Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you

Call me paranoid, but....

We've learned that IRS employees have declined to approve the tax-exempt status of Tea Party groups and other conservative organizations.   Democrats are generally fond of the IRS and taxing and wasting - much more so than Tea Party groups and Libertarians.  Something like 95% of IRS lawyers consider themselves Democrats.

If you're going to have an IRS with lots of power, you gotta be prepared for them to abuse it.  That's what people do with raw, unaccountable power. 

I can't stop shopping with the IRS and start shopping with a competitor, in the way that I fired Long John Silver's seafood restaurants and started eating at Captain D's (after a bad, bad fish sandwich episode). 

The IRS has a monopoly. If I had a choice, I would treat them like Long John Silver's seafood restaurants, and not give the IRS another dime.

This action on the part of the IRS just may have been enough to give the state of Ohio to Obama in the last election.  The IRS was everything it could, legal or illegal to support their candidate.  There's nothing I can do about it.  I can't fire them. 

Call me paranoid, but....

We've recently learned that the NSA has been accumulating records of our calls and emails.  If I had a choice, I'd de-fund the bastards immediately.  They would join Long John Silver's, Wal-Mart's produce department, AT&T's telephones, General Motors, and a host of other companies that I've fired. 

If the NSA wasn't using this phone/email/wiretap info to help Obama, I'll kiss your ass on the courthouse steps and give you 30 minutes beforehand to draw a crowd to witness the event.  I can't fire them either. 

Call me paranoid, but....

I use Google's free Blogger/Blogspot website hosting program for this website.  I've always liked it.  It's free.  Easy to use.  Google puts ads on it and I get some of the revenue anytime you good folks click on the ads.  Google gets money anytime you click on them too.   

I can't prove this, but it seems that the great majority of political sites that use Blogger/Blogspot are either economically conservative, socially conservative, or small-l libertarian.  (Yeah, I know they cater the searches to your track record.)  But it seems that there are a lot more anti-Democrat bloggers than there are pro-Democrat bloggers.  Hell, the Dems already have almost every newspaper in the U.S. except for the Washington Times and maybe the NY Post.  Who needs the drunken ramblings of a Democrat Precinct Captain when you've already got the New York Times??? 

Google supports the Dems in general and Obama in particular. 

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Few Silicon Valley companies have ever embraced a political party as passionately as Google has. Its executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has been described as a "kind of guru" to President Obama's campaign manager, and Google employees emerged as the No. 2 donor to the Democratic National Committee in the last election.....

....Google's affection for Democrats, especially the president, is long-standing. Schmidt stumped for Obama and joined other company executives in chipping in for the inaugural celebration. Employees and the company's political action committee gave $1.6 million to Democrats in the last presidential election, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, but only $300,000 to GOP candidates. In 2008, Google's climate director, Dan Reicher, exhorted an audience at the Democratic National Convention to "get out the vote and let's get Barack Obama elected in November!"

Google has been hassled by the FTC about sending traffic to their own "products" instead of those of competitors.  That's nobody's business but Google's, in my arrogant opinion.  They shoulda told the FTC to go have sexual relations with themselves.   

But....If I were a high-ranking exec at Google, and I wanted to do my part to help The Obamessiah, I'd start by steering readers away from those anti-Obama websites.  Even if it meant steering a few readers away from the pro-Obama sites that I also "owned".  That, too, is nobody' business but Google's.  If you don't like Google, you can fire them with the click of a mouse. 

A LOT of my traffic used to come from Google.  No more. 

I like to think that I've served up high-quality rants in an entertaining manner several times a week since 2007.  I don't think that the quality has gone down.  There's probably been some competition from Facebook, where everyone I know is now a blogger.  And perhaps Google was correct not to keep sending me a ridiculous amount of traffic based on one picture of Macaulay Culkin. 

This is what the daily hits for this site have looked like from the beginning.  (BTW, I'm now grateful for the new search engine called Bing.  They're now sending me almost as much traffic as Google does, and are going to become my desktop's new home page as soon as I finish writing this rant.) 

A lot of you folks have been reading my stuff for a long, long time. 
Did I suddenly descend into drunkenness and become tiresome after December 2010 ? 
Did Google ignore their "Don't Be Evil" mission statement and roll over for the FTC and start spreading their search results around to more competitor sites? 
Or is my paranoia justified, and Google made a conscious decision to de-emphasize its Blogger/Blogspot program, the one that has all those anti-Obama guys typing away in their pajamas? 

What it comes down to is this....  Should I continue typing crap for Google and letting them make money (however small the amount) from my efforts?  Should I fire Google and get my own domain? 

Call me paranoid, but....

It would be a lot easier to decide what to do if those black helicopters that follow me all day didn't keep blowing away my tinfoil hat. 

Grocery School

I've watched the documentary "Waiting For Superman" twice in the last few weeks.  The damn thing haunts me. 

Go here for details. 

Basically, the film follows five or six kids from failing or inadequate public schools in their effort to be accepted in charter schools. 
It comes down to a drawing.  A lottery. Pure, blind luck. 
Imagine being trapped in a public, bureaucratic hell-hole for 12 years, where the only thing that matters is having your ass counted as "present" in a seat. 
Ugh. 

Don Boudreaux likes to make the supermarket analogy.  I'm going to reprint part of it here. 

Suppose that we were supplied with groceries in same way that we are supplied with K-12 education.


Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. A huge chunk of these tax receipts would then be spent by government officials on building and operating supermarkets. County residents, depending upon their specific residential addresses, would be assigned to a particular supermarket. Each family could then get its weekly allotment of groceries for “free.” (Department of Supermarket officials would no doubt be charged with the responsibility for determining the amounts and kinds of groceries that families of different types and sizes are entitled to receive.)

Except in rare circumstances, no family would be allowed to patronize a “public” supermarket outside of its district.

Residents of wealthier counties – such as Fairfax County, VA and Somerset County, NJ – would obviously have better-stocked and more attractive supermarkets than would residents of poorer counties. Indeed, the quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in determining people’s choices of neighborhoods in which to live.

Of course, thanks to a long-ago U.S. Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer; such private-supermarket families, though, would get no discount on their property-tax bills.

When the quality of supermarkets is recognized by nearly everyone to be dismal, the resulting calls for “supermarket choice” would be rejected by a coalition of greedy government-supermarket workers and ideologically benighted collectivists as attempts to cheat supermarket customers out of good supermarket service – indeed, as attempts to deny ordinary families the food that they need for their very survival. Such ‘choice,’ it would be alleged, will drain precious resources from the public supermarkets whose (admittedly) poor performance testifies to the fact that these supermarkets are underfunded.

And the small handful of people who call for total separation between supermarket and state would be criticized by nearly everyone as being, at best, delusional and – it would be thought more realistically – more likely misanthropic devils who are indifferent to the malnutrition and starvation that would sweep the land if only private market forces governed the provision and patronizing of supermarket. (Some indignant observers would even wonder aloud at the insensitivity of referring to grocery shoppers as “customers”; surely the relationship between suppliers of life-giving foods and the people who need these foods is not so crass as to be properly discussed as being ‘commercial.’)
….

Does anyone believe that such a system for supplying groceries would work well, or even one-tenth as well as the current private, competitive system that we currently rely upon for supplying grocery-retailing services? To those of you who might think so, pardon me but you’re nuts.

To those of you who understand that such a system for supplying grocery-retailing services would be a catastrophe, why might you continue to count yourself in the ranks of those who believe that government schooling (especially the way it is currently funded and supplied) is the system that we should continue to use?

Think of the millions of lives wasted in the public school-to-prison pipeline.
You cannot give me a good reason why we're still doing this. 

What Is "Approval Voting"?

Libertarians (and other parties who challenge the status quo) are often accused of merely being "spoilers".  Some claim that we don't have a hope in hell of winning, but we might take votes away from Romney and give them to Obama.  Or vice-versa. 

Here's another problem: A lot of voters like the Libertarian Party's position on almost everything, but they're reluctant to "waste their vote" on a possible non-winner.  This is called the "wasted vote fallacy", and virtually guarantees that we'll keep getting shafted by those representing the false choice of Democrat vs Republican. 

So what to do....what to do....

Many Libertarians advocate something called Approval Voting.  (Hit the link for a plethora of links and explanations.)  Here's a blurb from the Approval Voting site:

Approval voting is a voting procedure in which voters can vote for, or approve of, as many candidates as they wish. Each candidate approved of receives one vote, and the candidate with the most votes wins. It was independently proposed by several people in the 1970s.


Approval voting has several compelling advantages over other voting procedures:

•It is eminently practicable and easy to understand
•It will reduce negative campaigning
•It will increase voter turnout
•It helps elect the strongest candidate
•It gives voters flexible and simple options
•It will give minority candidates their proper due

Unlike more complicated ranking systems, which suffer from a variety of theoretical as well as practical defects, approval voting is simple for voters to understand and use. It doesn't require redesigning of ballots and is trivial to implement in vote-counting systems. Approval voting is used today by various governments and organizations around the world, including its use by the United Nations to elect the secretary-general.   An approval voting-style ballot would look like this:  

Let's assume that Smith is a Republican.  Citizen and Doe are both Democrats.  Rubble is from the Green Party, and Hill is a Libertarian.  I'm going to vote for the Libertarian every chance I get.  So Mary Hill gets one of my votes.   

Let's assume that the Republican, Joe Smith, advocates school prayer, the Defense Of Marriage Act, the Drug War, giving more money to Lockheed to kill more babies in Pakistan, a 40% tariff on all imports, and a return to our Judeo-Christian heritage.  I wouldn't trust Joe Smith to put together Happy Meals.  Joe Smith doesn't get my vote.   

Jane Doe, one of the Democrats, has an Obama sticker on her car, and was once photographed shaking hands with the man.  Therefore she is not to be trusted.  She doesn't get my vote.   

Mr. Rubble is the Green Party candidate.  I don't know anything else about him, but the Green Party affiliation is enough to keep me from giving him a vote.   

I've heard good things about John Citizen.  He's a rare small-government Democrat, and has spoken out against a lot of pork spending in the past.  He's with the Libertarians on all social issues - not just lip service, either.  So John Citizen gets a vote from me.   

So on my ballot, I've supported Mary Hill and John Citizen.  Voting for one doesn't take away a vote from the other.  None of my votes were "wasted".    When everyone's votes are tallied in an Approval Voting election, the election is OVER.  The person with the most votes is the winner. There's no need for a runoff.  Everyone who wanted a chance to vote for these folks has had that chance.   

I like it.  Let's talk it up, folks !! 

Gary Johnson at Freedom Fest in Las Vegas

From the Lost Wages Review-Journal:

Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson is a man with little baggage, political or otherwise.

The Libertarian presidential nominee travels light, two carry-ons, no fees. He has no entourage, opening his own hotel room door at Paris Las Vegas on the Strip when a reporter arrives Friday to conduct an interview.
A trim man in a gray suit and blue tie, the 59-year-old Johnson skis, rides bikes and likes to climb mountains - four of the seven highest summits on the world's seven continents so far, including Everest.

And like many White House hopefuls before him, Johnson has written a new book, laying out his "Seven Principles of Good Government," to promote his ideas on the campaign trail.

They sound more like rules your mother might post on the refrigerator door, if she were a student of Taoism.

■ Become reality based.
■ Always be honest and tell the truth.
■ Always do what is right and fair.
■ Determine a goal and set a plan for reaching it.
■ Make sure everyone who should know your goal does.
■ Acknowledge mistakes immediately.
■ Love what you're doing; if you don't, find something else to do.

Yet the former Republican also has a strong record as a two-term governor in the 1990s. He slashed the New Mexico budget and vetoed 200 bills during his first six months in office, intent on eliminating wasteful spending.

Johnson said his goal in running for president is to win. He's one of three candidates who will be on all 50 states' ballots Nov. 6, along with President Barack Obama, the Democrat, and presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

The reality is no Libertarian presidential candidate has ever won more than 1 percent of the national vote. And Johnson's spartan campaign can't compete with the billion-dollar behemoths behind Obama and Romney.

The truth is, Johnson knows he has little chance of winning, especially if he isn't allowed to debate Obama and Romney in the fall. Johnson needs to reach at least 15 percent support levels in national polls to qualify.
So he's trying to raise his profile, traveling the country to attend conferences like the "Freedom Fest" meeting of conservatives and libertarians in Las Vegas, where he's speaking today at one of the sessions at Bally's. He's also doing lots of radio, print and TV interviews, and appearing on shows like Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show," a popular late-night program among political junkies.

Johnson said he loves promoting libertarian ideas, which are socially liberal and fiscally conservative. That means he's running to the left of Obama and to the right of Romney. For example, he thinks government should recognize gay marriage and legalize drugs, including marijuana. And he believes the federal government should balance its budget immediately, which would mean cutting spending by 43 percent his first year in office.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal talked with Johnson for half an hour. Here are some of the exchanges:

What makes you different than the other presidential candidates?

I would be the only candidate proposing a balanced budget in the year 2013. I would be the only candidate that would get out of Afghanistan immediately, end the war. I would be the only candidate that wants to end the drug wars. I would be the only candidate advocating abolishing the IRS, income tax and the corporate tax.

I'd be the only candidate, I think, that really would be talking about marriage equality from the standpoint of it being a constitutionally guaranteed right. I think I would be the only candidate that doesn't want to bomb Iran. And I know we haven't bombed Iran yet, but there sure is a lot of saber rattling. And I'm not rattling a saber at Iran.

How would you balance the budget?

I like to start by talking about Medicaid, Medicare and military spending. I would be proposing a 43 percent cut in military spending.

Would you cut the budget 43 percent across the board?

Some areas I would eliminate completely. Other areas. I think you always want to keep an open mind. Perhaps government is spending money wisely somewhere. I'm not aware of it, but perhaps it is.

Can you really cut Medicare much since it's such a hot-button political issue?

If we don't balance the federal budget, I am in the camp that believes there is a consequence to continue to borrow, spend and print money to the tune of 43 cents out of every dollar that we spend. And the consequence is going to be a monetary collapse.

What about people like you who may retire in a few years and are counting on Medicare?

What about my kids? My kids can't retire - ever - because they're going to pick up the tab for all this. And then if you want to add on President Obama's health care plan, that is a plan that is dependent on healthy people paying for those that aren't so healthy. ... So young people have got it coming at them from all directions.

And how fair is that. They're getting screwed. If I were a young person right now, I would be openly in revolt.

What do you think about the Supreme Court upholding the health care law as constitutional?

I just think it's a horrible precedent that the government can tell me what I can and can't buy.

What do you think of the Arizona law the high court partly upheld that allows police to ask immigrants for proof they're in this country legally?

States should have the right to be able to pass legislation that they think can help themselves out. But in the case of Arizona, much as they should be empowered to do that, I would have vetoed that legislation if I would have been governor of Arizona. I line up with all the negative criticism that gets heaped on it. It just leads to racial profiling.

What should be done about the 11 million illegal immigrants in this country?

I think we should make it as easy as possible for someone that wants to come into this country to work to get a work visa - not a green card, not citizenship, but a work visa. And for those 11 million in the country right now, I think we need to set up a grace period where we can document them, give them a work visa. Would immigrants stand in line to get a work visa to come into this country if the line were moving? I think they would.

Many of your ideas might be popular with the public, but are they politically realistic?

I did serve two terms as governor of New Mexico with the same mind set then that I do right now. And I'm going to argue that was a Libertarian bent. And I don't know as I'm not going to get elected. ... I don't know if Americans really understand that we are in deep doo-doo and that neither party, neither Republicans or Democrats, are going actually to offer up the solutions, the medicine, that goes along with how ill we are.

What do you think of Obama?

I listened to Obama four years ago when he was running for office and he was saying some really favorable things about gay rights. I thought he said some very favorable things with regard to the war on drugs. I thought he said some very favorable things about American military involvement and our military interventions. (Now) he doubles down on Afghanistan. He's raiding medical marijuana facilities in California and Colorado when he said he wasn't going to do that. And then the whole marriage equality thing. He's just taken a cop out on that.

What do you think of Romney?

Romney says he wants to balance the federal budget but he wants to increase spending for defense. And he wants to hold Medicare intact. I finished the second grade and the mathematics that went along with that and it doesn't add up. So are either candidate really talking about the solutions that go along with the problems? No, I don't think so. They're talking about what the other ate for breakfast and the gaseous smells that resulted from the poor breakfasts they ate.

Which man would be better for the country in the White House, Obama or Romney?

I think this is tweedledee, tweedledum. What you're going to give up with Obama is he's a little bit better on civil liberties. He's horrible on dollars and cents. Romney is horrible on civil liberties and he's a little bit better on dollars and cents. I think I'm better than Romney on dollars and cents. I think I crush Romney when it comes to civil liberties. I think I crush Obama when it comes to dollars and cents. And I think I do a lot better on civil liberties than Obama.

What will you do if you don't win?

I have a goal to climb the highest mountain on each continent. I have three of those to go.

What does mountain climbing teach you?

Life is really about the moment. You need to enjoy the moment and you need to make the most out of all the time that you spend. Mountaineering, when you have to concentrate on being warm, or you need to cool off, or you need to eat, or you need to relieve yourself. You know it's very, very in the moment. Life's a journey. It's not a destination. But if you make life a destination, you're going to be disappointed.

The Tarrant County Libertarian Party has a new chair.

Big Daddy John Spivey has been the Tarrant County Libertarian Party chair for 6 years. 
He has done one heck of a job. 
Now he's stepping down.  He'll still be on the county executive committee, and the state executive committee, but he hopes to spend more time on some of his other passions. 

Thank you, John, for 6 years of great work !

After John's resignation today, the County Executive Committee got down to the business of Spivey's replacement.  They decided on....me. 

This is going to be a fun, fun year.
 
I can't remember a better year of opportunity for the Libertarian Party.  Obama has given us a 3-year primer on the non-effectiveness of Statism, the Republicans seem determined to nominate Mewt, and there are going to be a lot of voters looking for an alternative to whatever those two groups put out there.  We've got some great candidates on our ballot for statewide and local positions this year, but could always use more.   (see my previous post.  And hurry !!)   

I'll probably be writing a lot more about local issues, and posting fewer pictures of Obama picking his nose.  It's time to get serious about this thing. 

We're going to need a lot of help.  If you'd like to get involved, you can go here to join the Tarrant County Libertarians on Facebook.  Here's our Tarrant Libertarian Meetup page.   And here's the official Tarrant County Libertarian Party website. 

So what's the Libertarian Party about?  Here's something from our state website:

It's very simple: Let people live their own lives as they want and get the government out of our business. The Libertarian Party of Texas bases its philosophy on these core principles:


CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS. You, as stated by our nation's Founding Fathers, have the inalienable right to live, be free and prosper to your fullest potential without hindrance from any person or entity. You have the freedom to pursue your happiness as long as you respect others' rights to pursue theirs.

PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY. You are responsible for your personal choices, able to take care of yourself and capable to do for others as you expect them to do unto you. Conversely, others are free to live their lives as they see fit and are responsible for their choices. We believe in tolerance toward others and respect for self-sovereignty.

LIMITED GOVERNMENT. Your government's principal function is to protect your freedom, your unalienable rights of Life, Liberty and Property, all crucial rights for building a free and prosperous society. Government should be of the necessary size and scope, as outlined in the United States Constitution, to efficiently support its constitutional duties and effectively maintain the rule of law. The Libertarian vision of government is of a government strictly confined to its constitutional role, a government that respects civil liberties, recognizes that the individual is more important than the State, exercises fiscal restraint and understands that each generation must pay its own debts, believes in free markets and practices a non-interventionist foreign policy of "peace toward all, entangling alliances with none."

The Libertarian Party is the third largest and fastest-growing political party in Texas and in the United States. It is also the only political party to advocate truly limited government, especially as established in the U.S. Constitution by our Founders.

That's what we're about, and I hope you can help out. 
Hope everyone has a good weekend.  I've got to go buy a new Spivey suit. 

Why Obama would be preferable to Gingrich

From Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek:

Four more years of Obama in the Oval Office would be better, in my view, than four years of Gingrich there: each man is mad for power; each man’s Promethean opinion of himself is quite the opposite of what a realistic self-opinion would be; each man is a font of economic idiocy; and each man’s principles are such that each would – recalling Mencken’s description of FDR – fatten up a crew of missionaries on the White House lawn for slaughter if he thought that endorsing cannibalism would get him more votes. Yet the countless nutty and destructive policies that Pres. Gingrich would likely implement would inevitably be described by our crack mainstream press as “laissez faire” – thus creating more public misunderstanding. (Of course, four more years of Obama in the White House might also be better than four years of Romney there….)

Of course when Mencken made his crack about presidents trying to get the cannibal vote, he had no idea what would happen to the national mindset in another 75 years....  See below. 

From The Occupy Wall Street Protests. 

John Galt has left California

My employer, Jukt Micronics, recently opened a west coast warehouse to serve our customers in that region. 
 
Where did we go - L.A.?  Long Beach?  San Diego?  San Fran? 
Nope. 
We opened our west coast warehouse in Phoenix, Arizona.  That's a long way from the coast, where the shipping containers come in, but it's worth the drive.   

No one in his right mind will open anything in California.  The place is a regulatory hell.  The taxes are ridiculous. 

Here's something from Bloomberg News:

California (STOCA1) Governor Jerry Brown’s plan to balance the state budget in part with higher taxes on the wealthy depends on a group of top earners that shrank by one-third from 2007 to 2009.


Tax returns with adjusted gross incomes topping $500,000 fell to 98,610 in 2009, the latest year available, from a recent peak of 146,221 two years earlier, according to data from the Franchise Tax Board, the state agency that collects income and corporate taxes.

Once again, here's the good part:

California (STOCA1) Governor Jerry Brown’s plan to balance the state budget in part with higher taxes on the wealthy depends on a group of top earners that shrank by one-third from 2007 to 2009.

It's called Going Galt.  May the trend continue until Jerry Brown changes his ways. 

Clarification

Someone can be against capital punishment, and still be in favor of law and order. 

Someone can be in favor of marijuana legalization, and still be against drug use. 

Someone can be opposed to the "No Child Left Behind Act", and be in favor of education. 

There are people who oppose the "American Jobs Act" who hope that Americans can get jobs. 

You really can care about the environment, and continue believing that it was a bad idea to give half a billion dollars to bankrupt solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra. 

There are people of good will who oppose the "Employee Free Choice Act" while also believing that employees should have a free choice in the matter of joining a union. 

Some of the people who think that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are the biggest messes ever birthed by bureaucrats - some of those very same people don't believe that old sick people should be thrown out in the street. 

It is possible to be in favor of a strong national defense, and also believe that sending 2,500 Marines to Australia is a bad idea. 

Many people who oppose Affirmative Action aren't racists. 

1)  There are people who had a default setting of "No" when asked to contribute money to Jimmy Swaggart, Bernie Madoff, Enron, Pets.com, and that lady in Nigeria who sent you the email about putting some money in your bank account for a short time just to get it out of the country. 

2)  There are also people who have a default setting of "No" when asked if they favor almost any government program.

If you understand the suspicions of the first group, you are closer to understanding the suspicions of the second.   

Some clarification on the remarks of Jimmy Hoffa, Jr.

Jimmy Hoffa Jr., made a big fuss during an Obamessiah campaign event.  (That's Jimmy Hoffa the current Teamsters Union president, not the elder Jimmy Hoffa who was convicted of fraud, jury tampering, and bribery.)

He told his union audience:

That’s what we are going to tell America…..When he sees what we are doing here, he will be inspired, but he needs help. And you know what? Everybody here has got a vote. If we go back, we keep the eye on the prize, lets take these sons-of-bitches out and give America back to America where we belong.


There was an earlier reference in his speech to The Tea Party, and if you're willing to skip about 4 paragraphs of other stuff, Jimmy Jr can be interpreted as saying that it's time to take The Tea Party sons-of-bitches out. 

(You can already buy T-shirts.)

I believe Hoffa meant that it is time to take generic sons-of-bitches out, not necessarily Tea Party sons-of-bitches.  And who are these generic sons-of-bitches?  Anyone who opposes Hoffa, the unions, or The Teleprompter Jesus, perhaps.  Here's some clarification:

Hoffa describes the combatants in his “war” as “workers” on the one hand and “the Tea Party” on the other. But of course he isn’t interested in workers in general, only those who belong to unions–a group that, after decades of private-sector union decline, largely consists of employees of government, government contractors and government bailout beneficiaries such as General Motors and Chrysler. “The Tea Party,” meanwhile, is a dysphemism for taxpayers.


A dysphemism, in case you're wondering, is a substitution of a more offensive or disparaging word or phrase for one considered less offensive.  For instance, my preferred phrase "Fascist Union Thug" instead of "Teamsters President" is a dysphemism. 

Hoffa was not calling Tea Party members "sons-of-bitches" as far as I can tell.  He was calling taxpayers "sons-of-bitches". 

I hope this clears up the matter, and that we can all move forward. 

BTW, for everyone who works in shipping, freight, warehousing and logistics....  Did you know that UPS is a Teamsters Union outfit and that FedEx is not?  And that part of every dollar you spend with UPS goes to Jimmy Hoffa, and part of that money goes to support The Teleprompter Jesus and all his works? 

Remember, you have choices.  Money spent with FedEx doesn't go to Jimmy Hoffa, Jr.  Let your UPS sales rep know what you think about being called a son-of-a-bitch.   

An apology for posting inaccurate information

I've probably posted this (inaccurate) chart a dozen times, and regret doing so. 
It shows public education spending going through the roof, while test scores remain flat. 

The cost of public education has indeed increased as shown. 
My mistake was in assuming that the miserable flatlined test scores were accurate.
Here's why I was wrong:

In the Atlanta Public School system, the administration held "cheating parties", in which they met at a teacher's home to change test scores. 

A similar thing happened in Pontiac, Michigan. 

Here's more on the Atlanta mess:

Teachers and principals erased and corrected mistakes on students’ answer sheets.

Area superintendents silenced whistle-blowers and rewarded subordinates who met academic goals by any means possible.
Superintendent Beverly Hall and her top aides ignored, buried, destroyed or altered complaints about misconduct, claimed ignorance of wrongdoing and accused naysayers of failing to believe in poor children’s ability to learn.

....For teachers, a culture of fear ensured the deception would continue.

“APS is run like the mob,” one teacher told investigators, saying she cheated because she feared retaliation if she didn’t.
The voluminous report names 178 educators, including 38 principals, as participants in cheating. More than 80 confessed. The investigators said they confirmed cheating in 44 of 56 schools they examined.

So.   I humbly repent of publishing that chart so many times.
The chart is inaccurate. 
Test scores have not remained flat despite the spending increases.  If Michigan and Georgia are any indication of what's going on in government schools, test scores have declined. 

My bad. 

Go here to read an outraged editorial about the pro-choice movement that wants to privatize the public schools and give students and parents some other options.