Despicable Senator Snowe

She makes my list again:

Senator Olympia Jean Snowe McKernan

“History calls“, Senator Snowe, not for your vote on the Democratic “health care” (uh, power grab assault on individual liberty) “bill” (uh, alleged bill), but rather for you to leave the GOP in disgrace.

the looming cap and trade disaster

My letter du jour to Congressman Griffith:

Dear Congressman Griffith,

I applaud your vote against the Cap and Trade bill in this morning’s “test vote”.  It’s a massive tax hike/power grab based on pure pseudoscience.

I would request that you not only vote against this bill when it comes to a live vote, but also speak out strongly in a leadership role against it.

We Americans are growing very weary of these supposed “emergency” bills that must be rushed to vote right now or else.  We’re not being given reasonable time to review the text of these voluminous bills.  I suspect our representatives have no time to truly digest them, either.

Vote NO, lead NO on cap and trade.

Respectfully,

Dave K. Smith
Huntsville, AL

hmm, weren’t we free to join unions before?

My letter to Congressman Parker Griffith:

Congressman Griffith,

Please vote NO on the euphemistically named Employee Free Choice Act (aka Card Check).  Americans do not need to be strong armed into joining unions.  Misguided unions destroyed GM with their power to drive the company to a globally uncompetitive position.  Exporting that failure to the rest of our economy accomplishes nothing.

America doesn’t have “little guys”.  We don’t want or need faceless unions to stand up for us.  We stand up for ourselves.

I will be watching your votes very carefully on repressive power grabs like this one that seem to be all the rage in Washington, DC these days.  I will work diligently against those members who support such attacks on our cherished freedoms.

Respectfully,

Dave K. Smith
Huntsville, AL

that pesky “endless mantra” of fiscal responsibility

Here’s Senator Steinberg to Senator Sam Aanestad, R-Penn Valley, who took issue with the public being excluded from recent California state budget deliberations:

And I wish to God that you could deviate just a little bit from your philosophy, from this endless mantra of no new revenue, no new revenue ever…

I've got a small violin going for California Senator Darrell Steinberg...

Yeah, I see where you’re coming from, Senator Steinberg.  There’s been way too much of this “no new revenue” nonsense flying around recently.  I can fully appreciate your frustration.  [Okay, okay, let me find the off switch for this sarcasm-whirligig before it throws a lug nut...]

Despicable Senators

The vote is not quite over, but the turncoats have ensured that it’s a mere formality at this point:

Senator Arlen Specter
Senator Olympia Jean Bouchles Snowe McKernan
Senator Susan Margaret Collins

In response to your votes on today’s Economic Stimulus bill, American conservatives invite you to leave the Republican Party.  Each of you is a complete disgrace to the GOP.

Jack Pelton gets it

Kudos to Jack Pelton, the CEO of Cessna, who’s showing the courage not to sprint off the zero-sum cliff with the rest of the economic know-nothings.  Make no mistake, the control freaks advocating curbed use of business jets are either environmental extremists, anti-capitalist zealots, or both.

a CEO with courage

“Listen, I just want to say one thing”

Tom Brokaw was thinking back to the 60’s on inauguration day, and he chose to emphasize that well-worn playbook page on divisiveness.  Curious choice – shouldn’t “hope” and “change” be an optimistic focus on the future rather than a pining for the worst of the bad ol’ days? From newsbusters.org:

Listen, I just want to say one thing. Having been in the South in the ’60s and Los Angeles, in Watts and northern urban areas, when we were evolving as a country, I’m thinking of all the bigots and rednecks and people I met along the way. I’m saying to them, “Take this.” You know?

Tom Brokaw, on “Morning Joe”, MSNBC, 1/20/2009

why the outrage over $140 million?

Obama’s $140 million inauguration has been watercooler and talk radio fodder over the last week.  Is that because people can wrap their head around the concept of $140 million, but not $X trillion?  In terms of flushing money down the toilet, we’re talking orders of magnitude difference here, folks.

obscene, excessive, windfall profits

Now that oil prices are hovering around $50/barrel, perhaps the Rahm Emanuel-style window of “opportunity” is less open now than it was back in the spring when Obama and Clinton were both talking windfall profits taxes.

But we must remain vigilant whenever retread ideas like this rear their ugly heads.  Again, from Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson,” originally published in 1946:

The best profits, from the standpoint not only of industry but of labor, are not the lowest profits, but the profits that encourage most people to become employers or to provide more employment than before.  If we try to run the economy for the benefit of a single group or class, we shall injure or destroy all groups, including the members of the very class for whose benefit we have been trying to run it.  We must run the economy for everybody.

regarding dying industries

According to yesterday’s WSJ article (by Hitt, McCracken, and Dolan), the U.S. automakers somehow fancy themselves to be “above” bankruptcy:

Ford CEO Alan Mulally said Ford studied a bankruptcy scenario and believes “it is not a viable” option.

Have we been here before?  Yes.  From Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson,” originally published in 1946:

The lobbies of Congress are crowded with representatives of the X industry.  The X industry is sick.  The X industry is dying.  It must be saved.  [...]

Paradoxical as it may seem to some, it is just as necessary to the health of a dynamic economy that dying industries be allowed to die as that growing industries be allowed to grow. The first process is essential to the second. It is as foolish to try to preserve obsolescent industries as to try to preserve obsolescent methods of production: this is often, in fact, merely two ways of describing the same thing. Improved methods of production must constantly supplant obsolete methods, if both old needs and new wants are to be filled by better commodities and better means.