That’s Right Nate

I really hate to take this blog up with family business when Obama is currently threatening this great country, but since Steve has refused to acknowledge that he received payment not once, but three times for a present he bought for an aunt I don’t even like, I thought I would post the canceled check online as he had demanded I do.  This should put an end to any further nasty rumors or speculation.

Much of the AIG bonuses will go towards family expenses like cars for their children to get to school.

The American dream is in jeopardy.   Imagine what it is like to work long days and longer weeks in the hopes of getting a bonus to help get you by in lean economic times.   Now imagine that congress uses the power to tax in order to take all that money away from you simply because they resent your success.  The power to tax is the power to destroy and the Democrats in congress have no trouble wielding this power.  It is enough to make successful people simply “go Galt” and refuse to work.  Afterall, they won’t see the fruits of their own labor.  Such is the plight for dozens of employees of AIG.

American, a country which used to aspire to the success of its elite, now resents it.   Let me tell you about these bonuses.  Companies like AIG have to pay these large bonuses in order to get the top people to work for them.  Without a million dollar bonus or retention payment or whatever you want to call it, many of these guys would just go into social work or teaching.  Companies pay these bonuses because that is the cost of doing business requires it.  Its just unfortunate that since the taxpayers are paying that cost, we have to pay the bonuses.  These bonuses will help stimulate the economy though.  They represent a potential $165,000,000 in sports cars, caviar, private planes, and luxury yachts.

And how does congress react?  Well according to Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), “My colleagues and I are sending a letter to [AIG CEO Edward] Liddy informing him that he can go right ahead and tell the employees that are scheduled to get bonuses that they should voluntarily return them,” Sen. Charles Schumer said on the Senate floor. “Because if they don’t, we plan to tax virtually all of [the money] … so it is returned to its rightful owners, the taxpayers.”

His fellow Democrat Bill Nelson of Florida chimed in by calling for a 90% excise tax on the bonuses, but it isn’t just the Democrats who seem to have problems with successful hard working men and women.   Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) took an even more extreme position, “But I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they’d follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.”

The AIG executives will get their hard earned bonuses and they will spend them, but I can promise you they won’t enjoy it.  Caviar and champagne just aren’t the same when somebody has killed your appetite.

Emily's shirt can't conceal her weight problem as she celebrates her birthday by devouring a chocolate cake.

This post is going out to Megan McCain or I guess maybe John McCain too.  Megan has been in the news lately because, to put it bluntly, she’s fat.  Recently, in a show of tough love Laura Ingram called her on it teasing “Ok, I was really hoping that I was going to get that role in the Real World, but then I realized that, well, they don’t like plus-sized models. They only like the women who look a certain way. And on this 50th anniversary of Barbie, I really have something to say.”

Megan immediately got defensive, ““It infuriates me,” she said. “I’m a political writer on a blog, and all of a sudden I’m too fat to write?”  She further went on to tell Laura Ingram, “Kiss my fat ass.”  Like Megan, I too am a political writer on a blog and like her father John I too have a fat daughter.  I know how defensive they can get when you suggest that they might want to order something a little less fattening at a restaurant.  Poor Laura Ingram seems to have been caught in the crossfire.  It is just a simple fact that fatties get defensive.

For John McCain it must be very tempting to love Megan like any other child in spite of her overwhelming girth.  The question though is at this time of her life is unconditional love really what Megan needs?   I tried that with my daughter Emily and what I got was a daughter weighing in at 125 pounds at the age of 12 and unlike Megan, Emily has no aspirations of a Hollywood career.  As Megan herself told The View, she has a younger sister.  Is she really setting a good example for her sister?

I especially feel sorry for John McCain who like me has always enjoyed a good fat joke or a political daughter joke.   Who can forget his zinger from the late 90s?  “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.”  I hope that he’ll have some equally cutting material about the Obama daughters in the years to come.

The real tragedy here though is Megan McCain who by all accounts has a great personality and she does have a very pretty face if only she’d take off some pounds.  She could be that young Republican sex symbol for the 2o somethings the way that Sarah Palin is for the older generation.  Let’s hope she gets her act together.  As it is now who can take a woman seriously when she obviously needs to lose weight.  If she has any hopes of being the next Rush Limbaugh she’s going to have to look more like the women on Fox.   Why do they have credibility?  Because they’re hot.  Meow!

UPDATE – One tradition at the Peele house was always hiding Easter candy so that Emily wouldn’t eat it all.  I’ll have to be really careful if I win the See’s candy contest over at Soup is not Finger Food.

I’ve never really cared much for the Irish with all that drinking and fighting, but in honor of St. Patrick’s Day I thought we’d have some Jim Malcolm from the Old Blind Dogs performing his solo version of A Man’s  a Man for All That which is based on a poem by the great Irish poet Robert Burns.  The poem speaks to the pleasures of honest poverty and not seeking government handouts–sentiments we could all learn from right now.

During a speech last week, Barrack Obama reminded us that South Korean students go to school a month longer than our students do.  After looking up the statistics, I learned that they are also scoring better on standardized tests than our students even though we have a higher percentage of students scoring in the highest category.  I decided that we need to look at what it will take to replicate the South Korean educational miracle.

First, we need the kind of quality teachers that they have in South Korea.   First, all teachers in this country should get a 75% raise so that they are equal to South Korean teachers in salary as a percentage of GDP.   I’m not thrilled about this aspect of things either because a teacher who is currently overpaid at $40,000 a year would now make $70,000.  Wow!  OK, let’s just skip this step.

One thing that South Korea has that we need is hagwons.  Hagwons are private tutoring schools that students go to after their regular school day is completed.  South Korean families spend 7 percent of their income on their children’s education and that’s for students in public school.    Student days in South Korea are much longer with both school and hagwon taking up time.  It isn’t unusual for students to catch up on their shut eye in class.  The saying in Korea is, “Sleep 5 hours and fail.  Sleep 4 hours and pass.”  Especially in high school, students routinely begin school at 6 a.m. and spend the day in classes until midnight.  This schedule lasts 7 days a week.

Students in South Korea know that they have a lot pressure to succeed and unfortunately, there is an abnormally high suicide rate among teens and children in South Korea.  However,  the schools know that if they need to instill discipline they still can.  80% of schools in South Korean still employ corporal punishment.  There was one famous story in 2006 when a teacher hit a student 200 times for being 5 minutes late for class.  You can be sure that student was on time the next day.  This iron willed discipline allows Korean teachers to use a curriculum that features far more rote memorization than are children can handle.

Some may argue, that this kind of approach is too costly or that it saps children of their childhoods.  However, what is the effect of a childhood on a country’s economy?  We need to start working to get our students capable of competing with the hard working automotons of South Korea.

You don’t have to watch Lou Dobbs for very long to reallize just what a threat the United States has on its Southern border.  Even semi-legitimate organizations like the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce “is effectively an organization that is interested in the export of American capital and production to Mexico and Mexico’s export of drugs and illegal aliens to the United States. This is crazy stuff.”

We must get control of the Mexico situation.  The Mexican towns on the border with the United States are  getting more and more dangerous as drug fueld violence is escalating.  Illegal immigrants continue to flood into the United States and As Mr. Dobbs has pointed out Mexican immigrants are responsible for the health care crisis, our failing schools, the economic downturn, the failure of the war in Iraq, and leprosy.

I have an idea that will solve the Mexican problem and help our economy at the same time.  Back in 1847, the United States sent General Zachary Taylor into Mexican territory where 11 soldiers were killed by the Mexican cavalry in what became known as the Thornton affair.  As a result, the United States plunged into the Mexican-American War–a war that brough us both Texas and California.  By sending troops down to Mexico we can start a war that gives us a legitimate claim to a large chunk of Mexican territory.  Unlike Islamic extremists, most of Mexico would be thrilled to be conquered.    We could use this area (which I would place just South of Monterey) as a sort of proving ground for Mexicans who want to come into the United States proper.   Believe it or not, it would reduce the size of our border with Mexico too if we want to build a fence.

This is the time for bold thinking.  It is an excellent time for provoking a war–not a depressing war that goes on forever, but a quick and decisive vicyory that can revive our economy.

As you know, I don’t really have time to read.  However, one of the greatest books ever written was Ann Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The novel’s hero John Galt leads a secret strike of the most productive citizens in an America where productivity and freedom is no longer valued.  The strike is an act of rebellion and self-preservation, fueled by Galt’s crucial insight that their enemies’ only weapons are the ones the strikers produce for them.  By recruiting more and more strikers, Galt precipitates the ultimate collapse of American society.  Somebody really ought to make a movie out of this.

Anyway,  my website is joining a movement that is currently growing by leaps and bounds to unite those of us who make over $250,000 per year to “go John Galt”.  Sure, teachers, policemen, firemen, and and even most doctors make less than $250,000 per year, but without the rest of us what kind of life would those people have?   Who will manage the hedge funds?  Who will make the important management decisions?  Who will own and operate the good self-storage businesses?  When the wealthy people of the world refuse to work like dogs for their meager compensations those unproductive people will regret it.

Citibank gets it.  Bank of America gets it.  They haven’t let tough financial times and requiring the government to bail them out to prevent them from standing up to the unproductives.  They have both been hosting phone calls to rally support against the Employee Free Choice Act.  For you gentle readers who have missed it, The EFCA is a piece of communist legislation designed to make it easier for lazy employees to “stick it to the man” by organizing unions.  If company’s who are barely getting by with massive taxpayer support can spend the time and money to say “no more free lunch!”  isn’t that the least we can do?

Barrack Obama is fond of saying that “elections have consequences.”  However, if he truly believes this, why does he continue to ignore the nearly half the nation that voted for John McCain.  During the election, McCain made ending earmarks a major point of his campaign.  So why exactly is Obama approving a huge earmark laden spending bill?

Faithful readers, I wish that it was only earmarks, but Obama has continually broken McCain’s campaign promises.  When it comes to income taxes, Obama has raised taxes on people earning over $250,000 despite McCain’s promise to keep the Bush tax cuts  in place.  He has also  removed the Bush barriers to stem cell research.  “It has really been a disappointment,” said Brian Burch, president of Fidelis and CatholicVote.org. “The people who argued during the campaign that Obama’s pro-life rhetoric represented a reason to be hopeful have been totally discounted. We are 60 days in, and he has taken advantage of every opportunity to shut the door on any consensus building on the issue.”  You can be sure if we knew that Obama would do this stuff we would have voted against him much harder.

I know this comes off as sour grapes now that John McCain has lost the election, but did John McCain’s promise of a balanced budget by the end of his first term in office need to be swept aside as well?  Had we known that Barrack Obama was not going to keep any of his promises, I believe we all would have worked harder for John McCain and that just isn’t right.

Merit pay would encourage firemen like these to get out and fight fires instead of clowning around.

There’s an old song by the Pink Floyd that goes “We don’t need no education.”  I’m not quite sure what the song is, but those lines always stuck with me.  Teachers for years have been riding the educational gravy train in this country and we need to stop it.  Today, Barrack Obama laid out his plans to make teachers accountable and it is about time.  I may be one of Obama’s harshest critics, but I think his proposal is a good start.  Obama called for tying teachers’ pay to students’ performance and expanding innovative charter schools Tuesday, embracing ideas that have provoked hostility from members of teachers unions.

Obama also called for us to emulate the South Korean school system where students go a month longer than kids in this country do.  I applaud Obama for not looking to Canada which has the second best school system in the world behind only Finland, but which remains a hotbed of liberalism and socialized medicine. According to the Mathematics Association of America,  “Most of the top countries pay their starting teachers a salary equivalent to about 95% of national GDP per capita. South Korea pays 141%. In the United States, average starting salaries for teachers are at 81% of national GDP per capita. With avergae ntional GDP in the US currently at $46,000, 81% means an average starting salary of a bit over $37,000. To raise starting salaries to 95% of US GDP per capita, this would have to rise to almost $44,000″ and 141% would be over $60,000 to start, but we’re America and if we can’t get a first class education for third world wages, we might as well just give up now.  I would also hope we can avoid South Korea’s huge teen suicide epidemic which is often blamed on high stakes testing.

Now, Obama wants to increase funding for teacher salaries, but he is wisely tying this increase to merit pay.  I really love this idea because it assures us of getting what we pay for.  The problem with education is how lazy so many teachers are.  They sit at their desks all day sipping their expensive coffee and not paying any attention to what theri students are doing.  What about the lazy cops who hang out in the doughnut shop or the lazy firemen who don’t want to run into a burning building though?   Let’s face it teachers aren’t the only lazy government workers on easy street.

Which is more valuable to a city–The cop who sits in his comfortable car all day or the one who is busting his back writing speeding tickets?   Is the city getting its money’s worth for the fireman who sits around the station watching televsion all day or the one who is putting out fires?  These people should also be put on incentive pay.  Let’s allow cops to keep 20% of all ticket money they raise.  Let’s give our firemen $100 for every burning building they enter.  That’ll get them off their behinds.  In the unfortunate event that you had to go to a public hospital, wouldn’t you want to know the doctor’s salary was being tied into his patients’ survival rates?  Let’s truly make this a merit based society.  For once, Obama and I seem to agree on something.

Wake up you lie-berals.  There is a war going on in this country between the forces of good (Spelled G-O-D) and the forces of science.  Sadly for our beloved country, President Obama has clearly demonstrated what side he is on with his executive order overturning the ban on federally funded stem cell research.  At first, I couldn’t figure out why, but conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck put it in perspective for me:

So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research, and then some, fundamentally changing – remember, those great progressive doctors are the ones who brought us Eugenics. It was the progressive movement and it science. Let’s put science truly in her place. If evolution is right, why don’t we just help out evolution? That was the idea. And sane people agreed with it!

And it was from America. Progressive movement in America. Eugenics. In case you don’t know what Eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person. …. The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening. So I guess I have to put my name on yes, I hope Barack Obama fails. But I just want his policies to fail; I want America to wake up.

It is undeiable that at the beginning of the 20th century progressives like Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the American Medical Association were followers of the theory of Eugenics.  However, only Hitler rivaled Obama for the sheer audacity of using stem cells to create a master race and why not?  The Chinese are already hard at work on their own master race by treating things like ALS, autism, and MS with stem cells.   It is diseases like these that keep Obama from his goal of a country full of racially pure aryan super beings.   Glenn Beck knows this, why can’t the liberals figure it out?

For the past 8 years George Bush has heroicly stood between this country and the forces of science.  He has stood up to stem cell research, global warming crazies, and he cut science funding so that he could put in place the sensible tax cuts that could help fund the economy’s growth.   President Bush seems to be willing to throw open the gates of this country to the Trojan horse of scientific inquiry.   Fortunately, another hero has emerged.

In Oklahoma, State Representative Todd Thomsen has sponsored a bill opposing a visit to the University of Oklahoma by Richard Dawkins of Oxford Universtiy and another bill to oppose the teaching of the theory of evolution at the University of Oklahoma.  There is no reason for our country to allow a tax funded university to teach things like evolution that goes against the traditional morals and Biblical teachings upon which this country was founded.   At least one person sees it.  You can be sure if there is a master race in this country, it won’t be coming out of Oklahoma.