Monday, January 30, 2012

Romney, runaway train(wreck?)

I'm liking Romney less and less -- all due to his negative advertising.

Has he got nothing positive to run on? Just try to break the legs of the other guys?

No honor? Just run your campaign the same way the democrats do -- by namecalling and lies, generating divisiveness and hatred? How is Romney any different in this than the Comrade?

I don't know if I could support Romney. I think this is a terrible way to run a campaign, And the media and pundits all say, "But the negative ads work,"

Well, if Romney hired a couple button guys and sent them out to just murder all other Republican contenders in their beds -- that would work too, wouldn't it?

But would you vote for the candidate who did that?

Just think about it, that's all.

Beginning to think the anti-Romney people are correct saying that the "establishment" is firmly on Romney's side because he won't rattle their cages. He'll keep everything "business as usual," with mounting debt, no real solutions to anything, politicians sitting on their butts doing not much of anything.

Perhaps they want four more years of socialism and collapse. They've got theirs, after all.

No honor. No real love or respect for the USA.

I'm definitely not in like with those who will stoop so low to conquer.

Save the Republic.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

So Mitt has nothing but big bux for attack ads?

Despite the fact that Mitt Romney's 59 points are so wimpish (see a few blogs back), I was quite willing to support him if he won the nomination... until...

Mark Levin played a couple of Romney's attack ads against Newt Gingrich tonight. They were attacks not on policy or issues, or even Newt's well-known "baggage." They were personal attacks, name-calling with not much meat behind them. And so vicious, they kind of made you wonder about the people who produced them, appeared in them, who promote and pay for them. And they make you wonder about Mitt Romney.

So Romney's got nothing else? Really? Just lots of money to buy lots of ad space to tear down his opponents? That's it? Nothing on the plus side?

No. If Romney wins, I'll probably stay home on Election Day. He's starting to turn my stomach. I'm not seeing a lot of difference anymore between Romney with a briefcase full of money, surrounded by henchmen and the Comrade with the Secret Service and NBC.

'Course the ads are not Mitt's fault.

I'm a  little sick that b.s. too.

I don't care that Mitt hasn't made his tax returns public. I don't care if he's got money in the Cayman Islands and only pays 15% in taxes. As far as I'm concerned, good for him. It's not like I was going to launch a venture capital firm until Mitt galloped up and snatched that opportunity away from me. I don't care one way or the other if he's rich. Might a sign of his acumen, not a bad thing.

But I can't respect someone who won't argue the facts or policy, instead just throws a bunch of crap against the wall to see what sticks.

That's no way to "win," Mitt. That's no win at all. You should be ashamed of yourself.

I'll tell you something else, based on 30 years working in marketing, advertising, public relations, and publishing. If you don't have a halfways decent product, you're not going to sell it. No matter how much lipstick you put on that pig, it's still a pig. People might buy it once, mistaking it for... whatever else was promised... but never again. The customers feel like they've been conned and fleeced and they become highly disgruntled. It doesn't end well.

This is the situation where the Comrade finds himself. He seems to think he can buy himself re-elction. And it seems to be where Romney's headed.

It doesn't really work. You end up just pissing off a lot of people who will never trust you again. Hey, if he can do it to Gingrich, he can do it to me, too. And probably will.

And that's all for now. Plenty more to say about the blockhead in the White House -- and I can provide quite a lot of evidence support that description -- but frankly, I'm sick of thinking about it.

America seems to be doomed.

Save the Republic.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

White House betrays citizens... as usual

Well, the early word is that the Comrade's administration is going to say no to the Keystone Pipeline. There must be some interesting insect that lives in the area, whose life is more valuable than the lives of American citizens.

Just another reason to dump this reckless and destructive fool as soon as possible.

By the way, can't the Comrade be impeached for ignoring the Constitution? Clearly he violated the very plain procedure the Constitution describes regarding making appointments. I mean, that was in your face. No question about it. Throw the bum out.

You know he's just going to double down on dismantling the economy and our culture. He knows he's only got a few months before he's history. He wants to destroy as much as he can while he still can. It's kinda like we have Osama bn Laden in the White House in terms of his attitude toward the USA.

An OWie threw a stink bomb on the White House lawn yesterday and the Secret Service did a lock down. Yeah, there's an idea -- lock the sucker in. Keep him there. Censor his Internet and his phones.

Of course, then that gives Slappy Joe Biden free rein over running things, and in that case, perhaps we can expect an atomic blast before November? Perhaps the Comrade, Biden, and Hillary are even goading the Iranians to do it, so the Comrade won't be blamed. (Avoiding blame and responsibility being truly the #1 thing on his agenda.)  Perhaps as the Comrade sees it, the only thing that would get him another term is if the US were under attack from outside and united behind him.

Somehow, if we were under attack, I wouldn't even dream of uniting behind the Comrade. He'd sell us out in a  heartbeat. He already has.

We can't afford this jerk any more.

Save the Republic.

Friday, January 13, 2012

Wolf in wolf's clothing

Maybe I'm speaking too soon, but just turned on the TV, and there's the Comrade, asking congress for "more authority" to cut the federal government.

Sure, he'll cut. He'll cut out everything but his little marxist buddies -- appointed in violation of the straightforward language in the US Constitution -- and give each of them their own little dictatorial feofdom. He's got less than a year left in office. Has to try to do as much more damage as possible in that short time.

Hey, I know, get a bunch of socialist economists from Ivy League schools to advise people on setting up grocery stores and/or plumbing companies. I'm sure these Harvard/Yale/Princeton blockheads can give us all the benefit of their own personal experience. How has that worked so far?

He says the government is too complex; business owners have too hard a time getting aid.

No business owner in his/her right mind goes to the government for aid in doing business.

Hey Comrade Dude, remember the French Revolution? "Laissez faire" ring any bells? That means "Leave me alone." That's how business does business. Nobody goes to the government unless they're sucking up for some big juicy plum contract. That's the Chicago way, isn't it?

But if the Comrade really wants to do soemthing useful for business... rescind socialized medicine and repeal all the silly, destructive regulations your tree-hugger pals in the EPA are using to suffocate the general population. Stop obstructing the Keystone Pipeline. But helping people become more independent is probably the very last thing on this jerk's mind.

And you've got to hand it to the Comrade. No one on earth is more freaking arrogant and cheeky. He completely ignores Congress and the Constitution to install a couple of his totalitarian fellow travelers in the NLRB, and comes around a week later, asking for more autocratic authority. The ink isn't even dry on Congress's law suit.

Hey, jughead -- why not just seize control? Why not do a full-bore Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro? Why the sudden concern about constitutional legality or the public? We all know full well you don't care about the law. So what's this? Political theater? Who do you think you're kidding?

We know now what to expect from you: lies and cheating. Power grabs. Supercilious arrogance. Golf. Trips to Hawaii. Kissing ass overseas. Totally irresponsible spending of our money.

Anyone who agrees to give you more power for anything would have to be either a wannabe diktator like yourself, hoping for a "czar" benediction, or have a hole in their head big enough to drive a truck through. We can't trust you, Comrade. You're a proven liar, cheat, and I'm guessing, some degree of psychopath as well.

What the country's going for is just the opposite -- we're out here trying as hard as we can to get rid of your sorry ass. Only a little more than 10 month and so long, Comrade. And good riddance.

Save the Republic.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Romney -- the timid conservative

OK, so Mitt Romney won the New Hampshire primary. Big news. It was a foregone conclusion, but the media is still chattng on about it endlessly anyway, like it's a big surprise. "Well, he won the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire Primary, so it looks like he's got it sewn up." I think that's from the mouth of Tim Pawlenty, who's hoping for a cabinet post in the Romney Administration.

You know, there's still 48 more states to go, and the Iowa Caucuses are not binding, meaning the Iowa delegates at the Republican Nominating Convention can change their votes. So big deal.

I actually went to Romney's Web site and looked at his 59 point program. Gingrich keeps saying, "The Wall Street Journal has called it 'timid.'" You know what? It is timid. It's like it's designed to take tiny non-boat-rocking baby steps that conservatives can agree on, but without actually doing much to solve America's problems. In fact, it's designed to not raise objections from anyone at all.

America does have problems. That's how the Comrade got elected. Romney's programs don't do much at all. He promises to repeal nationalized health care. That's the most radical, and I'm sure that was pretty much forced upon him by the prevalence of the Tea Party and the 2010 elections.

He nowhere addresses Social Security, which is just about bankrupt. Nothing about Medicare -- also tottering on the brink of insolvency -- though he does want to give the states block grants to manage their own Medicaid programs. He doesn't say anything about the EPA, and apparently will keep it and its authority in place, although he does want to speed up the approval process for construction and building nuclear plants and stuff like that.

The whole program seems to be predicated on a kind of 1998 snapshot of the USA. Hey, that was a while ago. Things have changed.

Oh, and this is a good one -- he wants to repeal Dudd-Fudd financial regulations -- excellent -- but replace it with a better set of reforms -- yuck. And Oxley-Sarbanes, kept in place for the big corporations, though lightened up for smaller firms.

Who called it "nibbling around the edges" during one of the weekend's debates? The whole program is nibbling around the edges. Nothing very striking about it. Very bland, tepid, supposedly safe, I guess. As I said, not much anyone can object to, because it doesn't really promise very much.

And he wants to do something about China. Difficult there, because if we slap tariffs on imports from China (or anyone else, really), they slap tariffs on our exports to them. That's a bad game to get into in foreign trade. It was one thing that nudged the USA into the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But it's kind of like Romney is saying, "Don't worry. I'm not going to shake things up. Just a few little tweaks and we'll be fine." Then give the inspirational speech about the Founding Fathers, and there we have Mitt Romney.

This isn't going to work. It's going to take some broader and bolder action to "Restore America," as Romney's backers claim to support. Restoring it to what? 1995? Sorry, no Internet Bubble to keep it all afloat.

Romney's conservatism is just way too damn conservative. Nothing will change. Very little will improve. He's not "fixing" anything, not redirecting anything. More like preserving all the bullshit so as to avoid upsetting anyone. And then in 2016, the dems will run another communist.

This just doesn't work for me, and I'm totally talking policy here. I don't see any "vision" of America. Just don't see it in the 59 points.

I wish they'd get into all this in some detail in the debates. And the Comrade will kill Romney -- Romney just doesnt have much to fight back with.

I don't know. I'm a big blues fan, you know. Love the gritty "Woke up this mo'nin', rain pourin' down" raunchy raw kind of thing. These endless riffs that make you want to just scream. Not the British. The British are just too damn polite. Ever hear the Rolling Stones make a mess of Motown? (I know, technically not blues, but still.... makes me think of "Motor City's Burning." That was blues.)

Romney's conservatism is kinda like British blues. It's OK. Just not outstanding. Not passionate. No real soul to it. Not going to make anyone scream.

Save the Republic.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

The positive side of negative -- is there one?

You know, thinking about negative ads in general...

The candidates all give themselves this convenient out by saying, "Well, we're just getting him ready for when Obama goes after him."

Yeah, right.

However, talking a while back with a political friend about George W. Bush and the incredible trashing he took during the last two years of his term in office, we both wondered, "Why the hell didn't he fight back?"

By remaining silent, even with movies premiering that featured his assassination, Bush effectively set the table for the Comrade. When you're a public figure, I guess you have to assume that a large portion of the public will believe anything they hear. You kinda have to defend yourself against even the stupidest accusations or the barely-interested assume the accusations are true.

In Gingrich attacking Romney over Romney's record at Bain Capital, Gingrich also appears to be attacking capitlism -- which is just too easy for the socialists to turn around. As well, saw Gingrich's interview with Megyn Kelly about all this, and he's walking a very fine line here, trying to define the boundary between "corporate looting" and "redirecting capital." I mean, sometime it gets to a point where you have to conclude, this business isn't going anywhere, no matter how well-capitalized it is. The funds will just drip away keeping the doors open, not enough potential revenues to make it an ongoing concern.

In every case, this is a pretty subjective call. And I'm a person whose career has been like the kiss of death for nearly every company I ever worked for. They've all been bought out, shut down, restructured, downsized, etc. etc. Makes my resume look pretty hairy. I mean, would you want to hire someone who attended the funerals of the last five or six companies she worked for? (High-tech businesses and industries... 'Nuff said? Same high-tech now allows me to be self-employed and work in my pjs.)

At any rate, I kinda wish the Republicans would keep their focus on knocking the Comrade out of the box rather than damaging each other. I mean, "Keep your eye upon the donut and not upon the hole." Right?

I'd like to direct this question to Dana Perino if she's listening: Why didn't George W. fight back? He had a whole team -- you and others -- to do the dirty work. He wouldn't have to be personally involved.

Just wondering.

Save the Republic.

Monday, January 9, 2012

In defense of capitalism

A long time ago, Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of England during WWII, noted that democracy is a terrible system, but it's better than anything else we have.

Same is true of capitalism. Let's not paint it as another version of Utopia.

Capitalism is almost unbelievably productive, ruthlessly efficient, and where capitalism is in operation, there's usually never enough labor, ostentatious wealth, and so much innovation and development in products and services, it's hard to keep track. Choices for ordinary consumers abound -- including low-cost alternatives for the non-wealthy.

Capitalism is also very unforgiving. Money flows toward success and useful innovation. It will support even what looks like pretty screwy ideas, if their originators can create a market for them. It dumps the dubious, the lazy, the obsolete. And it does so with a dizzying speed. This is where the efficiency comes in.

Take, for instance, paper companies. Even 20 years ago, paper companies were huge, rich corporations. They owned thousands of acres of forestlands, produced a wide range of products -- not only paper, but building materials. Some of them had such large mills, they built their own power geneation plants and sold the excess energy to local towns. They had enormous untapped resouces in their forests, even developed new types of trees to grow fast and produce a lot of pulp, employed hundreds of thousands of people in pretty good-paying jobs.

What happened? Email, mostly. The Internet. Add the tree-huggers who thought the paper companies were a big fat target they could humiliate and knock down, or at least make it so expensive for the paper companies to do business, they'd re-think growth plans. So now all of the big paper companies are struggling. Many have shut down, merged witn others, restructured. Nearly all have divested their forests. Many have greatly narrowed their focus -- they do ONLY lumber, ONLY office papers, ONLY packaging.

Maine and northern Wisconsin, along with many areas of the South, have suffered through this. In many towns, the paper mill was the largest employer.

But see, to continue to support the paper industry as it was about 1985 or 1990 would be a huge waste. In fact, for about a decade -- and perhaps continuing -- the biggest problem the paper industry faced was over production and over-capacity for production. The market had too much paper, the price went down, the producers and distributors and everyone else associated suffered.

So what's the answer? Should the government have bailed out the paper companies to save all those jobs? So the paper companies could continue to crank out tons of product nobody wants or buys?

Even worse is the capital tied up in (in this case), the paper companies. By one estimate, it costs about $1 billion to build a new mill. Many functioning paper machines are 100 years old or more. They aren't very complicated machines and have been retooled over time, including for recycling operations, but China is building brand new, computer-operated mills and machines. Should American investors put more money into paper, then? Will that bring the industry back?

No. That's good money after bad. The market -- that is, millions of consumers -- decided that they don't need that much paper anymore. Bye-bye.

The capital has long gone somewhere else to support probably electronics or telecommunications or something like that. Something that's still being developed, still growing.

The free market -- capitalism -- is absolutely without pity in support of growth and development, and downright stinking cruel to the useless, the non-productive, the obsolete.

And to throw another platitude at you -- "A rising tide lifts all boats."

America has always been very cruelly capitalist. We often hear the stories of immigrants who came here looking for the streets of gold, and were stunned at how damn hard they had to work to simply stay fed and raise their families. We don't often hear from people who went back to Europe or Asia, tails between their legs, whining about the vicious materialism and lack of compassion.

As it's happened, though, the rewards resulting from capitalism have generally been so vast and mind-boggling that it's been able to support a so-called "safety net" for the disabled, the aged, and others who just can't take care of themselves. That, by itself, is kind of a miracle, but even in America, capitalism can be over-burdended, tweaked and regulated to the point where it's not capitalism anymore -- not free, not fluid, not productive.

There is an end to it. Kill the rewards, you kill the system. You kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

We all become Greeks, screaming at banks for lack of a more accurate target -- the true source of failure being the lazy, the freeloaders, the so-called "privileged victims" of one thing or another, demanding "reparations" for one thing or another. Those who take without giving anything back.  The spine and backbone of capitalism is, after all, value-for-value trade at every level. Not giveaways or plums or favors.

So anyway, in defense of some things that have been said about Mitt Romney -- though I'm not overly enamored with him -- he was one of the guys who re-directed capital from failure and waste into new channels that were productive and useful. That's not a bad thing. If he got rich in the process, good for him. He worked for it, took the risk, made some successful calls.

What's the alternative to this? Is it any better?Is it any more secure to attach yourself to someone else's coattails and hang for dear life, for the "free" ride? Does that support individual liberty and fund a free society?

Think about it.

Save the Republic.

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Republicans hoping to win with negativity?

I'm beginning to dislike the primary process. Too much bashing going on.

Actually looked up "Restore Our Future" or whatever it's called -- the Super PAC that's funding Mitt Romney's campaign. No, not funding his campaign, but raising and distributing lots and lots of money ($12 million and change) to organizations that do the anti-Gingrich and anti-Perry ads.

No secret... The Wall Street Journal and other publications have already looked at Restore Our Future. Huge contributions, including donations of $1 million from Nu Skin Corp., F8 LLC, and Eli Publishing. These are all basically Nu Skin Corporation -- with the dummy corporations being prinicipals in Nu Skin donating their own funds. Then there are several members of the Marriott family, as in Marriott Hotels, who gave in the neighborhood of $200,000 to $500,000 each. Astronomical numbers, no? I mean, coming from individuals.

Curious about all of the above-mentioned donors, they're all Mormons. Saints, you know, as in Church of the Latter-Day Saints. I have nothing against Mormons. Been to Salt Lake City and was rather impressed that the streets are so clean.

The Saints weren't such good neighbors 100 years ago or so, but I don't want to dredge all this stuff up, mainly because it's probably totally irrelevant. They don't do polygamy anymore, at least not as an official part of the religion (Sister Wives notwithstanding). Otherwise, Utah would not have been admitted as a state in the USA.

However, I wouldn't like to be a Mormon. They don't drink coffee for one thing. When I was in Salt Lake City, I went for breakfast and asked for coffee, and the waitress promptly brought me a whole carafe all to myself, and with a friendly, understanding smile. I bet she probably smoked, too. (Mormons aren't supposed to smoke, either.) I felt like I'd found a friend, a kindred spirit.

Mormons seem to be relentlessly pleasant. Look at the Osmonds. Maybe that's why it's so hard to believe in what the press is beginning to call Mitt Romney's "authenticity."

Mormons are also kind of died-in-the-wool capitalists, and not always so meticulous about exactly how they make money. And this goes way back, too, and may not be entirely worth mentioning... but on the frontier in Missouri and Illinois, when that was the frontier, the Saints had this attitude that you could short-change and rip-off anyone who wasn't a Mormon. Because the Mormons were privileged, God's Own, and non-Mormons weren't. That simple. So they were extremely -- and I do meant extremely -- accommodating and helpful to each other, and didn't give much of a damn about how they treated anyone else. No one else mattered. Not good neighbors. They got booted out of Missouri and also Illinois. That's how they ended up in "Deseret," Salt Lake City nowadays.

But that's history.

Another source of candidate-bashing is the Ron Paul campaign. Like Romney, Ron Paul also targeted Newt Gingrich, primarily. Paul's people put out some very pro-level stuff, and Gingrich has lots of baggage. However, I find it interesting that Ron Paul, who's been in congress for going on 30 years now, has so little baggage.

I mean, what has Ron Paul accomplished in 30 years?

Do you expect he'd suddenly begin to get along with congress and manage to get anything done as president? This "functionality," for want of a better word, has eluded even the Comrade this season, and the Comrade apparently has more friends in congress than Ron Paul does. Already the Comrade is seizing all kinds of dictatorial powers in order to "get something done." Will Ron Paul do the same?

And then just yesterday or so, someone ran a TV ad in New Hampshire, which is the current stage under siege of a Republican primary, that targeted Jon Huntsman. Huntsman was ambassador to China and adopted two Chinese kids while over there. The ad features Huntsman speaking Chinese and holding a little girl, he and little girl with red dots on their foreheads. Is that supposed to be somehow subversive? Nasty ad, though. Asked if the viewer believed Huntsman had American values. Because of the red dots or because Huntsman speaks Chinese? (I speak French. Does that make me a can-can dancer or an existentialist?)

And the ad ended with "Vote for Ron Paul."

Ron Paul has disavowed the ad, and now large and small-L libertarians are falling all over themselves trying to figure out what nasty snark ran the ad and attributed it to Ron Paul. I supposed that's possible. Perhaps more than possible.

Jon Huntsman is also a Mormon. But I have no doubt he has American values. I actually do agree with some of his political positions, but have only a slight familiarity.

(What is this sudden pervasiveness of Mormons?)

Then there's Santorum, who upset the Iowa primary by running about dead-even with Romney. Santorum is Catholic and apparently making an appeal to Catholics in New Hampshire. Thus far, he's confined his bashing pretty much to the media, but we'll see....

Anyway, so apparently the Republicans are self-destructing. So much bashing going on.

There's actually a reason Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and even Mitt Romney have so much that they can use against each other. It's because they've experienced the chaos and back-stabbing and need-to-compromise of everyday politics. They've all got baggage. None of them are perfect.

There is no perfect. I'd settle for "effective."

So hard to watch the bloodletting when you don't have a horse in the race and just want solutions. I wish they'd stick to policy.

Save the Republic.