United Autoworkers, Detroit, and your hard-earned dollars

Just read yet another account of how extravagant the Detroit automotive complex has become, what with lavish retirement plans, first-rate health care, unemployment compensation at up to 95% base salary, and $75 an hour pay rates .. now it's the multimillion dollar retreat on Michigan's Black Lake with its own designer golf course. The story reports that union dues built this brothel-like palace for union leaders and top brass .. all from your own dollars which you've spent on overpriced, fuel-hungry American rides.

It looks like the government's gonna fund this glutenous monster's habit too .. much to our chagrin. We all know who's in bed with whom these days and, frankly, it hasn't come as much of a surprise that the big three's gonna get their bailout (that's right - B A I L O U T) despite the fact that most Americans oppose it. We all knew it would happen.

I'm gonna make this one short and sweet instead of harping on how miserable this bailout is from a moral standpoint. Here's the deal:

Even with the money Uncle's gonna take out of our pockets and give to Detroit, we can still kick 'em in the pants and force them into the bankruptcy enema they need so very badly. And it's a simple solution: Just don't buy a new American car for the next two years. Get something from Toyota or Nissan; they make some really nice cars and trucks and you get more for your money. After all, you won't be funding any Black Lake retreats.

Vote with your feet, people. If Detroit hits an all-time sales slump through 2010, they'll have no choice but to finally morph into the industry they should have been all along. Hit the mute button when the Chevy commercials come on; turn the page and skip looking at the Ford truck ad in the paper, and change the station when Chrysler starts that crap on the radio. Don't even look at their products and they won't be able to romance you.

In the end, when you finally do get around to considering buying a new American vehicle, you'll have a better choice than you ever thought possible because they will have reinvented themselves. Won't be a choice.

Don't buy another American vehicle until Fall of '10. It's just that easy.

GalaxyArmyNavy poor internet vendors

This is the kind of online vendor I try to stay away from. I placed an order and paid for it and that was the last I ever heard from them other than a confirmation of the order .. no tracking number, no order status, no replies to EMails, no communication at all. When I telephoned them, the phone rang five minutes before it picked up, the assistant was typical New York brusque and he told me he needed to call the factory to get a status. Huh? Presumably, they have no modern inventory network in place .. and after being placed on blank hold about ten minutes, I hung up and called him again. The assistant's response, incredibly, was "I think it's been shipped". Clearly, he just wanted to get rid of me or the factory didn't know what they're doing either. After a full week, I still had no order status update on the website's joke-of-a-status-page other than 'processing' and really no idea if I'd ever get my product.

Finally got through on the phone again on the eighth day and the assistant Stanley confirmed that they don't have the item in stock and it's back-ordered. Although I have provided ample contact information to them, GalaxyArmyNavy never telephoned or EMailed to advise me of this difficulty. I then demanded a refund and the assistant agreed and sent an EMail to that effect. That was my first ever message from GalaxyArmyNavy on this issue.

Had I not intervened, I might still be waiting to receive my product.

As I have no faith in these people, I have opened a Paypal dispute issue, just to document it all and ensure it gets resolved through Paypal. If I have no reply by the end of the week, it escalates to a Paypal claim.

GalaxyArmyNavy online vendor has banker's hours .. typical 8 hour days Mon-Thu, a half day on Fri, and the weekend off; that usually indicates a poor work ethic right there. Once they have your payment, they just don't want to have anything to do with you from then on. They are a bloated, high-volume, big-time vendor that's overgrown its service department and probably couldn't care less as long as the money's rolling in.

I've posted this account just in case anyone is considering doing business with this vendor and is smart enough to do a search on 'em first .. my recommendation is find another vendor who'll treat you better.

Half-Ton Man Dies of Heart Failure in Mexico

Now here's a story you have to read to believe just how stupid the world has become. OK, digest the following foxnews story and see if your logic fault LED lights:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,434166,00.html

An obese patient, bed-ridden, pleads for help as his heart fails. His weight: a staggering 990 standard pounds of sallow, drooping flesh. The man cannot get up from his special bed; hasn't been able to for some years, yet claims he cannot keep from overeating .. has an "eating disorder". The authorities actually attempted to remove this man to a hospital using a pickup truck but he died anyway enroute to the hospital. Later at the funeral, his family is critical of the government for not acting sooner to save the man. They claim it's the government's fault that the man got so huge .. that he was allowed to die like that. Incredibly, this occurs in Mexico .. not exactly known for having a fawning government which caters to its citizens' personal needs.

Has that LED lighted yet? Got any really outstanding questions on this one?

Well, DUH!

Somebody had to be feeding the man; he couldn't get his own food because he couldn't leave the bed. That's the person that caused this man to die. Well, DUH! All that needed to be done was to throttle this sow's food intake down to the bare minimum required to sustain him and he would have begun to lose weight. Right?? Somebody was enabling this blimp to overeat and that's the person the family should be complaining about, not the government.

If it occurred to you that someone other than the government was responsible for this guy's death, give yourself five points. If it outraged you, you get ten.

Guilty Murderous OJ finally Jailed as Common Thief

Sometimes I find myself despairing at the events that I see unfold in our country .. seemingly against all decency and goodness .. in defiance of true justice. Today my spirits were boosted when I read the headlines proclaiming O.J. Simpson's conviction on armed robbery and other high crimes against others. No more will we see his phony, smug smile on the golf course. No more will we have to hear "if I did it" because this time the tale reads "I did it" and he will spend, hopefully, the rest of his days behind bars in a small prison cell instead. The Brown and Goldman families can now lay just claim to the man's many possessions .. but, more importantly, they can find some small measure of justice and comfort in his incarceration.

Well done to the prosecution, which laid a solid foundation for his conviction on all twelve counts during the trial, no easy task when one considers how hard it was to establish that case and pick a good, solid jury. Well done to that jury, too, which heard the evidence and fairly and impartially found him to be guilty as charged. Now it is up to the Judge to make sure the correct message is sent far and wide throughout our country .. that the harvest of a wicked life is, and always should be, imprisonment. Today, on the 13th anniversary of the perversion of justice that saw this man freed, Orenthal heard more verdicts read aloud in another courtroom .. and this time he heard "guilty as charged". The news reports called it 'eery' .. I agree; exactly thirteen years!

May the face of convicted felon Orenthal James Simpson be forgotten by America, save for the replays of his football dashes on the sports channels and occasional repeats of "The Naked Gun", and may the trophies and trinkets so eagerly coveted by this evil man now grace the walls of the Goldman and Brown homes. May the souls of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman rest easier now that this man has been finally caught up with thirteen years later .. even though he wasn't convicted for their murders, this will do just as well. Let us not forget that Al Capone was finally tripped up, not for racketeering or murder, but for not paying taxes on his wicked wages, and it caused him to die miserably in prison.

The Goldman family, which has labored in the courts for so many years to pursue Simpson, also played a huge part in all this by making him fight bitterly for the material possessions he held dear but had no right to. Were it not for the civil court judgements against Simpson, he wouldn't have been driven to stealing from others as a common thief. It was his persistence and dedication to his son's memory that inspired Fred Goldman in his tireless quest for justice that finally brought this sad story to this end. O.J. departed society today and may he never return to freedom and our American way of life. It made all the other bad news just a little sweeter.

As for me, I will speak his name no more.

Democratic congress squarely to blame for Financial Crisis

I must admit, I've been largely confused over the current financial crisis .. never have been one to follow economics .. relying, instead, on others more versed to explain the complicated mechanics of money to me whenever I needed to follow something. The current blur of terms is enough to puzzle a lot of us .. hedge funds, securities, Fannie Mae .. the list goes on and on.

I think most of us just pretend to understand the complex machine that Wall Street and the financial market has become. The machine has grown bloated in complex schemes that appear designed simply to wring money out of money for people who prefer this scheming over working to earn an honest dollar. That's always been my opinion of bankers, brokers and the like.

I'm not going to get into the complex structure behind Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (where did they get those stupid names, anyhow?), but I really don't need to. I also frankly don't know if we should rescue the situation, either. All I need to know on this account is that the government tried to limit Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their power 3 years ago and was defeated roundly by the democratic-controlled congress .. unanimously .. every time. The dems fought to keep these two financial institutions running strongly and without oversights or limits .. to facilitate those who are less affluent (minorities and the poor) to buy large and previously unaffordable upscale homes and Barnie Frank has his name all over that one. It was a shortcut in a mad dash to bring the poor into the middle class without it having to actually earn that place. That's what I call putting lipstick on a pig.

And that's really as much as I need to understand. Whatever spin comes out of it, that's the naked truth to the matter. Well, it's certainly backfired over the years. The republicans tried to reign it all in and got defeated and, now that the project has failed, the dems want them to take the blame for it.

Stand by for more spin. Nancy Pelosi, chief spinmaster for the largely democratic congress, is trying feverishly to lay the blame for all this on the Bush administration. Anything that she can successfully stick to Bush will vicariously stick to McCain because that's the relationship hollywood and the liberal press have been working hard to establish.

See how it works? If they thought they could blame the Pearl Harbor attack on Bush, they'd give it a try .. and it'd be about as true, too.

Ask yourself: who would be behind easy low interest mortgage loans for the poor? Let's see .. which party fits that one? Hmmmm .. see how easy it is when you simplify things and think for yourself?

Am I my half-brother's keeper?

I became intrigued last week with an account on the internet regarding a half-brother of democratic candidate Barack Obama .. who shares the same father as the senator, and who lives on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya. Always mindful of the false stories that have been spawned lately in this cruel and combative campaign, particularly from the democrats, I was cynical and suspicious at first. Was this payback mud-smearing from the supporters on our side of the fence or was it genuine? Surely the Obama campaign would refute such stories as they crop up, first springing from an interview with Vanity Fair of Italy magazine, and then growing from several follow-up internet interviews by private journalists. Surely the Obama campaign would address these stories and deny them, or at least spin the issue.

The revelations were surprising, to be sure: The 26-year-old man, whose name is George Hussein Onyango Obama, acknowledges that he is indeed Barack Hussein Obama's half-brother and even cites an entry in Barack's book acknowledging such a brother in Kenya. Could this be true; no denials have yet been issued from the Obama camp either on this somewhat obscure story .. so I slowly began to give it some credence, little by little. As it turns out, this guy's the youngest of several half-brothers .. the son of a woman known only as "Jael" and a well-traveled 'father'.

What I found hard to believe was the fact that this slight young man lives in abject poverty and perpetual peril .. in a violent miasma of political unrest, starvation, and filth .. which is common for that part of the world .. subsisting on about a dollar a day. His home is basically a small hut, barely enough to keep out rain or vermin .. or intruders. It appears that intruders are the most dangerous component of life in this cesspool known as Huruma. George Obama, in a net interview with Telegraph.co.uk, related " .. Huruma is a tough place, last January during the elections there was rioting and six people were hacked to death. The police don't even arrest you they just shoot you. I have seen two of my friends killed. I have scars from defending myself with my fists." ... adding, somewhat proudly " I am good with my fists".

I was baffled the first time I read the account in Vanity Fair of Italy .. how could this be true? How could such an affluent family not send some aid to a blood relative in such a place? How could a senator not at least attempt to rescue his own half-sibling from this hellhole by perhaps sponsoring him for a visa? How about helping him to immigrate out of Kenya and gain U.S. citizenship? At the very least one would expect a family with assets in the millions to send some cash to the fellow time and again .. to help him along. I mean, $50 would put this guy in much better shape than he is in now.

Now I understand a liberal press ignoring a story like this .. we've been seeing this lopsided reporting going on for the better part of a year .. pillorying the governor of Alaska for her daughter's pregnancy or Senator McCain for his age .. however, they apparently don't regard this as newsworthy .. or they direly hope that this doesn't hit mainstream America until after November. And, in light of this liberal non-coverage, I can even understand how the Obama people are conspicuously silent on the subject. Ignore it and it just might go away, courtesy of the press with one blind eye .. but deny or spin it and it might hit the street. That's the corrupt kind of coverage we're becoming accustomed to .. the numbing of American values .. the filtering of journalism to achieve their end. Yes, we're getting used to it, almost like the F word in casual speech.

But what I just can't seem to understand is the core issue at the center of this whole embarrassing revelation: How is the senator ignoring his own flesh and blood in the first place?

And what does this say about Obama's family values? What does it say about his spiritual beliefs, his church, or his immediate family members who are also related to that wiry little man in the wretched hut? How can a man's private actions clash so dramatically with his public words and he still enjoy such support and acceptance in the political arena? How can we be so blind to this kind of character flaw that we can allow ourselves to be herded along like sheep .. with hollywood and the liberal press in attendance as our shepherds .. to November's polls? How can we allow ourselves to be sold such a bill of goods so obviously tainted .. so very not yet ripe .. so very inexperienced and disingenuous .. as this unfaithful half-brother Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois?

As for the concept of support, George had this to say of his relationship with his half-brother in the Telegraph interview: " No one knows who I am. I live like a recluse, no one knows I exist. If anyone says anything about my surname, I say we are not related. I am ashamed".

And in that sense, George Hussein Onyango Obama is richer than a lot of Americans because he has enough moral fiber and intelligence to actually feel shame.