we are told. Okay. Start with economics.
Neither candidate has particularly deep economic knowledge or finely honed economic instincts. Neither has any clear idea exactly what to do in the current financial meltdown. Hell, neither does anyone else, including the best economic minds in the world, from Henry Paulson to the head of the European Central Bank. Yet they have muddled through with some success.
Both McCain and Barack Obama have assembled fine economic teams that may differ on the details of their plans but have reasonable approaches to managing the crisis. So forget the hype. Neither candidate has an advantage on this issue.
On other domestic issues, McCain is just the kind of moderate conservative that the Washington/media establishment once loved -- the champion of myriad conservative heresies that made him a burr in the side of congressional Republicans and George W. Bush. But now that he is standing in the way of an audacity-of-hope Democratic restoration, erstwhile friends recoil from McCain on the pretense that he has suddenly become right wing.
Self-serving rubbish. McCain is who he always was. Generally speaking, he sees government as a Rooseveltian counterweight (Teddy with a touch of Franklin) to the various malefactors of wealth and power. He wants government to tackle large looming liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare. He wants to free up health insurance by beginning to sever its debilitating connection to employment -- a ruinous accident of history (arising from World War II wage and price controls) that increases the terror of job loss, inhibits labor mobility and saddles American industry with costs that are driving it (see: Detroit) into insolvency. And he supports lower corporate and marginal tax rates to encourage entrepreneurship and job creation.
An eclectic, moderate, generally centrist agenda in a guy almost congenitally given to bipartisanship.
Obama, on the other hand, talks less and less about bipartisanship, his calling card during his earlier messianic stage. He does not need to. If he wins, he will have large Democratic majorities in both houses. And unlike Clinton in 1992, Obama is no centrist.
What will you get?
(1) Card check, meaning the abolition of the secret ballot in the certification of unions in the workplace. Large men will come to your house at night and ask you to sign a card supporting a union. You will sign.
(2) The so-called Fairness Doctrine -- a project of Nancy Pelosi and leading Democratic senators -- a Hugo Chávez-style travesty designed to abolish conservative talk radio.
(3) Judges who go beyond even the constitutional creativity we expect from Democratic appointees. Judges chosen according to Obama's publicly declared criterion: "empathy" for the "poor or African American or gay or disabled or old" -- in a legal system historically predicated on the idea of justice entirely blind to one's station in life.
(4) An unprecedented expansion of government power. Yes, I know. It has already happened. A conservative government has already partially nationalized the mortgage industry, the insurance industry and nine of the largest U.S. banks.
This is all generally swallowed because everyone understands that the current crisis demands extraordinary measures. The difference is that conservatives are instinctively inclined to make such measures temporary. Whereas an Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Barney Frank administration will find irresistible the temptation to use the tools inherited -- $700 billion of largely uncontrolled spending -- as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to radically remake the American economy and social compact.
This is not socialism. This is not the end of the world. It would, however, be a decidedly leftward move on the order of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. The alternative is a McCain administration with a moderate conservative presiding over a divided government and generally inclined to resist a European social-democratic model of economic and social regulation featuring, for example, wealth-redistributing growth-killing marginal tax rates.
The national security choice in this election is no contest. The domestic policy choice is more equivocal because it is ideological. McCain is the quintessential center-right candidate. Yet the quintessential center-right country is poised to reject him. The hunger for anti-Republican catharsis and the blinding promise of Obamian hope are simply too strong. The reckoning comes in the morning.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
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