iPandora

"No Wal-Mart in Chicago"

For y’all who don’t know, Chicagoans must deal with, among other things, a city hall in the pocket of labor unions. One of the results of this is that only very few Walmarts are allowed to be built within the city limits.

As noted before, Walmart saves money for people in neighborhoods nearby by creating pressure to lower prices in surrounding stores as well as allows people to choose healthier food options because of the greater strength of their dollars.

Despite Chicago’s efforts, though, Walmart continues to try to build more stores here, and city hall just decided they could get Walmart where it hurts while pretending to be for the “little guy”.

Responding to one of the latest applications, Chicago said Walmart could build their store if they paid an artificially inflated minimum wage higher than the minimum wage for the rest of the employers in Chicago.

Lesson one in hurting people: make it hard for employers to hire people.

Walmart called Chicago on their scheme, and one can’t help but grin at this call:

Rolando Rodriguez, vice president and regional general manager for Wal-Mart, said the company would be willing to swallow a Chicago wage mandate under certain conditions.

“If there is a minimum wage ordinance that applies to everybody, and every business in Chicago is held to that ordinance, then the answer would be yes,” Rodriguez said Thursday. “There’s no need for Wal-Mart to be singled out. Why is it all other retailers are allowed to build in Chicago and we are not?”

Answer that fat cats and charlatan pols in Chicago City Hall.

You raise the wage for all employers in the city and half of them will go out of business. The other half will hate your guts.

Nobody will higher full-time employees because there’s no way they’d agree to pay benefits and full-time taxes on top of that exorbitant wage.

Why so sad, Mr. President?

Dear Mr. President,

Today is probably not your best day. After the rush of the election, the thrill of victory, the surge of support, and the adulation of the petty tyrants at the UN, your poll numbers have begun falling, your policies are gaining little traction, your adoring masses are getting disillusioned with the continuing economic problems and high unemployment, and today you lost the Olympics.

Failed in the first round, no less.

Booted.

Kicked out.

Epic fail.

But buck up, Mr President. Welcome to the club of people not everybody likes.

Most of the rest of us have been here for quite a while. My own tale of arriving in this party is a tale of my growing up. The main differences are that I learned it by getting lost in Italy at the age of 25, and I’m now content to stay with this group.

You’re in your 40’s now and have had little in your past to prepare you for this rejection. You’ve been adored and coddled and had plenty of friends to pad your parties for far longer than I ever did.

Fair weather friends are pretty nice when fair weather has followed you for 40 years. But the clouds blow in, and today you found yourself out on your butt.

Too bad your pal Ahmedinejad wasn’t heading the IOC today.

Except he wouldn’t have been any nicer.

The point is, Mr. President, you must accept the fact that not everybody can and will like you. And you can’t follow the simpleton notion that those who disagree with your or don’t vote for you are evil.

I’m neither evil, racist, nor a pygmy. But we  disagree in more ways than not.

So what is to be done?

Once you accept, as I have, that some people just don’t want to be part of your crowd, you must move on. You find the people who do want to hang out with you, and you hang out with them.

Or you put away the megalomaniac glasses, and you find a group that you want to be a part of, not because they like you, but because they are worthwhile.

If you find a group that likes you, they are most likely fakers and liars.

But when you find a group that, regardless of their feelings for you, are worth being a part of, you’ve joined yourself to something bigger than yourself and found your identity in something outside yourself.

Champions are quickly forgotten who fight for themselves and their own name and honor. The ones we remember fought for something bigger and more worthwhile.

After all, you’ll be here on this earth probably not much more than 40 more years. At the most. And if you were only fighting for yourself, who will care at that point. We’ll put you 6 feet under just like everybody else.

Now, the important thing is to decide who to join yourself to. I’d submit that the fact that America’s Exceptionalism is a mighty fine thing to champion. I’d cheer you on for that. And hell would probably freeze over.

I labor under no assumptions you’ll change, though I hope God will see fit to direct your heart in such a way.

So welcome to the club, Mr. President. Enjoy your stay.

I hope you’re not planning on leaving soon.

UPDATE: Morgen from Verum Serum quotes BBC News’ Adam Brookes:

(Obama’s) legendary powers of persuasion will be said to have failed him, though in reality it will be Chicago’s bid that failed him.

And VelvetHammer from Ironic Surrealism gets snarky:

The entire planet rejects Obama

Tis a pity, the Obama, his bitter half Michelle and the Oprah shilled, sacrificed and begged for the Chicago Olympics bid to no avail.

From the Mud Monster file:

Roland Burris (yup, that guy) “failed” to disclose a lot of stock options. He plans on amending his mandatory financial disclosure report to the Senate to reflect the fact he was caught. Again.

I believe that all people, regardless of race, are capable of being a moral as any others. Therefore, they are all held to the same moral standard.

Therefore, it is not racism for me to state that Senator Burris is an immoral, lying, cheating, conniving, duplicitous, ne’er-do-well who I wouldn’t trust with my money or my country.

In the Blood-Chilling and the We Told You categories:

Obama says stopping pointless procedures for terminally ill people can help cut costs.

Who decides what’s pointless?

It isn’t cold-hearted Republicans trying to take kill Grandma. It’s the Liberal Ideology and it’s domestic partners, Euthanasia. Their love child, President Obama is their Messiah.

In the It’s None Of Their Business category:

“Consumer protection” groups are encouraging new government bureaucracies to oversee hidden costs and predatory behavior on the part of evil corporations trying to stiff us for out money. The Democrats love it, of course. The Republicans don’t, of course.

The Reuters headline has more truth that it probably realizes itself:

Personal Finance: Don’t wait for Congress, be your own regulator

Concise yet cogent argument to the plain fact that we are responsible for ourselves.

The real question shouldn’t be if the government is going to look out for us in this way, too. It should be, why aren’t you using the tools available to you, the glut of information waiting to be perused, to make yourself as knowledgeable as you need to be regarding your own financial situation?

Forget the government, I’ve got the Internet!

From the Why Can’t We Get This Right file:

Hugh Hewitt posts a letter from an anonymous ad exec regarding the dearth of creativity emanating from the conservative movement.

I agree whole-heartedly with the ad exec.

While I love the witty yet pithy videos on PJTV (yes, watch that video, it’s great), I’ll admit most people I’d like to convince of their accuracy of the philosophy they espouse would be bored by them.

Maybe I should take up video editing? I’d have to revise my vocabulary. A lot.

And finally, from the Here It Goes Again and Will We Ever Learn and It’s Obvious They Just Want The Money files:

Fannie and Freddie (remember them?) are being “encouraged” to offer mortgages to high-risk and low-income borrowers again.

AGAIN!?!?!?

Good night, and keep laughing.

Burris is a crook. Whodathunkit?

And a liar, of the worst kind. Pretentiously hiding behind his squeaky clean image and claiming he’d never talked to Blagojevich about favors that resulted in his appointment to the Senate. Santimoniously sermonizing ad nauseum about how he was about the people’s business and wouldn’t allow sordid speculation sway his resolve.

There’s no sordid speculation here and that sactimonious sermonizing can go right back down the vile gullet it emerged from to add it’s putrid mass to the seething stench that inhabits that man’s soul.

Just a question, an honest one here: knowing the FBI had recorded phone conversations and in all likelihood had him incriminating himself with incontravertible proof, how did Burris walk the halls of Congress with his debonaire smile? Was  his conscience eating him at all? Or is his corruption so complete that he’s quelled all better things within him?

Oh, and now he’s “torn” over helping Blagojevich.

This much is true: as a parent we want our child to feel bad about doing wrong, not about being caught.

Burris is feeling bad about being caught. His emotional development is very likely so incredibly stunted it would take a redemptive work in his life to make him feel grief over his actual wrong.

So throw the Senator out already.

Judge Sotomayor has lots of things going for her: Obama likes her, and… Obama thinks she’ll do a good job.

Why?

A significant number of her decisions have been reversed, and of those upheld, her arguments have been faulted by superior judges. This indicates a consistency only in fallacy and not in skilled jurisprudence.

Reading through a list of Sotomayor decisions, one finds very quickly she is anti-business, pro-union,  and pro-regulation.

She believes business is out to hurt people.

She believes unions are completely good and no bad thing can come from them.

She believes generally that government knows best, especially when the right kind of people run government.

One thing conspicuously absent from her beliefs is a belief in the rule of law and the supremacy of law over all men equally.

It’s no unfair fear tactic to quote her (from the NY Times):

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life

Would a white male judge saying a version of that phrase last any longer than a water drop on a hot iron skillet? Of course not, and for good reason. There’s no place for preference or opinion in the law.

Justice is supposed to be blind.

Sotomayor, in her arrogance and conceit, proudly claims her judgement issued with her eyes of justice wide open and uncovered is best.

It may indeed her best judgement, but it’s not the judgement we require of those occupying the highest chairs of justice in our land.

When the most powerful man in the world says something, anything, it carries a significantly greater weight than if Joe Schmoe on the corner says even exactly the same thing.

An account executive or a cable repair man can joke about their kids schools closing when a little ice accumulates and it’s just that, a joke.

The President of the United States makes a joke about the weak populents of Washington DC relative to the hardy Chicago stock, and it means something far greater.

You can imagine the calls that went out when the heads of the exclusive private school the Obama girls attend heard our President’s words:

“My children’s school was canceled today, because of what? Some ice. As my children pointed out, in Chicago school is never canceled.”

That’s the way to win friends and influence people, for sure.

I’m sure there was no malice aforethought in the Presidents jab, but even the lightest of touches from the big stick of the President of the United States of America will floor many, many people.

I’m afraid what will occur when he makes an off-hand comment regarding a foreign country or head of state.

Besides, Chicagoans herd their kids off to school every day regardless of the weather to give the kids plausible deniability when the parents are hauled into court on racketeering and corruption charges.

At first blush, the Arne guy is rather interesting.

Barack Obama’s pick for Secretary of Education seems, by all counts, to be willing to make hard choices and push hard policies for the strengthening of the education system.

Pushing past all the arguments (which I tend to agree with) that education is not mandated by the Constitution as a responsibility of the Federal Government, we have what we have, and we must work with it at the same time we work to change it.

The newspapers seemed to be a little less rosy about Arne than for some of the other Obama appointees. And now they’re complaining.

What first perked my ears was when I read in the Chicago Sun-Times yesterday:

(Obama) praised Duncan’s shutdown of failing schools, charter school expansions, push for better teachers and pay-for-performance experiment that rewards teachers and principals for student test gains.

And this further down:

Chicago Teachers Union President Marilyn Stewart conceded Tuesday that she has not had a “love fest” with Duncan, who drew union ire by closing failing schools, leaving teachers scrambling to find new jobs. But Stewart said she also has been able to work with him.

Anyone whose credits include shutting down schools and drawing the ire of a Union President is probably a real reformer.

The Globe and Mail this morning hit the nail on the head:

The former head of the Chicago Teachers Union has condemned Barack Obama’s choice of Arne Duncan as education secretary – proof positive that the president-elect chose wisely.

And then this morning the gloves came off.

The Sun-Times this morning says teachers at the Chicago Public Schools board meeting were less than enthused about Arne:

With the school closing hit list due next month, teachers charged that CPS charter schools — which have replaced some closed schools — are “destroying” neighborhood schools by luring away high-scoring kids. Meanwhile, they said, neighborhood schools are being forced to absorb low-scoring kids.

This is a false argument. It’s like the kid blaming his mom when he drops his cake on the floor.

There are not rules precluding, preventing, any school from using the resources available to it to do a better job than it is doing.

It is a poor manager, superintendent, or principle who thinks because they can’t get more money they can’t improve.

In the real world, one has to improve in order to get more money. “In order” is a phrase of relative position, the process or action before the “in order” generally has to occur earlier in time than the result afterwards.

In fact, principles who complain when Arne encourage and facilitated the firing of poor performers are the worst sort of ingrates around. Our children are at stake, not your favorite pet teacher.

If the schools are so bad that people prefer to take their children out and find alternative and superior methods of instruction, shouldn’t that encourage those failing schools to reexamine their methods and seek to do better? Apparently not to some.

The Union mindset of entitlement has become ingrained so deeply in the public school system in America that someone with the guts to buck the protectionism and croneyism so common in the union is a breath of fresh air indeed.

Kudos to Obama for this selection.

And they were singing: Bye, bye miss American pie…

Yesterday the US automakers, the UAW, and the US government failed to reach an agreement that could have secured a bailout for the “Big 3″. GM is consulting with bankruptcy lawyers. Chrysler is considering selling itself. Ford is apparently mostly OK and will survive with little change.

Senate Republicans and several Democrats followed their constituents calls and stood up to another free money day for American business.

I don’t believe Darwinian Biological Evolution is likely have occurred but there is scant proof indeed than anything besides a Darwinian approach to business is dangerous to liberty and allows for bloat and growth of government both in the breadth of responsibility and the expectations of the populace. The dying ought to be allowed to die to make room for new and fresh ideas.

It is not a closely held secret, the fact the UAW does more harm to GM than it does good for its members.

The entitlement mentality of many die-hard union members I know of is something to behold. I make an honest wage for a job I truly enjoy. I’m expected to contribute to my insurance costs and my employer does as well. I’m given the choice which benefits I wish to make use of, and I have a marginal cost for each one. But for each additional cost, my employer also contributes amounts and so while I’m paying more (or taking home less in each paycheck) I’m actually earning more. The benefits are delayed but there nonetheless.

The union workers I know are decent people, no worse nor better than many others I know. However, they have become used to two paradigms at least which are either wrong or detrimental. They are used to a conflicting relationship between themselves and the management and they are used to a level of coddling by their employers at the behest of the Union.

The relationship of the employer to the employee ought to be one of shared and communicated goals and observed ability and process communication and refinement and achievement recognition. This is admittedly an optimal goal, but it is not unattainable and for it’s optimal nature it ought not be dismissed.

The Union infrastructure destroys both directions of communication necessary to the successful and profitable enterprise. By setting up a default adversarial relationship between the average workers and the management, with the workers via their Union trying to get more and more of the company ‘pie’ for themselves with deeper and longer guarantees of remuneration and the managers trying to get concessions and extra work from the increasingly insulated employees.

When you have cases where GM has shut down a factory and is still paying full wages and benefits to thousands of people there is something obviously wrong.

You may say that GM owes it’s employees something: I would get severance if I was fired, but the idea is to make me WANT to get a new job. Paying me as much as I made previously as part of some inactive workforce is sound business sense only to those without sense or with an incredibly skewed set of priorities.

Now that, directly because of the UAW’s actions, GM is in free-fall and will likely file bankruptcy, they will be firing a lot of people. There will be thousands fewer jobs. People will be in REAL hurt. Good union people too. And the UAW will be unable to to anything about it.

GM will be restructured and without the UAW in their shops.

Congressmen were quoted saying that if the UAW had only agreed to wage cuts they would have been able to salvage the bailout. Thank God they did not.

Greed and avarice are light labels for the UAW.

I will rise again…

But look out.

Barack Obama will be president soon, and the unions are virtually guaranteed that federal law will be changed to allow “card check” which will set the bar for unionizing agonizingly low. With public votes, strong arming and union thug pressure will thrive and the UAW will be able to unionize the Toyota and Honda factories.

So they’re not dead. They know their payday is coming soon.

If you don’t know Chicago politics you don’t know that corruption is the norm, and the appearance of honesty is a closely honed art. Unions run Chicago arm in arm with the Democrat political machine. They’ve delivered Obama to the White House and they are expecting a high return on investment.

My union friends have a problem, they refuse to see the forest for the trees. They are used to the safety and coddling in benefits they receive because of the Unions work, but they refuse to acknowledge their accepting the benefits of the Unions come at such a price.

Unions served their purpose, and in some cases they may still have  a valid place. Federal law for the most part has codified the reasonable purposes of the Union. But Unions are about power, and their continued presence in America is without merit.

The internet and the vast web of information and advocacy outside of the Union are quite capable of keeping accountability within the workplace without the need for the stultifying and parasitic presence of the Union.

Until the UAW dies, American industry will fail.

David Limbaugh, the less bombastic, more correct brother of that dynamic duo (oh to be a fly on the wall during their childhood), has written an article regarding Barak Hussein Obama’s “reintroduction” to the American populace.

First with Gore, we joked about Gore Version 2.0 and 3.5, etc.

Then with Kerry, we just joked.

And now Obama. Following in the footsteps of the grand masters of moral ambiguity, personal power-gathering, and political pandering, he is trying to reinstroduce himself because apparently, we don’t really know the “real” Obama.

Who as been that messianic, sainted, robed and haloed bright and shining light illuminating all the brightest corners of our unexamined American experience? His evil twin?

The one with ties to Chicago-corrupt political machines and liberal terrorist friends and racist anti-Christ preachers, that must’ve been his evil twin. For sure.

So he is trying to set the record straight, reintroducing us to the “real” him, the “real” Obama. One question: Why do they think this ploy will be even potentially effective? Because of relativism.

In the enlightened eyes of relativist philosophy, there is no unambiguous absolute truth. Everything is subject to perception, and that perception, to our addled minds, must be truth.

(Writing that just now caused some flashing lights in my head: Relativism is born of our own despotic egos trying to rationalize an incredibly over-wrought sense of our own self-importance. If we do not bow to some supreme truth, we believe our own thoughts to be our own ultimate truth. And if our own thoughts are necessarily subject to our own biased perceptions, we must find some way of convincing ourselves that our biased perception can still be considered actual truth. Ergo: relativism, the belief that my limited perception of a small part of truth can somehow rise to the same level as that absolute truth.)

So, if perception is everything to relativists, Obama should be expected to try and reinvent himself.

Unfortunately for him, truth always prevails.

Throughout this election we have seen and we will continue to see ugly skeletons crawling out of Obama’s closets. McCain steadfastly refuses to capitalize on these and I do not believe he has been the source of any of their “outings”, but Obama cannot hide that he is a liberal and divisive and corrupt as they come. The truth will keep finding a way out and he will be stuck in perpetual damage-control mode trying to cover over those pernicious things we call facts.

David Limbaugh: It’s Only About Winning

If you live somewhere besides Chicago, you probably thought political machines were things of the past. With the fall of political operator Tony Rezko, friend and business dealing buddy of Barak Hussein Obama, the truth is once again brought to light: the dirtiest of politics are still being played and are still the keys to real power in Chicago and Illinois.

And Barak Hussein Obama is a fish in the waters of Chicago and Illinois. It’s where he cut his political teeth, where he learned his trade, and it is how he operates.

Dennis Byrne, writing in the Chicago Tribune today fears an Obama presidency for precisely this reason:

More than his racist minister chums, his starkly liberal voting record, his pandering to the get-out-of-Iraq-right-now zealots, what really bothers me about Barack Obama is his association with politics as practiced in Chicago and Illinois.
This is not a crime, of course, but the fact that he is someone who got his start and was propelled to stardom after an internship in the incubator of perhaps the nation’s most corrupt state gives me, at least, pause. It seems that everywhere you turn here, especially if it is toward the federal courthouse, some politician or political insider is being found guilty of some or another form of corruption

The Wall Street Journal reports that Obama is popular in Europe, which tells is volumes. And their comments show us how similar to his state-side supporters his Europeans fans are:

“Belgians are rooting for Obama because, let’s face it, the guy knows what he’s talking about, especially compared to Bush,” says Stéphane Mangnay, a 34-year-old house husband in Villers-la-Ville.

I would rephrase that claim: “He knows how to talk” is about all I can agree with.

And yet, the Washington Times reports that Europe may not be as enthusiastic regarding an actual Obama presidency as they apparently are regarding his candidacy:

“Once President Bush is out of the White House, there will be huge expectations in Europe that a new, rosy dawn of peace and love is appearing over the Atlantic,” said Reginald Dale, a Europe scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“They’re liable to be somewhat disappointed, because America is still going to look after its own interests, and then the fundamental interests may not have changed that much,” he said.

The article actually begins by noting that an oft-overlooked part of Mr. Bush’s presidency is the fact that European relations have been significantly improved over his second term:

(A)s Mr. Bush heads to the continent Monday for a weeklong goodbye tour, the little known fact is that his administration has done much to repair the trans-Atlantic relationship in his second term.

And then there is the sea-change of leadership and power change in key and leading European countries over the last few years, with heads of state coming into power with decidedly pro-America and pro-Western ideologies:

The French and German leaders who opposed Mr. Bush on Iraq have been replaced by more pro-American conservatives – Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, respectively. Silvio Berlusconi, an old Bush friend, is once again Italy’s prime minister. And in Britain, the Conservative Party is resurgent while Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who has distanced himself from Mr. Bush, is fighting for his political life.

Returning to the Chicago Tribune Op-Ed article:

(I)f Obama’s affiliations with the likes of Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., Rev. Michael Pfleger and ex-revolutionary Bill Ayers are legitimate issues, so is his political apprenticeship in the bowels of a political process that has sent governors, aldermen and countless other public officials to the pen. Has Obama picked up any bad habits by hanging around with these gents? Is he susceptible to the pressures that the “guys back home” will undoubtedly bring? The conventional wisdom among the Chicago punditry is that Chicago and Illinois pols are smacking their lips at the thought of installing an associate in the Executive Mansion.