J's Cafe Nette

Archive for September 24th, 2007

The UAW has gone on strike against GM, the first strike in ten years.

The hangup seems to be health care benefits for retirees and “job security” for active employees. This has been an ongoing battle over the same issues for over twenty years.

As a former officer of a local union who has been on strike too many times I can tell you this is a losing proposition for the company and the employees.

In the end a compromise will be reached that will satisfy neither side, and both the company and the workers will suffer economically, though I believe strikers’ benefits for UAW are much better than they were in my union.

It’s fun for the first week, but when negotiations drag on it starts to get on your nerves to the point you worry all the time.

In our case we lost our benefits after 30 days out so the union always settled within that 30 days for the same basic offer that was on the table when they walked out. Maybe the UAW has the funds to pay benefits to the strikers.

When the strikers return to work their first check most likely will have union dues taken out effective the first day they went out, which means a check for a very small amount. I once had a check for less than a dollar and kept it just to mess up the company’s bookkeeping system.

Unions have priced our companies out of business, or close to it.

Although I was once pro-union, I see no benefit in belonging to one now.

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Another ER visit for the Anchoress’ father in law and the mother in law isn’t doing so well either, although the Anchoress says things are looking up.

If you’re so inclined please pray for these fine folks.

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Here is the text of the advertisement:

Ahmadinejad is a terrorist.

Columbia University is wrong to give him a platform.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens our nation and the freedoms we value. He has supported attacks on our soldiers and our allies.

He should be treated as the terrorist that he is.

Yet, while Columbia gives a terrorist like Ahmadinejad a platform to speak, they refuse to allow the ROTC on campus.

What has happened to this prestigious university?

People who support killing Americans are welcome. But the military that defends them is not.

Columbia should be ashamed of its actions.

Freedom’s Watch knows that America and the forces of freedom are right. We know the threat of terrorism is real.

And we know democracy must prevail.

The terrorists and their appeasers are wrong.

SUPPORT FREEDOM’S WATCH

Stand up for Freedom and those who defend it.

Surrender is not an option. Victory is America’s only choice.

Visit www.freedomswatch.org or call 877-222-8001

Hat Tip: Red State

For a round-up of protest activities go to Sister Toldjah

If you live in or near New York and wish to participate in the demonstrations against this devil go to Atlas Shrugs for the schedules. The rest of us will be with you in spirit.

Let’s show this thug what America really is!

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This flag is planted — there are 9+ miles of flower fields that go all the way to the ocean. The flowers are grown by seed companies. It’s a beautiful place, close to Vandenberg AFB. Check out the dimensions of the flag. The Floral Flag is 740 feet long and 390 feet wide and maintains the proper flag dimensions, as described in Executive Order #10834. This flag is 6.65 acres and is the first floral flag to be planted with five-pointed stars, comprised of white larkspur. Each star is 24 feet in diameter; each stripe is 30 feet wide. This flag is estimated to contain more than 400,000 larkspur plants, with four to five flower stems each, for a total of more than 2 million flowers.

Aerial photo courtesy of Bill Morson Soldiers’ Prayer

For our soldiers….

Hat Tip: Sue

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Mark Steyn, in his usual (some would say sarcastic) way, explains HillaryCare II to us.

A year ago, I wrote that “the story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government ‘security,’ large numbers of people vote to dump freedom – the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, seat belts and a ton of other stuff.”

Last week freedom took another hit. Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled her new health care plan. Unlike her old health care plan, which took longer to read than most cancers take to kill you, this one’s instant and painless – just a spoonful of government sugar to help the medicine go down. From now on, everyone in America will have to have health insurance.

Hooray!

And, if you don’t, it will be illegal for you to hold a job.

Er, hang on, where’s that in the Constitution? It’s perfectly fine to employ legions of the undocumented from Mexico, but if you employ a fit 26-year-old American with no health insurance either you or he or both of you will be breaking the law?

That’s a major surrender of freedom from the citizen to the state. “So what?” says the caring crowd. “We’ve got to do something about those 40 million uninsured! Whoops, I mean 45 million uninsured. Maybe 50 by now.” This figure is always spoken of as if it’s a club you can join but never leave: The very first Uninsured-American was ol’ Bud who came back from the Spanish-American War and found he was uninsured and so was first on the list, and then Mabel put her back out doing the Black Bottom at a tea dance in 1926 and she became the second, and so on and so forth, until things really began to snowball under the Bush junta. And, by the time you read this, the number of uninsured may be up to 75 million.

The fact is we don’t really know how many people (Americans) are actually uninsured or underinsured.

I read a piece the other day stating that 20% of our uninsured are actually illegal aliens in our country.

What would be the incentive for a company to offer a good health care package to potential or existing employees if the company knows the “government” will provide the insurance for them?

What will the real cost of health care be for the taxpayers, and not just those who make from $90,000 to $250,000 per year depending on which Democratic candidate is giving the numbers?

And what about those numbers? How many times can you spend the same money?

When my daughter was a teen we had told her we were going to give her x amount of dollars for a birthday gift.

You should have heard all the things she was going to buy with it. I finally asked her where she was going to get the money to buy all these things and she innocently replied “From the money I get from you”, except she gave the dollar figure.

I told her she had spent that amount of money four or five times over already with everything she was planning to buy.

Reality set in and she got what she most wanted, but I’m afraid reality to a politician is to raise taxes when you over-promise on the same amount of money. The problem is once they get their hands into your pockets they never take them out.

Then we get real change because change is all you have left when they’re finished spending you poor.

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I was interested in this LA Times opinion piece by Matt Bai yesterday, mainly because it’s something I have never thought about.

His argument is that a large segment of the country is moving west and yet the Democrats are still picking candidates from the Industrial states and the South to run for president.

As pundits have already noted more times than John Edwards has uttered the words “two Americas,” Democrats may well make history this presidential season by nominating, for the first time, either a woman or an African American. What the party will not do next year, however, for the 39th straight time since the massive territory of California won its statehood in 1850, is to select a nominee who hails from the West Coast.

For the record, Sen. William Gibbs McAdoo of California came closest, having narrowly lost the nomination twice in the 1920s. But, frankly, he was no more a Californian than Hillary Rodham Clinton is a New Yorker. Other than that, the nearest the party has come to nominating a true Westerner in the last century would be South Dakota’s George McGovern or Texas’ Lyndon Johnson, neither of whom would likely have known the Pacific Ocean had it carried them away while they were sleeping.

This is a telling omission. The Democratic Party, still tightly tethered to its 20th century zenith and the governing agenda that grew from it, continues to look to politicians from the old-line industrial states (New York, Illinois) and the manufacturing and farming South (North Carolina, Tennessee) even as unassuming San Jose quietly replaces Detroit on the list of the 10 largest American cities. In fact, since the modern party was born in Martin Van Buren’s time, Democratic politics at the highest levels has always been controlled by a power axis joining urban Easterners with populist Southerners.

And yet, under the surface, something is in fact changing in the party’s geographic balance. The candidates may give the impression of a party centered east of the Mississippi, but, in every other way, the Democratic universe is tilting West. The shift is most obvious in Congress, where industrial-state Democrats such as Charles Schumer and Rahm Emanuel now answer to a couple of Westerners, Harry Reid of Nevada and Nancy Pelosi of California. Its effect is even more profound at the activist level, however, where the power and energy in Democratic politics now runs increasingly along an East-West current.

When Richard Nixon ran for president the first time he lost his home state of California. Ronald Reagan, I believe, won it both times.

Republicans have always had a hard time winning in California, not because there are no Republicans or conservatives there, but because the larger cities make up the majority of the population and they are largely Democratic cities.

The same holds true for Washington state and Oregon.

Republicans have to pick up some western states in order to win the presidency, and not getting California consistently means they have to pick up a large chunk of the electoral votes in the west.

Colorado seems to be turning purple if not blue. If it goes blue we have to look elsewhere for their electoral votes with the presidential elections being as close as they have been the last few cycles.

On the other hand, with the Democrats having to win all the big states, or at least most of them, it means there is more fertile ground for Republicans and losing one small state isn’t as hard for them as losing a state with a lot of electoral votes is for the Democrats.

Maybe it’s time for the Republican party to start to invest campaign dollars into the larger western states to see if they can pick off a couple, while still hanging onto the campaign strategy for electoral votes that has helped them win the White House all but three times since Truman.

Your thoughts?

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The father of slain Marine Pfc. Geoffrey Morris, killed in Iraq in April 2004, has announced his entrance into the Republican primary for the opportunity to oppose sophomore Congresswoman Melissa Bean.

Kirk Morris, 49, who backs the war, said Friday that his campaign is a way for him to honor his 19-year-old son, Pfc. Geoffrey Morris, who was killed in battle in April 2004.

“I’ve always taught my kids that if you’re willing to complain about something, be willing to put your feet in and do something about it,” said Morris, an international sales and marketing executive with a Park Ridge firm. “When Geoff joined the Marines, he was putting that mantra to work. Now it’s time for me to stand up.”

To get the nomination he will have to beat out businessman Steve Greenberg and second-time candidate Ken Arnold.

May the winner of the primary defeat the incumbent.

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Appearing on the dreaded Fox News program Fox News Sunday, a brave Hillary Clinton, out there on her own, fielded hard questions from Chris Wallace. The same Chris Wallace who gave her husband such a “hard time” when he interviewed him and asked why he didn’t do more to stop terrorism.

WASHINGTON, 23 (UPI) — U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton said Sunday she can appeal to Republicans as well as Democrats on the presidential trail.

Clinton appeared on “Fox News Sunday.” Host Chris Wallace, citing his acerbic interview with former President Clinton last year as well as the former first lady’s comments this year, asked, “Why do you and the president have such a hyper-partisan view of politics?

… Why do we want another president who thinks so much in terms of right versus left and red state versus blue state?”

After attempting to turn the questioning to declining family income and the loss of healthcare, Clinton said, “Oh, Chris, if you had walked even a day in our shoes over the last 15 years, I’m sure you’d understand. But you know, the real goal for our country right now is to get beyond partisanship. And, I’m sure trying to do my part. Because we’ve got a lot of serious problems that we’re trying to deal with.”…

… I’ve been able to get a lot of Republican and independent support in this campaign.”

I wonder which two Republicans are supporting her? She seems to be the one to energize Republicans to vote in the presidential race next year…against her.

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There is no question that individuals like Iranian President Ahmadinejad thrive on all the press they receive in the United States. Let’s face it, his visit to NY has generated more than it’s share of commentary in all the various mediums.

Perhaps when he delivers his speech at the UN, he will explain the role of his country in supplying weapons to terrorists who kill our troops, or his statements concerning Israel, or maybe he will inform us how it is that he comes in “peace” to a place where over 3,000 Americans died at the hands of those he supports.

I doubt it. Until he has a satisfactory answer just for those few questions, (the list could go on forever), I prefer the approach of this former UN Ambassador to all the many headlines which will certainly be forthcoming.

“You should treat this as an off-Broadway production,” former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton said, describing the United Nations as a “Twilight Zone” that gives a platform to “tinhorn dictators.” “The General Assembly is the theater in which Ahmadinejad and others perform.”

Works for me.

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“Right Wing Nuthouse celebrated it’s third anniversary yesterday. It is a daily stop for me as I find the commentary both insightful and enjoyable.

Today marks the third anniversary of Right Wing Nuthouse. Looking back on my humble, fumbling beginnings (and my even more humbling present) makes me realize how much and how little has changed in my life as well as the wide, wide world of blogs.

I am a little wiser today, a lot better informed and more circumspect in my language (believe it or not). I’m a little more cynical about some things, less so about others.

Happy (belated) birthday Mr. Moran and may you have many, many more.

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What a wonderful feeling it must be to have yourself surrounded by people who believe you have the ability “to mesmerize any human being.”

Former President Clinton is attempting to sell his wifes possible presidency on the premise that world leaders love her and she will save us from the debacle which he must believe has been President Bush.

“Every African leader I talked to, every single one when I was there, without any prodding from me, said, ‘For God sakes, I hope Hillary wins. We don’t like disliking America here,’” Bill Clinton said at a fund-raiser for her last month.

“I called the outgoing French president, and he said, ‘Oh, tell me Hillary’s going to win. I’m so tired of disliking America,’” Bill Clinton told the crowd.

Bill Clinton also quoted the immediate past prime minister of Singapore as saying, “‘Please tell me Hillary’s going to win. We need America leading the world again.’”

So, with all of these foreign countries facing their own internal problems and many staring terrorism in the face as we are, their main focus is returning a Clinton to the White House?

Hold on a moment though, there is a twist.

Aides to Jacques Chirac, the former French president, and Goh Chok Tong, Singapore’s former prime minister, told The News they could not confirm Bill Clinton’s assertions -and, they said, it’s general policy to stay out of other countries’ elections.

and:

Aides to the Clintons refused to provide a full list of the global leaders allegedly supporting Hillary Clinton. But records show Bill Clinton met with Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete and Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika in July, just weeks before he boasted that “every African leader” he talked to voiced hope his wife would win.

Officials from both countries said neither president has expressed public support for Hillary Clinton. A Tanzanian official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it would be a mistake to interfere in the U.S. election.

So where is the truth? Does it lie with the former president, or all of these foreign leaders who appear to deny his assertions? Well, just ask a former aide to the president and a member of Senator Clinton’s staff and he will clarify the issue for you.

Jay Carson, who served as an aide to Bill Clinton and is now working for Hillary Clinton, initially told The News that Bill Clinton has “never cited specific countries” whose leaders support his wife.

When The News provided Carson with the former President’s quotes, he replied, “Sen. Clinton visited 82 countries as First Lady and is beloved around the world because people everywhere know she’ll end America’s current policy of cowboy diplomacy,” he said.

Carson also said the former President stood by his statements.

The News repeatedly asked Carson to supply confirmation from these leaders. Carson did not.

Well, that answers all the questions doesn’t it. Case closed.

HT: Betsy Newmark

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