Welcome To Freedom for US Now!
Quote of the Day
******
"A popular Government, without popular information, or the means
of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own
Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." --James
Madison, letter to W.T. Barry, 1822
Iwo Jima
Feb. 23, 1945
67 years
Those depending upon a benevolent government will find the same benevolence a sheep may find among a pack of wolves.
Jim Mullen
Without the power to tax, politicians lose their power over the people... higher taxes...
more control.
Keep it Ringing!
Blog 2012
2-5-12
United States Supreme Court Justice, Ginsberg tells Egyptians, "Don't look to the old United States Constitution." Rather, model your constitution after South Africa or Canada.
2-4-12
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it." --Benjamin Franklin
2-3-12
Sadly, this is no longer true, and Madison's warning was prophetic.
"The house of representatives ... can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as the great mass of society. This has always been deemed one of the strongest bonds by which human policy can connect the rulers and the people together. It creates between them that communion of interest, and sympathy of sentiments, of which few governments have furnished examples; but without which every government degenerates into tyranny." --James Madison, Federalist No. 57, 1788
2-2-12
"To me, the real split among conservative voters is about whether it's actually important that a politician 'loves' us or is 'one of' us. Count me with the conservatives who could not care less. Notice this is different from saying character doesn't matter. Indeed, I look past the basic condescension common to most politicians to other, more important virtues of personal and professional conduct. The point is that, if politicians look at voters instrumentally, then we should return the favor. I don't care about wanting to have a beer with you, I care about whether you can be compelled or cajoled into enacting conservative policies." --columnist Daniel Foster
of The Patriot Post
2-1-12
I fear this is not enough..
"If it be asked what is to restrain the House of Representatives from making legal discriminations in favor of themselves and a particular class of the society? I answer, the genius of the whole system, the nature of just and constitutional laws, and above all the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America, a spirit which nourishes freedom, and in return is nourished by it." --James Madison, Federalist No. 57, 1788
1-31-12
From Constitution Club. org
While the Obama Media Group got its race-baiting panties in a wad over Newt Gingrich’s recent reference to Barack Obama as the “Food Stamp President,” one thing is abundantly clear: If Obama is not the Food Stamp President, he sure is working his ass off to become the Food Stamp President. Hell – he’s even giving out rewards for increased participation.
Since the Obama Regime has been in power, the number of Americans on food stamps has increased by two-thirds and stands at a record-high 46 million citizens, or one out of every seven people in the United States. Incredibly, this is not “good” enough news for Barack Obama, who believes not enough people are receiving food stamps. How strongly does he believe it? The Regime is now offering $75,000 grants to organizations who come up with “effective strategies” to “increase program participation” among those who have yet to sign up. Seriously, folks – you can’t make this stuff up.
According to the U.S. Agriculture Department’s website laments the “under utilization” of the food stamp program – officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP:
“There are many reasons why eligible people, including seniors and Hispanics, do not participate in SNAP. These include unawareness of eligibility, confusion about program rules and requirements, a complex application process, a lack of transportation and pride. Participation barriers can be unique to different populations. According to FNS’s Office of Research and Analysis, seniors may not participate in SNAP because of the perceived low monthly benefit or because of fears of giving personal information to people they do not know. Hispanic persons may not participate because of language barriers, concerns about their immigration status, or their work schedules.”
The craziness gets worse.
Obama’s Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack argues that food stamps are an effective form of economic stimulus that puts “people to work” because each time food stamps are used at a grocery store, “someone’s got to stock it, shelve it, package it, process it, ship it–all of those are jobs.” Vilsack obviously attended the Nancy Pelosi School of Economics.
I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but is this logic not dissimilar from suggesting that murder is good for the economy because it increases business for funeral homes? Or, that tornadoes are an excellent form of economic stimulus because they provide increased opportunities for the housing industry?
At any rate, the Obama Regime says it will continue offering cash grants through the SNAP Outreach Grant Program through 2015. Such a dedicated Socialist is our president.
Liberal “logic.” It may be oxymoronic, but it sure is hysterical, huh?
1-30-12
Real education!
"History will also give occasion to expatiate on the advantage of civil orders and constitutions, how men and their properties are protected by joining in societies and establishing government; their industry encouraged and rewarded, arts invented, and life made more comfortable: The advantages of liberty, mischiefs of licentiousness, benefits arising from good laws and a due execution of justice. Thus may the first principles of sound politics be fixed in the minds of youth." --Benjamin Franklin, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania, 1749
1-29-12
News From the Swamp: The Senate Budget Abdication
Tuesday, Jan. 24, was not only the day of Barack Obama's State of the Union address, but it also marked the 1,000th day that the Democrat-controlled Senate has not passed a budget. Whenever the president or the media rails against the unproductive and unpopular Congress, they always take pains to place blame on the Republicans. In fact, Obama is making this the cornerstone of his re-election bid. The truth, however, isn't nearly so convenient. This gross dereliction of duty falls squarely on Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), and it goes to the heart of Washington's fiscal problems.
Reid actually has called passing a budget "foolish," relying instead on continuing resolutions to address one spending problem at a time, and not very well at that. Democrats can have it both ways -- federal spending has skyrocketed while they are saddled with an overarching budget to set long-term goals and priorities. Since April 29, 2009, the last date the Senate passed a budget, the federal government spent more than $9 trillion, nearly half of which was deficit spending. The current debt total is more than $15 trillion, with interest payments on that bill running $200 billion per year. The long-term damage created by this continued intransigence will be nothing short of catastrophic. By 2050, entitlement spending will more than triple, and the debt will hit 344 percent of GDP. These are all important points to keep in mind when going to the polls this November.
From the Patriot Post
1-28-12
"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it." --Thomas Jefferson
1-27-12
Ben Franklin seemed to foretell what lawmakers would do if left unchecked. Special rights will eventually lead to no rights.
"History affords us many instances of the ruin of states, by the prosecution of measures ill suited to the temper and genius of their people. The ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy. An equal dispensation of protection, rights, privileges, and advantages, is what every part is entitled to, and ought to enjoy... These measures never fail to create great and violent jealousies and animosities between the people favored and the people oppressed; whence a total separation of affections, interests, political obligations, and all manner of connections, by which the whole state is weakened." --Benjamin Franklin, Emblematical Representations
1-26-12
Does this not sound like Obama and the liberals
Favorite Quote: "When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are" -- Ayn Rand.
1-25-12
Today marks the 1000th day that the US Senate has not produced a budget. A budget is one of the most basic and fundamental requirements of our legislature and now for 1000 days, the Senate has failed.
What would happen to you if you failed to do your job for 1000 days? You would lose your job.
In this environment of economic turmoil, how can we let these servants of the people get by without actually serving the people?
What's more, today the President is also slated to give his State of the Union Address. What is the state of our union?
No Budget. No Direction. No Leadership.
Unacceptable!
From The Tea Party Patriots
1-24-12
Taxpayers must adjust their standards of living and spending habits so that government can engage in their excesses, graft, corruption, and vote buying.
1-23-12
"Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience." --George Washington
1-22-12
"The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse." --James Madison, speech in the Virginia constitutional convention, 1829
1-21-12
"The diversity in the faculties of men from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government." --James Madison, Federalist No. 10, 1787
1-20-12
The excuse and blame President strikes again
President Barack Obama made his rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline official this afternoon, placing the blame squarely on House Republicans for inserting a 60-day deadline into the payroll tax legislation at the end of last year.
"This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people," Obama said in a statement. "I'm disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision, but it does not change my Administration's commitment to American-made energy that creates jobs and reduces our dependence on oil."
1-19-12
"It is necessary for every American, with becoming energy to endeavor to stop the dissemination of principles evidently destructive of the cause for which they have bled. It must be the combined virtue of the rulers and of the people to do this, and to rescue and save their civil and religious rights from the outstretched arm of tyranny, which may appear under any mode or form of government." --Mercy Warren
1-18-12
"Wisely, therefore, do they consider union and a good national government as necessary to put and keep them in such a situation as, instead of inviting war, will tend to repress and discourage it. That situation consists in the best possible state of defense, and necessarily depends on the government, the arms, and the resources of the country." --John Jay, Federalist No. 4
1-17-12
Please read my new article,
This must be our year to stop the onslaught
1-16-12
"If our country, when pressed with wrongs at the point of the bayonet, had been governed by its heads instead of its hearts, where should we have been now? Hanging on a gallows as high as Haman's." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to Maria Cosway, 1786
1-15-12
Excerpt from Rush Limbaugh
...You know where I come down on this Obama business. And Giuliani's right. This guy's an Alinskyite. He has been taught, he's been raised, educated, whatever, he's got a deep resentment for this country. You know me, I have told you, I'm willfully naive, I guess. I can't get my arms around the fact that there are people born in this country who hate it. I know they do, and they can explain to me the differences in ideology and so forth, I'm never going to intellectually or emotionally understand it. Even though I can explain it, it still makes no sense to me. Yet I know that those people exist and I know that they are the people that taught Obama. They are among those who educated him, both in his family and at the institutions of higher learning and academe that he attended.
I know that he thinks this is an unjust country, that it was immoral in its founding, for reasons including but greater than slavery. He thinks it was economically unjust and immoral. He thinks a bunch of rich white guys, this 1% versus 99% stuff, that's how he thinks the country was founded and that the 1% has maintained themselves in total control of all the wealth since the days of the founding and that they take purposeful steps to keep everybody out of that club. He believes it. He thinks the only remedy for it is to take everything the 1% has and give it away to everybody else.
Now, the ulterior motives to that are entrenching his own power. I don't think there's benevolence in this. In other words, I don't think Obama runs around every day feeling genuinely sorry for the 99%. I don't think he's motivated by altruism. I think he's motivated by anger. He's got a chip on his shoulder, a number of them. But I guess when you're running for office against the guy you can't say that. They can say it about us. The Democrats can say whatever they want about us, and there's never a concern from anybody that they are going to frighten away independents or any other voters. Romney has to say, "Ah, he's just an incompetent boob, you know, he's really got good motivation. He's trying. He's just in over his head. He doesn't know what he's doing, he just didn't know what to do."
Well, he's got three years in, and if he's supposedly this smart guy. After three years of trying what he thought would work, wouldn't a smart guy who's trying to get it right try something different? Wouldn't it be about time now to admit, "Hey, you know, my ideas didn't work." "Mr. Limbaugh, ego is not going to --" Okay, I understand. But still, all I'm trying to do is construct evidence here, present evidence to refute this notion that Obama's in over his head and doesn't know what he's doing. I believe he clearly does, and I don't know why we can't say it, especially when it's the truth. What's wrong with educating people?
See, this is where, when I say we have a group of people who don't think the country needs to be, quote, unquote, saved, the people who want to accurately portray Obama, like me, the people who want others to honestly understand who Obama is and why he's doing what he's doing and why he's gonna continue it. We think the country's imperiled, and we think something needs to happen to save it, and we think Obamacare is ball game, and we think that every freedom that we take for granted is gone once the government gets that fully implemented. It's serious. But I'm left to wonder, does Romney look at it that way? He may not. I don't know too many Republicans in the establishment who really do. In the so-called conservative media establishment, I know there are people who think that the view that the country's in peril and that we are facing a forever transformation from which we can't come back, they don't think that.
To them, $16 trillion of national debt's no different than five trillion. As long as we keep making the interest payments we're cool. They don't see any danger for their kids and grandkids because of this. In fact, they want -- I'm including some Republicans -- they want to win the election to be in charge of the money and its spending. So when I hear Romney say, (paraphrasing) "This has been a failed presidency. I don't think he's tried to make it bad, he just didn't know what to do, he's in over his head." I guarantee you a pollster or a consultant has gotten to him and said, "Look, Obama is personally liked, and if you go out and accuse him of these terrible motives, you're going to lose people." I know that's what this is. So the reason I couldn't run for office and do politics apparently is 'cause you're not allowed to be honest.
1-14-12
Car Radio, an Interesting Quincy, Illinois Story
CAR TUNES
Radios are so much a part of the driving experience, it seems like cars have always had them. But they didn’t. Here’s the story.
SUNDOWN
One evening in 1929 two young men named William Lear and Elmer Wavering drove their girlfriends to a lookout point high above the Mississippi River town of Quincy, Illinois, to watch the sunset. It was a romantic night to be sure, but one of the women observed that it would be even nicer if they could listen to music in the car.
Lear and Wavering liked the idea. Both men had tinkered with radios – Lear had served as a radio operator in the U.S. Navy during World War I – and it wasn’t long before they were taking apart a home radio and trying to get it to work in a car. But it wasn’t as easy as it sounds: automobiles have ignition switches, generators, spark plugs, and other electrical equipment that generate noisy static interference, making it nearly impossible to listen to the radio when the engine was running.
SIGNING ON
One by one, Lear and Wavering identified and eliminated each source of electrical interference. When they finally got their radio to work, they took it to a radio convention in Chicago. There they met Paul Galvin, owner of Galvin Manufacturing Corporation. He made a product called a “battery eliminator” a device that allowed battery-powered radios to run on household AC current. But as more homes were wired for electricity, more radio manufacturers made AC-powered radios. Galvin needed a new product to manufacture. When he met Lear and Wavering at the radio convention, he found it. He believed that mass-produced, affordable car radios had the potential to become a huge business.
Lear and Wavering set up shop in Galvin’s factory, and when they perfected their first radio, they installed it in his Studebaker. Then Galvin went to a local banker to apply for a loan. Thinking it might sweeten the deal, he had his men install a radio in the banker’s Packard. Good idea, but it didn’t work – half an hour after the installation, the banker’s Packard caught on fire. (They didn’t get the loan.) Galvin didn’t give up. He drove his Studebaker nearly 800 miles to Atlantic City to show off the radio at the 1930 Radio Manufacturers Association convention. Too broke to afford a booth, he parked the car outside the convention hall and cranked up the radio so that passing conventioneers could hear it. That idea worked – he got enough orders to put the radio into production.
WHAT’S IN A NAME
That first production model was called the 5T71. Galvin decided he needed to come up with something a little catchier. In those days many companies in the phonograph and radio businesses used the suffix “ola” for their names – Radiola, Columbiola, and Victrola were three of the biggest. Galvin decided to do the same thing, and since his radio was intended for use in a motor vehicle, he decided to call it the Motorola.
But even with the name change, the radio still had problems: When Motorola went on sale in 1930, it cost about $110 uninstalled, at a time when you could buy a brand-new car for $650, and the country was sliding into the Great Depression. (By that measure, a radio for a new car would cost about $3,000 today.) In 1930 it took two men several days to put in a car radio – the dashboard had to be taken apart so that the receiver and a single speaker could be installed, and the ceiling had to be cut open to install the antenna. These early radios ran on their own batteries, not on the car battery, so holes had to be cut into the floorboard to accommodate them. The installation manual had eight complete diagrams and 28 pages of instructions.
HIT THE ROAD
Selling complicated car radios that cost 20 percent of the price of a brand-new car wouldn’t have been easy in the best of times, let alone during the Great Depression – Galvin lost money in 1930 and struggled for a couple of years after that. But things picked up in 1933 when Ford began offering Motorola's pre-installed at the factory. In 1934 they got another boost when Galvin struck a deal with B.F. Goodrich tire company to sell and install them in its chain of tire stores. By then the price of the radio, installation included, had dropped to $55. The Motorola car radio was off and running. (The name of the company would be officially changed from Galvin Manufacturing to “Motorola” in 1947.) In the meantime, Galvin continued to develop new uses for car radios. In 1936, the same year that it introduced push-button tuning, it also introduced the Motorola Police Cruiser, a standard car radio that was factory preset to a single frequency to pick up police broadcasts. In 1940 he developed with the first handheld two-way radio – the Handie-Talkie – for the U.S. Army.
A lot of the communications technologies that we take for granted today were born in Motorola labs in the years that followed World War II. In 1947 they came out with the first television to sell under $200. In 1956 the company introduced the world’s first pager; in 1969 it supplied the radio and television equipment that was used to televise Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon. In 1973 it invented the world’s first handheld cellular phone. Today Motorola is one of the second-largest cell phone manufacturer in the world. And it all started with the car radio.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO
The two men who installed the first radio in Paul Galvin’s car, Elmer Wavering and William Lear, ended up taking very different paths in life. Wavering stayed with Motorola. In the 1950’s he helped change the automobile experience again when he developed the first automotive alternator, replacing inefficient and unreliable generators. The invention lead to such luxuries as power windows, power seats, and, eventually, air-conditioning.
Lear also continued inventing. He holds more than 150 patents. Remember eight-track tape players? Lear invented that. But what he’s really famous for are his contributions to the field of aviation. He invented radio direction finders for planes, aided in the invention of the autopilot, designed the first fully automatic aircraft landing system, and in 1963 introduced his most famous invention of all, the Lear Jet, the world’s first mass-produced, affordable business jet. (Not bad for a guy who dropped out of school after the eighth grade.)
1-13-12
"[T]ake care that the laws be faithfully executed ... support the Constitution ... faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and ... preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." --Article II Section 1, 3, the Constitution of the United States
1-12-12
A word to describe our current political situation.
Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc'-ra-cy) -
a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.
1-11-12
Insight
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." --author and theologian C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)
The Gipper
"The government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. Every businessman has his own tale of harassment. Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, unalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment." --Ronald Reagan
1-10-12
This says it all...
Government
"Government becomes big by having big ambitions for supplanting markets as society's primary allocator of wealth and opportunity. Therefore it becomes a magnet for factions muscular enough, in money or numbers or both, to bend government to their advantage. The left's centuries-old mission is to increase social harmony by decreasing antagonisms arising from disparities of wealth -- to decrease inequality by increasing government's redistributive activities. Such government constantly expands under the unending, indeed intensifying, pressures to correct what it disapproves of -- the distribution of wealth produced by consensual market activities. But as government presumes to dictate the correct distribution of social rewards, the maelstrom of contemporary politics demonstrates that social strife, not solidarity, is generated by government transfer payments to preferred groups. ... Not only does redistributionist government direct wealth upward; in asserting a right to do so it siphons power into itself. A puzzling aspect of our politically contentious era is how little contention there is about the ethics of coercive redistribution by progressive taxation and other government 'corrections' of social outcomes it considers unethical or unaesthetic. ... Government uses redistribution to correct social outcomes that offend it. But government rarely explains, or perhaps even recognizes, the reasoning by which it decides why particular outcomes of consensual market activities are incorrect. ... People are less dissatisfied by what they lack than by what others have. And when government engages in redistribution in order to maximize the happiness of citizens who become more envious as they become more comfortable, government becomes increasingly frenzied and futile." --columnist George Will
1-9-12
"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself." --Thomas Jefferson
1-8-12
"The Middle Class Is Being Systematically
Wiped Out of Existence in America . . ."
— Business Insider
1-7-12
UAW Picks Targets for Suicide Bombing of US Economy
John Ransom
For over a year, it’s been rumored that the United Auto Workers union (UAW) was going go after a major foreign auto manufacturer in the United States to force unionization upon them by a world-wide boycott.
A new report from Reuters, based on interviews of union and industry insiders, has indicated that the target will be not one, but two German manufacturers operating in the US, Volkswagen AG and Daimler AG.
Specifically, Reuters has learned, the union is going after U.S. plants owned by German manufacturers Volkswagen AG and Daimler AG, seen as easier nuts to crack than the Japanese and South Koreans.
It's a battle the UAW cannot afford to lose. By failing to organize factories run by foreign automakers, the union has been a spectator to the only growth in the U.S. auto industry in the last 30 years. That failure to win new members has compounded a crunch on the UAW's finances, forcing it to sell assets and dip into its strike fund to pay for its activities.
The UAW has seen its numbers of workers shrink over the last two decades as domestic manufacturers GM, Ford and Chrysler wrestled with high labor and benefit costs compared to foreign manufacturers operating in the US.
In fact, GM’s recent financial problems were, in part, caused by pension and health plan liabilities to UAW workers, necessitating a federal government bailout. In the $95 billion GM bankruptcy, $50 billion of it was benefit liabilities to UAW workers.
The head of the union, Bob King, has admitted that declining union membership rolls means that if the UAW doesn't "organize these transnationals [foreign auto manufacturers], I don't think there's a long-term future for the UAW — I really don't."
That’s correct. Because unless the UAW can figure out how to increase labor costs across the entire industry, foreign manufacturers will continue to beat American manufacturers in the number one cost for cars: labor. Labor costs, including benefits, put current per-hour employee cost for U.S. automakers [at] around 50 percent higher than the costs for their foreign counterparts,” according to NPR.
As I reported last March, the UAW’s honcho, King, gave foreign automakers including BMW, Volkswagen AG, Toyota and Nissan an offer they can't refuse: Unionize their workers or else he'll single out one automaker and put the screws to them with a boycott. Never mind that the boycott will hurt workers, consumers and the US economy.
Last year, sources close to one foreign car manufacturer told me that they thought the target would be Toyota. But that was before a tsunami set back Japanese auto manufacturing. German automakers are likely a better bet because German unions are willing to back the UAW.
“This will be the biggest campaign ever undertaken. It will involve hundreds of dealerships,” said Dennis Williams, UAW Secretary Treasurer, adding the union will ask for help from its retirees, community groups and other unions to help with the campaign, said the Royal Oak Tribune (MI).
“We will do whatever it takes,” said Williams.
Volkswagen employees about 2,000 people at its manufacturing plant in Tennessee, while Daimler employs 17,697 in the US, down from 22,476 in 2008.
“You can’t have a middle class here in the U.S. or around the world without organized labor,” said Williams.
The Tribune reported that "he UAW has 'enhanced' it relationships with unions in Germany, Japan and South Korea to help with the upcoming campaign."
In other words, King is uniting the "Workers of the World."
If they can't get what they want at the negotiating table, the UAW will now try the economic equivalent of a suicide bombing of the economy. Never mind that they already destroyed the US automakers and their employees.
But it may not be as easy as King thinks.
From Reuters:
Central to this effort is the belief that if car companies refrain from actively opposing a UAW organizing push, workers at German-American factories will gladly join the union.
Volkswagen tops the 10 best car ads of 2011
But that belief may be off-base. Workers know that almost every job lost at U.S. car factories in the last 30 years has occurred at a unionized company, while almost every job gained has come at a non-union company. And most of the factories the UAW is targeting are in the South, which is historically hostile to unions.
"People have a different opinion in the South about unions," said Robert Plisko, a retired autoworker who helped UAW organizing efforts at German and Japanese plants in the 1970s and 1980s. "It's a lot harder now than it has ever been, and I don't see it getting any easier."
German auto executives declined to talk in detail about the UAW's push. Privately, they remain wary of the union and its confrontational past. "They view the UAW as a disaster," said a Wall Street banker who has worked extensively with the industry.
And they’d be right.
The UAW has pushed the domestic auto industry to the brink of death.
And the only way they can survive is by using the old mob tactic of firebombing a competitor. But that tactic will likely backfire, as consumers, already resentful of union and government interference in the auto industry, simply shrug their shoulders and buy Volkswagens and Daimlers anyway, perhaps not in spite of, but because of the boycott.
Consumers of the world unite.
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/johnransom/2012/01/03/uaw_picks_targets_for_suicide_bombing_of_us_economy/page/full/
1-6-12
Vote Like Your Future Depends On It
Because it Does
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2012 is finally upon us and while many are making resolutions for personal ambitions, there is one task that we should all resolve to do in the new year: vote like our future depends on it, because the truth is it does. For far too long, we as Americans had given in to the status quo and we had come to accept the lack-luster representation we were receiving from our elected officials. In 2009, the tea party movement sparked a wave across the country that opened the eyes of many Americans. We finally began to speak up against cronyism, corruption, and irresponsibility. 2012 will be no different. As one of the most important election years in American history begins, we wanted to share with you what some local tea party activists are looking for in their elected officials as we prepare to go to the polls over the course of the new year.
Jim Bratten - Evansville, IN
Indiana State Coordinator
1-5-12
In 2012, Obama to press ahead without Congress
By Julie Pace
Associated Press
HONOLULU (AP) — Leaving behind a year of bruising legislative battles, President Barack Obama enters his fourth year in office having calculated that he no longer needs Congress to promote his agenda and may even benefit in his re-election campaign if lawmakers take little action in 2012.
Devoid of any major policy pushes, much of the year will instead focus on the biggest goal of all: winning a second term. The president will keep up a robust domestic travel schedule and aggressive campaign fundraising and use executive action to try to boost the economy.
Unlike the partisan, down-to-the-wire fights over allowing the nation to take on more debt and sharply reducing government spending that defined 2011, there are almost no must-do pieces of legislation facing the president and Congress in the new year.
The one exception: negotiations in early 2012 on a full-year extension of a cut in the Social Security payroll tax rate from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent. Democrats and Republicans are still divided over how to implement the extension. But the White House believes GOP lawmakers boxed themselves in during the pre-Christmas debate on the tax break and will be hard-pressed to back off their own assertions that it should continue through the end of 2012.
Once that debate is over, the White House says, Obama’s political fate will no longer be tied to Washington.
“Now that he’s sort of free from having to put out these fires, the president will have a larger playing field. If that includes Congress, all the better,” said Josh Earnest, White House deputy press secretary. But, he added, “that’s no longer a requirement.”
Aides say the president will not turn his back on Congress completely in the new year. He is expected to once again push lawmakers to pass elements of his jobs bill that were blocked by Republicans last fall.
If those efforts fail, the White House says, Obama’s re-election year will focus almost exclusively on executive action. Earnest said Obama will unveil at least two or three directives per week — a continuation of the “We Can’t Wait” campaign the administration began this fall — and seek to define Republicans in Congress as gridlocked and dysfunctional.
Obama’s election year retreat from legislative fights means this term will end without significant progress on two of his 2008 campaign promises: comprehensive immigration reform and closing the military prison for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Piecemeal presidential directives are unlikely to make a sizeable dent in the nation’s 8.6 percent unemployment rate or lead to significant improvements in the economy, the top concern for many voters and the issue on which Republican candidates are most likely to criticize Obama.
In focusing on small-bore executive actions rather than ambitious legislation, the president risks appearing to be putting election-year strategy ahead of economic action at a time when millions of Americans are still out of work.
“Americans expect their elected leaders to work together to boost job creation, even in an election year,” said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.
Still, Obama and his advisers are beginning 2012 with a renewed sense of confidence, buoyed by a series of polls that show the president’s approval rating climbing as Congress becomes increasingly unpopular. And they believe his victory over Republicans in the payroll tax debate has boosted his credentials as a fighter for the middle class, a mantle Obama will look to seize on in his Jan. 24 State of the Union address.
Aides say that while the president is just starting to brainstorm ideas for the speech, he’s certain to strike a populist tone and tap into middle-class frustrations with growing income inequality. And he’s expected to focus on similar themes when he’s campaigning around the country.
Obama’s campaign-driven, domestic-travel blitz starts in Cleveland on Wednesday, the day after GOP presidential hopefuls square off in the Iowa caucuses. He will also keep up an aggressive re-election fundraising schedule, with events already lined up in Chicago on Jan. 11.
Campaign officials say Obama will fully engage in the re-election campaign once the Republicans pick their nominee. He will focus almost exclusively on campaigning after the late summer Democratic National Convention, barring unexpected developments at home or abroad.
Among the issues that could disrupt Obama’s re-election plans: further economic turmoil in Europe, instability in North Korea following its leadership transition and threats from Iran.
The president’s signature legislative accomplishment will also come under greater scrutiny in the new year, when a key provision in his health care overhaul is debated before the Supreme Court. White House officials say Obama will not shy away from the measure. Instead, he will double down in his defense of it and highlight new aspects of the law that go into effect in 2012.
With domestic issues a top concern for voters, Obama’s foreign travel next year will be limited mainly to the summits and international gatherings every U.S. president traditionally attends. He’s expected to travel to South Korea in March for a nuclear security summit and to Colombia in April for the Summit of the Americas. He’s also likely to visit Mexico in June for the G-20 economic summit.
Two other major international gatherings — the NATO summit and the G-8 economic meeting — will be held in Chicago, giving Obama a chance to promote his standing in the international community on his home turf.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/dec/31/2012-obama-press-ahead-without-congress/?page=all#pagebreak
1-4-12
"The pyramid of government-and a republican government may well receive that beautiful and solid form-should be raised to a dignified altitude: but its foundations must, of consequence, be broad, and strong, and deep. The authority, the interests, and the affections of the people at large are the only foundation, on which a superstructure proposed to be at once durable and magnificent, can be rationally erected." --James Wilson
1-3-12
The Year in Obama Scandals -- and Scandal Deniers
Michelle Malkin
With 2011 drawing to a close, it is time to account. As an early-and-often chronicler of Chicago-on-the-Potomac, I am amazed at the stubborn and clingy persistence of President Barack Obama's snowblowers in the media. See no scandal, hear no scandal, speak no scandal.
Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan asserted in May -- while Operation Fast and Furious subpoenas were flying on Capitol Hill -- that "one of the least remarked upon aspects of the Obama presidency has been the lack of scandals." Conveniently, he defines scandal as a "widespread elite perception of wrongdoing."
So as long as left-wing Ivy League scribes refuse to perceive something to be a scandal -- never mind the actual suffering endured by the family of murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, whose death came at the hands of a Mexican cartel thug wielding a Fast and Furious gun walked across the southern border under Attorney General Eric Holder's watch -- there is no scandal!
Self-serving much?
Mother Jones' Kevin Drum likewise proclaimed: "Obama's presidency has so far been almost completely free of scandal."
This after the year kicked off in January with the departure of lying eco-radical czar Carol Browner. In backroom negotiations, she infamously bullied auto execs to "put nothing in writing, ever." The previous fall, the White House's own oil spill panel had singled out Browner for misleading the public about the scientific evidence for the administration's Draconian drilling moratorium and "contributing to the perception that the government's findings were more exact than they actually were."
The Interior Department inspector general and federal judges likewise blasted drilling ban book-cooking by Browner and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who falsely rewrote the White House drilling ban report to doctor the Obama-appointed panel's own overwhelming scientific objections to the job-killing edict.
In February, federal judge Martin Feldman in Louisiana excoriated the Obama Interior Department for defying his May 2010 order to lift its fraudulent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling in the Gulf. He called out the administration's culture of contempt and "determined disregard" for the law.
This spring saw rising public anger over the preferential Obamacare waiver process (which I first reported on in September 2010). Some 2,000 lucky golden ticket winners were freed from the costly federal mandates -- including a handful of fancy restaurants in Aloha Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco district, the entire state of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's Nevada, and scores of local, state and national Big Labor organizations, from the Service Employees International Union and Teamsters on down. Meanwhile, as The Hill newspaper reported last month, other not-so-lucky Republican-led states seeking waivers, such as Indiana and Louisiana, were rejected.
But it wasn't just Republicans objecting to the president's arbitrary Obamacare fiats. In July, congressional Democrats turned on the monstrous federal health bureaucracy known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The constitutionally suspect panel -- freed from normal public notice, public comment and public review rules -- would have unprecedented authority over health care spending and an expanding jurisdiction of private health care payment rates.
Obama's health and human services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, faced separate legal questions over her overseer role in a hair-raising document-shredding case when she served as governor of Kansas. In October, a district judge in the Sunflower State suspended court proceedings in a high-profile criminal case against the abortion racketeers of Planned Parenthood. Bombshell court filings showed that Kansas health officials "shredded documents related to felony charges the abortion giant faces" and failed to disclose it for six years.
That same month, Bloomberg News columnist Jonathan Alter gushed: "There is zero evidence ... of corruption. Where is it?"
Alter's declaration of the "Obama Miracle" came just weeks after the politically driven half-billion-dollar Solyndra stimulus "investment" went bankrupt, prompting an FBI raid and ongoing criminal and congressional probes of the solar company funded by top White House bundler and visitor George Kaiser.
As Solyndra and an avalanche of other ongoing green subsidy scams erupted, so did the LightSquared debacle -- a federal broadband boondoggle involving billionaire hedge fund managers and Obama donors Philip Falcone and George Soros. In September, two high-ranking witnesses -- William Shelton, the four-star general who heads the Air Force Space Command, and National Coordination Office for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Director Anthony Russo -- exposed how the White House had pressured them to alter their congressional testimony and play down concerns about LightSquared's interference threat to military communications.
The White House continues to block efforts to gain information about the Federal Communications Commission's approval of a special waiver for the company, even as new government tests this month showed that the company's "signals caused harmful interference to the majority of ... general purpose GPS receivers."
The Obama White House closed out the year with Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri demanding a probe of the smelly $443 million no-bid smallpox antiviral pill contract with Siga Technologies -- controlled by big lefty donor Ron Perelman. Then there was the small matter of massive voter fraud in Indiana, where a Democratic official resigned amid allegations that "dozens, if not hundreds," of signatures were faked to get Obama on the state primary ballot in 2008. And while Americans busied themselves with the holidays, White House and Democratic campaign officials were dumping more than $70,000 in contributions from another deep-pocketed contributor -- scandal-plagued pal and former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, who oversaw the collapse of MF Global.
All this -- and so much more -- yet erstwhile "conservative" journalist Andrew Sullivan of Newsweek/The Daily Beast scoffed, "Where are all the scandals promised by Michelle Malkin?"
There's none so blind as those who will not see.
1-2-12
"To form a new Government, requires infinite care, and unbounded attention; for if the foundation is badly laid the superstructure must be bad." --George Washington, letter to John Augustine Washington, 1776
1-1-12
Happy New Year!!!
2-5-12
United States Supreme Court Justice, Ginsberg tells Egyptians, "Don't look to the old United States Constitution." Rather, model your constitution after South Africa or Canada.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNC-kbmpscE&feature=youtube_gdata_player
2-4-12
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it." --Benjamin Franklin
2-3-12
Sadly, this is no longer true, and Madison's warning was prophetic.
"The house of representatives ... can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as the great mass of society. This has always been deemed one of the strongest bonds by which human policy can connect the rulers and the people together. It creates between them that communion of interest, and sympathy of sentiments, of which few governments have furnished examples; but without which every government degenerates into tyranny." --James Madison, Federalist No. 57, 1788
2-2-12
"To me, the real split among conservative voters is about whether it's actually important that a politician 'loves' us or is 'one of' us. Count me with the conservatives who could not care less. Notice this is different from saying character doesn't matter. Indeed, I look past the basic condescension common to most politicians to other, more important virtues of personal and professional conduct. The point is that, if politicians look at voters instrumentally, then we should return the favor. I don't care about wanting to have a beer with you, I care about whether you can be compelled or cajoled into enacting conservative policies." --columnist Daniel Foster
of The Patriot Post
2-1-12
I fear this is not enough..
"If it be asked what is to restrain the House of Representatives from making legal discriminations in favor of themselves and a particular class of the society? I answer, the genius of the whole system, the nature of just and constitutional laws, and above all the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America, a spirit which nourishes freedom, and in return is nourished by it." --James Madison, Federalist No. 57, 1788
1-31-12
From Constitution Club. org
While the Obama Media Group got its race-baiting panties in a wad over Newt Gingrich’s recent reference to Barack Obama as the “Food Stamp President,” one thing is abundantly clear: If Obama is not the Food Stamp President, he sure is working his ass off to become the Food Stamp President. Hell – he’s even giving out rewards for increased participation.
Since the Obama Regime has been in power, the number of Americans on food stamps has increased by two-thirds and stands at a record-high 46 million citizens, or one out of every seven people in the United States. Incredibly, this is not “good” enough news for Barack Obama, who believes not enough people are receiving food stamps. How strongly does he believe it? The Regime is now offering $75,000 grants to organizations who come up with “effective strategies” to “increase program participation” among those who have yet to sign up. Seriously, folks – you can’t make this stuff up.
According to the U.S. Agriculture Department’s website laments the “under utilization” of the food stamp program – officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP:
“There are many reasons why eligible people, including seniors and Hispanics, do not participate in SNAP. These include unawareness of eligibility, confusion about program rules and requirements, a complex application process, a lack of transportation and pride. Participation barriers can be unique to different populations. According to FNS’s Office of Research and Analysis, seniors may not participate in SNAP because of the perceived low monthly benefit or because of fears of giving personal information to people they do not know. Hispanic persons may not participate because of language barriers, concerns about their immigration status, or their work schedules.”
The craziness gets worse.
Obama’s Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack argues that food stamps are an effective form of economic stimulus that puts “people to work” because each time food stamps are used at a grocery store, “someone’s got to stock it, shelve it, package it, process it, ship it–all of those are jobs.” Vilsack obviously attended the Nancy Pelosi School of Economics.
I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but is this logic not dissimilar from suggesting that murder is good for the economy because it increases business for funeral homes? Or, that tornadoes are an excellent form of economic stimulus because they provide increased opportunities for the housing industry?
At any rate, the Obama Regime says it will continue offering cash grants through the SNAP Outreach Grant Program through 2015. Such a dedicated Socialist is our president.
Liberal “logic.” It may be oxymoronic, but it sure is hysterical, huh?
1-30-12
Real education!
"History will also give occasion to expatiate on the advantage of civil orders and constitutions, how men and their properties are protected by joining in societies and establishing government; their industry encouraged and rewarded, arts invented, and life made more comfortable: The advantages of liberty, mischiefs of licentiousness, benefits arising from good laws and a due execution of justice. Thus may the first principles of sound politics be fixed in the minds of youth." --Benjamin Franklin, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania, 1749
1-29-12
News From the Swamp: The Senate Budget Abdication
Tuesday, Jan. 24, was not only the day of Barack Obama's State of the Union address, but it also marked the 1,000th day that the Democrat-controlled Senate has not passed a budget. Whenever the president or the media rails against the unproductive and unpopular Congress, they always take pains to place blame on the Republicans. In fact, Obama is making this the cornerstone of his re-election bid. The truth, however, isn't nearly so convenient. This gross dereliction of duty falls squarely on Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), and it goes to the heart of Washington's fiscal problems.
Reid actually has called passing a budget "foolish," relying instead on continuing resolutions to address one spending problem at a time, and not very well at that. Democrats can have it both ways -- federal spending has skyrocketed while they are saddled with an overarching budget to set long-term goals and priorities. Since April 29, 2009, the last date the Senate passed a budget, the federal government spent more than $9 trillion, nearly half of which was deficit spending. The current debt total is more than $15 trillion, with interest payments on that bill running $200 billion per year. The long-term damage created by this continued intransigence will be nothing short of catastrophic. By 2050, entitlement spending will more than triple, and the debt will hit 344 percent of GDP. These are all important points to keep in mind when going to the polls this November.
From the Patriot Post
1-28-12
"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it." --Thomas Jefferson
1-27-12
Ben Franklin seemed to foretell what lawmakers would do if left unchecked. Special rights will eventually lead to no rights.
"History affords us many instances of the ruin of states, by the prosecution of measures ill suited to the temper and genius of their people. The ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy. An equal dispensation of protection, rights, privileges, and advantages, is what every part is entitled to, and ought to enjoy... These measures never fail to create great and violent jealousies and animosities between the people favored and the people oppressed; whence a total separation of affections, interests, political obligations, and all manner of connections, by which the whole state is weakened." --Benjamin Franklin, Emblematical Representations
1-26-12
Does this not sound like Obama and the liberals
Favorite Quote: "When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are" -- Ayn Rand.
1-25-12
Today marks the 1000th day that the US Senate has not produced a budget. A budget is one of the most basic and fundamental requirements of our legislature and now for 1000 days, the Senate has failed.
What would happen to you if you failed to do your job for 1000 days? You would lose your job.
In this environment of economic turmoil, how can we let these servants of the people get by without actually serving the people?
What's more, today the President is also slated to give his State of the Union Address. What is the state of our union?
No Budget. No Direction. No Leadership.
Unacceptable!
From The Tea Party Patriots
1-24-12
Taxpayers must adjust their standards of living and spending habits so that government can engage in their excesses, graft, corruption, and vote buying.
1-23-12
"Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience." --George Washington
1-22-12
"The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse." --James Madison, speech in the Virginia constitutional convention, 1829
1-21-12
"The diversity in the faculties of men from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government." --James Madison, Federalist No. 10, 1787
1-20-12
The excuse and blame President strikes again
President Barack Obama made his rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline official this afternoon, placing the blame squarely on House Republicans for inserting a 60-day deadline into the payroll tax legislation at the end of last year.
"This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people," Obama said in a statement. "I'm disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision, but it does not change my Administration's commitment to American-made energy that creates jobs and reduces our dependence on oil."
1-19-12
"It is necessary for every American, with becoming energy to endeavor to stop the dissemination of principles evidently destructive of the cause for which they have bled. It must be the combined virtue of the rulers and of the people to do this, and to rescue and save their civil and religious rights from the outstretched arm of tyranny, which may appear under any mode or form of government." --Mercy Warren
1-18-12
"Wisely, therefore, do they consider union and a good national government as necessary to put and keep them in such a situation as, instead of inviting war, will tend to repress and discourage it. That situation consists in the best possible state of defense, and necessarily depends on the government, the arms, and the resources of the country." --John Jay, Federalist No. 4
1-17-12
Please read my new article,
This must be our year to stop the onslaught
1-16-12
"If our country, when pressed with wrongs at the point of the bayonet, had been governed by its heads instead of its hearts, where should we have been now? Hanging on a gallows as high as Haman's." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to Maria Cosway, 1786
1-15-12
Excerpt from Rush Limbaugh
...You know where I come down on this Obama business. And Giuliani's right. This guy's an Alinskyite. He has been taught, he's been raised, educated, whatever, he's got a deep resentment for this country. You know me, I have told you, I'm willfully naive, I guess. I can't get my arms around the fact that there are people born in this country who hate it. I know they do, and they can explain to me the differences in ideology and so forth, I'm never going to intellectually or emotionally understand it. Even though I can explain it, it still makes no sense to me. Yet I know that those people exist and I know that they are the people that taught Obama. They are among those who educated him, both in his family and at the institutions of higher learning and academe that he attended.
I know that he thinks this is an unjust country, that it was immoral in its founding, for reasons including but greater than slavery. He thinks it was economically unjust and immoral. He thinks a bunch of rich white guys, this 1% versus 99% stuff, that's how he thinks the country was founded and that the 1% has maintained themselves in total control of all the wealth since the days of the founding and that they take purposeful steps to keep everybody out of that club. He believes it. He thinks the only remedy for it is to take everything the 1% has and give it away to everybody else.
Now, the ulterior motives to that are entrenching his own power. I don't think there's benevolence in this. In other words, I don't think Obama runs around every day feeling genuinely sorry for the 99%. I don't think he's motivated by altruism. I think he's motivated by anger. He's got a chip on his shoulder, a number of them. But I guess when you're running for office against the guy you can't say that. They can say it about us. The Democrats can say whatever they want about us, and there's never a concern from anybody that they are going to frighten away independents or any other voters. Romney has to say, "Ah, he's just an incompetent boob, you know, he's really got good motivation. He's trying. He's just in over his head. He doesn't know what he's doing, he just didn't know what to do."
Well, he's got three years in, and if he's supposedly this smart guy. After three years of trying what he thought would work, wouldn't a smart guy who's trying to get it right try something different? Wouldn't it be about time now to admit, "Hey, you know, my ideas didn't work." "Mr. Limbaugh, ego is not going to --" Okay, I understand. But still, all I'm trying to do is construct evidence here, present evidence to refute this notion that Obama's in over his head and doesn't know what he's doing. I believe he clearly does, and I don't know why we can't say it, especially when it's the truth. What's wrong with educating people?
See, this is where, when I say we have a group of people who don't think the country needs to be, quote, unquote, saved, the people who want to accurately portray Obama, like me, the people who want others to honestly understand who Obama is and why he's doing what he's doing and why he's gonna continue it. We think the country's imperiled, and we think something needs to happen to save it, and we think Obamacare is ball game, and we think that every freedom that we take for granted is gone once the government gets that fully implemented. It's serious. But I'm left to wonder, does Romney look at it that way? He may not. I don't know too many Republicans in the establishment who really do. In the so-called conservative media establishment, I know there are people who think that the view that the country's in peril and that we are facing a forever transformation from which we can't come back, they don't think that.
To them, $16 trillion of national debt's no different than five trillion. As long as we keep making the interest payments we're cool. They don't see any danger for their kids and grandkids because of this. In fact, they want -- I'm including some Republicans -- they want to win the election to be in charge of the money and its spending. So when I hear Romney say, (paraphrasing) "This has been a failed presidency. I don't think he's tried to make it bad, he just didn't know what to do, he's in over his head." I guarantee you a pollster or a consultant has gotten to him and said, "Look, Obama is personally liked, and if you go out and accuse him of these terrible motives, you're going to lose people." I know that's what this is. So the reason I couldn't run for office and do politics apparently is 'cause you're not allowed to be honest.
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/01/12/obama_is_just_in_over_his_head
1-14-12
Car Radio, an Interesting Quincy, Illinois Story
CAR TUNES
Radios are so much a part of the driving experience, it seems like cars have always had them. But they didn’t. Here’s the story.
SUNDOWN
One evening in 1929 two young men named William Lear and Elmer Wavering drove their girlfriends to a lookout point high above the Mississippi River town of Quincy, Illinois, to watch the sunset. It was a romantic night to be sure, but one of the women observed that it would be even nicer if they could listen to music in the car.
Lear and Wavering liked the idea. Both men had tinkered with radios – Lear had served as a radio operator in the U.S. Navy during World War I – and it wasn’t long before they were taking apart a home radio and trying to get it to work in a car. But it wasn’t as easy as it sounds: automobiles have ignition switches, generators, spark plugs, and other electrical equipment that generate noisy static interference, making it nearly impossible to listen to the radio when the engine was running.
SIGNING ON
One by one, Lear and Wavering identified and eliminated each source of electrical interference. When they finally got their radio to work, they took it to a radio convention in Chicago. There they met Paul Galvin, owner of Galvin Manufacturing Corporation. He made a product called a “battery eliminator” a device that allowed battery-powered radios to run on household AC current. But as more homes were wired for electricity, more radio manufacturers made AC-powered radios. Galvin needed a new product to manufacture. When he met Lear and Wavering at the radio convention, he found it. He believed that mass-produced, affordable car radios had the potential to become a huge business.
Lear and Wavering set up shop in Galvin’s factory, and when they perfected their first radio, they installed it in his Studebaker. Then Galvin went to a local banker to apply for a loan. Thinking it might sweeten the deal, he had his men install a radio in the banker’s Packard. Good idea, but it didn’t work – half an hour after the installation, the banker’s Packard caught on fire. (They didn’t get the loan.) Galvin didn’t give up. He drove his Studebaker nearly 800 miles to Atlantic City to show off the radio at the 1930 Radio Manufacturers Association convention. Too broke to afford a booth, he parked the car outside the convention hall and cranked up the radio so that passing conventioneers could hear it. That idea worked – he got enough orders to put the radio into production.
WHAT’S IN A NAME
That first production model was called the 5T71. Galvin decided he needed to come up with something a little catchier. In those days many companies in the phonograph and radio businesses used the suffix “ola” for their names – Radiola, Columbiola, and Victrola were three of the biggest. Galvin decided to do the same thing, and since his radio was intended for use in a motor vehicle, he decided to call it the Motorola.
But even with the name change, the radio still had problems: When Motorola went on sale in 1930, it cost about $110 uninstalled, at a time when you could buy a brand-new car for $650, and the country was sliding into the Great Depression. (By that measure, a radio for a new car would cost about $3,000 today.) In 1930 it took two men several days to put in a car radio – the dashboard had to be taken apart so that the receiver and a single speaker could be installed, and the ceiling had to be cut open to install the antenna. These early radios ran on their own batteries, not on the car battery, so holes had to be cut into the floorboard to accommodate them. The installation manual had eight complete diagrams and 28 pages of instructions.
HIT THE ROAD
Selling complicated car radios that cost 20 percent of the price of a brand-new car wouldn’t have been easy in the best of times, let alone during the Great Depression – Galvin lost money in 1930 and struggled for a couple of years after that. But things picked up in 1933 when Ford began offering Motorola's pre-installed at the factory. In 1934 they got another boost when Galvin struck a deal with B.F. Goodrich tire company to sell and install them in its chain of tire stores. By then the price of the radio, installation included, had dropped to $55. The Motorola car radio was off and running. (The name of the company would be officially changed from Galvin Manufacturing to “Motorola” in 1947.) In the meantime, Galvin continued to develop new uses for car radios. In 1936, the same year that it introduced push-button tuning, it also introduced the Motorola Police Cruiser, a standard car radio that was factory preset to a single frequency to pick up police broadcasts. In 1940 he developed with the first handheld two-way radio – the Handie-Talkie – for the U.S. Army.
A lot of the communications technologies that we take for granted today were born in Motorola labs in the years that followed World War II. In 1947 they came out with the first television to sell under $200. In 1956 the company introduced the world’s first pager; in 1969 it supplied the radio and television equipment that was used to televise Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon. In 1973 it invented the world’s first handheld cellular phone. Today Motorola is one of the second-largest cell phone manufacturer in the world. And it all started with the car radio.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO
The two men who installed the first radio in Paul Galvin’s car, Elmer Wavering and William Lear, ended up taking very different paths in life. Wavering stayed with Motorola. In the 1950’s he helped change the automobile experience again when he developed the first automotive alternator, replacing inefficient and unreliable generators. The invention lead to such luxuries as power windows, power seats, and, eventually, air-conditioning.
Lear also continued inventing. He holds more than 150 patents. Remember eight-track tape players? Lear invented that. But what he’s really famous for are his contributions to the field of aviation. He invented radio direction finders for planes, aided in the invention of the autopilot, designed the first fully automatic aircraft landing system, and in 1963 introduced his most famous invention of all, the Lear Jet, the world’s first mass-produced, affordable business jet. (Not bad for a guy who dropped out of school after the eighth grade.)
1-13-12
"[T]ake care that the laws be faithfully executed ... support the Constitution ... faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and ... preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." --Article II Section 1, 3, the Constitution of the United States
1-12-12
A word to describe our current political situation.
Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc'-ra-cy) -
a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.
1-11-12
Insight
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." --author and theologian C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)
The Gipper
"The government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. Every businessman has his own tale of harassment. Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, unalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment." --Ronald Reagan
1-10-12
This says it all...
Government
"Government becomes big by having big ambitions for supplanting markets as society's primary allocator of wealth and opportunity. Therefore it becomes a magnet for factions muscular enough, in money or numbers or both, to bend government to their advantage. The left's centuries-old mission is to increase social harmony by decreasing antagonisms arising from disparities of wealth -- to decrease inequality by increasing government's redistributive activities. Such government constantly expands under the unending, indeed intensifying, pressures to correct what it disapproves of -- the distribution of wealth produced by consensual market activities. But as government presumes to dictate the correct distribution of social rewards, the maelstrom of contemporary politics demonstrates that social strife, not solidarity, is generated by government transfer payments to preferred groups. ... Not only does redistributionist government direct wealth upward; in asserting a right to do so it siphons power into itself. A puzzling aspect of our politically contentious era is how little contention there is about the ethics of coercive redistribution by progressive taxation and other government 'corrections' of social outcomes it considers unethical or unaesthetic. ... Government uses redistribution to correct social outcomes that offend it. But government rarely explains, or perhaps even recognizes, the reasoning by which it decides why particular outcomes of consensual market activities are incorrect. ... People are less dissatisfied by what they lack than by what others have. And when government engages in redistribution in order to maximize the happiness of citizens who become more envious as they become more comfortable, government becomes increasingly frenzied and futile." --columnist George Will
1-9-12
"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself." --Thomas Jefferson
1-8-12
"The Middle Class Is Being Systematically
Wiped Out of Existence in America . . ."
— Business Insider
1-7-12
UAW Picks Targets for Suicide Bombing of US Economy
John Ransom
For over a year, it’s been rumored that the United Auto Workers union (UAW) was going go after a major foreign auto manufacturer in the United States to force unionization upon them by a world-wide boycott.
A new report from Reuters, based on interviews of union and industry insiders, has indicated that the target will be not one, but two German manufacturers operating in the US, Volkswagen AG and Daimler AG.
Specifically, Reuters has learned, the union is going after U.S. plants owned by German manufacturers Volkswagen AG and Daimler AG, seen as easier nuts to crack than the Japanese and South Koreans.
It's a battle the UAW cannot afford to lose. By failing to organize factories run by foreign automakers, the union has been a spectator to the only growth in the U.S. auto industry in the last 30 years. That failure to win new members has compounded a crunch on the UAW's finances, forcing it to sell assets and dip into its strike fund to pay for its activities.
The UAW has seen its numbers of workers shrink over the last two decades as domestic manufacturers GM, Ford and Chrysler wrestled with high labor and benefit costs compared to foreign manufacturers operating in the US.
In fact, GM’s recent financial problems were, in part, caused by pension and health plan liabilities to UAW workers, necessitating a federal government bailout. In the $95 billion GM bankruptcy, $50 billion of it was benefit liabilities to UAW workers.
The head of the union, Bob King, has admitted that declining union membership rolls means that if the UAW doesn't "organize these transnationals [foreign auto manufacturers], I don't think there's a long-term future for the UAW — I really don't."
That’s correct. Because unless the UAW can figure out how to increase labor costs across the entire industry, foreign manufacturers will continue to beat American manufacturers in the number one cost for cars: labor. Labor costs, including benefits, put current per-hour employee cost for U.S. automakers [at] around 50 percent higher than the costs for their foreign counterparts,” according to NPR.
As I reported last March, the UAW’s honcho, King, gave foreign automakers including BMW, Volkswagen AG, Toyota and Nissan an offer they can't refuse: Unionize their workers or else he'll single out one automaker and put the screws to them with a boycott. Never mind that the boycott will hurt workers, consumers and the US economy.
Last year, sources close to one foreign car manufacturer told me that they thought the target would be Toyota. But that was before a tsunami set back Japanese auto manufacturing. German automakers are likely a better bet because German unions are willing to back the UAW.
“This will be the biggest campaign ever undertaken. It will involve hundreds of dealerships,” said Dennis Williams, UAW Secretary Treasurer, adding the union will ask for help from its retirees, community groups and other unions to help with the campaign, said the Royal Oak Tribune (MI).
“We will do whatever it takes,” said Williams.
Volkswagen employees about 2,000 people at its manufacturing plant in Tennessee, while Daimler employs 17,697 in the US, down from 22,476 in 2008.
“You can’t have a middle class here in the U.S. or around the world without organized labor,” said Williams.
The Tribune reported that "he UAW has 'enhanced' it relationships with unions in Germany, Japan and South Korea to help with the upcoming campaign."
In other words, King is uniting the "Workers of the World."
If they can't get what they want at the negotiating table, the UAW will now try the economic equivalent of a suicide bombing of the economy. Never mind that they already destroyed the US automakers and their employees.
But it may not be as easy as King thinks.
From Reuters:
Central to this effort is the belief that if car companies refrain from actively opposing a UAW organizing push, workers at German-American factories will gladly join the union.
Volkswagen tops the 10 best car ads of 2011
But that belief may be off-base. Workers know that almost every job lost at U.S. car factories in the last 30 years has occurred at a unionized company, while almost every job gained has come at a non-union company. And most of the factories the UAW is targeting are in the South, which is historically hostile to unions.
"People have a different opinion in the South about unions," said Robert Plisko, a retired autoworker who helped UAW organizing efforts at German and Japanese plants in the 1970s and 1980s. "It's a lot harder now than it has ever been, and I don't see it getting any easier."
German auto executives declined to talk in detail about the UAW's push. Privately, they remain wary of the union and its confrontational past. "They view the UAW as a disaster," said a Wall Street banker who has worked extensively with the industry.
And they’d be right.
The UAW has pushed the domestic auto industry to the brink of death.
And the only way they can survive is by using the old mob tactic of firebombing a competitor. But that tactic will likely backfire, as consumers, already resentful of union and government interference in the auto industry, simply shrug their shoulders and buy Volkswagens and Daimlers anyway, perhaps not in spite of, but because of the boycott.
Consumers of the world unite.
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/johnransom/2012/01/03/uaw_picks_targets_for_suicide_bombing_of_us_economy/page/full/
1-6-12
Vote Like Your Future Depends On It
Because it Does
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2012 is finally upon us and while many are making resolutions for personal ambitions, there is one task that we should all resolve to do in the new year: vote like our future depends on it, because the truth is it does. For far too long, we as Americans had given in to the status quo and we had come to accept the lack-luster representation we were receiving from our elected officials. In 2009, the tea party movement sparked a wave across the country that opened the eyes of many Americans. We finally began to speak up against cronyism, corruption, and irresponsibility. 2012 will be no different. As one of the most important election years in American history begins, we wanted to share with you what some local tea party activists are looking for in their elected officials as we prepare to go to the polls over the course of the new year.
Jim Bratten - Evansville, IN
Indiana State Coordinator
1-5-12
In 2012, Obama to press ahead without Congress
By Julie Pace
Associated Press
HONOLULU (AP) — Leaving behind a year of bruising legislative battles, President Barack Obama enters his fourth year in office having calculated that he no longer needs Congress to promote his agenda and may even benefit in his re-election campaign if lawmakers take little action in 2012.
Devoid of any major policy pushes, much of the year will instead focus on the biggest goal of all: winning a second term. The president will keep up a robust domestic travel schedule and aggressive campaign fundraising and use executive action to try to boost the economy.
Unlike the partisan, down-to-the-wire fights over allowing the nation to take on more debt and sharply reducing government spending that defined 2011, there are almost no must-do pieces of legislation facing the president and Congress in the new year.
The one exception: negotiations in early 2012 on a full-year extension of a cut in the Social Security payroll tax rate from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent. Democrats and Republicans are still divided over how to implement the extension. But the White House believes GOP lawmakers boxed themselves in during the pre-Christmas debate on the tax break and will be hard-pressed to back off their own assertions that it should continue through the end of 2012.
Once that debate is over, the White House says, Obama’s political fate will no longer be tied to Washington.
“Now that he’s sort of free from having to put out these fires, the president will have a larger playing field. If that includes Congress, all the better,” said Josh Earnest, White House deputy press secretary. But, he added, “that’s no longer a requirement.”
Aides say the president will not turn his back on Congress completely in the new year. He is expected to once again push lawmakers to pass elements of his jobs bill that were blocked by Republicans last fall.
If those efforts fail, the White House says, Obama’s re-election year will focus almost exclusively on executive action. Earnest said Obama will unveil at least two or three directives per week — a continuation of the “We Can’t Wait” campaign the administration began this fall — and seek to define Republicans in Congress as gridlocked and dysfunctional.
Obama’s election year retreat from legislative fights means this term will end without significant progress on two of his 2008 campaign promises: comprehensive immigration reform and closing the military prison for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Piecemeal presidential directives are unlikely to make a sizeable dent in the nation’s 8.6 percent unemployment rate or lead to significant improvements in the economy, the top concern for many voters and the issue on which Republican candidates are most likely to criticize Obama.
In focusing on small-bore executive actions rather than ambitious legislation, the president risks appearing to be putting election-year strategy ahead of economic action at a time when millions of Americans are still out of work.
“Americans expect their elected leaders to work together to boost job creation, even in an election year,” said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.
Still, Obama and his advisers are beginning 2012 with a renewed sense of confidence, buoyed by a series of polls that show the president’s approval rating climbing as Congress becomes increasingly unpopular. And they believe his victory over Republicans in the payroll tax debate has boosted his credentials as a fighter for the middle class, a mantle Obama will look to seize on in his Jan. 24 State of the Union address.
Aides say that while the president is just starting to brainstorm ideas for the speech, he’s certain to strike a populist tone and tap into middle-class frustrations with growing income inequality. And he’s expected to focus on similar themes when he’s campaigning around the country.
Obama’s campaign-driven, domestic-travel blitz starts in Cleveland on Wednesday, the day after GOP presidential hopefuls square off in the Iowa caucuses. He will also keep up an aggressive re-election fundraising schedule, with events already lined up in Chicago on Jan. 11.
Campaign officials say Obama will fully engage in the re-election campaign once the Republicans pick their nominee. He will focus almost exclusively on campaigning after the late summer Democratic National Convention, barring unexpected developments at home or abroad.
Among the issues that could disrupt Obama’s re-election plans: further economic turmoil in Europe, instability in North Korea following its leadership transition and threats from Iran.
The president’s signature legislative accomplishment will also come under greater scrutiny in the new year, when a key provision in his health care overhaul is debated before the Supreme Court. White House officials say Obama will not shy away from the measure. Instead, he will double down in his defense of it and highlight new aspects of the law that go into effect in 2012.
With domestic issues a top concern for voters, Obama’s foreign travel next year will be limited mainly to the summits and international gatherings every U.S. president traditionally attends. He’s expected to travel to South Korea in March for a nuclear security summit and to Colombia in April for the Summit of the Americas. He’s also likely to visit Mexico in June for the G-20 economic summit.
Two other major international gatherings — the NATO summit and the G-8 economic meeting — will be held in Chicago, giving Obama a chance to promote his standing in the international community on his home turf.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/dec/31/2012-obama-press-ahead-without-congress/?page=all#pagebreak
1-4-12
"The pyramid of government-and a republican government may well receive that beautiful and solid form-should be raised to a dignified altitude: but its foundations must, of consequence, be broad, and strong, and deep. The authority, the interests, and the affections of the people at large are the only foundation, on which a superstructure proposed to be at once durable and magnificent, can be rationally erected." --James Wilson
1-3-12
The Year in Obama Scandals -- and Scandal Deniers
Michelle Malkin
With 2011 drawing to a close, it is time to account. As an early-and-often chronicler of Chicago-on-the-Potomac, I am amazed at the stubborn and clingy persistence of President Barack Obama's snowblowers in the media. See no scandal, hear no scandal, speak no scandal.
Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan asserted in May -- while Operation Fast and Furious subpoenas were flying on Capitol Hill -- that "one of the least remarked upon aspects of the Obama presidency has been the lack of scandals." Conveniently, he defines scandal as a "widespread elite perception of wrongdoing."
So as long as left-wing Ivy League scribes refuse to perceive something to be a scandal -- never mind the actual suffering endured by the family of murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, whose death came at the hands of a Mexican cartel thug wielding a Fast and Furious gun walked across the southern border under Attorney General Eric Holder's watch -- there is no scandal!
Self-serving much?
Mother Jones' Kevin Drum likewise proclaimed: "Obama's presidency has so far been almost completely free of scandal."
This after the year kicked off in January with the departure of lying eco-radical czar Carol Browner. In backroom negotiations, she infamously bullied auto execs to "put nothing in writing, ever." The previous fall, the White House's own oil spill panel had singled out Browner for misleading the public about the scientific evidence for the administration's Draconian drilling moratorium and "contributing to the perception that the government's findings were more exact than they actually were."
The Interior Department inspector general and federal judges likewise blasted drilling ban book-cooking by Browner and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who falsely rewrote the White House drilling ban report to doctor the Obama-appointed panel's own overwhelming scientific objections to the job-killing edict.
In February, federal judge Martin Feldman in Louisiana excoriated the Obama Interior Department for defying his May 2010 order to lift its fraudulent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling in the Gulf. He called out the administration's culture of contempt and "determined disregard" for the law.
This spring saw rising public anger over the preferential Obamacare waiver process (which I first reported on in September 2010). Some 2,000 lucky golden ticket winners were freed from the costly federal mandates -- including a handful of fancy restaurants in Aloha Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco district, the entire state of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's Nevada, and scores of local, state and national Big Labor organizations, from the Service Employees International Union and Teamsters on down. Meanwhile, as The Hill newspaper reported last month, other not-so-lucky Republican-led states seeking waivers, such as Indiana and Louisiana, were rejected.
But it wasn't just Republicans objecting to the president's arbitrary Obamacare fiats. In July, congressional Democrats turned on the monstrous federal health bureaucracy known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The constitutionally suspect panel -- freed from normal public notice, public comment and public review rules -- would have unprecedented authority over health care spending and an expanding jurisdiction of private health care payment rates.
Obama's health and human services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, faced separate legal questions over her overseer role in a hair-raising document-shredding case when she served as governor of Kansas. In October, a district judge in the Sunflower State suspended court proceedings in a high-profile criminal case against the abortion racketeers of Planned Parenthood. Bombshell court filings showed that Kansas health officials "shredded documents related to felony charges the abortion giant faces" and failed to disclose it for six years.
That same month, Bloomberg News columnist Jonathan Alter gushed: "There is zero evidence ... of corruption. Where is it?"
Alter's declaration of the "Obama Miracle" came just weeks after the politically driven half-billion-dollar Solyndra stimulus "investment" went bankrupt, prompting an FBI raid and ongoing criminal and congressional probes of the solar company funded by top White House bundler and visitor George Kaiser.
As Solyndra and an avalanche of other ongoing green subsidy scams erupted, so did the LightSquared debacle -- a federal broadband boondoggle involving billionaire hedge fund managers and Obama donors Philip Falcone and George Soros. In September, two high-ranking witnesses -- William Shelton, the four-star general who heads the Air Force Space Command, and National Coordination Office for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Director Anthony Russo -- exposed how the White House had pressured them to alter their congressional testimony and play down concerns about LightSquared's interference threat to military communications.
The White House continues to block efforts to gain information about the Federal Communications Commission's approval of a special waiver for the company, even as new government tests this month showed that the company's "signals caused harmful interference to the majority of ... general purpose GPS receivers."
The Obama White House closed out the year with Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri demanding a probe of the smelly $443 million no-bid smallpox antiviral pill contract with Siga Technologies -- controlled by big lefty donor Ron Perelman. Then there was the small matter of massive voter fraud in Indiana, where a Democratic official resigned amid allegations that "dozens, if not hundreds," of signatures were faked to get Obama on the state primary ballot in 2008. And while Americans busied themselves with the holidays, White House and Democratic campaign officials were dumping more than $70,000 in contributions from another deep-pocketed contributor -- scandal-plagued pal and former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, who oversaw the collapse of MF Global.
All this -- and so much more -- yet erstwhile "conservative" journalist Andrew Sullivan of Newsweek/The Daily Beast scoffed, "Where are all the scandals promised by Michelle Malkin?"
There's none so blind as those who will not see.
1-2-12
"To form a new Government, requires infinite care, and unbounded attention; for if the foundation is badly laid the superstructure must be bad." --George Washington, letter to John Augustine Washington, 1776
1-1-12
Happy New Year!!!
