Category Archives: USA

2012/01/21

Ron Paul, Red Dawn and Chinese Armed Forces in Texas

There is a very interesting new Ron Paul RevolutionPAC advertisement that focuses on foreign policy.

One premise of the Ron Paul campaign has been that many of our woes around the world are self-inflicted. I would agree, although I am not in complete harmony on this.

Below is Ron Paul’s new RevolutionPAC foreign policy ad. (The ad is not by the Ron Paul campaign itself, but by his supporting PAC. I know: hamburger, cheeseburger. Not much difference.)

The theme from Ron Paul’s ad is not new. It is a thread of thought that has been with us a long time now.

In 1984 there was a Patrick Swayze movie called Red Dawn. The movie didn’t explain what happened to cause foreign troops to be stationed on U.S. soil but the rest of the movie makes for a feature length story of Ron Paul’s new foreign policy ad.

Movie - Red Dawn - 1984

Movie - Red Dawn - 1984

Thanks to Al Alborn for bringing the Ron Paul ad to my attention.

DISCLAIMER: I support the core thesis of this advertisement. On the other hand I consider America to be an empire. Empires have a choice: stay involved or become one of the players that have to play by the rules rather than make up the rules. It isn’t a perfect world.

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Filed under Afghanistan, Election 2012, Libertarianism, Philosophy, Texas, War

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2011/11/25

When is a cloud just a dream — rather than a savory Apple pie?

by Bill Golden
CEO, USAJobZoo.com
and IntelligenceCareers.com

When is a cloud just a dream — rather than a savory Apple pie?

Apple invested $300 million to build a cloud center at an internet and highway crossroads in North Carolina. The dream was that the cloud would bring jobs and growth to a community hard hit by foreign competition.

Certainly the cloud makes for a good enabler of telework and can help lower costs for businesses that are information-intensive.

There are costs, however. Local investments in such technology does not mean that there will be local jobs.

Apple got a $46 million state tax break in North Carolina to build one of its new cloud centers. The promise was that at least 250 jobs would be created.

So far the actual job count is perhaps 50 employed, or $920,000 in tax breaks per job. Combine state tax breaks with a local 50% reduction in Apple’s property taxes and it soon seems that Carolinians are paying their own wages via statewide taxes to work at the Apple cloud facility.

The future of jobs as one industry analyst frames such investments: “… in the newer digital economy, capital investments that a generation ago would have created thousands of new positions often equal only a handful today, with computers and software processing the heavy lifting while the key programming is often done by engineers back in Silicon Valley.”

The cloud also is a two-edged sword. So while the cloud enables telework and can help lower costs for businesses that are information-intensive, it can also be the vehicle for transferring work to whereever the work can be done at a lesser cost.

For communities such as the one in North Carolina that hosts the Apple cloud facility, the cloud may well cost them more jobs than it will create unless they find a way to harness the power of the cloud rather than just have it live in their backyard while paying for its existence through tax credits and lost state tax revenue which they will pay through other forms of taxation.

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2011/10/06

Zen – Democrats and Republicans. Who Needs Them?

Remember: smoking is bad for your health. If you think that Democrats and Republicans are working for the greater good then please share what you are smoking … even if it does have side effects. Smoke enough and you won’t notice (or remember … or care about) the side effects.

Democrats and Republicans

Thanks to Laurie Millam and to Kerry Helmer for sharing this big important thought with me and with many other people.

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Filed under Civil Society, Democratic Party, Republican Party, USA

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2011/09/21

Bureaucracy and Dead Horses

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that, “When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.”

However, in bureaucracy more advanced strategies are often employed such as:

1. Buying a stronger whip.

2. Changing riders.

3. Appointing a committee to study the horse.

4. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses.

5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.

6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.

7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.

8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.

9. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase dead horse’s performance.

10. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.

11. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of economy than do some other horses.

12. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.

And of course….

13. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Thanks to Joe Cummins for these 13 talking points. No PowerPoint presentations were used in developing these ideas or concepts, or the random words used to form seemingly coherent sentences … in those cases where the words appear to actually form some structure of readability.

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2011/08/24

About that Virginia earthquake yesterday – rumor roundup!

RUMOR Roundup – The Weather Channel says yesterday’s East Coast earthquake was caused by an unknown fault line running under D.C. and through Virginia.

It is now being called Obama’s Fault, though Obama will say it’s really Bush’s Fault.

Other theories are that it was the founding fathers rolling over in their graves or, that what we all believed to be an earthquake was actually the effects of a 14.6 trillion dollar check bouncing in Washington.

Original source: found floating on Facebook. Was wearing a life preserver so I hauled it in. Original author unknown.

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2011/08/02

Five pearls of Irish wisdom

Borrowed from my dear friend and occasional zombie hunting partner Debbie Dix.

1. Money cannot buy happiness but somehow, it’s more comfortable to cry in a Mercedes Benz than it is on a bicycle.

2. Forgive your enemy but remember the bastard’s name.

3. Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.

4. Many people are alive only because it’s illegal to shoot them.

5. Alcohol does not solve any problem, but then neither does milk.

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2011/05/29

Texas, Migrants, H.B. 1202 and Hypocrisy

Topic: Texas and H.B. 1202

Purpose: H.B. 1202 proposes to make it a felony to do business with anyone that is possibly an illegal alien, or what it calls “unauthorized alien”.

Major Exception: This bill would exempt “domestic help”: lawncare, nannies, almost anyone that works at your residence — and many family-run farms in Texas are also classified as a residence. So people — aka employers — who hire or contract with someone for work “exclusively or primarily at a single-family residence” are off the hook.

This bill was originally introduced back in early March 2011, and appears to have stalled in committee where it has remained since  April 13, 2011

Texas Labor Code (201.047) also exempts from consideration of a person as being employed if the person working on a farm or ranch makes less than $6,250 per quarter — with most migrant farmhands making just $3,510 per quarter.

Some thoughts:

– Over 80% of all agricultural workers in Texas are migrants, and 95% are Mexican.

– The average reported wage for hired farm labor is $6.75/hour or $3,510 per quarter … barely half of the Texas legal requirement to be considered ‘employed’.

– It can be difficult and time consuming to get a work visa. Three government agencies are involved in the work visa process, with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) being a third checkbox determination as to whether an H2-A migrant seasonal worker visa should be granted. Three agencies = slow, slow, slow.

– The DHS issued ONLY 149,763 H2-A migrant work visas (2009) for the entire USA. An H2-A visa can be granted without limit if an employer agrees to pay market rates, provide health care and basic benefits (shelter/food) to their workers.

– Farmers so abuse the system that Texas state government issued a 2010-2011 TEXAS MANUAL FOR IDENTIFICATION AND RECRUITMENT OF MIGRANT CHILDREN — in an attempt to remind farmers that some things are just unacceptable.

– Per the federal government, Texas has the largest migrant worker population of any state and quite specifically the feds say that these migrant workers have only one skill: agriculture.

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So what does it all mean?

Dear Fellow Conservatives and others,

As a conservative I take great pride in the Jeffersonian principle that freedom means freedom of choice and action free from government interference, but enjoying freedom also requires that no harm should be done to another.

Texas H.B. 1202 does only one thing: it demonizes an entire group of people that it will probably never affect. Once you consider the parameters of Texas Labor Law (quarterly earnings) and the exemption of domestic help then you have probably exempted 80-85% of all illegal aliens from this law being applied. So why even trot this bill out to begin with?

Let’s stop being hateful.

I believe in strong borders. I get it that ‘illegal’ means illegal. I strongly believe that we are shipping American jobs overseas and we need to fix that.

However I also believe that we have essentially invited these millions of illegal immigrants to our country because it is profitable.

Illegal migrant labor is profitable because we write guidelines that overlooks the employment of the vast majority — because it is cheaper to hire these folks than to pay a decent wage to your fellow Americans or to legal migrants and to provide basic benefits.

Let’s stop being hypocritical about why we have illegal aliens.

“If the Mexican farm laborers all went back tomorrow, the U.S. farm system would collapse” per one major Texas farmer, who was backed up by Texas Produce Association president John McClung (2007). McClung says that  industry wants a legal workforce and supported President George W. Bush’s attempt to formalize the status of millions of illegal migrant workers, which failed.

H.B. 1202 is hateful and hypocritical. No attempt whatsoever has been made to give some legal status within Texas to these folks that keep its agricultural system competitive and productive.

When I first wrote about this issue back  in March some readers said that I was just being ‘business unfriendly’.

I am not unfriendly to business just because I refuse to look beyond reality: we are encouraging illegal migrants and to write guidelines that keep them in dirty and minimal wage jobs.

I am not unfriendly to business just because I refuse to ignore the plight of hardworking abused people that are being abused and exploited so that you and I can enjoy cheap food, or mow our laws, or wash our clothes and keep our kids.

I am no less a conservative because I believe many that call themselves conservatives are being hateful and hypocritical.

Let’s secure the borders. But let’s also secure our hearts and acknowledge why we have an illegal alien problem: we invited them here.

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Filed under Civil Society, Economics, Immigration, Texas

2011/03/27

Russell Baker — some quotes about life, humanity, and pierogies

Even as a child I consumed the newspapers. Yes, the comics were interesting but as someone that got involved while still quite young in 1968′s presidential election — at the age of 12 — I lived to read the serious commentary and thought pieces.

One of my favorites on the commentary page has always been fellow Virginian Russell Baker.

Baker was never a George Will or a Jack Anderson. Baker was thoughtful farce. Baker had the ability to sum up entire philosophies in as little as an entire sentence. Sometimes. He was the person that you always wanted around the dining room table for long chatty meals, and endless coffees afterwards.

Russell Baker is probably closer to Mark Twain and to Dave Barry than to the other great minds that mislead us. While it amazed me that he was included on the same page with the serious columnists I am happy to report that I probably learned more from Baker than all the others (although I never missed a George Will or William Safire column, even after Safire became a continuous grump after the late 1990s).

Some Russell Baker observations on life, humanity and pierogies:

    “In America nothing dies easier than tradition.”

    “The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.”

    “Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.”

    “One of the many burdens of the person professing Christianity has always been the odium likely to be heaped upon him by fellow Christians quick to smell out, denounce and punish fraud, hypocrisy and general unworthiness among those who assert the faith. In ruder days, disputes about what constituted a fully qualified Christian often led to sordid quarrels in which the disputants tortured, burned and hanged each other in the conviction that torture, burning, and hanging were Christian things to do…”

    “The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.”

    “The Government cannot afford to have a country made up entirely of rich people, because rich people pay so little tax that the Government would quickly go bankrupt. This is why Government men always tell us that labor is man’s noblest calling. Government needs labor to pay its upkeep.”

    “Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime, and should be taken in small doses.”

    “An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious – just dead wrong.”

    “A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday.”

    “Live by publicity, you’ll probably die by publicity.” >> Are you listening Newt?

    “You can’t enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.”

    “A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems than you have to.”

    “All politicians are humble, and seldom let you forget it. They go around the country boasting about their humility. They are proud of their humility. Many are downright arrogant about their humility and insist that it qualifies them to be President.”

    “Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don’t work, those that break down and those that get lost. The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately to defeat him, and the three major classifications are based on the method each object uses to achieve its purpose. As a general rule, any object capable of breaking down at the moment when it is most needed will do so.”

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2011/03/13

One Year Later — I’m not Satan, and you ain’t Lucifer … even though you drink coffee, tea and/or koolaid.

One year ago today on a very cold, snowy Saturday I got up and went to the national kickoff of the Coffee Party, here in Prince William, Virginia.

Later that day I sat down and wrote my observations in “I’m not Satan, and you ain’t Lucifer … even though you drink coffee, tea and/or koolaid.”

I also explored the TEA Party, even becoming a local chapter founder and coordinator.

Have since gone inactive with both TEA and Coffee. But along the way I met some of the most amazing people.

The Prince William Coffee Party had a very short life. Stuff happens. However, I have made a number of lasting relationships with these folks. And I look forward to working with them for years to come.

As an independent-minded American I have questions. Am looking for answers. Life is complex. I want more than simplistic answers.

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I’m not Satan, and you ain’t Lucifer … even though you drink coffee, tea and/or koolaid.
– 2010.03.13

OK, so I did it. I went to the local Coffee Party on Saturday, March 13th.

I’m conservative with a long track record of supporting whatever walks the right side of the street. Although born a Democrat, back in 1972 I even joined the ‘Democrats for Nixon’ campaign as a highschooler — in Florida there were no Republicans elected to state office until 1978. None. Long story short: I have never identified with liberal or Democratic groups, even though I was born a Democrat — registering as a Republican only when that other former Democrat ‘God bless Ronald Reagan’ ran for president.

Bottomline: I wasn’t sure how these Coffee folks would take to someone with an NRA ballcap, who openly describes themself as conservative, or how they would deal with someone willing to discuss issues from a more conservative perspective. Certainly I have seen how more liberal-minded people were treated by the opposing view in my community — not a pretty sight.

There were a few things said by fellow attendees that made my ears twitch. At one point a group moderator even pointed me out and said “OK, so you smiling. So why the smile?” Blink. Blink. “Oh, crap” thought I. “She mistaked my smirk for a smile.” Time to put up or to shut up. So I did. Blink. Blink. “OK, well that’s a helpful perspective to understand a different view”, said she … and on we moved in the conversation. Hmmm …

Our group conversation focused on issues that we all individually believe should be of interest and worthy of group investigation. The issues added up: 15, 20, 25 … perhaps 30 different issues got listed. Then each participant got two votes to select two issues that they personally would like the group to focus on. Issues with the most votes were rolled into four study groups.

Hmmm … so the rumors that I heard beforehand that this was just a disguised group pimping for liberal causes or the Democratic party were … they were … bogus. Solidly bogus.

By the day’s end I found myself in the ‘Financial Oversight’ issue study group responsible for issues such as taxation, banking regulation, etc.

Boom! So now we would get our agenda if it were ever to happen. Someone would surely guide the study groups to what breadcrumbs should be followed. Nope. Didn’t happen.

We six group members decided what topics we wanted to study, set our own agenda for meeting, created a Facebook page to exchange info and to build whitepapers that can be used within the group and for approaching our legislators. The Coffee leadership didn’t even get involved in asking what we had decided upon. They’ll find out when we report back later in the month.

I’m not Satan, and you ain’t Lucifer … even though you drink coffee, tea and/or koolaid.

America stands at a crossroads. We are always arriving at some crossroad but the issues today are huge and imminently in front of us. The outcome will directly affect our children and grandchildren, leaving them incredible debt. We owe trillions to foreign countries and investors (and to Americans, too) — almost $2 trillion is due in October 2010 to pay back money borrowed in the early 2000s.

We have major healthcare issues that are at an impasse; our system is one of the best medicine that people can buy. Yet we rank just ahead of Cuba in the general health of our population. Obamacare to me is an abomination that will bankrupt the country and yet the alternative is “personal responsibility” — even though healthcare insurers are a monopolistic industry and some recently announced hikes of 25-36% in annual premiums.

Enough of labels. Enough of political party hacks and support groups — both the Democratic and Republican parties are focused on the next election. Neither can be trusted to hold real discussions and to make hard decisions. Each put party before country.

As for all the liberals, moderates, conservatives and wingers of every stripe: I’m not Satan, and you ain’t Lucifer … even though you drink coffee, tea and/or koolaid.

If you want to sit down with me and discuss issues then good. Check your name calling and label machines at the door — I don’t have time for you or that if that is what you are about.

Here is what I am about: God bless the U.S. Constitution, the 10th Amendment has real meaning, don’t put your hands in my pockets to pay for programs — unless we are both paying the same, and we should pay as we go. I don’t believe that “cut taxes” is the answer to everything, but taxes should be minimal and government intrusion into our lives should also be. But be assured “we” includes both you and me. We are both Americans — and I’ll drink any beer that you buy me. … :^)

I’ll meet with you any time and any place — except Sunday afternoons when I’m either enjoying my Second Amendment rights or playing soccer, or doing both.

BTW – I drink both tea and coffee. Both are OK with me.

This post by Bill Golden, aka Bill4DogCatcher.com, an independent observer of American political life, economics, and workforce issues.

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2010/08/04

Health Care Reform Act Headed for the Supreme Court due to Partial Victory by Virginia Constitutional Challenge? Yes.

by Bill Golden
Bill4DogCatcher.com and JeffersonConservative.com

The Health Care Reform Act, AKA ObamaCare as it is called by both supporters and detractors, has stumbled badly in its attempt to fend off a constitutional challenge posed by Virginia.

On Monday, August 2nd, 2010, U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson denied Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the state of Virginia challenging the new health care insurance law. His ruling stated that it is far from certain Congress has the authority to compel Americans to buy insurance and penalize those who don’t.

The stumble comes from the entire Health Care Reform Act (HCRA) depending upon the individual mandate for the HCRA to have meaning. Please remember that Virginia chose carefully as to how it challenged the HCRA’s constitutionality: it did not challenge the power of the Congress to pass such a bill; Virginia challenged the constitutionality of requiring individuals to have health insurance.

Failing to overcome Virginia’s challenge, the fate of the HCRA now goes to a court trial to begin October 18th, 2010. Win or lose, both parties will undoubtedly appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The effective outcome is that many states will delay beginning to implement the HCRA until its constitutionality is determined. Just as Arizona is stymied in its ability to implement portions of SB1070 so is it the same for the HCRA whose first requirements and benefits went into effect as of July 2010.

My view is that Arizona will ultimately prevail at the Supreme Court level and Virginia may well also prevail.

Back on March 21st 2010, just hours before the vote was taken in the House on the Senate version of the HCRA, I gave my opinion and an overview of the constitutional issues facing the HCRA.

My opinion then and now:  “As much as I believe health care reform is needed, and needed now, the senate version of health care reform is both unconstitutional and overreaching. If the senate bill should be passed by the House then it will be more of chimeral victory that will be defeated in the SCOTUS due to its many flawed provisions, rather than the total sum value of its intent.”

For more info: What the press is saying about this development.

Bill Golden is an independent observer of American politics, trends and economics. Bill’s political views meet at the crossroads of conservatism, libertarianism and being a practical centrist. No longer a member of any political party, Bill would undoubtedly be declared a DINO if he were a Democrat and a RINO if he were Republican.

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