The government-run General Motors, under its new CEO Barack Obama, will soon be selling nothing but O’smobiles, which will definitely not be your father’s Oldsmobile. They will all be union-made, of course, since the primary mission of the new GM will be to keep the UAW in business. As an arm of the state, GM will turn quickly to all green cars, and we will have the chance to test Obama’s theory that green jobs will revive the economy.
I’m willing to bet that a nationalized GM will be unable to exploit any workable green technology. The first problem will be its ineptitude and inefficiency in getting a product to market. The second will be a question of ownership. If a private company develops the technology, it will exploit its advantage. If a government-owned GM develops a green technology, what will be the government’s rationale for not putting that technology immediately in the public domain?
March 30th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Politics |
2 comments
Ask the geniuses in our new and improved State Department, the best and brightest, the ones who are going to demonstrate America’s cultural sensitivity around the world.
March 29th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Politics, Religion |
one comment
Some worry that Obama’s plan to reduce tax deductions for charitable contributions poses a real threat to philanthropy. But if you’re an arts organization, soup kitchen, or church, only the top 3% of your donors will be affected.
Of course, that 3% of taxpayers represents 44% of your charitable contributions, as Dick Morris explains.
Obama’s plan will cost them $10 billion in extra taxes on the income they allocated to charitable donations. How can the president be so glibly certain that they will not curtail their charitable contributions by a like amount or even more?
Imagine all the harm Obama’s program will cause. Churches will be hit most hard. They account for the largest share of charitable donations, but universities, disease research, hospitals, soup kitchens and cultural institutions will also be hard hit. So will international relief efforts that funnel aid abroad through churches or directly.
The government needs the additional taxes, however, to pay for all the good things it has planned – things like homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and a new Secretary of the Arts.
March 28th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Politics |
one comment
The Shootist has the full story of how the administration is taking a back-door approach to gun control. The initial strategy lay, ironically enough, in killing a recycling program. The military’s spent brass had been recycled to ammunition manufacturers for use in products sold to civilians and law enforcement. The new rule required the military to scrap the brass instead for no reason other than to make it useless.
So The Shootist sent this letter, and encouraged his readers to do the same:
The Honorable Bill Cassidy
Member of Congress from Louisiana
Dear Congressman Cassidy:
It has come to my attention that the Department of Defense has issued a directive that all expended military brass (fired cases) will now be shredded and sold for scrap material, rather than resold by Government Liquidators LLC to the civilian market for remanufacture.
You may not be aware of it, but there is a severe shortage of ammunition available for sale to the public across the country, causing problems for shooters, hunters, and reloaders everywhere.
Now, apparently the Obama administration, realizing they cannot move against private firearms ownership since the landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Washington D.C./Heller case, has made their move in another way.
By cutting off the resale of expended military ammunition to remanufacturers, they have put a stranglehold on the nation’s ammunition supply.
Further, they have reduced the return to the government on expended brass by 80%. What was sold for remanufacturer at a fair return to the government, will now cost the taxpayers untold sums of money as the cost of scrap brass is far below the price per pound for expended military ammunition.
In addition, the use of remanufactured ammunition is a huge asset to law enforcement agencies across the country who buy millions of rounds of reloaded ammunition a year from these manufacturers for practice rounds.
With this market gone, law enforcement will no longer be able to purchase inexpensive reloaded ammunition, and with the continuing combat status of military forces across the Middle East, original manufacturers of new ammunition are turning out everything they can make to the government, thus exacerbating the shortage of new ammunition in both the civilian and law enforcement market.
Lastly, in these harsh economic times, does it not strike you as cold and calculating that the Obama administration has no compunction against ruining an industry that employs thousands of American citizens in the remanufacturing of sporting and military ammunition. One major resupplier, Georgia Arms, the fifth largest manufacturer of centerfire pistol and rifle ammunition has informed me he will have to quickly lay off half his 60-person workforce, as he has had to cancel contracts with dozens of police agencies who had contracted with him to supply them with remanufactured .223 ammunition.
Georgia Arms has been practically put out of business by this directive that all expended military brass must be shredded. His current contracts have been canceled, and he is notifying his customers across the country he can no longer supply their ammunition needs.
Please look into this immediately. This move by the Obama administration is nothing but a back-door strike against firearms ownership in this country–if shooters can’t buy ammunition, the guns are little better than steel clubs–and this is obviously the intent.
Thank you for your time and efforts in this serious attack against the Second Amendment rights of the American citizenry.
Sincerely,
Gordon Hutchinson
Author “The Great New Orleans Gun Grab”
Proving that the right to petition still has some utility, Hutchinson now reports that the administration has scrapped the rule: “Plowshares Beaten Back into Bullets”
March 25th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Ammo, Politics |
one comment
Maggie Gallagher keeps stating the obvious, but is anyone listening?
Women are people who, when we have sex, sometimes create new life. This truth deeply colors relations between men and women — even men and women who never have children together, indeed, men and women who never have sex together. Men impregnate, women are not impregnable. A society which tries to deny these facts ends up doing great and lasting damage to its own children, and to both men and women.
The movement to redefine marriage runs off the rails because its success necessarily depends on redefining gender and ignoring the basic facts of nature. Gallagher looks at the marriage fight that began in the 1960s.
Five great strands of contemporary liberalism — the sexual revolution, the gender-role revolution, the expansion of welfare for the poor, the movement for racial equality, and the environmental movement — came together to support de-norming of marriage, knocking it off its pedestal and de-legitimating, in various ways, its privileged cultural postion.
So where’s the harm in extending marriage to any two people who share a bed?
I learned this truth: Connecting sex, babies, love, money, and mothers and fathers is hard.
Hard at the individual level, and hard at the societal level. A society where marriage is the normal, usual, and generally reliable way to raise children is a great cultural achievement, not a law of nature.
March 24th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Law, Politics |
no comments
Bach was born on this date in 1685, and Leipzig is a good place to celebrate. The location of Bach’s last post where he spent his last 27 years, Leipzig is described as “a city devoted to letters, song, and the coffee bean.” Bach made his own contribution to Leipzig’s coffee craze as the YouTube video shows.
March 21st, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Leisure, Music |
no comments
How do the sexual politics of the Episcopal Church in America affect Christians throughout the world? Faith J. H. McDonnell explains in an article for the Institute on Religion and Democracy. Her story begins with a Sudanese priest, John, who sought assistance from the Diocese of Newark’s “justice missioner,” only to find that the justice missioner’s sole concern was advocacy for people with disabilities, people of color, and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex community.
John is a former “Lost Boy,” one of some 33,000 southern Sudanese children who fled attacks by government-sponsored militias during Sudan’s more than two decades of civil war. He survived a three-year trek from Sudan to Ethiopia to Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. Now he is the pastor of over 1,000 refugees at Kakuma.
John assumed that a church justice office would focus on human-rights issues like genocide in Sudan, religious persecution, poverty, hunger, and human trafficking. What he did not know was that in the U.S. Episcopal Church, affirming one’s sexual orientation is as much a justice and human-rights issue as genocide.
“There is rather more at stake here than the issue of sexual politics,” writes Andrew Proud, Area Bishop of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, in an article on the Anglican crisis for Trinity Journal for Theology and Mission. In fact, one church’s human-rights issue is creating another church’s human-rights crisis. By pushing sexual politics, Episcopal church leaders are compromising the churches’ witness abroad, exposing Christian brothers and sisters to violence, and unwittingly aiding and abetting the Islamization of Africa and elsewhere.
March 21st, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Politics, Religion |
one comment
Go ahead. Make my day 
with a Dirty Harry martini. The recipe from Best-Martini-Recipes Ever.com:
Ingredients:
6 oz. vodka
1 Dash Dry Vermouth
4 Stuffed Green Olives
1 oz. Brine from Olive Jar
Directions:
In a mixing glass, combine the vodka, dry vermouth, olives, and the brine.
Pour into a martini glass over ice, you can either drink it on the rocks, or strain out the ice.
After you drink it, it will be your “inner Dirty Harry.”
Image by Ken30684 - Creative Commons
March 20th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Leisure |
no comments
Obama needs to discovery his “inner Dirty Harry”? So says Margaret Carlson. Please.
She is perceptive enough to understand that Timothy Geithner has no inner Dirty Harry and compares him instead to Barney Fife.
Obama meanwhile is begging sponsors of terrorism to be nice and getting his tail kicked in return.
Some people, like Beethoven, can be plausibly portrayed as having an inner Dirty Harry, as this site attests, but there are limits to the magic of PhotoShop.
March 20th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Politics |
no comments
The Obama administration dropped a proposal to require some disabled veterans to pay for medical treatments through their private insurance companies, heeding a chorus of outrage from veterans groups and Capitol Hill lawmakers who said the idea was immoral, unconscionable and un-American.
That about sums it up. It’s hard to imagine how an administration that touts its plans to provide health coverage to everyone can begin by taking it away from the most deserving. But you don’t have to imagine. You can listen to what they said:
“In considering the third-party billing issue, the administration was seeking to maximize the resources available for veterans,” said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs.
Just like your employer maximizes “available resources” by paying lower wages, or your insurance company maximizes resources by denying claims.
“However, the president listened to concerns raised by the [veterans groups] that this might, under certain circumstances, affect veterans and their families’ ability to access health care.”
And it might, in all circumstances, have required them to dig deeper into their own pockets to pay for injuries suffered while serving the government.
March 19th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Politics |
one comment
