You have to see this. It’ll break your heart. It certainly does mine.

Only two days in, while in the midst of a major economic crisis, what does Obama do with our money? He uses it to kill babies in foreign countries. Hooray for change.

Robert over at POW in CA posted a link to the funniest site! I had a great time playing with it, so I thought you all might like to check it out too:

The Barack Obama Inauguration Speech Generator!

What is it, you ask? It’s just like madlibs, except it’s made especially for people who are mad at liberals!
Just follow the instructions, put in a few choice adjectives, verbs, and nouns – be sure not to forget all the hope and change! – and you’re good to go. It’s just that simple! Finally this explains how all those toolerrific 20-somethings have gotten hired to be Obama’s speechwriters, despite being idiotic enough to post compromising photos of themselves on Facebook. One more mystery solved!
If you’d like to see the speech I came up with, click “More.” Honestly, I’m quite proud of it!

Our friends over at Deceiver.com have done an absolutely remarkable job of putting this whole Timothy Geithner debacle in perspective. It’s just too good for you to miss, so please, you HAVE to go read this.
Enjoy! Of course, I’m sure – like me – the enjoyment will end when you realize that you’re going to be crying once the reality of the situation sinks in and it becomes all too apparent that this is our country this man is futzing with in making all of this ludicrous nominations, and that these sorry people are the ones who will be determining our fate. Yeah, once that sinks in, all the enjoyment of Deceiver’s clever post kind of dries up and is replaced with a remarkable empty feeling inside. That feeling of finally seeing all that “Hope” and “Change” turn right into exactly what we all thought it would be – nothing but tried and true “Deceit” and “Business as usual.”
But of course, what else can we expect from a whole hoard of Chicago politicians and Clinton retreads setting up camp in Washington? That’s an unholy union in there ever was one.

Wasn’t it one of Obama’s campaign promises that if we elected him, we would regain the respect of the International community that we had supposedly somehow lost? Well, I’m sure convinced! Look at this, Japan loves us and totally respects us so much!

Ahhh, doesn’t that respect just feel so warm and fuzzy?! It’s like a return to the respect we received during Clinton’s administration, when they were selling Monica Lewinsky nesting dolls in Russia. Mmm, feel that respect!

I was going to name this title with a prayer, “God help us.” But as I was waiting for the “write post” page to load, I realized something. No, as much as we always need God’s help, right now we can’t rely on Him completely. We can’t rely solely on Him when there are still things that we must do to help ourselves. We only rely on him completely when there’s nothing left for us to do. At least, that’s what I believe. Sure, we always have faith, we always believe in what He can do for us, but no, so long as there’s something we can do for ourselves, we must do it, and we must do it now. That’s what free will, independence, and being an adult is all about, right?
Well, right now, we have something big we need to do for ourselves and we need to do it now. That something is opposing the Democrats’ bail out. Why? Because it’s not a bail out. Democrats may be saying it’s a bail out, but if you look closely at the language in the actual bail out bill, they’re also screaming at the top of their lungs, “Hello, my name is Socialism! Nice to meet you!” They’re lying with one side of their mouth and screaming out the truth with the other. We just need to wake up and realize which is which before it’s too late.

One of the bits of language in this bill that makes it obvious which bit is the truth and which is the lie, has to do with universal healthcare, i.e. socialized medicine. In that bail out – that’s supposedly SO important and SO critical and SO time sensitive that we have to do it NOW without thinking – is a short little snippet. Just a few quick sentences, but those quick sentences have one hell of a price tag. What is it?
Six hundred billion dollars “to address shortages and prepare our country for universal healthcare.” And yes, that’s a direct quote. (You can see the original here, the direct quote is from page 10. Pay special attention to the opening statement of the entire document. Note any fearmongering there? Funny, I thought only Republicans were the ones who did that…)
If this bill is SO important, SO time sensitive, SO crucial to save our economy that we have to do it NOW without thinking, why in the hell is that in there? Because it’s not a bail out. It’s yet another foot in the door for socialism. But rather than be clear, honorable, and direct with their intentions, Democrats are being sneaky about it. They’re slowly sneaking socialism in at night, under the cover of darkness, so we won’t know what’s going on until it’s too late.

Remember, please remember, the words of Rahm Emanuel. They may be trying to sneak this in, but their arrogance is getting the better of them. They’re giving themselves away, because they believe they’re unstoppable. That pride is dangerous for them, but a blessing for us. So please, don’t forget his words:

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before. This is an opportunity. What used to be long-term problems — be they in the health care area, energy area, education area, fiscal area, tax area, regulatory reform area — things that we had postponed for too long that were long-term are now immediate and must be dealt with. And this crisis provides the opportunity for us, as I would say, the opportunity to do things that you could not do before.”

His words. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” He said this shortly after he was announced as Obama’s new Chief of Staff. This is recent. He wasn’t speaking metaphorically, he was outlining the Democrats’ plan to shove socialism in through our front door while we’re looking the other way. With that quote in mind, think back to that $600 billion – $600 BILLION – “to address shortages and prepare our country for universal healthcare.” He told us what they were going to do, and they’re doing it. Now it’s our turn to stand up, stamp our feet, close that door in their faces, and say, “Not on our watch!” We have to say no to socialism now, before our country, our America, isn’t even ours anymore. The government is expanding under the guise of this crisis, they’re using our panic to gain an advantage over us. Please, I’m begging you, don’t let them do it.

Unlike most people who look at universal healthcare as a purely political issue, for me, it’s much more personal. I happen to have a very real, very urgent, very legitimate reason to oppose socialized medicine. That reason is a rare genetic condition known as Dercum’s Disease.
I won’t go into the details, because that would make this post even longer than it is. But suffice it to say, Dercum’s is fatal if it’s left untreated. It was discovered over 100 years ago, yet hasn’t really been to thoroughly studied. Because it’s not very well known and not very well understood, a lot of doctors are hesitant to try to treat it. Unfortunately this can mean that people are left to the mercy of the disease, left to die a very miserable, excruciatingly painful and drawn out death. It can take a few years or it can take a few decades. You die because your body is at war with itself, down to your very cells. The pain is unbelievable, unlike anything you could ever imagine. Every inch of your body screams constantly. Your bones, your flesh, everything. If left untreated, this constant fight will cause your body to enlarge at an exponential rate, until your heart and lungs give out. Or until a tumor forms on one of your internal organs and shuts it down.
Unfortunately, the disease also attacks your immune system, leaving you vulnerable to secondary infections. So if you don’t die directly from Dercums itself, you may be left to the mercy of a cold or the flu or something similarly simplistic. But if a doctor doesn’t understand how to handle Dercums, they won’t know how to handle the secondary infections. For instance, it took my doctors over 10 months just to diagnose me with mono when I was a teenager, simply because of the ways in which Dercums manipulates the systems of your body, which then alters the way medical tests are read.

Why am I telling you all this? Because while I’m fortunate enough to get care in the United States, I have friends with this disease who are dying because they had the misfortune to be born in the United Kingdom, in Australia, in Canada; in countries with socialized medicine. My friends have been left for dead by their countries’ socialized medical systems, the same systems the Democrats are trying to shove down our throats right now. If we walk down that same path, if we accept universal healthcare here, it will mean death for me and people like me. Not just people with Dercum’s Disease, but anybody with a chornic complicated condition. For the sake of taking care of people with colds, we will be sacrificing caring for those with cancer.
This is not an exaggeration, as much as I wish it was. I’ve spent a great deal of time in England. I’ve seen what their National Health Service does to people. I’ve even been subjected to it myself. As my friend Alastair in London says, “If the NHS can’t fix you with a sticking plaster (band-aid), you’re screwed.”
He should know. He almost died when his lung was punctured by a random attacker on the street. He went into an NHS hospital bleeding to death and about to die from his lung collapsing. The NHS doctor told him he needed surgery immediately, but that they couldn’t fit him in for another two weeks. If Alastair hadn’t been paying through the nose for private health insurance, he would have been dead thanks to socialized medicine.

That’s the cold hard reality of socialized medicine. Democrats are feeding it to us under the guise of a new name, justifying it as “fairness.” They claim that socialized medicine will mean that everyone will have access to the same quality of care. What they aren’t telling you is that yes, everyone will have access to the same care, but that quality of care consists of – again, as Alastair says – if they can’t fix it with a band-aid, you’re screwed. The reality is, it will make the class gap even wider. Private insurance in England costs four times what it does here. The wealthy are still getting proper medical care, while the poor and the middle class are suffering under conditions four times as dismal as what we have here in the States. The supposed class warfare the Democrats are using as an excuse to feed us socialized medicine is nothing compared to the entrenched class warfare built into the National Health Service in England.

What makes me angriest of all, however, is when the Democrats use such sad stories of poor poster children who supposedly can’t get health coverage. They’re hoping that you aren’t aware that every child in this country is automatically covered by Medicare. They’re hoping you also aren’t aware of the fact that every pregnant woman is also covered, and that the elderly are automatically covered as well. They’re hoping you don’t realize that pretty much anyone can walk into an emergency room when their life is in danger and get care. The same can’t be said in England, France, Australia, Canada, Iceland, or any other country suffering under “universal” healthcare. If they can’t fix you with a band-aid, you’re screwed. If your case is complicated, they’ll stall you by any means necessary until you die. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen far too many times and it breaks my heart.

Please, we need to wake up. My life depends on it, the lives of so many of my friends. We have to stop this now. Rahm Emmanuel is making good on his promise to not waste this crisis. They’re urging you to just accept this while in a panicked state of mind, so that they can take advantage of you. Why should we trust anyone who seeks to take advantage of us?
Please, I’m begging you, don’t let them do it. Call your Congressperson, call your Senator. Please, please, put your foot down now before it’s too late. Tell them to stand up against this “bail out”, tell them you won’t tolerate anymore socialism in this country. Tell them you love what America is, tell them that there are other ways to solve her problems than by adopting socialism. Socialism has failed in absolutely every single country that has ever adopted it. Surely we can’t be so arrogant as to believe our luck will be any different, or that people won’t die in the process.

Please, just tell them no.

My friend Abraham over at Occidental Soapbox has produced yet another brilliant, informative, concise, and essential video about the roots of radical Islam, the true intentions of its many violent branches, and the remarkable idiocy displayed in the west’s traditional approaches to negotiating with jihadists. This time around, Abraham is presenting us with a remarkable six-minute history of the Caliphate, the Muslim Brotherhood, and how it all relates to the conflict in Gaza. Miraculously he has managed to squeeze all this information into a six minute span. I highly recommend taking the time to check it out – if more people would dedicate just six minutes to learning about this, maybe we’d all have a better understanding of what it is we’re up against, what Israel is up against, and what we must do to better organize our efforts to eradicate extremism and reach true peace in the middle east.

As the war in Gaza rages on, it seems as if the antisemites of the world have been raging right along with it. From the talking heads on CNN who propagate false videos of fake atrocities, to politicians clamoring for the protection of a terrorist group, it seems everyone’s ganging up on Israel for daring to defend itself and its people. Who knew self defense was such a no-no. Apparently if you’re a Jew, you’re just supposed to sit there and take every ounce of abuse hurled at you.
I can’t believe how wrong our world has gotten. It’s amazing that in less than 100 years since the Holocaust, we’re repeating it, step for step. (We’re even back to arguing about Eugenics!) Antisemitism has become as rampant as it was in the 1930s. It’s commonplace, it’s the daily norm, and it’s wrapped up in so much politically correct leftist nonsense that sometimes it can even be hard to recognize for what it really is. But rest assured, antisemitism is still antisemitism, no matter how hard someone may try to disguise it. And it’s still wrong. I’m not even Jewish myself, but you don’t have to be Jewish to care about antisemitism, because it affects all of us, of every race, creed, color, nationality and faith.

A few weeks ago, my friend Joey sent me a wonderful mp3 of a speech given by Professor Anne Bayefsky, a human rights activist, Director of Touro College Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, a Professor in the Department of Political Science at York University in Toronto, and Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in New York. She’s also an expert on the United Nations. This particular speech was given at the request of the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission of Australia. It contains remarkable, mind-opening, earth shattering, eye watering information about the true intent, purpose, and history of the United Nations that I feel every American, every citizen of the world, absolutely has to hear.
The oration itself is available here, but since not everyone has the time to listen to a nearly two-hour long speech, I want to condense the most important information here for your convenience. But honestly, if you have the time, please consider listening to the speech. Professor Bayefsky is a remarkable speaker with some very important things to say. If you click on the link above, simply click on “To hear the 2008 oration, please click here.” Then you can download the mp3 file and listen to it at your convenience. Trust me, it’s well worth it. Or if you would prefer to read the speech in its entirety, you can download it in pdf format here.

If you’d like to see my condensed list of the most important facts from Professor Bayefsky’s speech, please click “More” to continue reading this entry.

The Demons of Gaza
Only Hamas is to Blame for the War; Only the Palestinians Can Stop It
January 10, 2009
Ralph Peters
The New York Post

Israel hasn’t killed a single civilian in the Gaza Strip. Over a hundred civilians have died, and Israeli bombs or shells may have ended their lives.
But Israeli didn’t kill them.
Hamas did.
It’s time to smash the lies. The lies of Hamas. The UN lies. And the save-the-terrorists lies of the global media.
There is no moral equivalence between Hamas terrorists and Israeli soldiers.
There is no gray area. There is no point in negotiations.
Hamas is a Jew-killing machine. It exists to destroy Israel. What is there to negotiate? When Hamas can’t kill Jews, it’s perfectly willing to drive Palestinian civilians into the line of fire – old men, women and children. Hamas herds the innocent into “shelters,” then draws Israeli fire on them. And the headline-greedy media cheer them on.
Hamas isn’t fighting for political goals. “Brokered agreements” are purely means to an end. And the envisioned end is the complete destruction of Israel in the name of a terrorist god. Safe in hidden bunkers or in Damascus, the Hamas leadership is willing to watch an unlimited number of civilians and even street-level terrorists die.

Lives, too, are nothing but means to an end. And dead kids are the coins that keep the propaganda meter ticking.
All Hamas had to do to prevent Israel’s act of self-defense was to leave Israel unmolested by terror rockets. All Hamas needs to do now to stop this conflict and spare the Palestinian people it pretends to champion is to stop trying to kill Israelis and agree to let Israel exist in peace.
Hamas didn’t, and Hamas won’t.
Now Israel has to continue its attack, to wreak all the havoc it can on Hamas before a new American president starts meddling. If Israel stops now, Hamas can declare victory just for surviving – despite its crippling losses.
While it’s impossible to fully eliminate extremism, killing every terrorist leader hiding in a Gaza bunker is the only hope of achieving even a temporary, imperfect peace. The chance may not come again.
And don’t worry about “creating a power vacuum.” Let the Palestinians pick up their own pieces. Even anarchy in Gaza is better for Israel than Hamas. Israelis, Americans and Westerners overall share a tragic intellectual blind spot: We’re caught in yesterday’s model of terrorism, that of Arafat’s PLO, of the IRA, the Red Brigades or the Weather Underground. But, as brutal as those organizations could be, they never believed they were on a mission from God.
Yesteryear’s terrorists wanted to change the world. They were willing to shed blood and, in extreme cases, to give their own blood to their causes. But they didn’t seek death. They preferred to live to see their “better world.”
Now our civilization faces terrorists who regard death as a promotion. They believe that any action can be excused because they’re serving their god. And their core belief is that you and I, as stubborn unbelievers, deserve death.
Their grisly god knows no compromise. To give an inch is to betray their god’s trust entirely. Yet we – and even some Israelis – believe it’s possible to cut deals with them.
In search of peace, Israel handed Gaza to the Palestinians, a people who had never had a state of their own. As thanks, Israel received terror rockets.
And the Palestinian people got a gang war.
Peace is the last thing Hamas terrorists and gangsters want. Peace means the game is up. Peace means they’ve disappointed their god. Peace means no more excuses. They couldn’t bear peace for six months.
This is a war to the bitter end. And we’re afraid to admit what it’s about. It’s not about American sins or Israeli intransigence. It’s about a sickness in the soul of a civilization – of Middle-Eastern Islam – that can only be cured from within. Until Arabs or Iranians decide to cure themselves, we’ll
have to fight.
Instead, we want to talk. We convince ourselves, against all evidence, that our enemies really want to talk, too, that they just need “incentives” (the diplomat’s term for bribes). The apparent belief of our president-elect that it’s possible to negotiate with faith-fueled fanatics is so naive it’s
terrifying.
Yet, it’s understandable. Barack Obama’s entire career has been built on words, not deeds, on his power to persuade, not his power to deliver. But all the caucuses, debates, neighborhood meetings and backroom deal-making sessions in his past haven’t prepared him to “negotiate” with men whose single-minded goal is Israel’s destruction – and ours.
If Obama repeats the same “peace-process” folly as his predecessors, from Jimmy have-you-hugged-your-terrorist-today? Carter through Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, he’ll be devoured before he knows he’s been bitten.
How many administrations have to repeat the identical error of believing that, deep down inside, terrorists, gunmen and warlords really want peace every bit as much as we do? Israel’s enemies aren’t just looking to cut a sharp deal. They want to destroy Israel.
Which part of what they shout in our faces is so hard to understand? Israel’s foes have been preaching Jew-hatred for so long that even the “moderates” can’t turn back now.
And why does the global left hate Israel so? Why would they pull out the stops to rescue Hamas?
Because Israel exposed the lie that a suffering people can’t lift itself up through hard work, education and discipline. Israel didn’t need the help of a hundred condescending NGOs and their misery junkies.
Because the Holocaust is a permanent embarrassment to Europeans. They need to believe that Israelis are kosher Nazis.
Because, from the safety of cafes and campuses, it’s cool to call terrorists “freedom fighters.” It makes you feel less guilty when you hit up daddy (or the state) for money. I mean, dude, it’s not like you have to, like, live with them or anything, you know?
(The preceding sentence is not a direct quote from Caroline Kennedy.)
Because, above all, the most-destructive racists in the world today are mainstream leftists. Want the truth? The Left codes Israel as white and, therefore, inherently an oppressor. Israel is held to the highest standard of our civilization and our legal codes – and denied the right to self-defense.
But the Left tacitly believes that people with darker skins are inferior and can’t be expected to behave at a civilized level. Leftists expect terrorist movements or African dictators to behave horribly. It’s the post-modern, latte-sucking version of the “little brown brother” mentality.
The worst enemies of developing societies have been leftists who refuse to hold them to fundamental standards of governance and decency. But, then, the Left needs developing societies to fail to prove that the system’s hopelessly stacked against them.
A battered, impoverished, butchered people built a thriving Western democracy in an Eastern wasteland. Israel can never be forgiven for its success.
In this six-decade-old conflict that Israel’s intractable neighbors continue to force upon it, there not only are no good solutions, but, thanks to the zero-sum mentality of Islamist terrorists, there aren’t even any bad solutions – short of nuclear genocide – that would bring an enduring peace to the Middle East.
And even the elimination of Israel wouldn’t be enough. The terrorists would fight among themselves, while warring upon less-devout fellow Muslims.
All Israel can do is to fight for time and buy intervals of relative calm with the blood of its sons and daughters. By demanding premature cease-fires and insisting that we can find a diplomatic solution, we strengthen monsters and undercut our defenders.

And don’t believe the propaganda about this conflict rallying Gaza’s Palestinians behind Hamas. That’s more little-brown-brother condescension, assuming all Arabs are so stupid they don’t know who started this and who’s dragging it out at their expense.
Gaza’s people may not care much for Israelis, but they rue the day they cast their votes for Hamas. Hamas is killing them.

Ralph Peters is a retired U.S. Army officer and the author of “Looking For
Trouble.”

You have to see this clip of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg being interviewed by a total leftist Hamas shill “reporter”! I’m no fan of Bloomberg, but I think he does a remarkable job of answering this woman’s laughably idiotic and obviously slanted questions.

Listening to people like that woman from CNN, it’s easy to see just how Holocausts get started. It’s slow, it’s meandering, but when you start hearing such drastic attempts to bend over backwards to paint a nation as evil, simply for defending itself and its people from outright terrorism, you’ve got to know you’re on the eve of something truly terrible and truly wrong. When is this nation going to wake up to the antisemitism that’s running rampant throughout the Left?
I’ll have more on that later, but for now, just think about it. And remember, the last Holocaust didn’t happen overnight. It’s so easy to forget that, looking back with full 20/20 hindsight. With all the grand moments from that period of time, it’s easy to overlook the slow, simmering boil that led to the first shots being fired. But never forget, before the people of a nation could exterminate an entire race, they had to grow accustomed to the idea. People don’t become monsters overnight. First school children were taught to count tanks instead of apples in their textbooks. Humor turned from harmless to rampantly antisemitic. Whispers in back alleys turned into questions posed by national figures on the biggest stages. The biggest waterfalls begin with a single drop of water, so do atrocities begin with the smallest of wrongs.

I remind myself of this with an issue of Life magazine that I happened to find in a junk shop. It was from 1939. The US hadn’t joined the war yet, we were still on the outside looking in. At the time, we didn’t know the truth of the concentration camps, the horrors of the war in Europe. In this magazine, there’s an entire article talking about how remarkably progressive and respectable Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party are. It’s an interview with Hitler and his minions, discussing such progressive ideas as feminism, healthcare, science, religion, and eugenics (if you’re not familiar with that, please, look it up). It’s wholly congratulatory, it even goes so far as to encourage the American people to respect this “great man.” It is a brilliant piece of propaganda, sprinkled with the tiniest hints of antisemitism. It speaks of racial purity, but only in the kindest of ways. On the eve of the bloodiest of all wars, even Life magazine was singing Hitler’s praises, calling him a progressive leader worthy of emulating. It was just the very beginning of an overall attempt to familiarize the American public with a monster. You don’t welcome a monster into your home when it’s full grown and menacing. But when it’s small, minute, and disguised by obscured naivety, you open your door and welcome it inside, all the while never noticing what it is you’re nurturing at your hearth. Until it’s too late, and you’re a nation that’s bred an entire generation ready, willing, and proud, to murder in the name of what’s right, what’s good, and what’s honorable.

There has been enough of our own history to teach us how to recognize these infantile monsters, if only we’d open our eyes to see them.

You really have to read this if you haven’t already – apparently a letter has been circulating around EmailLand lately, and it only just now made its way to my inbox. It’s a response to a pitiful plea for bailout support that was sent out by Troy Clarke, President of General Motors. When one average, hard-working American – Gregory Knox, President of Knox Manufacturing – received this missive in his email inbox, he decided to let loose and give Mr. Clarke a piece of his mind. That piece turned out to be quite honest, truthful, and not only thankfully sane, but refreshingly American. I’ve checked it out on Snopes, and sure enough, it’s for real. So I’m sharing it here, to hopefully add to the throngs of average Americans who are shouting the same sentiments right back at Mr. Clarke and the rest of Congress. Maybe they won’t listen to us, but they should at least be well aware that if they continue down the path of the bailout, they sure as hell won’t be receiving any of our money or our votes.

Dear Employee,

Next week, Congress and the current Administration will determine whether to provide immediate support to the domestic auto industry to help it through one of the most difficult economic times in our nation’s history. Your elected officials must hear from all of us now on why this support is critical to our continuing progress we began prior to the global financial crisis. As an employee, you have a lot at stake and continue to be one of our most effective and passionate voices. I know GM can count on you to have your voice heard.
Thank you for your urgent action and ongoing support.

- Troy Clarke
General Motors North America

Dear General Motors,

In response to your request to call legislators and ask for a bailout for the United States automakers please consider the following, and please also pass this on to Troy Clarke, the president of General Motors North America, for me.

You are both infected with the same entitlement mentality that has bred like cancerous germs in UAW halls for the last countless decades, and whose plague is now sweeping the nation, awaiting our new “messiah” to wave his magical wand and make all our problems go away, while at the same time allowing our once great nation to keep “living the dream.”

The dream is over!

The dream that we can ignore the consumer for years while management myopically focuses on its personal rewards packages at the same time that our factories have been filled with the world’s most overpaid, arrogant, ignorant and laziest entitlement-minded “laborers” without paying the price for these atrocities, and that still the masses will line up to buy our products.

Don’t tell me I’m wrong. Don’t accuse me of not knowing of what I speak. I have called upon Ford, GM, Chrysler, TRW, Delphi, Kelsey Hayes, American Axle, and countless other automotive OEM’s and Tier ones for three decades now throughout the Midwest and what I’ve seen over the years in these union shops can only be described as disgusting.

Mr. Clark, the president of General Motors states:
“There is widespread sentiment in this country, our government and especially in the media that the current crisis is completely the result of bad management. It is not.”

You’re right, it’s not JUST management; how about the electrcians who walk around the plants like lords in feudal times, making people wait on them for countless hours while they drag ass, so they can come in on the weekend and make double and triple time for a job they could easily have done within their normal 40 hour week.

How about the line workers who threaten newbies with all kind of scare tactics for putting out too many parts on a shift and for being too productive (mustn’t expose the lazy bums who have been getting overpaid for decades for their horrific underproduction, must we?!?) So you really not know about this stuff?!?

How about this great sentiment abridged from Mr. Clarke’s sad plea:
“over the last few years we have closed the quality and efficiency gaps with our competitors…”

What the hell has Detroit been doing for the last 40 years?!?

Did we really JUST wake up to the gaps in quality and efficiency between us and them?

The K car vs. the Accord?

The Pinto vs. the Civic?!?

Do I need to go on?

We are living through the inevitable outcome of the actions of the United States auto industry for decades.

Time to pay for your sins, Detroit.

I attended an economic summit last week where a brilliant economist, Alan Beaulieu, surprised the crowd when he said he would not have given the banks a penny of “bailout money.” Yes, he said, this would cause short term problems, but despite what people like George Bush and Troy Clarke would have us believe, the sun would in fact rise the next day and something else would happen where there had been greedy and sloppy banks, new efficient ones would pop up. That is how a free market system works. It does work if we let it work.

But for some reason we are now deciding that the rest of the world is right and that capitalism doesn’t work, that we need government to step in and “save us”. Save us, hell! We’re nationalizing and unfortunately too many of this once fine nation’s citizens don’t even have a clue that this is what’s really happening, but they sure can tell you the stats on their favorite sports teams! Yeah, THAT’S important!

Does it occur to ANYONE that the “competition” has been producing vehicles, EXTREMELY PROFITABLY, for decades now in this country?

How can that be???

Let’s see:

Fuel efficient…

Listening to customers…

Investing in the proper tooling and automations for the long haul…

Not being too complacent or arrogant to listen to Dr W Edwards Deming four decades ago…

Ever increased productivity through quality, lean, and six sigma plans…

Treating vendors like strategic partners, rather than like “the enemy”…

Efficient front and back offices…

Non-union environment!

Again, I could go on and on, but I really wouldn’t be telling anyone anything they really don’t already know in their hearts.

I have six children, so I am not unfamiliar with the concept of wanting someone to bail you out of a mess that you have gotten yourself into. My children do this on a weekly, if not daily basis, as I did at their age. I do for them what my parents did for me (one of their greatest gifts, by the way), I make them stand on their own two feet and accept the consequences of their actions and work them through.

Radical concept, huh?

Am I there for them in the wings? Of course, but only until such time as they need to be fully on their own as adults.

I don’t want to over-simplify a complex situation, but there certainly are unmistakable parallels here between the proper role of parenting and government.

Detroit and the United States need to pay for their sins.

Bad news people, it’s coming whether we like it or not.

The newly elected Messiah really doesn’t have a magic wand big enough to “make it all go away”. I laughed as I heard Obama “reeling it back in” almost immediately after the vote count was tallied. We might not do it in a year or in four. Where was that kind of talk when he was RUNNING for the office?

Stop trying to put off the inevitable.

That house in Florida really isn’t worth $750,000.

People who jump across a border really don’t deserve free health care benefits.

That job driving that forklift for the Big Three really isn’t worth $85,000 a year.

We really shouldn’t allow Wal-Mart to stock their shelves with products acquired from a country that unfairly manipulates their currency and has the most atrocious human rights infractions on the face of the globe.

That couple whose combined income is less than $50,000 really shouldn’t be living in that $485,000 home!

Let the market correct itself, people. It will. Yes, it will be painful, but it’s gonna be painful either way, and the bright side of my proposal is that on the other side of it is a nation that appreciates what it has and doesn’t live beyond its means. Gets back to basics and redevelops the work ethic that made it the greatest nation in the history of the world. And probably turns back to God.

Sorry, don’t cut my head off, I’m just the messenger sharing with you the “bad news.”

- Gregory J. Knox
President
Knox Machinery, Inc
Franklin, Ohio 45005

Well said, Mr. Knox! I certainly wish there were more politicians like him around, and hell, for that matter, simply more Americans like him. Then maybe we might actually be a little closer to solving this mess the right way, rather than digging ourselves even deeper into this hole of debt we already find ourselves in. Continually bailing out companies and individuals who repeatedly engage in unsound financial practices is like shooting yourself in the right foot after already shooting yourself in the left one. Fairly soon you won’t even have a foot to stand on, and it’ll be your own damn fault.
Wake up, people. Times are going to be hard enough anyway, let’s not make them any harder by completely decapitating the free market system that made us the greatest, most successful, most independent country in the world. Name me just one socialist nation that can even hold a candle to what we’ve accomplished, then I might actually think that bailing out any companies at all might be a good idea. But guess what? You can’t even name one. So let’s just drop all this nationalizing crap once and for all, okay?