What Bass Player Am I????
Band Stuff, Bass's And Guitars | Sonicfrog July 8, 2011 | 
Comments (2)
Casey Anthony Over-Reacts???
* A push dedicated to creating yet another crime, of not reporting a child right away when it’s discovered that said child is missing.
As if this happens often! Come on, do we really need yet another law? And some want to take this all the way to the Federal level.
* A restaurant deciding to refuse service to ANY juror who served in Pinellas County.
I am not a lawyer, but here are my thoughts on this one….
Business owners do have a lot of latitude on refusal of service, but they have to be careful. You may have a perfectly good reason in your mind why you decide to refuse service to someone.
But, lets say that person also happens to be gay, and feels that the reason you are singling him out is because he’s gay.
You do have a right to refuse service. But the customer also has a right to sue if he or she thinks it’s wrong. It’s the great equalizer.
Even though you the business owner / manager may think your reason for denying service has nothing to do with said patron being gay… maybe you didn’t even know the customer is gay, when gay customer sues you, then you had better be able to show with some certainty that it wasn’t actually because the customer is gay. And you may eventually win. But the legal cost may be so much that you end up having to fold up shop and go out of business.
By the way, I own my own business, Frog’s Pool Service and Spa Repair, and more than once have wanted to not provide service to a customer, either really smelly people or they have a dozen dogs and don’t pick up the doggie doo, leaving tons of lands mines in my wake. But I have only stopped servicing a pool or not completed a spa repair because of payment issues. And that has only happened a couple of times.
Oh, and I’m also gay, so don’t refuse my service, or else I may sue!!!
Just kidding. I don’t have the money or time to take up a law suit. Plus, lawsuits are just not my style… And they’re too damned annoying!!!!
Political Bits That Make You Go Hmmmm.
On Instapundit’s blog, he links to the Washington Examiner, which says this:
President Obama insisted yesterday that Congress reach a long-term budget deal, not a short-term “quick-fix” that could put the debt ceiling debt smack in the middle of the 2012 campaign next year. This is a major shift. Since January, the Obama administration has been calling for a “clean” debt limit hike to avoid economic “catastrophe.” As recently as two weeks ago the White House signaled they were open to a short-term deal. Now Obama’s position is that the deal must include reforms for Medicare, Medicaid and taxes, all to be completed by July 22. Why the monumental shift in position?
Obama wants to minimize how often Republicans in Congress can ask for spending cuts and maximize his own opportunities to seek tax hikes aka “revenue.” Obama has been asking for a $2.4 trillion debt hike that would allow enough deficit spending to last into 2013. That would be after the Bush tax cuts expire in 2012. If Obama gets a deal that locks Republicans into to a couple trillion in long-term spending cuts now, then he is free to push for trillions in tax hikes when the debate shifts to extending the Bush tax rates later in 2012. That gives Obama two bites at the tax hiking apple: He’ll accept some tiny tax hikes now, paired with a couple trillion in spending cuts, but then in 2012 he’ll push for $5 trillion in tax hikes by ending the Bush rates. Why any conservative would sign on to this deal escapes us.
Two points…
1. Of Course Obama will push for letting the Bush tax cuts expire…. Duh!!!! But that won’t be a part of this deal! Are you saying Republicans must not pass a balanced budget because of what Obama will do in the future? Obama has been asking for a $2.4 trillion debt hike, but I can’t imagine he’ll get that.
2. “President Obama insisted yesterday that Congress reach a long-term budget deal, not a short-term “quick-fix” that could put the debt ceiling debt smack in the middle of the 2012 campaign next year…. the deal must include reforms for Medicare, Medicaid and taxes, all to be completed by July 22.”
Funny, President Obama is not exactly known for keeping a deadline. Look back and see how many deadlines were moved leading up to the passage of the healthcare reform bill. That took at least nine months longer than the first hard deadline demanded. My bet is that Republicans won’t pass anything that includes tax increases or the sun-setting of certain tax deductions, and the President won’t sign onto any long term deal without them. So they will pass some sort of stop gap measure measure to keep things going into the full election year. Maybe I’m just too cynical, but this is just too juicy an issue NOT to have laying around to beat each other over the head with in the 2012 election cycle.
Politics / Law Stuff, Stupid Government | Sonicfrog July 6, 2011 |
Comments (0)
Lies And Spin! Stimulus Style! UPDATE!
Compliments of the Weekly Standard, which, apparently, doesn’t seem to have any standards.
Concerning a new report issued by the White House on the dreaded ARRA stimulus package of 2009, they write:
When the Obama administration releases a report on the Friday before a long weekend, it’s clearly not trying to draw attention to the report’s contents. Sure enough, the “Seventh Quarterly Report” on the economic impact of the “stimulus,” released on Friday, July 1, provides further evidence that President Obama’s economic “stimulus” did very little, if anything, to stimulate the economy, and a whole lot to stimulate the debt.
??? Is that really what it says???? We’ll tackle that in a moment.
The report was written by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, a group of three economists who were all handpicked by Obama, and it chronicles the alleged success of the “stimulus” in adding or saving jobs. The council reports that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it describes as a “natural way to estimate the effects of” the legislation), the “stimulus” has added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs — whether private or public — at a cost (to date) of $666 billion. That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.
(A) OK, just under 2.4 million jobs is not the “over 3 million” Obama had been touting while justifying the stimulus, but… it’s still 2.4 million jobs that were there, helped or created by the stimulus. How many non-stimulus jobs were created by normal capitalist processes during this period? Judging from the rise in the unemployment numbers during the same period, I can guess the normal jobs creation numbers were in the negative.
(B) “That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.”??? Seeing that some of the stimulus package were tax cuts, about a third I believe, and since tax cuts don’t count against deficit numbers (unless a Democrat passes it) wouldn’t the real number be something like $183,000 per job. Still less efficient in jobs creation cost than the private sector can do, but the value on the economy of a person having a job versus one that doesn’t can not be under-estimated.
In other words, the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the “stimulus,” and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead.
Uhm… But I thought welfare was bad?????
Furthermore, the council reports that, as of two quarters ago, the “stimulus” had added or saved just under 2.7 million jobs — or 288,000 more than it has now. In other words, over the past six months, the economy would have added or saved more jobs without the “stimulus” than it has with it. In comparison to how things would otherwise have been, the “stimulus” has been working in reverse over the past six months, causing the economy to shed jobs.
What???? Does the writer have a crystal ball??? Mr. Anderson (thank you Matrix for putting Hugo Weaving’s voice in my head when I think of the name “Mr. Anderson”) provides no evidence at all that business would have stopped firing people and hire 2.8 million if the stimulus would not have been passed. Now, if the Obama stimulus package would have significantly raised taxes to pay for itself, as FDR’s New Deal did, then you could make the claim that the stimulus hurt growth of free market job opportunities. But since the stimulus included tax cuts for employees and small businesses, and the Bush era tax cuts are still in place, there is simply no real economic basis for his claim, only a political partisan one.
Mr. Anderson then writes this:
Again, this is the verdict of Obama’s own Council of Economic Advisors, which is about as much of a home-field ruling as anyone could ever ask for.
In the previous statements, Mr. Anderson was being speculative. Here, he is flat out lying! The C. O. A. DOES NOT agree that the stimulus has been working in reverse. Here is what they say:
In light of the actual behavior of GDP, the estimates in Table 7 suggest that most
forecasters believe that, in the absence of the Act, GDP would have declined sharply in 2009:Q2
and continued to decline in 2009:Q3, and that growth would have been considerably weaker in
subsequent quarters than it actually was. Likewise, the estimates in Table 8 imply that most
forecasters believe that jobs losses would have moderated much more slowly than they actually
did over the course of 2009, and that substantial job losses would have continued into 2010.
Nothing in that statement reads “reverse”.
And in the conclusion:
The analysis indicates that the Recovery Act has played a significant role in the turnaround of the economy that has occurred over the past two years.
If the Weekly Standard is supposed to be a benchmark for good Conservative journalism, then it’s no wonder so many hold the conservative press as a whole in such contempt!
UPDATE: Here is a much better criticism of the ARRA. The key point:
As early as the summer of 2009 it was clear that ARRA was not working as intended, as John Cogan, Volker Wieland and I reported. Research since then has uncovered the reasons why. One reason is that very large stimulus grants to the states did not go to infrastructure spending as intended, and that’s what Ned Gramlich found out about Keynesian stimulus packages thirty years ago.
The author respectfully kicks Paul Krugman in the teeth for advocating an even larger stimulus package!
Economics, Politics / Law Stuff, Tortured Logic | Sonicfrog July 5, 2011 |
Comments (2)
Life Imitates Art!
And BOTH Involve Police!!!!
I’d invite you back to my place
It’s only mine because it holds my suitcase
It looks home to me alright
But it’s a hundred miles from yesterday nightMust I be the man in a suitcase
Is it me, the man with the stranger’s face
Must I be the man in a suitcase
Is it me, the man with the stranger’s faceAnother key for my collection
For security I race for my connection
Bird in a flying cage you’ll never get to know me well
The world’s my oyster a hotel room’s a prison cellMust I be the man in a suitcase
Is it me, the man with the stranger’s face
Must I be the man in a suitcase
Is it me, the man with the stranger’s faceI’d invite you back to my place
It’s only mine because it hold my suitcase
It looks like home to me alright
But it’s a hundred miles from yesterday night
The Declaration Of Independence!
How it was crafted, in Jefferson’s own words, from his point of view…. OK. It’s not Jefferson himself, but Jefferson scholar Clay Jenkinson, who portrays the writer of the Declaration every week on The Thomas Jefferson Hour!
The Declaration podcast, which explains so much about how that wonderful document was crafted, is HERE! There is a little introduction taht you can skip if you wish. The podcast starts at about 5 minutes in. Enjoy!
PS. I’ve been listening to this podcast for five or six years at least. I can’t begin to tell you how enlightening this show has been for me.
History | Sonicfrog July 4, 2011 |
Comments (0)
My Bass Rig, Mid 2011.
Some things come and go, some things stay the same.
Here is what my bass stuff, Circa 2009 – 2010 looked like.
The green Yamaha RBX750 is gone (bro-in-law now has it), and the red Peavey Dynabass 4 string is, unofficially, for sale for $200.
Band Stuff, Bass's And Guitars | Sonicfrog July 3, 2011 |
Comments (3)