Rilaly's Blog
Simple Truths

Jan
27

Buffet cries foul on secretary’s critics

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Warren Buffet, the oracle of Omaha, and chairman of the Berkshire Hathaway mutual fund, launched his secretary into the limelight by saying that it’s unfair that she pays more in federal income taxes than he does.  The first question many have had is if we’re going to reform this nation’s tax code based on how much this particular secretary pays in federal income taxes, shouldn’t we know how much she makes?  Both Buffet and Ms. Bosanek have said that that’s private information. Buffet did announce that she’s paying 35.8%, and he’s paying 17.4%.  Based upon those numbers, the next logical question is how are each of you declaring your income, as earned income or as dividends or capital gains?  Buffet’s response to these questions, thus far, has been to call them personal attacks against Ms. Bosanek.  He’s amplified his response by saying these criticisms are ‘ridiculous’.

In an interview with The Omaha World-Herald, Buffet said none of the online guesses about Bosanek’s salary are right, and the critics are missing his point.  The next logical question to that statement is what is your point?  Do you want to raise capital gains taxes and discourage investment in this country?  Knowing Mr. Buffet’s position and stature in this country, one would think that that would be anathema to him, as he should understand how vital private investment is to the companies in this nation and the nation as a whole.  Buffet has decided not to calrify his point for us in this manner.  He simply wants his complaints about tax rates taken on face value, and he wants the statements he makes about the general unfairness of the tax code to be left as a general complaint.

“I’m saying she is being treated unfairly in the tax code, as are tens of millions of others, compared to me,” Buffett said.  “They shouldn’t change the rates on all the other people.  They should change mine.”

If Buffet is solely upset about the amount he is paying, he could simply give the government more.  He has that opportunity.  There is a box on the tax form that allows you to give more than what is due.  Simply check that box and give the federal government more than you owe.  Doing so, should relieve Mr. Buffet, and his ilk, of the guilt of paying less in their federal taxes than anyone else.  Another argument that is being made is why do we always have to increase taxes to achieve fairness?  Why don’t we simply lower the federal income taxes of all the Ms. Bosaneks around the nation?  In doing this, we wouldn’t be punishing anyone unfairly for the manner in which they make money or the amount they make.

The criticism being leveled against the Buffet rule is not a personal attack against Ms Bosanek.  It is a study of the federal tax code, and its fairness, with Ms. Bosanek as the symbol of this unfairness, a symbol that happened to be created by Mr. Buffet.

Is Mr. Buffet saying that capital gains taxes should be raised?  I’ve looked, and I’ve listened, and I don’t anywhere that Mr. Buffet was ever specific about these claims.  Buffet, and subsequently Barack Obama, just want to lay out the claim that it’s unfair that his secretary Ms. Debbie Bosanek should be taxed at a higher rate than Buffet is regardless of how they’re taxed respectively.  He doesn’t want you to examine tax rates and how they;re applied.  He doesn’t want you to examine the reason why capital gains rates are lower than earned income rates either.  To those who have attempted to analyze, scrutinize, and get to the bottom of this unfairness, Mr. Buffet has come to her rescue:

“They can’t attack the facts, so they attack the person. It’s ridiculous.”

Mr. Buffet won’t give us the facts though.  His argument is a bit like the guy who claims he was taken out of context then refuses to put these statements in context for us.  Buffet won’t give us the facts of his argument, so we are left his projections and fuzzy math.  Then when we make projections based on his fuzzy math, he says ‘these projections are way off’ (out of context) and ‘ridiculous’ without clarification.

Very few of us can make a living on our investments alone.  Most of us invest and seek dividends as supplemental income.  It’s this supplemental income that is now being taxed at the 15% capital gains rate.  Our annual income is usually taxed much higher.  For the purpose of adding in round figures, let’s say that I make $100,000.00 a year in annual income.  According to 2011 federal income tax figures, I would be taxed at between 25%-28%.  That would leave me with $75,000 after taxes.  Let’s say I buy and sell a stock long-term with that money.  If that’s the case, I am taxed 15% on the amount that I have gained on the sale, so if I made $10,000 in investment profit then I would have $8,500 of that profit after capital gains taxes are taken.  If I lose money on that investment, I am only able to declare $3,000 in losses regardless of amount of the loss.  If I gain on that investment, my principle amount is still $75,000, but anything over that is taxed at 15%.  The principle amount is not double taxed, but the investment profit is.  If you up the capital gains rate, fewer people are going to be as inclined to take such a gamble.  They’d just as soon put it in a proverbial hole and make nothing on that money than take the risk of loss if their gains are taxed higher.  Warren Buffet has the luxury of already having a boatload of supplemental income, and he can gamble that away without too much fear of altering his current lifestyle.  It’s more of a game to him.  To some of us, that supplemental income is everything.  Again, most of us don’t have the luxury Warren Buffet has of deriving the bulk of our income via dividends or capital gains, so most of us are not taxed at 15% as a result.

Buffet’s statement is confusing on so many levels.  He says that he’s only taxed 17.4%, and that that’s unfair compared with the 35.8% that his secretary pays.  Some sites have Warren Buffet’s nominal salary as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway at $100,000 in annual taxed income.  Buffet’s wife died, and he hasn’t remarried from what I can see, so Buffet should be taxed at 28% if his sole argument were on that reported $100,000 a year.  If that isn’t his nominal salary, and he’s telling the truth about being taxed at 17.4%, then his annual salary would have to be between $8,501 – $34,500 annually according to the 2011 federal income and tax brackets.  If that’s the case, then he should be audited, because we all know he makes more than that.  We shouldn’t be penalizing all millionaires for Buffet’s malfeasance in this scenario, and we shouldn’t be changing our nation’s federal tax code based on his fuzzy math.

As for Ms. Bosanek, she would only be taxed 35.8% (according to the 2011 federal income and tax brackets) if she were making $379,151.00+ and married and filing jointly.  If she files jointly, of course, we would need to know her husband’s salary for thorough analysis, but we don’t have that information, so we could only go with what we know.  If she files separately, then she would have to make 189,576+.  If these numbers are to be taken seriously, combined with Buffet’s numbers and their relative tax brackets, then Buffet pays Ms. Bosanek more than he makes…Unless, of course, you count investments and capital gains and dividends.

Buffett was quoted in the Times of London, about five years ago, saying he pays his secretary $60,000 a year.  If that’s the case, and she files jointly with her husband, she would only be paying 15%…if her husband didn’t make a dime for that year.  If that’s the case, then Buffet is paying more at 17.4%.  That, of course, defeats Buffet and Obama’s entire argument, so they prefer to say her salary is private.  I understand the need for privacy, of course, but one has to figure that if Ms. Bosanek’s salary bolstered their argument, Obama would encourage Buffet to encourage Ms. Bosanek to not be so private about her annual salary.

Buffet claims that criticism of Ms. Bosanek is ‘ridiculous’, but again it’s not criticism of her individually.  It’s critical analysis of her being used as a symbol for why we need tax reform in this country.  Mr. Buffet sent her out into the public as a talking point.  Buffet and Obama sent her to sit in the State of the Union address as a symbol of why we need reform, and if they’re going to hold her out as the reason we need to radically change the tax structure at this point in our history, shouldn’t we evaluate, and analyze, and scrutinize Buffet’s statements and Ms. Bosanek’s salary and the true nature of taxation in this country regardless of how Mr. Buffet feels about it?

Categorized in Nebraska Issues, politics, Simple Truths, Social Issues and The Thoughts of Neighbors
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Jan
26

Stressed out, but working, in Omaha

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Omaha is one of the top telemarketing markets in America.  I’ve heard that this is due to the fact that we are one of the most plain spoken people in America today.  Me thinks it also has something to do with the fact that the cost of living is low in Omaha, and as a result so are the wages.

Restaurants are also huge in Omaha.  The marketing line on restarurants in Omaha is: “If you can make it in Omaha, you can probably make it anywhere.”  Again, this may be due to the wages and the cost of living, but Omaha has also been said to have some of the most common tastes in America.

I list the traits of Omaha in this manner to lay the foundation for the fact that I know that working in Omaha is the same as working in Duluth, Albuquerque, Monroe, and Pocatello.  If something is going right in America, it’s usually going right in Omaha, likewise if times are getting tough.  Telemarketing and restaurant jobs are all over America, so I know that my plight in the workforce is no different than any other unqualified worker in any part of America, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to hold back.  I know I’m lucky to have a job, but I’m over that.  I usually get over it about two weeks in when the reality of what I have to do slides down on me.

A rule of thumb I had until the last year was that the more they pay you, the worse they treat you.  Until recently, I believed that the less they pay you, the more enjoyable the job.  Sure, they treat you like a grunt and make you stand in a certain area for hours at a time, they don’t want you to talk to your neighbors, and they discourage smiling in a roundabout way.  Other than that though, most of these bad jobs are largely stress free.  They know you feel lucky to have a job, and they take advantage of that, but they usually don’t treat you like a dog when you’re making peanuts.

The telemarketing jobs that are in Omaha usually go this way.  They send you in for a week’s worth of training, and they cover some of the basics of what it is you’re going to be doing, but that aspect of the job soon becomes irrelevant when they start in on the sales training.  The entry level customer service positions of these companies do not generate revenue for the company anymore, so they’ve brought in think tank types to try to generate some sort of revenue out of these positions. As a result of this, customer service is not the goal of these positions anymore.  This is why when you call a company to get your cable fixed, the agent you’re speaking with probably knows little to nothing about your cable box.  They’ll hit the reset button and ask you to watch the box, they’ll diagram your problem with you and ask you to do a lot of stuff from your home, but they really know little to nothing about your actual problem.  If they don’t transfer you to a “specialist” they’ll send a guy out to your place for forty bucks, or they’ll just simply pitch products on you until you get angry and go to the home office.  They won’t get in trouble for this either, because they’ve hit all of their bullet points, and they’ve delivered their sales pitch in a manner that allows them to pass their quality reviews even though you didn’t get anything fixed.

To train you in these sales strategies, these companies send in inspirational coaches to pump you up and make you think that you’re the bee’s knees.  They ask you what your dreams are, and they’ll get you all dream-oriented, then they’ll ask you how you can apply these dreams to your work.  This latter point will not be something they say outwardly, but they’ll quickly bring you back to the sales training soon after talking about your dreams to get you associating the two together.  Their goal is to get you focused on sales, their goal is to get you to get the cusotmer focused away from their problem and onto the products the company offers, and their goal is to get you whooping and hollering when any agent makes a sale.

This whole psychological game reminds me of detentions in grade school.  Detentions in grade school were an hour after school.  No big deal right?  Well, it was among the grunts.  We grunts talked among ourselves and said: “Gretchen just got a detention!” and we’d laugh behind our hands at her.  We’d all ask her the specifics of it, and she would either plead her innocence or say she didn’t care about detentions.  We all knew she did.  We knew we did when we were on the other end of this conversation.  The tale of her wrongdoing would spread like Grecian throughout that day, until Gretchen was forced to walk around with a proverbial, scarlet letter ‘D’ on her head.  She was ostracized, talked about, and made fun of.  She was the subject of scuttlebutt among those of us who needed something to talk about for a day.  We generated this hype, we did this to ourselves, and we made something that was largely no big deal the event of the day.  If you can get them to believe it, this told me, you can get them to behave, and you can get them to do anything you want.

To implore the tactics of group mentality I first saw in grade school, the company posts your sales before all.  This is to leave you feeling proud or humiliated on a relative basis.  It’s to get you motivated.  Then the big boss, we’ll call him Arnie, steps out of his office, and he walks near you, and he ocassionally graces you with a smile, but he never pets you for that would make you feel like a dog.  “How are you doing?” he may ask you if you’re a top performer.  “How are the sales numbers?” he will ask you.  He may then talk about how many sales Joanie made for the day, and he says that within earshot of Joanie, and Joanie smiles and blushes and tries to think of something to say, but her throat is dry.  She is overwhelmed, and she will probably go home and cry to her husband, and she may say it’s her greatest day ever without knowing why she said it.

If you’re on the bottom of this ladder, you get the proverbial scarlet letter attached to you.  You get talked about, and people laugh behind a hand at you.  You may be having a tough time, but at least you’re not at the bottom.  At least you’re not Jeff.  Then, when you are Jeff, you wish you could be Jeff, because at least he learned from his mistakes.  When you reach the point that you join Jeff in mocking Joanie, you’re in.  They got you by the short ones.  You’re their marionette from that point forward.

To get the marionettes amped and ready to run through walls, one of these firms hired an attractive female to train us on the sales portion of the job.  The lead trainer, the one who trained us on the other minutiae of the job, was homely and mousy.  When we were first introduced to this mousy and homely lead trainer, I wondered why the company made her a trainer.  Sure, she knew her stuff backwards and forward, and she had enough experience on the job to be able to flip out any answer on a dime without having to look it up, but her looks were such that she wouldn’t be able to inspire us to do anything beyond that which we were capable.  The answer to my quandary stepped forward a couple of days later in the form of the attractive female they chose to train us on the sales aspect of the job.  She was thin, attractive, and cute.  She was everything we wanted to be.  She was the combination of cute and thin and attractive that for centuries men have walked through fire to save just to see her smile.

We’ve all heard the studies about how students outperform their natural abilities when their teacher is attractive, but when you combine that with cute you can get them to run through walls for you.  When I write cute as opposed to attractive, I mean personable, I mean fun, and I mean the type of person that is the opposite of the aloof blonde with the incredible figure.  I’m talking about the type of person that makes you feel like you can be one of them, and that they’re one of you.

After implementing this association, this cute sales trainer let us know she was driven hard to succeed, and through implication how driven we would have to be if we, in fact, wanted to be one with her.  She asked us our dreams, and she was impressed with every one of them.  She had us write our dreams down on paper for further association, and she asked us if we’ve made any progress towards those dreams.  She was attractive and cute and she was impressed with us, and we were ready to take on the world to show her that we were one of her, until we got on the phone.

When we got on the phone, we realized how poorly trained we were.  Either that or we put so little prominence on what the mousy, lead trainer had to tell us that we didn’t retain.  In fairness to the employers, and the mousy trainer, most of the material these telemarketing companies teach is so overwhelming that you may not be able to train the employees to comprehension in six weeks.  So, they give you databases to find this information to answer customer questions.  The databases are usually poor and difficult to navigate, and you usually have two to three minutes per call to properly navigate them to answer the caller’s questions.  Then, you have to take what that attractive cute, sales trainer gave you and put it into play on an individual who is disgruntled that it took you two to three minutes to navigate the incomprehensible databases to sort of, somewhat, kind of answer their question.  They give you coaches, and if the coaches are around to answer your question, they usually don’t have a quality answer that fits the individual question the customer has asked you.   They give you an Instant Message (IM) board full of tenured agents to answer your questions, and in the beginning this is great, because all of the questions were so basic.  When the questions start to become more advanced, your questions sit on the IM board and roast away while your customer impatiently waits for the sort of, somewhat, kind of answer their question.  A friend of mine said: “I’ve had fast food jobs, and I’ve never been this stressed out!”

Here’s another key to their success: It’s all on you.  You get poorly trained, the availability of coaches is sporadic, the website is awful, the knowledge database is almost as bad, and the IM board is filled with people who have answers that aren’t as helpful as the coaches are, and you hang up on the call feeling like it’s your fault that you sort of, somewhat, kind of answered the customer’s question.  You feel like you didn’t pay enough attention in training, you feel like a dunce for not being able to navigate the website or the database, and you get the feeling that you didn’t properly ask the customer’s question of the coach or the IM board.  You can’t help it, you’re human, and you feel doubly flawed when you get back on the phone and the customer tells you that you didn’t answer their question.  There aren’t many people who can survive training, go through the list of help that I’ve provide above, and still think that it’s not their fault that the customer’s question didn’t get answered properly.  Most people think it’s on them.

In another job, I had a New York trainer who was very impatient.  If we didn’t remember what he said last Tuesday, about a specific product, he would raise his voice and get impatient with us.  “I told you that last Tuesday!” he would yell.  The yelling and impatience he showed intimidated all of us against asking for verification for something we may have forgotten among the one thousand things he crammed into the week.  The New Yorker then told us about product Z at the tail end of a training class. “I’m going to be blunt,” he said, “This corporation does not care about this product.  It does generate some calls, but we’re not going to spend a whole lot of time on it.  The company makes no money on this product.”  Guess what product we call takers received the most calls on?  You’re right!  So, we had to navigate the impossibly poor website, and the poor database, to try to figure out the answer.  Then, when the caller sits on the line for what feels like ten minutes, but was probably two, we had to churn that caller onto the fat, New Yorker sales pitch.

In both of these jobs, the statistical measurements concerned sales.  There is very little prominence placed on customer service, but of course adequate customer service leads to sales.  One plus one equals two.  A caller is more apt to purchase a product from a representative they deem to be competent.  A caller feels validated when you are able to answer their question before moving onto the sale.

The most recent job has implored a new aspect of the job I haven’t experienced thus far: The secret shopper. The secret shopper (or mystery shopper) for those not acquainted with the term, is a person who pretends to be a shopper and tests the quality of your service skills.  The secret shopper, in this particular job, seeks to push you to the limit and test your resolve, your temerity, and frustration levels.  I’m sure many of you are saying that that’s a great idea, but when it happens in call after call after call, day after day, and week after week, you get a little burned out.  They’re never rude, but they try to give you your worst call you’ve ever had in call after call after call day after day, and week after week.  They’re the impatient, but polite customer, and they’re the customer that is aghast when you cannot find an answer to their obscure question that you can’t find in the poor database or the impossible website, because you were never trained on it properly.  This happens on a daily basis, and it is most assuredly going to happen for the tenure of my stay at the company.  When I asked a coach about the secret shoppers she said, “There’s a whole team of them.” She said, “The corporation that leased out this work to us is regretting the fact that they bought the contract.”  She basically told me that the company who leased out their work services was looking for a way to break the contract without having to pay the fines for doing so.  In other words, if these secret shoppers can break a bunch of employees and get them to swear or be rude, the corporation can end their contract with the company by providing them a list of responses from these employees, and everything will look fine in the single script, because the secret shopper wasn’t entirely rude in that chat.  He may have been overly demanding, a little critical of the customer service agent’s skills, and on the border of rude, but that doesn’t become apparent in one chat.  So, you get your contract back, and you’ve only left one employee unemployed and a little more insane, all for an hour’s wage that was just a bit over minimum.

As I said, the job market in Omaha is probably no different than anywhere else in the world, but when you’re not qualified to do anything else you’re subjected to all of these fly-by-night companies that have incomplete ways of doing things.  Every parent who has a drifting young one who does not know what he wants to do for a living, should have them read this blog.

Categorized in The Thoughts of Neighbors, Simple Truths, Social Issues and Nebraska Issues
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Jan
24

Bob Kerry mulls Senate run

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Bob Kerrey isn’t yet a U.S. Senate candidate, but he’s getting lambasted on the airwaves by a conservative group with deep pockets.

The television and radio advertisements label Kerrey an “East Coast liberal.” They were bought last week by Americans for Prosperity-Nebraska, a group tied to a national organization supported by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch.

The group is running the ad in the Omaha and Lincoln television market, and on radio stations across the state. In all, about $105,000 in advertisements were purchased, said Brad Stevens, state director of the group.

He noted that the nonprofit group does not have to disclose its donors, but said that more than 1,000 Nebraskans have donated to the group.

Kerrey is considering a return to Nebraska and a run for his old U.S. Senate seat, more than a decade after he decided not to seek re-election and moved to New York City.  He said Monday that he expects to make a decision “soon,” about the bid.

A former Nebraska governor, Kerrey has said if he decides to run, he would return home and re-establish his residency.

He also has argued that he planned to spend more time in Nebraska before he considered a run for the Senate.

In the television ad, Kerrey is accused of “ditching” the state a decade ago and of wanting to return home to spread an “East Coast liberal agenda.”

Specifically, they note that he has said he would not vote to repeal President Barak Obama’s controversial health-care law.

Kerrey has argued that parts of the law were imperfect but that it does not need to be repealed. He said if he were to win election to the Senate, he would work to improve the law.

http://www.omaha.com/article/20120123/NEWS01/701249997/0#ad-kerrey-an-east-coast-liberal

Even in the local, Omaha media outlets one never hears who is funding ads designed to make Republicans look bad.  How many Nebraska ads are characterized as those run by George Soros?  When it’s a Democrat that looks bad, we get sources and characterization of those funding the ad, and we get attempts to diminish the ad before we even read the article about it.

If you’ve read the stories of Kerry’s mulling, you’d think that the only people against Kerry’s proposed run are Karl Rove and the Koch brothers.  From what I hear that’s not the end of the list.  People from small town Nebraska and…Omaha are saying that this guy has a long road ahead of him if he hopes to win my vote.  Ask Nelson how easy it is to win a Senate seat without Omaha, ask Pete Ricketts.

Everyone knows that the only reason Ben Nelson isn’t running for re-election is his vote for Obamacare.  Everyone knows that Tea Party pressure dug at Nelson to such a degree, over the vote, that he couldn’t take it anymore.  Why someone who publicly supports the same health care initiative that Ben Nelson wouldn’t even consider mentioning in a pizza parlor would run for the seat Nelson once occupied has many Nebraskans scratching their head.  He may as well wear a Longhorn cap to a press conference just to see if he can secure the Longhorn constiuency here.  (There are some here, trust me.)

Why would the DNC turn to Kerry in a last ditch effort to secure the seat with someone more prone to vote for the Health Care bill than Nelson?  Is it celebrity status?  Do the Democrats think that we yokels in the cornfields will get so impressed with him that we’ll fall all over ourselves to get some star-studded representation in the Senate?  Do they think that Nebraskans will greet him like Elvis returning home to Memphis?

Kerry’s new tag line is: “I’ve probably paid more income and property taxes than all the Republican candidates combined.” Ok, fair enough, you have made a ton of money in this state, but how many times, while president of the liberal New School, did you espouse conservative, Nebraska views.  How many times did you even mention this state in your time in the Big Apple Bob?

The question Nebraskans are asking is why?  Why would he run when, even if we didn’t live in an age of internal polling, Kerry could at least read tea leaves.  He would be able to see that the less three elections have trended away from liberalism in Nebraska.  Sure, Obama won the Omaha district in the last election, but as far as Senators are concerned we went from Chuck Hagel to Ben Nelson to Mike Johanns.  It’s trending the opposite way for Kerry.   Now we hear polling numbers say that 60% of Nebraskans think Obamacare is a bad idea, and Kerry is publicly stating he’s for it.  He says he wants to change it, but he doesn’t say how.  That’s a little critical Mr. Kerry, and 60% of Nebraskans are going to demand to hear how you’re going to change it.  Would you make it more government oriented or less?

Kerry once told a group of New Yorkers that the longer he lives in New York City the further to the left he gets on ObamaCare.  “From My Standpoint, It Isn’t Just Because I Live In Greenwich Village Now – The Longer I Live Here, The Further To The Left I Get On Health Care.” (Bob Kerrey, Remarks At Tishman Auditorium, New York City, 9/16/09)

“I Really Don’t Get How The Public Option Got Demonized So Badly, And Why It Became So Scary.” (Bob Kerrey, Remarks At Tishman Auditorium, New York City, 9/16/09)

“I Don’t Understand Why The Public Option Isn’t Seen For What It Is, Which Is A Nationalization, A Creating Of A National System.” (Bob Kerrey, Remarks At Tishman Auditorium, New York City, 9/16/09) Kerrey Said If He Were “A Right Wing Governor,” He’d Be For “Socializing” Insurance, And “Creating A Federal System Of Insurance.” KERREY: “So let’s say I’m a right wing governor …I’d be for socializing the insurance part. I’d be for creating a federal system of insurance.” (Bob Kerrey, Remarks At Tishman Auditorium, New York City, 9/16/09)

KERREY THANKED HARRY REID FOR HIS WORK ON OBAMACARE Kerrey Praised Majority Leader Reid For Taking On Health Care, Saying “We Need More Harry Reids.” “Former Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., who served during the Clinton administration’s failed health care reform initiative in 1993, said that Reid deserves ‘a tremendous amount of credit’ for taking on ‘the most difficult, the most emotional, and the most complicated issue in politics.’ Kerrey added, ‘We need more Harry Reids.’” (Alexis Simendinger, “Reid Faces His Biggest Test In Health Care Reform,” The National Journal, 11/21/09).

Kerry claimed he knew that that Climate Change Legislation Would Destroy Jobs, But He Believed It Was Possible To Create More Jobs Than It Destroyed “With The Right Investment Strategy.” Does this “right investment strategy” revolve around Solyndra and Beacon Power?

“As Nebraskans get reacquainted with Bob Kerrey, they’ll be surprised to learn that Kerrey cites his 11 years in New York City as the reason he’s an unabashed supporter of ObamaCare,” said National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) spokesman Jahan Wilcox. “Kerrey even supports the public option, which is an ominous sign for a person looking to replace the man who made government-run healthcare the law of the land.”

While running for President in 1992, Kerrey vowed to create a government-run healthcare system that would use taxpayer dollars to fund abortions – something he would later have in common with Senator Ben Nelson.

Kerry’s Senate record is spotty, but we do know that he voted against a partial birth abortion bill in 1997, he voted to save Bill Clinton’s presidency and later voted against overturning Clinton’s veto of the ban in 1999.

“Between his support for taxpayer-funded abortions and his repeated votes against a ban on partial birth abortions, Bob Kerrey is clearly out of touch with our state,” Fahelson said. “Ben Nelson alienated pro-life Nebraskans with his 60th vote for Obamacare, and Bob Kerrey’s equally indefensible record on abortion will not soon be forgotten.”

Kerry had said, in a KFAB interview, that he believes “America is headed in a dangerous direction,” but does anyone believe that Bob Kerry will stand tall before Harry “We need more Harry Reids” Reid and tell him that we need to cut spending?

Most people don’t think Bob Kerry will strive for Harry Reid status, and he’s simply enjoying his last fifteen minutes of fame.  It has to be intoxicating to have so many of the power brokers of our nation chasing after you, but at the end of the day he has to have seen what Ben Nelson went through in his final term.  Even an obscure blogger from Omaha doesn’t need the sophisticated, internal polling a potential candidate has to know that this is an impossible venture.  The impossible does happen though, and we all know that, but we should also know that if we decide to put more Bob Kerrys in office we’ll probably end up getting more Harry Reids when it comes to fiscal responsibility and more Harry “you can smell the public coming down the hall a mile away” Reids charm in office.

http://negop.org/news/bob-kerreys-greatest-hits-an-indefensible-record-on-abortion/

Categorized in Nebraska Issues, politics, Simple Truths, Social Issues and The Thoughts of Neighbors
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Jan
19

Can Mitt Romney transform America?

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Former Governor Mitt Romney claims he’s going to give it one, last ditch effort to try and save America if he’s elected president.  Mitt has made a claim that he’s willing to be a one-term President if it means overturning everything that’s been done the last twelve years—particularly the last four.

Personally, I’m a little tired of hearing Romney say he’s going to overturn Obamacare.  It’s probably why I would not make a great politician, a great musician, or an ad executive.  I loathe repetition.  I can’t stand it, but I do know that if you want a human being to know your message, you have to repeat it over and over and over again, until it sinks home.

Congressman Michele Bachman’s warning also doesn’t sit well with me when I hear Romney simply state that he will overturn this effort to transform America into a socialist country.  Her warning is that this mammoth piece of legislation, we call Obamacare, cannot be overturned in the manner Romney is suggesting.  She warned that by the time a Republican takes the seat, parts of Obamacare will be so entrenched that it will have to be fought line by line.  Her point was that no one has the temerity, or the knowhow, to do what needed to be done to erase Obamacare from our daily lives.  Her point was that only a legislator that knows the minutiae needed to weed out the damage that Obamacare promises to do to this country.

The question that Bachman raises is a good one.  Another question might be can a legislator weather the storm that is sure to follow any attempt to overturn and weed out the elements of Obamacare and all of the socialist legislation that has been passed over the last twelve years?  Or, would it take a proven leader, a Governor, to take on tasks that are unpopular in the short term for long term results?

Does Romney have the temerity to be such an unpopular president to overturn everything and rid our Republic of all of the waste, fraud, and abuse that have become so entrenched in our government?  Romney supporters would probably say, sure, he’s a good man.  Look at what he faced so far in Bain Capital, as Governor, and as a candidate for the Senate.  He’s a man who knows how to make tough decisions, and he has a proven track record.  But does he have the temerity it will take to fight back the media?  Does he have what it takes to weather the riots that are sure to follow some of that which he overturns: A la Greece, a la France, a la Ireland?  You take away their goodies, and some people don’t shrug and go out and get a job.  They riot, they burn stuff, and they occupy.  After showing that mayhem, the media will show your face and your press secretary taking questions, and you’re supposed to plod on with your agenda like nothing happened.  There aren’t a lot of people who can weather such a storm and remain teathered to their idea that what they’re trying to do is better for America in the long-term.  Most politicians will scale back a little bit to show that they’re kinder and gentler.  Most people can’t handle it when the onslaught that begins to weave its way out of NY Times headlines and columns, to the evening news programs, to the late night talk shows, to Saturday Night Live, and onto to the Marys in accounting who say: “I was with Romney when he did such and such, but he didn’t have to do such and such, that hurts such and such a people.”  Most people want the Marys of this world to like them, and they’re not willing to have their face put to the repetition.  What Romney is saying from the podium sounds great, but it’s ensconced in theory and sent out to friendly crowds where it plays well, but will it play as well in debates and in legislation and onto reality?  Will he have the temerity of a Reagan who watched all of this going on around him and pushed forward with what he believed in?

Romney says if he wins, he’s going to transform America back to what it used to be before moderate Republicans and liberal Democrats took the reins and progressively transformed this country into what it is today.  Many have said that Romney is a moderate on some social issues, but most have no question that he’s as close to a pure Capitalist as we currently have running for office.  He really believes Capitalism is the way to go, and he’s been able to defend his position against those who have called him a vulture capitalist.  He deftly avoids backing down on his position, but is it because he believes it, or is it political know how?

It’s hard to win me over with material that comes from a podium, but when one quiety laments that his ideas may rub some people the wrong way once it’s put into play, and that mirrors my beliefs I get so excited I’m bouncing off the walls.  It makes one think he might actually do this, but whether he has what it takes to get it done is another question altogether.  He appears to have a strong faith, and thus a strong constitution, that can combat all of which I described above.  He avoids full-fledged attacks that vet his positions on issues, but does that mean that he’s simply well-schooled in the art of debate, or that he believes in what he stands for in a manner that suggests that he might become an excellent statesmen?

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Jan
12

The things I hate about humans

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I hate people who think entirely too often with their heart.  I understand that the heart, the emotive component of the brain, has a lot of say in what we do and think, but some people just let that emotive component have far too much sway in what they do and say.  I’m a man who believes that logic rules.  Logic, to my mind, is the idea that you try as hard as you can to view matters objectively.  You attempt to view matters not only from your own perspective, but from others as well.  The latter is difficult to do, because it involves viewing matters from a perspective that is not a part of your conscious and subconscious mind.  It involves removing the nature of who you are and viewing it from another’s perspective, then adding the ingredient of who you are back into the equation after the fact.  I like to think that this is what I do, but it’s tough to do consistently, because you are the one who has to live with the ramifications of your actions regardless what the other minds around you think.  A friend of mine recently inserted a third component into the equation: the gut.  Gut instinct, my friend said, introduces a combination of experiences from your conscious and subconscious mind that take into account the emotions of the heart combined with the logic of the mind that has been ingrained into the nature of the person that’s relative to that person’s upbringing, his heritage, and everything else that makes him the man who he is today.  Regardless which of the latter arguments is correct, they’re both superior to the man whose thought process is ruled by the heart.  The man whose mind is overruled by his heart tends to think anecdotally, and while he may resolve the matter in the short-term for the object of his affection, he does little good in the overall for the long-haul.

I hate the drama.  Let’s face it, most of those us who are immersed in the drama chose to be there.  Drama usually does not happen by accident.  Usually, it’s the people, places and things one chooses to surround himself with that causes the problems and the drama.  People have problems, people have situations.  I’m not talking about genuine tragedy or genuine problems.  I’m talking about the man or woman who sees a relatively simple issue and starts screaming or belittling a loved one.  Their reason for being is soon quenched when everyone and the family dog rushes to their side to ease their pain.  I know, I know, you’re not one who falls prey to their cries.  You’re the one who doesn’t listen when Mary cries.  If something goes wrong, however, and the first person you look at is Mary, you in the drama mama.  The sad thing is it works, especially if you’re good looking.  If you’re not good looking, you had better learn how to scream louder and swear more often.  It then becomes everyone’s focus to try and get Mary to stop screaming and swearing, and she achieves her goal of being the only one crying in every room she’s in.  She’s officially the drama mama.

I hate book reviewers who say that they’ve read a book in one day.  “I just read this book this afternoon.  I read it in a day.  Yes, it’s that good!”  The goal of the reviewer is not to tell you how good he thinks the book is.  It’s to tell you how fast they read the book, and how intelligent they must be to have read a book, any book, that fast.

I hate teasing.  I don’t care if it’s a radio show, or a TV show, everybody teases.  Commercials are teases, of course, but we all know that.  I’m talking about the show, or host, who says: “I’ll get into this information after the break.”  Or, the TV show that leads you to the revelation of something huge and fades to the commercial of the latest drug that aids in some form of vaginal disorder.

On that note, there’s nothing more disturbing to me than to hear explicit detail on how some particular drug will assist you in curing the most explicit malfunctions of our reproductive organs.  I understand that these commercials are hoping to educate the public as to the virtues of their product, but they end the commercials with the words, “Consult your physician to find out if this drug is right for you.”  Can’t we consult with our physician with these intimate most details of our ailment?  If you have a reproductive organ jetting blood, you should probably consult with your physician.  I’m quite sure your physician will tell you that it’s not what it’s supposed to do that, and he’ll recommend a drug to cure it.  Why do I have to hear about this though?  I know that the company is trying to niche its way into the market, because every doctor knows that product A is the perfect cure for the jetting blood, but if the customer is adamant enough about the niche product then the physician will prescribe it.  In most cases of this sort, the knowledgeable consumer is not right, but with the perfect ad, showing the perfect model that has the same ailment as you, you can niche your way into the market.  I know what they’re trying to do, I’m just sick and tired of the effort.

I hate people who know the answer after the answer was given.  How many of us are Jeopardy! experts?  How many of us knew the answer shortly after it was given?  There’s probably some psychological name given to this, but I don’t know what it is.  I just know that all of us do it.  All of us can build backwards to most answers to figure why it’s the right answer, but we just shouldn’t ask for credit for it.  Most of us get frustrated when this moment arrives, because we weren’t able to think of the answer quicker.  We all knew the answer, we just weren’t able to process it quickly enough, and we express our frustration over that fact.  There are others who begin with, “I was going to say…”  These ‘I was gonna say’ creatures actually want credit for knowing the answer after it was given.  My reply, “Well, you should’ve said something earlier” is the only thing that frustrates them.  Some of the times, they are able to draw perfect angles to the answer, but I still don’t give them credit.  “You should’ve said something earlier,” then sits like a kidney stone between us that must pass in a painful manner.

I hate cheering on sports teams.  There’s nothing more frustrating than watching my favorite team go down in flames.  I had so much hope watching them this year.  I secretely thought this was their year.  I heard the experts say that they were lacking in such and such a way, but I ignored it.  They always say stuff like that.  They’re paid to be negative.  I thought these negative comments could be overcome once they got hot, and all of their pistons started firing.  This would be it.  They finally had that guy that completed some kind of equation that I had in my mind.  Things wouldn’t go down that way this year.  Not this year!  Then it does, and the goofball, Howdy Doody look alike Eli Manning is having fun, hopping around in my team’s defense like he’s playing hopscotch, and I realize that my loved ones have been afraid of me for the last couple of minutes, and my dog is shuddering in a corner, and it dawns on me that there’s not a damned thing I could do about any of it.  Phil Donahue once said, “With all the heartbreak that is out there with rejection from lovers, economic loss, and career failures, how can you guys invest such emotion in teams, when you can’t do anything about it?”  It’s one of the few intelligent things Donahue said in his twenty some odd years of broadcasting, and I think about it every time my team goes down in flames.

I hate it when politicians say they’re going to retire or not run for a seat for any reason other than the truth.  I hate it when a Congressman says that he’s not going to run for the Senate, because the job he was sent to do in Congress is not done.  When a Governor says that he loves his current job, I’m a little less convinced that he’s lying, but the cynical side of me tells me that he would love a Senate seat.  The cynical side of me says that like our Founding Fathers, most politicians fear appearing ambitious…especially when they’re told that they’re going to lose.  When a Senator tells us that he’s retiring because he wants to spend more time with the family, everyone from his colleagues in the Senate to my five-year-old nephew knows that he’s lying.  It’s all about research and internal polling.  Internal polling tells a Congressman, a Governor, and a Senator that they’re going to lose, and that’s why they are all telling us that they’re not running for Nebraska’s Senate seat that Nebraskans chose to let Ben Nelson occupy for twelve years.  I don’t expect them to say this publicly, don’t get me wrong, but it would be nice if they could switch up their lies every once in a while.  The current rolodex of excuses is so cliché, it’s an insult to our intelligence.

I hate it when liberals say that conservatives aren’t liberals because they aren’t intelligent enough.  Tim Tebow is not a liberal, according to this liberal line of logic (?), because he was home-schooled.  The theory being, if Tebow had gone to a school and experienced more gay and lesbians in every day life, he would be more liberal.  Rush Limbaugh isn’t more liberal, because he didn’t get laid enough.  If Sean Hannity smoked a doobie every once in a while, think what a better place this world would be?  He would be more relaxed, happier, more liberal, and we could all live in peace and harmony.  Conservatism is not a choice in other words, it’s a sentence inflicted upon those who weren’t reared correctly, or who didn’t know how to live when they had their taste of freedom in college.  I know liberals will say that I’m broad brushing a little too much on this note, but I’ve read a lot of liberal literature.  I’ve read a lot of liberal blogs, and I’ve watched a lot of liberal shows.  I know that their great answer to all that plagues man is that there is no answer.  They want complex constructs.  “There are no simple solutions,” they say, “and there are no absolutes!”  Yet, when it comes to their great dilemma, why don’t more people see the way, the truth, and the light, they break it down to all of the simple solutions and absolutes listed above.  I wasn’t home-schooled though, I’ve worked with and spent time with a variety of people from every walk of life, and I’ve done all the things listed above, so why am I still not a liberal?  To paraphrase Former President Ronald Reagan, a liberal is someone who reads liberal literature.  A conservative is someone who understands it.

I hate politicians who say I was taken out of context, then we all drop it.  We move on.  Wait a second here, I want to scream to all the reporters leaving the room with this as their only note, he said it.  He shouldn’t get off scot free just saying he was taken out of context.  He should be forced to put that quote back into context for us all, so we can know what he truly meant.  He should be forced to set the record straight.

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Jan
07

Mitt Romney and electability

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“The idea that you pick the most right-wing candidate without any concern over who can win is suicidal,” Ann Coulter said in an apparent flip-flop over the presidential run of former Governor Mitt Romney.

Coulter is receiving a lot of flak for this comment.  The reason is Coulter has been saying, for years, that Republicans shouldn’t fear electing conservatives to the White House.  In recent years, she has railed against the nominations of RINOs Dole and McCain.  Throughout her career, she has railed against soft bellied Republicans.  She is now saying that remaining stubborn on a right-wing candidate is suicidal.  The comment is charged, of course, but what Coulter comment isn’t.  The question is is she right?  All of us have our issues about the candidacy of Mitt Romney, be they the second Amendment, Romneycare, or the silly flak developed over the $10,000 bet Romney issued to Perry.  All conservatives have their reasons for being against Mitt Romney.

For many, Romney will be another, in a long list of presidential elections, in which the voter votes for the lesser of two evils (if he wins the GOP nomination of course).  Others have said that they simply won’t vote if Romney wins the nomination.  Whether it be their devotion to principle, or the vain pursuit of being perceived as the smartest person in the room, some have said they won’t vote at all because Romney doesn’t adhere to their pet issue in a manner that’s conservative enough.  This is what, in my opinion, Coulter was referring to as suicidal.

The line, ‘This is the most important election in our lifetimes’ has been bandied about so often that most people laugh when you say it.  The question many have is, is it true in this case?  We’ve never had, to paraphrase Thomas Sowell, a president test our limits in the manner this president has.  FDR wasn’t this liberal say some analysts, LBJ wasn’t this liberal, and some have gone so far to state that even Woodrow Wilson wasn’t even this liberal.  No one has mentioned James Earl Carter, but it could be said that even he wasn’t even this liberal.  I know a number of people who would find this charge outrageous, but I’m thinking those people are probably factoring Carter’s disastrous post-presidency into the equation.  Not even the damage Carter did to the generations that followed his presidency could be compared to the havoc Obama has wreaked upon the capitalistic system of this country.  He has done a majority of the damage with the full support of Congress, and now he’s doing it without Congress.  “I have an obligation, as president, to do what I can without Congress,” he said recently.  The only thing that appears to have kept him, somewhat, in check is the fact that he wants to be re-elected.  In this light, and in the general scheme of things, every conservative voter must ask themselves the question ‘just how important is this issue I hold true?’

“(It) is not just, can you check off this issue, this issue, this issue, but who can you send in in the debates against Obama,” Coulter said. 

In other words, what’s your equation?  Would you rather have Obama sitting in office for another four years, because you don’t think there would be that much difference between he and Obama on your particular issue?  Are you willing to sit out this election, because you’re seeking to prove a point to the GOP?  Do you think that the GOP will never learn to nominate a “suitable” candidate if you vote for a lukewarm conservative?  As I said in a previous blog, you’re not sending a message to a bunch of Scooby-Doo, cigar smoking, suspender wearing bad guys.  You’re trying to send a message to a huge voting bloc that can be as fickle as a teenage sports fan.  You’re trying to send a message to a collective conscience of the voters who decide candidates in a primary.  They won’t change their minds based upon you what you think, Jed in Pocatello.  They collectively decide who is best for them and the nation as a whole.  In other words, if you think Romney is soft (or wrong) on your issue, you need to ask yourself is Romney will be the most formidable candidate against Obama?  The next Republican candidate, Ann says, “should be someone ‘who has run in . . . a diverse enough state that he has had to appeal to get votes from independents, from Democrats, from women. . . .’

We have 50% of the American electorate not paying federal income taxes, we have one in six on some form of government assistance, and we have $1,974,042,215,000 funding 1,607 government programs.  Some have questioned whether Obama is the great debater that some have professed him to be, but we do know that with this much government dependence, a lot of people are getting government goodies that they’re not going to be willing to give up easily.

Some have said that those who receive government goodies shouldn’t be able to vote for a politician that promises them more goodies and leads us on an escalated course of destruction.  Some have said that those who don’t pay federal taxes shouldn’t be able to vote in federal elections.  We’re not there, and we may never be, so the GOP may need someone who is able to soft sell moving away from dependence.

To those informed individuals who produce the nuggets of information that detail that Romney may be soft on such and such an issue, do you know what we’re up against here?  How educated do you think the populace is?  We’re turning to late-night comedians for our news now.  I don’t expect anyone to shape their politics based on the influence of late-night comedians, but they have carved out their own niche.  They are influential in ways similar to Oprah Winfrey was in 2008.  While no one late-night host is as influential as Oprah was, collectively they may have an equal influence.  A recent study at the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University suggests that they’re all liberal.

A Thomas Sowell column suggested that if we broke all of the conservatives and liberals into teams, we would see the true nature of the movements.  If we took the top college graduates and broke them down by profession, we would find that the A team of the liberal movement, their best and brightest, all go into politics.  The A team of the conservative movement, however, usually go into business.  They see what like-minded individuals who run for office go through, and they don’t want any part of that.  It’s human nature to want to be liked, and these people don’t want to be hated for their conservative, Constitutional, beliefs in Capitalism.  Some would say that it takes a certain kind of mettle for a man to survive the media onslaught that the media heaps on Republicans and that those of this ‘A team’ that can’t handle it are weeded out.  How many of this movement simply want no part of it?  How many top businessmen, who would’ve made excellent leaders in the public sector, saw that like-minded candidate put through the sausage grinder and said I just don’t want to go through that?

If Romney is nominated for the GOP ticket, conservatives need to ask themselves if the Jed’s in Pocatello will vote for drastic change?  The line that conservatives usually offer up is Reagan got elected as a conservative.  He promised change, and he promised to save us from the disastrous Carter years, and he welcomed all to join in on the conservative doctrine.  Fair enough, but who is the Reagan in this election?  Who can combine heart-felt conservatism with electability?  We’ve seen the candidates thus far in numerous debates, and no one has shown Reagan’s prowess in combining the two.  The country may need an artful politician to bridge the gap between the dependence we’ve built up over the last couple of generations and where we need to be.   If the A team is not up there in the GOP stratosphere of candidates, then is it suicidal to wait until that man, our man, is up there?  What if that man never steps forth?  What if he would rather work within the confines of private industry where he is lauded for his beliefs rather than castigated?  What are we conservatives left with, and is it suicidal to demand that we all wait until he’s ready to finally step forward and take the heat?  Mitt Romney may be the least of all evils, but we may need him to be the candidate that is able to combine soft-sell change with electability.

http://americanvisionnews.com/266/coulter-flips-flops-sells-out-right-wing-republicans

http://funding-programs.idilogic.aidpage.com/

http://www.billoreilly.com/column;jsessionid=5FA95CBB33A31D180690713626C29764?pid=35371

Categorized in politics and Simple Truths
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Dec
29

Senator Ben Nelson retiring from the Senate

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Nebraska’s Senator Ben Nelson made the following announcement on 12-27-2011 regarding his plans to retire. The entire letter to Nebraskans can be found here:

http://bennelson.senate.gov/press/press_releases/statement-by-senator-ben-nelson-on-his-plans-for-2012.cfm

In this letter, Nelson stated that he was bowing out, because he wanted to spend more time with his family, and that it was “time to move on.” Former Fox football analyst John Madden once said: “Anyone who tells you he’s retiring because he wants to spend more time with his family is lying.” To be fair, when Madden eventually retired in 2009, the second and final time, he said that he wanted to spend more time with the family.

Nelson’s retirement gives Republicans an edge in Nebraska, where he is the only Democrat currently elected to statewide office, and in their campaign to take over the Senate, political analysts say.

“It qualitatively changes things for Democrats” because ‘I don’t see a path to victory for Democrats in Nebraska,” said Jennifer Duffy, a Senate analyst for the non-partisan Cook Political Report. Nelson’s retirement next year “puts Republicans one seat closer to a majority.”

To wrest control of the Senate, Republicans need a net gain of four seats in next November’s elections if President Barack Obama wins a second term. A Republican victory in the presidential race would reduce the needed pickup to three seats because the vice president casts tie-breaking votes.

“It’s a pretty tough road for Democrats in Nebraska, where Obama is so unpopular,” Duffy said.

Not always a reliable vote for Democrats, Nelson secured a concession for Nebraska in return for supporting President Barack Obama’s health-care legislation over a crucial procedural hurdle in 2009. Republicans derided the provision exempting Nebraska from paying for expanded Medicaid coverage as the “Cornhusker Kickback.” Nelson later asked that all states be treated equally. He still ended up voting for it though.

A maverick in his caucus, Nelson voted against legislation in August to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, saying it “sets up a maze of convoluted procedures that will only continue the chaos and political games Nebraskans are tired of seeing.”

In 2005, when Republicans ran the Senate, Nelson was part of the bipartisan “Gang of 14” senators who agreed not to block judicial nominations except under “extraordinary circumstances.” The agreement averted a threat of legislative gridlock in the Senate over confirmation of President George W. Bush’s appointments to the federal bench.

No one would say that Senator Ben Nelson was a liberal. The National Journal tabulated his votes as a Senator and found that he voted conservative 57.7% of the time and 42.3% of the time. It was one vote that did him in the minds of most Nebraskans I know: The vote for Obamacare, and the shenanigans that went on to secure that Nelson vote. The shenanigans are what we Nebraskans call The Cornhusker kickback. How much blame does Nelson deserve for the Cornhusker kickback compromise? No one knows. In the end, he still voted for Obamacare, so no one cares.

Some have pointed to the “Cornhusker kickback”, and the penetrating ads that the GOP has run to reveal the nature of the compromise, as the number one reason that Nelson would have had a great deal of difficulty getting re-elected to Nebraska’s Senate seat. Others have pointed to the pressures that Nelson faced among extremist Democrats as one of the primary reasons that Nelson decided to retire. Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi once commented that she wouldn’t mind certain Democrats losing, because it gave her party the chance to purge those who wouldn’t toe the party line. In other words, blue dog Democrats like Nelson should fend for themselves. In other words, those without party purity would not receive the same kind of vocal support that the purists received. Pelosi was primarily speaking of House Democrats of course, but many believe that this has been a general line of thinking for most extremists Democrats. One has to wonder if the pressure from these two factions proved to be too much for Nelson.

Clear-minded Democrats understood how important Ben Nelson was to them, and they saw to it that his campaign received more than one million in campaign finances for campaign ads. Some say this was done to attempt to convince Nelson not to retire.

The DNC leadership may not have loved Nelson, but they decided to focus on the fact that he was the only Democrat elected statewide in Nebraska, and that he generally delivered a vote they would not get otherwise. They knew that having another Mike Johanns (R,NE), or Jon Thune (R, SD) would be disastrous to their attempts to pass their agenda in the Senate in other words. According to a Senate Democratic leadership aide, Senators Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer tried to convince Nelson to stay in Congress after Nelson told a Nebraska newspaper a few weeks ago he was still deciding on whether to run.

“Over the last several weeks, there were intense conversations with Reid and Schumer trying to make Nelson understand how needed he was and how valued he is as a member of the caucus,” the Senate aide said. “Ultimately they understood that this is a personal decision.”

A Democratic strategist who spoke on condition of not being identified characterized Nelson’s decision as disloyal to the party.

“He typically takes the easy way out,” the strategist said. “The party has stood by him, but when the going gets tough, he abandons the party.”

During the first two years of the Obama administration, Senator Nelson’s vote proved crucial time and again in ending Republican filibusters, and Democratic leaders were willing to go to great lengths to meet his requirements — including handing him a $100 million special Medicaid allocation as part of the health care bill that was derided as “the Cornhusker kickback’’ and eventually repudiated by Senator Nelson. Even though that was taken off the table, Nelson still decided to vote for the Obamacare legislation.

It was that one vote from Nelson that did him in. It was political suicide in the minds of Nebraskans. It was taking one sixth of the economy and nationalizing it. Nelson could’ve survived other votes, and he has in the past. He could’ve even survived voting for the Obama stimulus in 2008, but voting to change the face of this nation was unforgiveable in the minds of most Nebraskans. Others (above) can say that Obama is popular in Nebraska, but he’s not. He won one district, Omaha’s district, a destrict that has been reshaped by the state legislature. In 2006, Ben Nelson lost just about every town and city in Nebraska, in his bid for re-election, except for Omaha. The votes were so overwhelming in Omaha that Nelson won re-election. Minds have obviously changed.

For all of his conservative votes, Nelson still decided to vote for one of the most partisan pieces of legislation this country has ever seen. The pressure must have been intense for him. After casting the vote, Nelson started getting booed out of Omaha pizza joints, and he started ordering protestors’ cars towed away from in front of his offices. It hasn’t been pretty for him, and I’m sure he’s just had enough of it.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-27/democratic-senator-ben-nelson-of-nebraska-won-t-seek-re-election-next-year.html

http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/27/politics/senate-nelson/index.html

http://nationaljournal.com/magazine/house-and-senate-centrists-20110224?page=1

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/n/ben_nelson/index.html

Categorized in politics, Simple Truths and Social Issues
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Dec
23

Was Apple founder Steve Jobs a closet conservative?

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Some have called Steve Jobs the billionaire hippie, or the hippie with a business brain.  As Bill Maher has said, Jobs smoked pot and did LSD.  Jobs considered dropping acid one of the most important moments in his life, and he insisted that creative types who hadn’t dropped acid at one point in their lives could never be truly creative.  He often walked through Apple without shoes, he didn’t bathe often, he washed his feet in urinals, and he existed for many years on what he called a fruitarian diet. He was also ambitious, a college dropout, delusional, egotistical, arrogant, tyrannical, and a self-described a whole (sic!).  For all those interesting eccentricities, it is the politics and philosophies of Steve Jobs that fascinates most of us.

Some have said that the creativity exhibited in the halls of Apple computers was an example of how hippie creativity could change the world when moderated by one with a corporate exec’s mentality.  Others have said that Apple computers was one of the most controlled atmospheres in corporate America. Whatever the case was, Steve Jobs brought both mentalities to Apple, and he took great pride in the fact that Apple products combined liberal art with modern technology to change our world.

On politics:In a conversation with President Obama last year, Apple founder Steve Jobs sounded more like an out-and-out Republican, according to an excerpt from the Walter Isaacson biography:

“You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” he told Obama at the start of their meeting, insisting that the administration needed to be more business-friendly.

As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where “regulations and unnecessary costs” make it difficult for U.S. businesses. Jobs also criticized America’s education system, saying it was “crippled by union work rules,” noted Isaacson. “Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform.”

Jobs proposed allowing principals to hire and fire teachers based on merit, that schools stay open until 6 p.m. and that they be open 11 months a year.

Bill Maher on Steve Jobs:“I want to say one other thing about Steve Jobs – agree or don’t,” Maher said. “But, I know that he’s one of the few people who liberals and conservatives both like, you know, in the partisan country that we live in. And I just know that the right-wingers are going to try to claim him because he was a giant success. Please don’t do it, right-wingers. He was not one of you. He was not a corporate type. He was an Obama voting, pot-smoking Buddhist. He wasn’t one of you. So don’t try to claim Steve Jobs.
“He got fired by corporate America,” Maher continued. “Remember – he got thrown out because he was a little too innovative. He didn’t play the game the way they do.”

 

Rush Limbaugh on Steve Jobs:”Steve Jobs epitomized American exceptionalism,” Limbaugh said. “His life epitomized it. His philosophies epitomized American exceptionalism. The fact that he was a liberal, to me, was one of the greatest contradictions.”

National Review’s deputy managing editor on Jobs’ innovation contrasted with the ennui of the Occupy Wall Street movement:

“Never has the divide between the iPhone world and the politics world been so clear: I saw a bunch of people very well-served by their computers and telephones (very often Apple products) but undeniably shortchanged by our government-run cartel education system. And the tragedy for them, and for us, is that they will spend their energy trying to expand the sphere of the ineffective, hidebound, rent-seeking, unproductive political world, giving the Barney Franks and Tom DeLays an even stronger whip hand over the Steve Jobses and Henry Fords. And they, and we, will be poorer for it.”

On this note, some have said that Jobs was not a conservative or a liberal.  “He was a capitalist, and the OWS movement has no problem with capitalism…just this form of capitalism.”  Most of us are not sure what that means.  Perhaps it’s too complicated for some of us to understand.  Please see my blog for a full explanation on my confusion on the “complications” inherent in the OWS movement.

http://www.examiner.com/republican-in-omaha/ows-the-complicated-movement

On Fox News: “You’re blowing it with Fox News,” Jobs told Rupert Murdoch. “The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society.”

The great contradiction that Limbaugh alludes to can be found in the fact that nearly 100% of Jobs’ political contributions went to politicians that most consider anti-business: Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, Rahm Emanuel, and Bill Bradley to name a few.  Yet, Jobs’ decried their efforts to strangle business with their anti-business legislation and regulation.  His quotes beg them to take another look at the issues they support, but when they don’t he gives them money and obviously votes for them to state that he believes their legislation, regulation, and philosophies will run the country properly.  These contradictions don’t stop Republicans from admiring Jobs’ business model and philosophies however.  Republican politicians, such as Eric Cantor, have taken the model Jobs created to further their agenda, saying:

“Through his example, you can see that America needs more than a jobs plan. It needs a Steve Jobs plan. In a Steve Jobs Plan, those who are successful not only create good jobs and services that make our lives better, they also give back and help everyone move just a little bit further up the ladder and everybody wins.”

On charity: Steve Job is quoted as saying that he didn’t believe in giving money away.  When he came back to Apple, Jobs immediately eliminated many of Apple’s charitable projects.  The report on this stated that Jobs believed Apple should be “focusing on developing new technologies as a better use of his and Apple’s time and money.”  To be fair, when Jobs regained control of Apple, it was hemorrhaging money, so in the beginning it was just good business for him to end their altruistic efforts. Even after he brought them back in the black, however, Jobs didn’t re-establish their charitable arm.  It is only now, after Jobs has passed, that Apple’s new CEO has decided to match employee donations to charity up to $10,000.00.  Anyone who has read Arthur C. Brooks’ book “Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism” will unquestionably point to this as a sure sign that Steve Jobs was liberal.

On altruism: Jobs didn’t believe in spreading the wealth around.  In one situation in the Steve Jobs biography, written by Walter Isaacson, Jobs is reported to have withheld stock options from some Apple employees who had tenure.  When confronted by one of Apple’s top executives on the matter, Jobs said: “You can give him some of yours.  I’m not giving him any of mine.”  In essence, Jobs wasn’t willing to simply spread the wealth around, as a recent politician told a man we call Joe the Plumber.  Jobs only wanted to give stock options to those he believed had earned it.

On prosperity and success: Jobs did not believe American prosperity and success should be created by bureaucratic planning boards.  He believed it was created by shaping consumer driven markets from his corner of the market.  He didn’t believe in listening or watching markets.  He believed in creating them.

On philosophy: As the Isaacson biography tells us when Apple cofounder Steve Jobs met Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, Wozniak was perfectly willing to give the circuit boards he created away.  Jobs tried to convince Wozniak that the initial circuit board (Apple I) he built had commercial appeal.  Wozniak was not driven by money.  He loved what he was doing, and he wanted to enrich others’ lives with his creations.  Wozniak was competitive in that he wanted to create better products than those in the Palo-Alto based Hombrew Computer club, but even he confesses that he wasn’t looking much further beyond that.  Jobs did.  Steve Jobs basically said, why don’t we see if there’s a market for this?  Why don’t we try to make a living doing this?  “We could sell forty to fifty people,” he said.  We can makes others’ lives better and make a buck on the side?  “Even if we’re not successful,” Jobs said, “At least we could tell our grandkids that we had our own company.”  In other words, Steve Jobs had an appreciation for entrepreneurship, individual initiative, and innovation.  If Jobs were a dyed in the wool liberal, he would’ve kissed Wozniak and cried about the beautiful idea Wozniak was proposing of giving it all away for free.  Instead, Jobs sounded more like Milton Friedman than Karl Marx when he suggested that the two of them could make money selling circuit boards.

The contradictions and complexities of Steve Jobs cannot be nailed down in a simple paragraph or blog.  Some would argue that Jobs fits the mold of the current liberal perfectly in that he was perfectly willing to vote for, and fund, candidates that gave away other people’s money, but not theirs.  If one were to extend that mold to the manner in which one conducts business, however, Jobs did not exhibit liberal characteristics.  For he never let his liberal, hippie sensibilities get in the way of business.  He took drugs that altered his mind, but he didn’t take so many that they ruined it.  He ruled Apple with an iron fist.  Many feared his outbursts, yet he cried in front of them almost as often as he yelled at them.  He hated corporate America, yet he ran a company many have called one of the most controlled organizations in corporate America.  He was obsessive about detail, yet he funded political campaigns that he admitted made his job as a corporate executive more difficult.  He stole innovation (from Xerox) yet he railed against those who stole from him.  He demanded perfection from his employees, and he chastised them for their flaws, yet he was admittedly a deeply flawed man.  For all of his flaws, however, he undoubtedly left this world a greater place than it was when he entered into it.  Conservatives and liberals alike can learn a lot from the way he lived his life, ran his corporation, and espoused his philosophies.

Categorized in politics, Reviews and Simple Truths
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Dec
22

Coulter versus Sowell on Newt Gingrich

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Amid the kerfuffle of primary politics it seems most of the conservative intelligentsia can agree on one thing, they don’t like former speaker Newt Gingrich.  George Will has basically called him a communist; Ann Coulter says he has so many ideas from so many different sides of the aisle that conservatives would do well to read the history of Newt Gingrich better; and Charles Krauthammer has said: “(Gingrich is) too erratic or mercurial… a victim of his own creative intelligence.  People wonder if he’ll wake up one morning the way he did in the past with a mandate or global warming… and surprise people by being unconservative.”  Even Brit Hume joined the fray calling Gingrich “Undisciplined.  You never know what he’s going to say next.  He’s a provocative thinker, but a promiscuous talker.”  The latter two have also gone on record to say that Gingrich’s May 2011 characterization of Paul Ryan’s plan, as regards Health care, as “Right-wing social engineering” was political suicide on the right.

Enter Thomas Sowell.  Sowell differs from Ann Coulter on the credit Gingrich is due for welfare reform, balancing the budget, the 90’s surplus, and the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress.  Coulter believes Gingrich is given too much credit.  She says Gingrich did not single-handedly engineer the takeover.  Coulter believes that the liberalism of Clinton’s first two years as president is more responsiblefor the takeover than anything Gingrich ever did.  (Coulter does not mention the Contract with America that Gingrich engineered.)  Coulter does not mention that the 1994 takeover was the first time in forty years that Republicans controlled the house.  Instead, Coulter mentions that Boehner’s takeover of Congress, (again, she writes, all glory to Obama for that one) was a greater takeover in pure numbers than Gingrich’s was.  Sowell says that Gingrich presided over the party that won Congress for the first time in forty years, and he presided over the Congress that produced the first balanced budget in forty years.  “The media called it “the Clinton surplus” but all spending bills start in the House of Representatives, and Gingrich was Speaker of the House,” Sowell furthered.  In other words, Gingrich’s seat of power while all this occurred is, at least, more than anything Romney accomplished as governor of Massachusetts.

Coulter concentrates much of her most recent column to Gingrich’s baggage saying:

“Despite regular assurances from The New York Times that Americans don’t mind divorced presidents anymore — why, look at how well Bob Dole​, John McCain​and John Kerry did! — only one president in the nation’s history has been divorced: Ronald Reagan. And his first wife left him, as was well-documented in Hollywood gossip sheets.

“Reagan also didn’t commit adultery ever, much less twice, much less once in the middle of impeaching a Democratic president for perjuring himself about an adulterous affair.”

Sowell parries:

“If Newt Gingrich were being nominated for sainthood, many of us would vote very differently from the way we would vote if he were being nominated for a political office.

“What the media call Gingrich’s “baggage” concerns largely his personal life and the fact that he made a lot of money running a consulting firm after he left Congress. This kind of stuff makes lots of talking points that we will no doubt hear, again and again, over the next weeks and months.

“But how much weight should we give to this stuff when we are talking about the future of a nation?”

Prior to this Sowell column, the conservative intelligentsia I read and watch was 100% against Gingrich.  One hates to admit when their opinions are swayed by others, but when all of the stars line up you can’t help but be moved a little.  With Sowell entering the fray and saying, “This is not just another election and Barack Obama is not just another president whose policies we may not like.”  One has to take a step back and reconsider their options again.

That having been said, personal baggage does matter to conservatives.  Regardless what Sowell says, we do care about a politician’s personal record.  We’re not liberals for criminy’s sakes.  Should it matter to the degree that if Gingrich wins the primary and goes on to challenge Barack Obama in the general, no.  I think this may be Sowell’s greater fear.  Sowell does slam on Romney a little, but I don’t think Sowell fears a future America under Romney in the same manner he fears a future America under a President Barack Obama.

Liberals may be rejoicing with the degree of acrimony occurring in the conservative intelligentsia, but I’m hoping that they will be sadly disappointed by the hand holding that occurs once the GOP candidate is selected for the general election.

Categorized in politics, Social Issues and The Thoughts of Neighbors
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Dec
21

Ace Frehley’s book: No Regrets. A Review

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Ace Frehley has written a book called No Regrets to present his side of the Kisstory.  To those not acquainted with Ace Frehley, he was the the guitarist and Space Man for the rock group Kiss in the 70′s, 80′s, and for a reunion tour in the 90′s.  Ace then went onto lead a band called Frehley’s Comet, and he has since released a couple of critically praised and popular solo albums.

Ace Frehley states that he is clean now, and like so many others rock bios that adorn libraries across America, Frehley takes the vantage point of an outsider commenting on his past debauchery.  Alcohol and drugs were the way Frehley dealt with the ups and downs of stardom, but he has No Regrets about any of this. As comedians in the past (Pryor and Carlin) have done, Ace chooses to laugh at his lifestyle choices.  He chooses the “now that I’m clean” meme to detail for us the hilarity of being so out of control that you don’t know what you’re doing.  As a lifelong Ace Frehley fan, I found many of the aspects of his life story troubling and disenchanting, but Ace has No Regrets.

The “breath of fresh air” arrives when Ace begins to tell the tale of Kiss.  Ace is more honest and forthcoming about the formulation of Kiss than any of the other members have been to this point.  The reader begins to realize that Ace is going to be the first to tell this story without a marketing plan. There is no Kiss mysticism attached to the story,  such as the stories faithful Kiss readers have been inundated with by Paul and Gene. This is the Kiss story as told by “the fun and spontaneous member”.  This is the more “real” version of the story.  Unfortunately, the more “real”, Ace Frehley version of the story substantiates many of the charges made against Ace’s poor work ethic.  The No Regrets book also substantiates the charge that Ace wasn’t particularly elemental in the formulation of the eventual Kiss product, that he was basically just along for the ride, and that he has No Regrets about any of this.

In one particular story, Ace says that a particular producer began pushing Ace hard for solos on songs, but that producer failed to recognize the spontaneous nature of the incredible Ace Frehley.  Ace’s lone contribution on a majority of the Kiss songs was a brief solo between the verses, and he couldn’t even come up with that by the time Kiss’s Destroyer album came out.  At this point in the story, I would’ve been mentally lambasting Gene and Paul for presumably leaving out some necessary details of the story.  That’s not the case here of course.  This is Ace telling the story.  As I said, it’s all troubling and disenchanting.

The question the reader has for Ace on this particular issue is: How long did you have between albums to work up spontaneous solos? I know spontaneity cannot be generated on the spot, but it can be cultivated over time, so that being spontaneous becomes easier every time out.  This is called art.  Art takes time; art takes work; and art takes talent.  Few have questioned Frehley’s God-given gifts, but he apprently did little to formulate and finesse those gifts that were given to him.  What were you doing between albums Ace, other than touring? The answer: Sex, drugs, and alcohol.  You read Ace detail this portion of his story, and you realize that Ace may have been paying a little bit too much attention to his press clippings.  He may have been listening to those adoring fans that put him on a pedestal a little too often.  He may have thought there was a degree of mysticism to his art that couldn’t arise as a result of a request from a meager human, but it had to be waited for in the manner of some divine artiste.  Say what you want about Gene and Paul, and many have (Ace does in this book in good ways and bad), but Gene and Paul knew there was nothing divine about what they were doing.  They simply worked their tails off for the legacy they have today.

Ace chastises the Kiss bassist Gene Simmons throughout the book as a man who took the Kiss product a little too seriously throughout the process of building it.  Ace talks about how he couldn’t do it.  The movie “Kiss Meets the Phantom” is an example in the “Kisstory” that Ace admits he basically sat out.  He looks good in hindsight for having sat that one out, for the movie is generally considered a bomb.  Ace talks about how he didn’t enjoy making the album “The Elder”, and how he generally sat that one out too.  Ace then talks about how he wasn’t much of a part of the making of the album Destroyer either.  The latter is a little more painful to him, as evidenced in his words, but this may be due to the fact that Destroyer is generally considered to be Kiss’s best album.  Hindsight shows Ace regretting that he wasn’t a greater part of the successes, but he doesn’t mind telling he had little to nothing to do with that which is generally considered less successful artistically and financially.  How convenient.

Ace condemns Gene as a business man who has no friends.  He says Gene needs to cut loose and have a beer every once in a while.  To be fair to Ace, he does thank Gene and Paul for everything they built, and he’s not as negative as I thought he would be.  I read where Gene leveled Ace on many planes, and I expected the return fire to be explosive.  He pounded home the point that Gene has no friends by saying that the Gene Simmons Roast only had comedians in it (and family members), but he doesn’t have as many negative things to say about Gene as this review and others may lead one to believe.

The biggest question I had when closing this book for final time was why would you write it?  Ace basically backed up everything Gene said about him.  Those of us who have defended Ace throughout the years were left with our mouths hanging open.  ‘You really didn’t have as much play in the formulation of this Kiss product as we thought you had.  You were really, basically, along for the ride?  There was no huge story behind your deparure from Kiss other than some minor artistic differences?  Or, that ou just got sick of it?’  Ace does mention the fact that he may not be alive if he were still in Kiss, but it’s clear that that was totally on him by that point.  The only one who would’ve encouraged Frehley into greater debauchery, Peter Criss, was long gone by the time he quit the first time, and Paul and Gene were basically dry as stated time and again throughout the book.  Did Ace envy the success Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash had with his autobiography?  Did he know that his story was similar, and he wanted a piece of that pie?

I saw Ace do an interview for The Today Show, and he talked about how proud he was to now be a published author.  An author of what though?  That’s the question.  The author of a tome that basically thrashed his legacy?  Sure, it has some humorous anecdotes and stories, in the manner the Slash autobiography did, and it’s entertaining throughout, but what is the price his legacy has paid for his desire for more notoriety?

The reader is left with the idea that Ace led a blessed and lucky life, but when it came to actually working, and finessing that gift to even greater heights, Ace got turned on and tuned out. Ace will undoubtedly receive a lot of praise for being “more real” with his story, but some of those of us who consider ourselves true fans wish he had been a little less real to keep the Ace myth alive. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fun (and in spots funny) read, but it’s also a little sad and disenchanting.

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