These courageous, battle-tested military leaders suggested the following solution for this fight, “In the report, the retirees called for less junk food in schools, better nutrition programs for kids and overall better funding for federally provided school lunches.”

Right, this is a problem for the federal government to solve.  I have been following the show on ABC called Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, where Jamie Oliver comes from Britain to America to fix America’s unhealthy eating habits.  He chooses to start his revolution in the schools.  I am interested in this topic since my business, School Lunch Choice, provides software and consulting to help charter schools and private schools develop healthy, revolutionary school lunch programs that don’t lose money.  I have a lot of experience dealing with State education leaders who administer the school lunch program, and I thought this clip captures the magnitude of the problem that these military leaders are claiming is a national security threat, please watch it:

Fat kids aren’t a national security threat, people like Rhonda are a national security threat.  My friends, Jake and Chuckles probably wonder how I became a right-wing nut.  The simple answer is that I have spent the last six years dealing with people like Rhonda, and I just don’t have any tolerance for government bureaucrats.  I don’t have any tolerance for draconian regulations, and the nutrition regulations for school lunches are a perfect example.  These are the regulations that allow fast-food in schools and outlaw nutritious food like Oliver’s dish.

Go back and watch the clip again.  Pay attention to how Rhonda’s mind works.  These are the kind of people who will soon be managing your healthcare.  The sad thing is that Rhonda seems like a nice, well-intentioned lady.  She is just working within the framework of a completely stupid system.  Her job is a complete waste of time and money.

I normally support the miliatary, but these retired officers are way off base.  The government isn’t the solution to this problem.  They are the problem.

The real solution to this problem would be an army of private lunch providers competing for school lunch business to make a profit.  Take school lunch power away from the NEA and the Department of Agriculture.  Get parents paying their money for the food that will be fed to their kids.  Then things will change.  As long as people like Rhonda are in charge, we are going to get more of the same.

I normally just passively promote my content, but this is a post that should be spread as far as possible.  Showing Rhonda in action is liberalism/big government at work.  Everyone needs to see it first hand, this is the logical end of any major Obama policy.

If you all could sumbit this post to stumbleupon, digg, facebook, share it with your friends that would be awesome.

Perhaps the best part of my online software business, school lunch choice, is that it is taxed as an LLC.  This entity can be as simple or as complex as I want it to be depending on how aggressive I want to get with deducting expenses.  Harrison Price from Just Politics, recently shared an article on Facebook discussing a recent recommendation by Obama’s FCC to impose a federal internet tax on digitial goods and services.

Currently, most ecommerce business models are taxed once the income passes through the entity to the income of the owner of the business.  Various states will regulate ecommerce to an extent with sales tax laws etc., but because most ecommerce transactions won’t be limited to a particular state, the reach of the states is a limited nuisance.

You have to love the logic in the recommendation by the FCC:

Digital Goods and Services Taxation

RECOMMENDATION 4.20:  The federal government should investigate establishing a national framework for digital goods and services taxation.
The National Broadband Plan is focused on increasing beneficial use of the Internet, including e-commerce and new innovative business models.  The current patchwork of state and local laws and regulations relating to taxation of digital goods and services (such as ringtones, digital music, etc.) may hinder new investment and business models.  Entrepreneurs and small businesses in particular may lack the resources to understand and comply with the various tax regimes.
Recognizing that state and local governments pursue varying approaches to raising tax revenues, a national framework for digital goods and services taxation would reduce uncertainty and remove one barrier to online entrepreneurship and investment.

Hmmmm.  Let’s look at the last 15 years.  It is pretty obvious that one of the most prevalent trends of the last 15 years has been an absolute dearth of new investment and business models surrounding the growth of the internet.  In fact I am having a hard time even thinking of one new company or innovative business model that has arisen as a result of the growth of the internet.  You would think that something as revolutionary as the internet would have had a bigger impact.

Imagine all the businesses that would exist if there were just more taxes on the internet

It is pretty likely that if Obama’s administration could just get a good federal tax in place that all the entrepreneurs and small businesses that are just waiting on the sidelines will finally jump in. Most of the small business owners I consult with tell me that the biggest obstacle to their business is that the federal government isn’t taxing everything they are doing. It really gets in the way of business. How are they supposed to know what to do with their businesses without the FCC telling them what to do? What are they supposed to do with their profits if they don’t give them to Washington?

I for one am pretty excited about this. Finally!!! Someone will decide to bring commercial value to the internet. Finally!!! Investors and entrepreneurs will decide to give this internet thing a chance.

What the FCC fails to recognize is that there already exists a national framework for digital goods and services taxations, and this framework is that there are no federal taxes on digital goods and services.  If there is one thing that causes Obama to lose sleep at night, it is probably the fact that there is an entire industry that is relatively untaxed and unregulated.

Hire someone, or else...

I recently received a comment on my blog from Trenton Powers.   Naturally, when people comment on my blog and leave a backlink, I will go check out their blog.  Two posts on his blog are certainly worth discussing.

In one post he says this:

As a runner-up to the Milford Regional Chamber of Commerce Businessperson of The Year in 2007 I know a thing or two about business and economics. For instance I know that this purported letter from a conspicuously anonymous, alleged reader of the reactionary conservative rag, the National Review is hogwash:

Small business will start to hire when one big thing happens.Sales Growth. End of story.

This goes beyond simple intellectual dishonesty and charges head-first to the realm of deliberate misrepresentation.  There is no correlation between small business’ hiring practice and sales growth. Only the presence of robust regulation can create an environment conducive to increased employment opportunity in the private sector. By extension, government expansion is a necessity if one wishes to create a job-friendly atmosphere.

In another post he says this:

Just to take the previous post a step further, wouldn’t it fix a whole butt load of problems if government were to mandate that small business hire people if they earn profits above an arbitrary threshold?

For instance, its really not unreasonable for a family owned polymer-injection business, or a start-up pinking enterprise to be required to bring on another worker if that business makes more than $20,000 in profits, or they could be required to take on a migrant worker if they pass a $10,000 profit threshold.

This is not a bad idea.

You can see from the comments that I made, that I think that this is a bad idea.  Trenton defends this idea as outside the box thinking.  However, in the Age of Obama, I can’t think of a clearer example of knee-jerk, inside-the-box thinking than to conclude that the best way to solve a problem is government intervention.  I am curious what the readers of the Independent Bloghorn think of Trenton’s idea.

Don't Drink the Water

Since I was following this development, I came across this story.  The premise here is that because XTO was purchased by Exxon, that this will attract environmental consciousness to the practice of how they extract natural gas, because we all know that Exxon Mobil is the corporate embodiment of pure evil.  XTO injects chemical-laced water 1,000s of feet below the surface of the earth, this fractures the shale deposits, and the gas comes out.  Radical environmentalist, in their relentless quest to ensure that no resource is ever consumed, are worried that putting chemicals thousands of feet below the surface of the earth could contaminate the water tables that lie thousands of feet above the gas deposits.

Stories like this reaffirm my tendency to never take environmentalists seriously.  We are told by the climate doom-mongers that we need to stop emitting carbon into the atmosphere, but when a company comes up with a viable alternative these environmentalists’ comrades in arms find some other ecopalypse for us to worry about.

A while back, my friend asked me if I thought global warming was just a big liberal conspiracy.  I think our rigourous scientists at the prestigious climatology department of East Anglia University have settled this matter.  However, my response to this question would be to look at the liberal solutions to any environmental “problem.”  For the average soft green, liberal, leftist, democrat environmentalist there is one obscenely predictable solution for preventing environmental doom: Exerting government power through regulation and taxation.

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times regularly claims that clean-tech is the next big thing, and divorcing our economy from oil is this generation’s moonshot.  Then, rather than propose moonshot ideas, he usually comes to the conclusion that we need to start taxing carbon.

I have recently been reading Superfreakonomics, and the authors suggest that we can cool the planet by pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere from hoses suspended by balloons.  This would cost a couple hundred million dollars as opposed to cap and trade which would cost trillions.  This is a moonshot idea.  Of course to really come up with and execute a moonshot idea like this, we would actually need some scientists.

Going Rogue

Her memoir, Going Rogue, will have a first printing run of 1.5 million.  To put things in perspective, The Audacity of Hope, sold 200,000 copies in 2007.  By the time Obama was elected each of his books had finally sold a million copies.  Regardless of how you feel about Sarah Palin, her faux memoir is probably going to sell more copies in 3 months than Obama’s 2 books have sold in 3 years.

Selling a lot of books, however, isn’t the only indication of Palin’s rise.  Unlike Obama, when she speaks, results follow.  For example, how long have we been listening to Obama speak about healthcare.  Has it only been 6 short months of incessant, ubiquitous, incomprehensible speeches?  What are the results?  We have 5?  Or is it 6? bills?  How many thousands of pages?  How many speeches?  And where are we?

Palin on the other hand, posts a microblog, and the world listens.  Palin gets David Letterman to apologize to her daughter, a feat only matched by his cuckolded wife.  And most lately, Palin is determining who wins political elections.  Dede Scozzafava was comfortably winning her congressional race in the 23rd district of New York.  Then Palin endorsed her rival from the conservative party, Dan Hoffman.  Not less than two weeks later, Scozzafava is backing out of the race and throwing her support to Hoffman.  Whether you like Palin or not, with her we can at least get a glimpse of what leadership looks like.  Barack Obama, on the other hand is throwing the Democrat gubernatorial candidate in Virginia under the bus.

Republican critics from within the party and from outside, have complained for a while now that the party has lost its way, and has therefore become an obstructionist party with no solutions of their own.  By going rogue, Sarah Palin might be playing a crucial role in helping the party find its new face, and here it is:

The Bean Counter

I haven’t been following this race very closely, but on the surface I can tell you one reason why Hoffman is a great candidate: He is an ACCOUNTANT.  If the trend of replacing Washington’s career politicians and lawyers with practiced and principled accountants can be replicated 100 times across the country, conservatives might have something to look forward to next year.  Every district in the country needs a nerdy, conservative, bean counter running with the simple message, “We can’t afford this.”

The fact that Sarah Palin is the one who gets this tells me that Obama better watch out, or we might get a new Messiah in Chief.

What's getting in the way of your prosperous future?

For those who watched BYU beat OU on Saturday night, you would know that former Heisman winner, Sam Bradford, hurt his shoulder in the game.  This is unfortunate, because apparently (hard to tell from the game) he is supposed to be a pretty good quarterback.  He also chose to play college football for one more year instead of skipping school to play in the NFL and start making millions.  The ESPN announcers mentioned that he took out an insurance policy against an injury such as this.  I don’t know the details of the policy, but I would imagine that he forks out a ton of money, and if he gets hurt, then the insurance company would pay out what he lost in potential earnings as an NFL quarterback – or something like that.

As I now have the knowledge that this type of insurance exists, I have to admit that I am a little disappointed that Obama only wants to provide health insurance to every American.  He is really cutting the American people short.  We deserve nothing less then to be insured/ensured that we will have prosperity.  This is primarily why I am disappointed in the speech that Obama gave to the kids at school.  He told them that they are personally responsible for doing well in school.  He said that success would take hard work.  Nothing is more cute than a liberal pretending to believe in personal responsibility.

I want the actuaries who crafted Bradford’s insurance policy to create prosperity insurance for all Americans, and I demand that Congress write a 1,000 page Universal Prosperity Insurance Act that would free us from the economic consequences of bad decisions and missed opportunity while sheltering us from risk.  Obama says I might be a good writer, but I’ll never know until I try.  I say, “Why even try?”  It is entirely possible that I could be a good writer.  Or at the very least, I could be the next J.K. Rowling or Stephanie Meyer, which means there are potential billions in earnings on the table that I could make if I were to pursue this talent.  The federal government should create an insurance policy that is subsidized by other taxpayers to pay me if I never reach this potential.  How much would they pay me, you might ask.  I would have to say ” a lot.”

Barack Obama said the words “a lot” a lot in his speech, which, like a lot of his speeches, has a lot of abstract, if not meaningless, words and ideas.  For a man who shows no evidence of understanding the magnitude of the number “1,000,000,000,000,” what are we supposed to think when he says in the speech that he has given a lot of speeches, when he has only given a mere 112 speeches since becoming president.  It is hard to know what “a lot” means to this president, and I have to say that I expected a lot more from his speech to the kids than conservative platitudes about personal responsibility.  He’ll promote personal responsibility to the kids, but the policies he is creating for the adults suggest that he doesn’t believe all the crap he told the kids.  He’ll straight talk with the kids, after all most of them can’t vote, but with adult Americans he’ll promise a lot of things that we can’t afford.  

While universal prosperity insurance might cost a lot, “a lot” is the one quantity that Barack Obama seems to believe that we can afford.

With Congress coming back to work and an expected intensification of the healthcare debate, I am imagining that at some point over the last few days the Obama administration had a meeting to discuss the following question:  How can we get more right-wingers with Hitler signs out on the streets?

Answer: Let’s broadcast an Obama speech to the youth of the country through the public education system.  That’ll get ‘em riled up.

Youth serves the leader

If this is the case, then this was certainly a brilliant plan by the Obama administration.  This otherwise “non-issue” has mobilized Obamaphobes into a frenzy.  As Obama becomes an increasingly toxic figure, many people, myself included, have the knee-jerk reaction to oppose everything that he does.  For the administration to take Obama’s toxicity to manipulate those who oppose him to become sidetracked over nothing is smart.  Well played.

Rather than oppose an Obama speech to students in public schools, we should be encouraging Obama to give more speeches.  I think he should have a speech for the kids every day, and the teachers should have to keep the kids in during recess to watch it.  To overexpose these kids to trite rhetoric, vague abstractions, and pathos driven banality at an early age, would be a healthy educational experience for them.  Perhaps an education such as this might yield a generation of voters that wouldn’t be as embarrassing my generation.

Those who oppose Obama should be enthralled every time he wants to interrupt prime-time television, to give yet another speech.  Ubiquity breeds irrelevance.  Let us hope that those who pull Obama’s string to make him talk never figure this out.

I close with a quote from George Will:

In August our ubiquitous president became the nation’s elevator music, always out and about, heard but not really listened to, like audible wallpaper. 

And some great quotes by Mark Steyn:

*The Omnipresent Leader has traditionally been a characteristic feature of Third World basket-case dumps: The conflation of the man and the state is explicit, and ubiquitous.

*Any self-respecting schoolkid, enjoined by his principal to be a “servant” to the head of state, would reply, “Get lost, creep.” And, if they still taught history in American schools, he’d add, “Oh, and by the way, that question was settled in 1776.”

*Now he’s giving a 112th [speech] — to a joint session of Congress — and this one, we’re assured, will finally do the trick. That brand-new Chevy may be rusting and up on bricks by the time he seals the deal, but America’s Auto Salesman-in-Chief will get you to sign in the end.

The president has made the mistake of believing his own publicity — or, at any rate, his own mainstream media coverage, which is pretty much the same thing.

*No wonder the poor chap’s running out of material. At the time of writing, one of his exercises for America’s schoolchildren is to suggest what you’d like him to do in his next speech. Here’s mine: Call in sick, sir. You’ll be doing your presidency a favor.

The president is not our ruler but our representative, a citizen-executive drawn from the people. It is unbecoming to a self-governing republic to require schoolchildren to (to cite another test question) select the three most important words in the president’s speech.

But, if we have to trudge down this grim road, go on, kid, I dare you: “That’s all, folks!”

Oh, wait. You have to rank the three most important words in order:

(1) Try (2) Something (3) Else.

Yes Master!

Conservative blogs are under attack.  In my previous post, A Good Mob is Hard to Find, Paul decided to make a comment.  Now I don’t know Paul, and I don’t want to deter people from commenting on my blog, but Paul has some explaining to do.  Here is his comment, so we are all on the same page.  Notice how his comment does nothing to engage with the point I was making in my post:

 

It’s funny we hear Republicans say that they do not want “faceless bureaucrats” making medical decisions but they have no problem with “private sector” “faceless bureaucrats” daily declining medical coverage and financially ruining good hard working people. And who says that the “private sector” is always right, do we forget failures like Long-Term Capital, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Enron, Tyco, AIG and Lehman Brothers. Of course the federal government will destroy heathcare by getting involved, Oh but wait, Medicare and Medicaid and our military men and women and the Senate and Congress get the best heathcare in the world, and oh, that’s right, its run by our federal government. I can understand why some may think that the federal government will fail, if you look at the past eight years as a current history, with failures like the financial meltdown and Katrina but the facts is they can and if we support them they will succeed.

How does shouting down to stop the conversation of the healthcare debate at town hall meetings, endears them to anyone. Especially when the organizations that are telling them where to go and what to do and say are Republicans political operatives, not real grassroots. How does shouting someone down or chasing them out like a lynch mob advanced the debate, it does not. So I think the American people will see through all of this and know, like the teabagger, the birthers, these lynch mobs types are just the same, people who have to resort to these tactics because they have no leadership to articulate what they real want. It’s easy to pickup a bus load of people who hate, and that’s all I been seeing, they hate and can’t debate. Too bad.

 

As a former writing instructor, I know that Google can be an invaluable tool for exposing intellectual dishonesty.  In Paul’s case you can google search any random part of his comment, and you will find a screen that looks like this:

comment spam

You will see that I am not the only blog where Paul has copied and pasted his brainless ideas.  You might say comment spam is part of blogging, so why make a big deal out of this.  Well, this is more than a simple case of comment spam.  

For another example of this kind of comment spam, you can check out the post, Congress won’t take the medicine they prescribe, on Harrison Price’s blog.  Check out the comments on this post and you will find another comment spammer named Jacksmith.  I called jacksmith on his bluff in my own comments – I am Burro by the way.  Once again you might justifiably say, “So what.”  Ultimately, Paul’s comment is evidence that a claim I have been making since May of last year is correct.  Read Obama’s Biggest Weapon for some context and a great quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  My claim is that Obama’s biggest weapon is an army of witless supporters who will do whatever their master tells them.

Obama’s army of Storm Troopers is called Organizing for America, and he recently sent an email to this army of 13 million clones to engage in activities that support his healthcare proposal.  I imagine that Paul and jacksmith are members of this mindless herd.  Liberals are whining (redundant I know) that the massive protests by angry Americans are “astroturf” protests as opposed to authentic “grassroots” movements.  This is a stupid claim on their part that is backfiring dramatically.  On the other hand, I remember watching a documentary about the development of CGI technology in movies.  One of the defining moments of CGI was when they were able to develop programming that was sophisticated enough to create an image of a grass field where every blade of grass was moving independently.  Grass generated by CGI programming is a good metaphor for describing this new form of activism pioneered by Obama and Howard Dean where you can just send an email to your 13 million shills and they will go spam websites with manufactured comments.  We can call this form of protest “technoturf.”  Nancy Pelosi has said that the protesters of the healthcare bill are un-American, I would have to say that it is hard to argue that Obama’s army of mindless supporters are even human.  Just as a marionette without strings, or Obama without a teleprompter, Paul, wouldn’t be able to debate if he didn’t have a message from his master that he could copy and paste all over the internet.  While I am opposed to the shouting matches going on at town hall meetings, I am at a loss at how else you might get someone like Paul to acknowledge their humanity.

Paul was quick to disparage faceless bureaucrats in his comment, but I would take an army of faceless bureaucrats over an army of faceless apparatchiks any day.

Paul, if you want to debate, come to my blog and make a real comment.  I predict that he doesn’t.

A good mob is hard to find

Paul Krugman, in his most recent column in the New York Times, has become yet one more liberal participating in the project of denouncing those who are protesting the policies of Barack Obama.  To see liberals reach for their guns of derision so quickly to shoot down the form of protest that they invented is amusing, to say the least.  Krugman, labels these conservative activist groups as “townhall mobs,” and he makes the typcial liberal maneuver to say that these protests are discredited by the fact that they aren’t real “grassroots” movements.  I find it fascinating that liberals, who are quick to fasten themselves to theories of postmodernism, are so suddenly worried about authenticity.  

After all, many of liberalism’s claims to fame (multiculturalism, moral relativism, deconstruction) are all based on a premise that authenticity is an elusive ideal that if pursued too aggressively will lead to violence and fascism.  So now the cultural gatekeepers of authenticity are observing forms of social protest from conservatives and saying, “unlike our fabricated, contrived, and orchestrated social protest groups like ACORN, PETA, the Sierra Club, the ACLU, Code Pink, the AFL-CIO etc. these conservative protest groups are not legitimate, because they are fabricated, contrived and orchestrated.”  If you follow this logic through to its conclusion, a reasonable observer would have to conclude that if authenticity is what gives the stamp of legitimacy to a social movement, then the major liberal movements of social protest are an exercise in inherent fraudulence.

Krugman concedes that some of these protesters appear to genuinely angry, but he can’t figure out why.

Krugman says:

There was a telling incident at a town hall held by Representative Gene Green, D-Tex. An activist turned to his fellow attendees and asked if they “oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care.” Nearly all did. Then Representative Green asked how many of those present were on Medicare. Almost half raised their hands.

Now, people who don’t know that Medicare is a government program probably aren’t reacting to what President Obama is actually proposing.

He then concludes that these people are just being racists.  I must applaud Krugman for his authentic liberalism.  There is nothing more authentic than a liberal trying to read something like race into every issue.

In response to Krugman’s anecdote, where he implies that people on Medicare shouldn’t be opposed to it, I would have to suggest that this is the problem with entitlements in general.  Once an entitlement becomes entrenched in society, a politician can always pull this trick on his constituents.  Maybe Krugman and Gene Green should pay more cognizance to the fact that even people who are enrolled in Medicare are still opposed to it.  This seems like a good question, and unfortunately for Krugman, the answer probably isn’t because they are a racist mob.

Maybe Krugman, recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, could take a look at the current budget projections for Medicare, and ask the question of why Americans would be against an expanded government role for health care.  Given the fact that Medicare is an abject economic failure by all standards, one has to wonder why someone who claims an advanced knowledge of economics would be holding this program up as something that should be supported.

Ultimately this leads me to say that I am not an ardent supporter of these town hall protests.  Conservatives don’t need to go shout down their representatives like a bunch of mindless liberals.  I would like to hear politicians like Gene Green answer one simple question:

“Mr. Green, every year I get a statement from the Social Security Administration that tells me that Social Security and Medicare on a fast-track fiscal train-wreck.  Given the undeniable fact that the federal government has proven to be grossly incompetent in managing these massive failures, why should average American citizens support an expansion of the government’s role in health care?”

If the answer to the question is the same meaningless Obama drivel that we have had to listen to for almost two years now, then maybe I undervalue a good mob.