Free Frank Warner

Clinton controller: Government workers highly paid on backs of poorly paid private workers

David Walker, the U.S. controller appointed by President Clinton, declared today that public sector workers are getting rich by making private sector workers poor.

“There is a huge gap. State and local plans on average … are much more lucrative than typical plans for employees. State and local government employees, on average, have greater job security than people in the private sector. And state and local government employees, in the middle of government, in many cases make more money than their private sector counterparts,” Walker said.

“Therefore, if governments expect taxpayers to pay more taxes to fund lucrative benefit programs that are much better than the average employee gets, in jobs that more job security and in some cases make more money than their private sector counterparts, that ain’t gonna happen,” he said.

“The only way you’re going to break the cycle is to make this information public in an understandable, clear, compelling and concise form, such that the first three words of the Constitution can come alive: ‘We the people.’”

Private parity. It is time to tax the income of government workers and shift that wealth until the average private-sector worker has better wages, benefits and pensions than the average public-sector worker. To make sure this happens, it would be best to make it a goal that, by the end of this decade, every current government worker, at every level, is replaced by someone from outside government.

The ruling elite has proven itself far too irresponsible and greedy to let this arrangement continue. They all need cash limits and term limits.

Frank Warner

Blinder and Zandi study fails to prove ‘stimulus’ did any good

President Bush’s TARP bank bailout and President Obama’s “stimulus” program pulled the U.S. from the brink of another Depression, a study by two economists has concluded. But wait.

The study by Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi accidentally shows the $700 billion TARP bank bailout was effective and might have cost us nothing had it not been altered and expanded later. The study claims there were benefits from the “stimulus,” but demonstrates none.

Any argument that the $800 billion “stimulus” program worked is undermined by Obama’s own Council of Economic Advisors, which predicted on Jan. 10, 2009, that the “stimulus” would hold the unemployment rate at 8 percent or lower. Without the “stimulus,” the Council said then, the jobless rate would reach 9 percent.

Failed ‘stimulus.’ With the “stimulus,” the unemployment rate did not peak at 8 percent. It went to 10.1 percent last October, even higher than Obama’s economists said it would go had there been no “stimulus” at all.

So it’s silly to declare now that the “stimulus” worked when the jobless rate is stuck at 9.5 percent -- 1.6 percentage points higher than the unemployment rate of February 2009.

As for the TARP bank bailout money, the Blinder and Zandi study has some good news. All of the money lent to the banks may be paid back.

Spend, spend. Oh, but there is bad news, too. Because the Democrats were aware we might lose that bank bailout money, the Democrats have decided that we will lose it.

Rather than taking the repaid money and repaying China for the loan, the administration quietly has been reallocating recovered TARP money to projects and programs that are almost guaranteed never to pay off.

The result: In addition to flushing the “stimulus” money down the drain, the good bets are being turned into bad.

Frank Warner

* * *

Update: Innocent Bystanders reaches a similar conclusion, with helpful numbers:

That’s right. According to Blinder & Zandi, we’ve spent $391 billion in stimulus money in “now” dollars, to get a GDP increase of $340 billion (in 2005 dollars), so we lost $51 billion. Lost $51 billion. If you adjust for inflation, it only cost us about $10 billion, but the point is that rather than spending the money in a way that has a big economic multiplier, it’s been spent with a economic multiplier less than 1.

They also tell us that their modeling predicts that the stimulus itself was responsible for 2.5 million jobs. If you simply take that at face value, and divide it into the $391 billion spent thus far, you find that each job cost us more than $150K. Yep – each job over that 18 month period cost us $100K/yr.

To the moon? Chinese will build 29-meganewton thrust rocket

The United States built the 34-meganewton thrust rocket, the Saturn V, to send men to the moon back in 1969. Now the Chinese are building what appears to be a 29-meganewton thrust rocket that might do the same.

The China Academy of Launch-Vehicle Technology wants first to develop a 600-ton-thrust rocket engine, and then cluster five of the engines on a “heavy launcher,” said Li Tongyu, general manager of CALT’s marketing department.

Why go for the heavy launcher?

“Rockets (with 600-tonne thrust engines) would only be justified for things like sending humans to the moon, if such projects are approved,” Li Tongyu told BBC News.

Long-delayed travels. It seems that, in the modern age, when a nation combines good fortune with freer markets to build a colossal bank account, thoughts naturally turn to voyages to the moon and Mars.

I doubt Red China will be satisfied with a lunar landing.

Frank Warner

Federal Judge Susan Bolton: Don't enforce federal law

You wonder how this is supposed to turn out. Is no one supposed to enforce federal law?

Frank Warner

Bear attack kills man near Yellowstone park

A man was killed early this morning by a bear in the Soda Butte campground in Montana, near Yellowstone National Park.

Kevin Kammer, 48, of Grand Rapids, Mich., was dragged 25 feet from his tent and left for dead at the edge of the campground, an official said.

Not too far away, Deb Freele, 58, of London, Ontario, awoke to a bear, possibly the same bear, biting deep into her arm. She survived.

Woman plays dead. Reuters reports:

“I thought I would be dinner,” said Deb Freele, who recalled awakening from a deep sleep in her tent to find a bear chewing on her arm.

“Within hundredths of seconds, I felt the teeth in my arm, heard bones breaking. I screamed and that seemed to aggravate him. He sunk his teeth into me again,” she recounted in a telephone interview from her hospital room in Cody, Wyoming.

“So I decided to play dead and mean it,” she said, adding that when she did, the bear, which she believed was a grizzly, let go and lumbered away.

Unlike the cartoons. Another camper, Ronald Singer, 21, of Alamosa, Colo., was bitten on the calf of his leg.

A month ago, Erwin Evert, 70, a hiking botanist, was killed by a grizzly bear in Kitty Creek, also not far from Yellowstone.

These bears certainly aren’t like the Yogi and Boo Boo I remember.

Frank Warner

* * *

Update: Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials appear to have found the grizzly bear, a mama bear, who killed Kammer and attacked the others. She has a chipped tooth that matches a tooth fragment found in the campground.

Bell, California, is one of many governments out of control

The ridiculously high salaries that Bell, California, city officials gave themselves is only one of the more outrageous examples of public “servants” serving themselves. Check out the pay, benefits and pensions that other government workers, particularly unionized public “servants” at the state and federal levels, have given themselves over the last 30 years.

I think it’s time to remove everyone who is in government, at any level. It should be a goal that, by the end of this decade, we replace everyone who is on a full-time public payroll today, from street workers to teachers to police to counselors to administrators to judges to elected officials. What an age of enlightenment that would be.

Imagine millions of government workers suddenly looking for real jobs and discovering they have to pay for part of their health insurance and they won't have a pension. And imagine the attitude change in millions of private workers suddenly taking government jobs. We'd have to have term limits for them, too.

Frank Warner

* * *

See also: Time for a Normal Workers Union -- to match government unions.

Back to BP oil spill conspiracy theory: It’s an interplanetary visit, not oil

The big conspiracy theory is that there is no BP oil spill, that there are no 200 million gallons of crude oil polluting the Gulf of Mexico, that what really is happening is that aliens have landed and the Government is covering it up.

ABC News seems to have bolstered the paranoid theory with its report that the cleanup teams sent out by BP and the federal government can’t find the oil to clean up.

ABC News says (doctored?) photos last month showed an oil slick the size of Kansas. Now that slick reportedly is no bigger than New Hampshire, with too little skimming to explain it. So where did the oil go? Or was it ever there?

Is it possible the Government tossed in a few cans of oil just to hide the landing of intelligent, yet incredibly shy aliens? Could this also explain the Government’s challenge to the Arizona law?

Frank Warner

Richard LeBaron to Scotland in 2009: No Lockerbie bomber release without proof he had less than 3 months to live

Selective leaks of U.S. official Richard LeBaron’s Aug. 9, 2009, letter to the “Scottish Ministry of Justice” recently suggested that the Obama administration approved of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohment al-Megrahi’s release last year.

Well, the U.S. State Department yesterday released the full text of that letter. What does it show?

The Scottish government may be the most shameful idiots on Earth.

Medical exams. Here are the key passages of U.S. charge d’affaires LeBaron’s letter to the Ministry of Justice and, by copy, to the Scottish Parliament:

- If a decision were made by Scotland to grant conditional release, two conditions would be very important to the United States and would partially mitigate the concerns of the American victims' families. First, any such release should only come after the results of independent and comprehensive medical exams clearly establishing that Megrahi's life expectancy is less than three months. The results of these exams should be made available to the United States and the families of the victims of Pan Am 103. The justification of releasing Megrahi on compassionate grounds would be more severely undercut the longer he is free before his actual death.

-- Second, the United States would strongly oppose any release that would permit Megrahi to travel outside of Scotland. We believe that the welcoming reception that Megrahi might receive if he is permitted to travel abroad would be extremely inappropriate given Megrahi's conviction for a heinous crime that continues to have a deep and profound impact on so many. As such, compassionate release or bail should be conditioned on Megrahi remaining in Scotland.

-- Again, while we are not able to endorse the early release of Megrahi under any scenario, we believe that granting compassionate release or bail under the conditions described (i.e. release with a life expectancy or less than three months and with Megrahi remaining in Scotland under supervision) would mitigate a number of the strong concerns that we have expressed with respect to Megrahi’s release.

Three months to live? The Scots last year said Megrahi had three months to live, but provided no solid evidence of that. He’s been free and alive now for 11 months, all that time pissing on the graves of the 270 people, including 11 Scots he killed in 1988.

It wasn’t until 2001 that he was sentenced to life in prison for the murders. In 2003, that sentence was reduced to 27 years. On Aug. 20, 2009, the Scots let him go. The next day, Megrahi returned to a hero’s welcome in Libya, where hateful crowds celebrated his 270 murders and laughed at the Free World, and particularly at the morons in Scotland.

It’s the shame of Scotland. For rewarding murder, that government should be dismissed and never reformed. Those officials have left the stench of stupidity and surrender that perfume and pretty words will never disguise.

Frank Warner

* * * Note: Check out how The [London] Guardian last year framed its Frequently Asked Question with answers that used the passive voice to explain that Megrahi “is not expected to live much longer.” The Guardian even suggested the world is so tired of Libya’s label as “pariah state” that it should reward Megrahi’s murders. What if Megrahi had murdered everyone at The Guardian? Would the next staff have been writing, “Free the murderer. Get over it”?

Oliver Stone cozies up to tyrants -- even Hitler

Oliver Stone, recently in Venezuela to lick the boots of would-be dictator Hugo Chavez, now says the "Jewish lobby" has blown the Holocaust out of proportion and that Adolf Hitler has to be seen "in context."

Part of the context, he says, is that some Americans actually encouraged Hitler to build his totalitarian state.

Yeah, pretty much the same way Stone has been encouraging Castro and the Iranian dictatorship to keep up their repression, and the same way Stone encourages Chavez to go the final mile and consolidate his tyrannical vision.

Meanwhile, Stone's position on Israel is a symptom of the common coward's syndrome -- the view that if something good is hard to do, let's call it bad and kill it.

Frank Warner

‘Inception’ review: Notice what was missing

Saw “Inception” today. Went into the theater when it was bright, sunny and hot outside. Came out to cool air, thundering clouds and a pouring rain.

The abrupt change in the weather was so much like the movie I looked around for huge buildings rising on the horizon.

I won’t mention the plot, but it works well. The visual effects are dazzling. And Leonardo DiCaprio finally has some gravitas.

Little electronics. I’ll mention two things that are played down in the film: Computers and cell phones. They are there, but they are hardly there.

When Saito fills Cobb in on Maurice Fischer, the dying oil billionaire, he doesn’t go to a computer screen or a Power Point presentation. He shows Cobb a paper dossier, with glossy paper photographs like we used to see on “Mission Impossible.”

There are a couple cell phone calls, but they are quick. And if I recall correctly, the people on the streets -- real and dreamed -- have no cell phones at all. Imagine.

Search for beauty. This tells me two things I’ve suspected for a while:

(1) Computers and cell phones are intrinsically not pretty things. Movie directors and other artists have figured this out, and they no longer want to see these ugly distractions in their art.

And (2), in the real world, we’ll probably see a continued evolution of computers and cell phones that eventually makes them as invisible as they were in “Inception.”

It will be harder to get rid of the annoying ringtones and loud cell-phone conversations of strangers. But I can dream. Right now, I can plant the idea.

Frank Warner