POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

New Post for FDL Shooting, Wherein Religion is Banned

Per request of commenter in other thread I didn't intend to hijack.

Enoch_Root

AKA. Bobby Donn Brubaker (the most popular man in Mesa, AZ), the Umbrella of Terror, Jack Ketch.

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Schadenfreudelicious Post of the Day

Regarding the lack of grass-roots blowback against Paul Ryan's budget and its supporters:

Where are the liberal protesters? Is there a brilliant rope-a-dope strategy in place, some plan to get Republicans even further out on a limb before hammering them in the August recess? Possibly. Labor strategists say that there'll be a much bigger focus on generating turnout at town halls come August; Ben Smith has been reporting on their plans to nationalize the actions they pulled off in Wisconsin. There really is no larger plan in effect for now. "We're focused on educating our members [on] the budget," a spokesman for the AFL-CIO told me, "and not showing up at Republican town halls." Democratic strategists say there is no larger strategy at work right now. Linda Christman, a Pennsylvania activist who started one of the only videotaped arguments with a member of Congress, was basically an independent operator. Meanwhile, the American Action Network, the think tank and campaign shop run by former Republican Sen. Norm Coleman, is making Ryan budget talking points and questions available for conservatives who want to buck up their members.

How did Republicans get so much better at this stuff? In 2009, after all, they were basically copying the Democrats—or what they thought were Democratic tactics. That was the year when sales of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals surged. FreedomWorks, Dick Armey's Tea Party group, handed out the book to new employees, who went on to train activists. Bob MacGuffie, a Rhode Island Tea Partier, wrote a two-sided tip sheet for his peers that called for them to "use the Alinsky playbook of which the left is so fond: Freeze it, attack it, personalize it, and polarize it."

Obviously, not everyone who made life painful for a soon-to-be-defeated Democrat was trained in Dick Armey's living room. The town halls were overflowing; Republicans returned to Washington after recesses claiming to have survived the biggest crowds they'd ever seen. And that was because all of this was going viral. Talk radio told people where to show up. The town-hall partisans used smartphone cameras and inexpensive video setups to record the damage.

If Democrats actually did invent that strategy, they've since managed to forget it.

Well, a couple of things. First of all, it's easy to promote a policy that many people understand will help to avert financial catastrophe. We're over two years into Obama's tenure, and there's little sign of economic improvement, much less any materialization of hope and change. Second, it helps to have convictions and a message.

So, enjoy the schadenfreude while it's there for the taking, but do remember: its taste is bitter when the cup is filled with your own unhappiness. Do what you can to make sure that doesn't happen anytime soon.

"The Face of" the Democrat Party?

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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I Shouted Out, “Who Killed Integrity?”

Well, after all, it was you and me.

Da TechGuy has the story of a very vile case of election fraud in Massachusetts:

You might recall the Worcester 6th race, the shenanigans we talked about concerning recounts, the judge ruling that a man who claimed his vote wasn’t counted could vote after the fact to tie the election, the Democratic legislature instead of having a new head to head election allowing independents to cut down on the GOP vote. Now the Worcester Telegram this morning report on the icing on the cake.

Town Clerk Madaline I. Daoust was in the process of selling her house to a key figure in the disputed 6th Worcester District election during the same time period she testified twice under oath that she did not know the man.

Run that through your head a second, the Southbridge Town Clerk, the person who makes sure elections are honest, testifies under oath, not once but twice. that she doesn’t know the man claiming to have been “disenfranchised” when she’s selling her house to him?

How do you get to such a point? Easy, you have an election where every state office is returned to the one party state. She is not afraid of the Attorney General, She is not afraid of the Secretary of State, she certainly isn’t afraid of the state Legislature. As the Telegram is a paper that leans left she likely didn’t fear them either. Lucky for us they are honest.

Corruption thrives when people are not afraid of the law or it being enforced.

Read the whole links-laden kaboodle and kit.

Steve Egg has the run-down on why there will be hand counts in 31 counties in Wisconsin. He's also got an idea of what Kloppenburg's strategy is, and, as Kirsten says, it could get ugly.

A reminder that what almost happened during Wisconsin's January lame duck session actually did happen in Illinois, with the predictable sequelae:

Last fall as State Rep. Careen Gordon (D-Morris) ran for re-election, she promised her constituents to fight Gov. Quinn and the Democrat party’s proposed tax increases. In November Ms. Gordon was defeated by her Republican challenger Sue Rezin. When the lame duck legislature pushed through the largest tax increase in Illinois history during the final hours of the session, Careen Gordon cast her vote in favor of the toxic tax hike (the bill passed without a single vote to spare).

Immediately after his inauguration, Governor Pat Quinn signed the tax hike into law and nominated Ms. Gordon to a high-paying job on the Illinois Prison Review Board. The stench of the corrupt bargain was so strong that the Illinois Senate (in a rare show of bipartisanship) was prepared to block Gordon’s appointment, but rather than face scrutiny over the circumstances surrounding her nomination Ms. Gordon withdrew from consideration.

That should have been the end of the story, but Pat Quinn found a way to reward Ms. Gordon for her service to the state. The Morris Daily Herald reports that Careen Gordon began her new job as associate general counsel in the Professional Regulation Division of the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation this week. The position has an annual salary of $84,000 and an array of benefits that those of us in the private sector can only dream about, a pretty sweet deal during the current recession.

Congratulations to Johanna, continuing the tradition of The Wounded Healer. I think I speak for all of POWIP when I say we're very proud and happy for you.

Dear Fr. [insert name of priest here],
Mother Gaia would like it very much if you'd take a little time to tell the parishioners what those colorful oblate spheroids that appear this time of year really mean.
If you're stuck on celebrating Easter, though, you can browbeat them next weekend.

Il Papa's answering your questions about The Faith on Italian TV.

Via @daveweigel, possibly the most pompous blog in the sphere.

Obama: "But then again, too few to mention . . ."

"You know, I think maybe I deserve better than a B+." Add that to yesterday's observation about the long pause. (via Politisite) Of course, Chairman Zero also believes Pelosi will once again be Speaker of the House. Change.

As a follow up to yesterdays crab invasion links, what global warming does best, apparently, is cause creepy crawly things to migrate. Ooh! Scaaaaary! It's all counter-intuitive, but there you go.

From Serr, Wonkette ain't worth Jack Stuef.

We tried to get him on the poster for Look Who's Talking, but it didn't work out.

Don't do the tech thing very often, but here's an ASUS tablet that doubles as a laptop. (via Insty)

I'm putting this under the fold even though the boobage is blurred out, in honor of Good Friday. Seems rather harsh that a woman who flashed prisoners got busted for it, seeing as she's attractive and all.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Happy People Oppress the Miserable: Obama Takes Action

Your happiness is driving people to suicide, conservatives!

The new research paper titled Dark Contrasts: The Paradox of High Rates of Suicide in Happy Places has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. It uses U.S. and international data, which included first-time comparisons of a newly available random sample of 1.3 million Americans, and another on suicide decisions among an independent random sample of approximately 1 million Americans.

The research confirmed a little known and seemingly puzzling fact: many happy countries have unusually high rates of suicide. This observation has been made from time to time about individual nations, especially in the case of Denmark. This new research found that a range of nations - including: Canada, the United States, Iceland, Ireland and Switzerland, display relatively high happiness levels and yet also have high suicide rates. Nevertheless the researchers note that, because of variation in cultures and suicide-reporting conventions, such cross-country scatter plots are only suggestive. To confirm the relationship between levels of happiness and rates of suicide within a geographical area, the researchers turned to two very large data sets covering a single country, the United States.

*******

University of Warwick researcher Professor Andrew Oswald said:

“Discontented people in a happy place may feel particularly harshly treated by life. Those dark contrasts may in turn increase the risk of suicide. If humans are subject to mood swings, the lows of life may thus be most tolerable in an environment in which other humans are unhappy.”

Professor Stephen Wu of Hamilton College said:

"This result is consistent with other research that shows that people judge their well-being in comparison to others around them. These types of comparison effects have also been shown with regards to income, unemployment, crime, and obesity."

You sicken me, you bullies.

Fortunately, Obama's here to help:

Americans are more pessimistic about the nation’s economic outlook and overall direction than they have been at any time since President Obama’s first two months in office, when the country was still officially ensnared in the Great Recession, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

At a time of rising gas prices, stubborn unemployment and a cacophonous debate in Washington over the federal government’s ability to meet its future obligations, the poll presents stark evidence that the slow, if unsteady, gains in public confidence earlier this year that a recovery was under way are now all but gone.

Capturing what appears to be an abrupt change in attitude, the survey shows that the number of Americans who think the economy is getting worse has jumped 13 percentage points in just one month. Though there have been encouraging signs of renewed growth since last fall, many economists are having second thoughts, warning that the pace of expansion might not be fast enough to create significant numbers of new jobs.

The dour public mood is dragging down ratings for both parties in Congress and for President Obama, the poll found.

Disapproval of Mr. Obama’s handling of the economy has never been worse — up to 57 percent of Americans — a warning sign as he begins to set his sights on re-election in 2012. And a similar percentage disapprove of how Mr. Obama is handling the federal budget deficit, though more disapprove of the way Republicans in Congress are.

This tyranny of the contented must end! Who says Obama's ineffectual now, huh?

Liberals: She was asking for it.

A Phoenix man who allegedly exposed himself to a woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty on Tax Day has been arrested for indecent exposure, police said on Thursday.

Kevin Robert Theriault, 42, was booked on suspicion of three counts each of indecent exposure and public sexual indecency.

The woman, who was standing on a street corner, dressed as the iconic statue to promote a tax preparer, called police after a man had masturbated in front of her four times.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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The Union President’s Latest Decrees

To anyone who watched Obama take Chrysler dealerships away from donors to Republicans, and award some of those dealerships to big Dem donors in the name of "streamlining," none of this should come as a surprise, unfortunately. Today, the National Labor Relations Board determined that Boeing had no right to move its production from Washington, where unions have more "rights," to South Carolina, where they don't. The "right" that the union wanted to preserve was the right to demand that all of the workers involved in building planes for Boeing should be required to pay union dues. Now, Obama's unelected and irresponsible bureaucrats claim that they have the "right" to determine the hiring practices of any company they choose.

McDonald's, meanwhile, set its sights on hiring an additional 50,000 workers, in payback for the exemption that they received from the administration from its onerous health care requirements. Once again, the number of first-time filings for unemployment was unexpectedly high: so much so, that the technique of revising upward to set a new temporary peg that the next soon-to-be-revised set of numbers would show a momentary reduction from, has become more difficult.

The last time we mentioned the NLRB, they had determined that a union member who brought to the attention of the company he nominally worked for a dangerous practice could be fined by the union for showing insufficient loyalty. Never mind that there was a safety issue involved, the outrageous part was that the employee in question would have risked the livelihood of his corner-cutting "brethren" by calling it to the company's attention. And never mind that the OSHA people likely would have sued the ass off the company if they hadn't addressed the conditions and should have known about them. In fact, as Warner Todd Huston discusses in a post today, those government employees who use their time on behalf of he union in the course of their daily duties are often remunerated, not by the unions themselves, but by the taxpayer.

Vincent Vernuccio, labor policy guy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, tells us that the Obama administration is even ignoring its responsibility to report on the matter. Obama is over a year late in releasing its Time Usage in the Federal Government Report, a report that tracks all the time that government union members spend working for the union bosses on the dime of the people.

The sad fact is that many government union contracts have a provision in them that stipulates that union members that have duties with the union itself (administrative, recruitment, what have you) can perform these duties while they are on the job and being paid by the taxpayers supposedly to do government business

This is the same NLRB that ruled that union members threatening other union members with physical harm when they act against the perceived interests of the union are behaving quite acceptably.

Any governmental employee utilizing government equipment and paid time to serve a political campaign or a PAC would face the prospect of losing his job or even being charged with a crime, but unions are not to live by the rules that other organizations face. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the correspondence that public employees doing union business on public property on the public dime would be found exempt from FOI requests by the same people.

That's all part and parcel of the administration's real agenda of "redistribution," of course, because people on the desirable side of the matter are all hygienic thinkers and would never, ever abuse any of the authority and privilege granted to them. In order to make sure that the redistribution goes only to the accredited people, it is necessary to know to whom each employee of each business is donating, whether it be worthies such as the SPLC or unworthies such as the TEA Party folks, who comprise a threat to the state.
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By the way, with the latest safety revelations about the Volt and the price of gas about to skyrocket, in all likelihood, the Feds are scrambling to dump their shares of GM, purchased by us, at a loss of $23 per share, for an overall loss of $11.5 billion.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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