Archives
Friday, April 17, 2009
Not Getting
It.
Lansing.
Right wing country? This is just a sex
joke?
MUCH MORE THAN A JOKE. For all you faint hearts out there. The ones who think we're done, defeated, and doomed. We're capitalists and so we're allowed to make use of quantitative concepts the know-nothing political science majors of the MSM have never heard of. One that's vitally relevant is something that came out of the whole quality improvement/customer satisfaction initiative of the 1980s and 1990s:
CNN, MSNBC, etc, wanted to dismiss the April 15 tea parties because the nationwide total was only somewhere between 225,000 and 250,000 active protesters. Look at the graphic. The active protesters were registering customer complaints against the federal government. The analogy works because unlike professional performances such as WTO protests and anti-war protests (which are organized and staffed by trained agitators), the tea parties were spontaneous, amateur, middle-class demonstrations. Every participant was, in fact, an unhappy customer who actually voiced a complaint to management, usually without any prior instance of having done so in such a direct way. Now look at the multipliers. The unavoidable implication is that there is a huge population of unhappy customers of which the tea party activists are a tiny subset.
Now consider two more facts. According to participants in a wide range of locations, this action was not confined to Republicans. There were Democrats aplenty involved in addition to Republicans and self-styled conservatives. Again, not professionals but ordinary citizens who were moved to protest in public for the first time in their lives. Imagine how bad the food and service have to be at a restaurant before you send a meal back for the first time in your life, no matter how shy and retiring you have always been about confronting your server.
Second fact. The real tax increases and personal impacts of the new administration's policies haven't occurred yet. We're still less than 100 days into the Obama regime. How many more will be willing to complain in public when this kind of economic punishment is passed into law?
Waxman
Won’t Compromise on 20% Carbon Cap in Climate Measure
April 17 (Bloomberg) -- House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman said he won’t compromise on his proposed 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gases over the next decade in the face of criticism from lawmakers who say the economy could suffer.
“I want to keep those caps in place,” Waxman said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt” airing this weekend. “It’s what the scientists are telling us we must do” to avoid a global catastrophe, he said.
Waxman, a California Democrat, said he would be willing to give ground in other areas of the measure, which comes up for its opening round of debate in Congress next week.
The four days of subcommittee hearings will follow the Environmental Protection Agency’s ruling today that greenhouse gases pose a danger to the public, a finding that opens the way for new U.S. regulation of cars, power plants and factories.
Waxman, 69, said he expects his climate bill, as well as health-care reform legislation, to clear the House before August.
He took issue with President Barack Obama’s plan to use 80 percent of the estimated $646 billion in revenue raised from carbon permits under a so-called cap-and-trade system to help fund middle-class tax cuts.
“I don’t think that’s the best use of it,” Waxman said. “By and large” it should be spent on green technologies, he said, and part of it could be used to “help consumers with higher energy costs” and hard-hit industries, “especially coal.”
April 17 (Bloomberg) -- House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman said he won’t compromise on his proposed 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gases over the next decade in the face of criticism from lawmakers who say the economy could suffer.
“I want to keep those caps in place,” Waxman said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt” airing this weekend. “It’s what the scientists are telling us we must do” to avoid a global catastrophe, he said.
Waxman, a California Democrat, said he would be willing to give ground in other areas of the measure, which comes up for its opening round of debate in Congress next week.
The four days of subcommittee hearings will follow the Environmental Protection Agency’s ruling today that greenhouse gases pose a danger to the public, a finding that opens the way for new U.S. regulation of cars, power plants and factories.
Waxman, 69, said he expects his climate bill, as well as health-care reform legislation, to clear the House before August.
He took issue with President Barack Obama’s plan to use 80 percent of the estimated $646 billion in revenue raised from carbon permits under a so-called cap-and-trade system to help fund middle-class tax cuts.
“I don’t think that’s the best use of it,” Waxman said. “By and large” it should be spent on green technologies, he said, and part of it could be used to “help consumers with higher energy costs” and hard-hit industries, “especially coal.”
What Waxman is promising is dramatically higher energy costs deliberately imposed by the federal government to blunt the theoretical long-term effects of climate change. Whether they call it a tax increase or not, this will be a punch in the gut to tens of millions of Americans who will know that this effective tax increase comes directly from the administration and the Democrat congress.
How dangerous to the political establishment is this iceberg? Already, it's safe to say that the April 15 tea parties mean that people who sat on their hands in November 2008 because they couldn't abide McCain will not be sitting on their hands in 2010 or 2012. It's also safe to say that some independents and Democrats who voted for Obama are already sorry they did.
When the unavoidable consequences of the sweeping anti-capitalist policy changes presently racing through congress start to be felt by average citizens, the iceberg will grow substantially larger.
Another point. When a customer complaint is met by denial, derision, and ridicule, all the multipliers increase. That's why smart businesses always apologize to unhappy customers. The MSM is stabbing their own cause in the back right now, like a Maitre D' who calls the bouncer to hurl complaining diners into the street. There's nothing that can make them understand this. But it's not important for them to understand it. All that's important is that we understand it. And use it to our advantage. Because there's more at stake than a dinner out. We're complaining on behalf of our constitution and our country. Remember that.
Just saying. Do NOT give up hope. I'm confident enough that I won't even make any sex jokes about who's going to be bending over the desk in the Oval Office.
So there.
