Pino knows crisis.

None of the work I did ever amounted to the staggering impact that this spill will have; on the environment, on the lives of people in the region and in scope of dollars lost.

But what I can tell you is when someone is making the mistake of asking the right questions at the right time.  And further, that by doing so, they are signaling a very strong need to cover their ass.

During a crisis, and the bigger they are the more important this becomes, every single action, decision and spent energy must be spent on ending that crisis.  And ending it quickly.  If you do your job well, the questions and action items after the event will be straight forward.  However, if you have NOT done that job well, but have done it long enough, you know you’re gonna get hammered and how.  You begin to take cover; you begin to act in a manner that doesn’t solve the crisis.  You begin to ask the right questions; just at the wrong time.

And the Administration is doing that right now:

U.S. officials, meanwhile, are pressing BP to clarify how the company will cover costs relating to the Gulf oil spill.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says reimbursement for individuals and state and federal government will be on the agenda when she and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar meet with Hayward and other BP executives in Washington later Monday. She told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that the Obama administration wants to make sure there is a clear claims process set up for proper reimbursement.

Why are they doing this?

Another potential hazard was a political one that depends on how the public judges the Obama administration’s response. In 2005, President George W. Bush stumbled in dealing with Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf and left the impression of a president distant from immense suffering. His presidency never recovered.

Now, to be fair, I’m not sure the Administration has failed the region.  But I think they intuit they might have:

Another potential hazard was a political one that depends on how the public judges the Obama administration’s response. In 2005, President George W. Bush stumbled in dealing with Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf and left the impression of a president distant from immense suffering. His presidency never recovered.

Much information can be gleaned by not only the literal words someone is saying, but the hows and the why in which they said them.

I was only too happy to have GM pay back their money.

Turns out GM is only playing with my heart:

General Motors is running ads on all the major this week claiming it has repaid its bailout from the taxpayers “in full.” But the claim isn’t standing up to scrutiny from lawmakers and watchdogs who have found that the automaker was able to repay the bailout money only by dipping into a separate pot of bailout funds.

They didn’t pay that money back.  They stole more money from more people and just played us with a shell game!

Bastards.  Back to the side of the road for you.

The shame.

Then again, it’s Union thugs working in cohoots with the government.  What should I expect?

President of the United States of America Barrack Hussein Obama.

This is awesome.  See, the real point of all of this isn’t if Obama did or didn’t have any influence on who should be selected to fill his seat.  The real point is that when you take a political thug from Chicago and wash him up, move to him Washington and give him a new title he is still….

A political thug from Chicago.

Attorneys for former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich Thursday asked a federal judge for permission to subpoena President Barack Obama to testify at his corruption trial.

And why would they do that?

According to the Chicago Tribune, Blagojevich’s (D) defense lawyers said in a filing that “President Obama has direct knowledge to allegations made in the indictment. In addition, President Obama’s public statements contradict other witness statements.”

See, there is an old saying back on the farm:

“You can take the girl oughta the country but ya can’t take the country oughta the girl.”

Obama grew up, so to speak, in the cesspool that is Chicago and is a product of that system.  Chicago is known for dirty, thuggish and brutal bloody knuckle politics.  The only thing more surprising that Obama would be subpoenad is the belief that at some point something like this wouldn’t happen.

Is the President in trouble?

Also, the president is said to have explicitly recommended current White House adviser Valerie Jarrett for his Senate seat…

This may not be so bad.  After all, the seat was Obama’s, he won it on promises made to his mafia thugs sorry, union member, jeez, voters and so you can say that he should have some say into who replaces him.

The rub?

…a supporter offered a quid pro quo if Jarrett was appointed to the Senate, that Obama kept a list of suitable Senate candidates, that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel Cheryl Jackson, head of the Urban League, for the seat and that Obama has undisclosed conversations with Blagojevich.

Ouch, that could leave a mark.

The first thing that you do if you wanna sell less beer and lose money doing it is to take out advertising spreading the message NOT to buy your beer.  Makes sense, right?  I mean, the single best way to have people not buy beer is to tell them not to buy your beer.

Good, one down, more to go.

Next, the second thing to do if you wanna sell less beer and lose money doing it is to restrict the days that people can actually purchase your beer.  For example, you set up shop such hat you won’t sell beer to people every other day.  Or, say, from the hours of 4pm through 10 pm, no beer.

The third thing to do if you wanna sell less beer and lose money doing it is to charge more for the beer.  In fact, you can charge so much money for your beer that people will look for other ways to obtain beer; maybe going to some other bar completely.

Okay, that should just about do it.  Three simple steps:

1. Tell people not to buy your beer
2. Restrict the hours you sell beer
3. Raise the price of your beer to force folks not to buy it

If you do these things you should not be surprised when you sell less beer.  And you certainly shouldn’t be surprised when you begin to lose money doing it.

So why is the government so effin’ shocked when THEY do it?!?

The Public Utilities Department is funded primarily by water and sewer usage fees, so when consumption drops, revenue dries up.

Since the record-setting drought that gripped North Carolina in late 2007 and early 2008, local water consumption has dropped, Buchan said. Last year, usage was down 7 percent from 2007 levels, he said

Now, why does this concern the gentle city of Raleigh?  Why:

to help pay for a new water treatment plant that will come on-line next week.

Of course!

The city, like all other things, enjoys being able to pay for things it likes, needs or wants.  water treatment plants are no exception.  So, when needing money to pay for things you like, need or want, the prudent thing to do is NOT follow the three steps I outlined above.  Right?

Sigh:

1.  Tell ‘em not to buy it:

Dick and Nancy Petty said they track rainfall at their house and cut back on water usage even more during dry conditions.

“We don’t want to run out of drinking water, for one thing. It’s just something that we’ve been on top of for a long time,” Dick Petty said.

2.  Restrict the hours you can buy:

Year-round water restrictions adopted by the City Council have kept a lid on consumption.

People with odd-numbered street addresses can water their yards on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, while those with even-numbered addresses can water on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Violators receive one warning before $50 and $200 fines are imposed for second and third offenses. A fourth violation will result in a homeowner’s water being shut off.

3.  And raise rates to the point that people go elsewhere:

In July, the city will implement tiered water rates to begin charging people based on their usage. The City Council adopted tiered water rates two years ago…

Jeepers.

1.  They turn off the AC.  It gets HOT on that plane.

2.  Often I have a connection that I would like to make.

3.  I know, just KNOW, that the only reason we pushed away was so the airline could count the flight as “on-time”

So yeah, I HATE waiting on the airplane.  But what really would have me over the top angry would be an extended delay.  The ones you hear about in the news where passengers are forced to wait for hours on the plane.  I mean serious.  Can you imagine waiting for 10 hours on that plane?

Jeepers.

With that said, I resonate with the spirit of the law that says:

airlines can be fined up to $27,500 per passenger if planes are delayed three hours and passengers can’t get off.

Really.  If we are going to be delayed for that long, just lemme off.  I can stretch, have a beer and let the kids run.  But then again, if my flight is delayed I imagine that there must be a hundred or so planes behind me delayed too.  So, if we go back to the terminal, we go back to the end of the line and we may never have the chance to take off.

So, how do airline companies react to the new law?

Smisek said … the government by God says, ‘We’re going to fine you $27,500.’ Here’s what we’re going to do: We’re going to cancel the flight.”

Because airlines have cut flights, leaving the remaining ones more crowded, passengers will have fewer chances to rebook on another flight. Passengers, he said, won’t get to their destinations “for maybe days.”

Uhh, wow.  Now THAT’S not what I want either.  What I would like is something in between.  We can wait on the tarmac for awhile.  10 minutes is no big deal, 30 isn’t bad.  45-60 is tough; much more than that I am upset.  But I would like to get to where I’m going.

In the end, I guess that the government can’t even do the things it SHOULD do well; pass laws.  There has to be something better than this, I wonder if they’ll fix it?

Oh, yeah.  Sometimes I wonder why were late to begin with, any clue?

long delays are rare, and mostly caused by an outdated air traffic control system that the government has failed to upgrade.

Nice.  Government failing to fix a problem caused by something else the government failed to do.

Maybe health care will fix it.

Farrell Block writing for the CATO Institute states: “Economic growth and employment go hand in hand. Taxation and regulation discourages business and the demand for labor.” He is joined in this assessment by many other economists including Llewellyn Rockwell of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute who comments: “All this talk of unemployment is preposterous. There is always work to be done, and therefore, always jobs. There is not a lack of work to be done.” The reason this work does not translate into new jobs is a function of labor costs which are aggravated by government intervention and policies that distort the labor markets.

Perhaps the best example of counterproductive government labor policy is mandatory minimum wage laws that price labor out of the market. This is especially true of immigrant labor, unskilled workers and new entrants into the labor market such as teenagers. Simply put, a teenager may be worth $5.00 per hour but no more. So, with the minimum wage artificially set at $8.25, no new job is created. Not surprisingly, today’s unemployment rate among youth exceeds 20%. While minimum wage laws may be well-meaning, they effectively knock out the bottom rungs of the employment ladder. Worse still, they help create what Professor Martin Haberman from the University of Wisconsin calls “a perpetual unemployed class of workers [with] behaviors and beliefs which form an ideology that is the source of their failure in the workplace.”

High payroll taxes are also a problem. These taxes prohibit employers and employees from setting their own wage rate by adding to it the cost of the employee and employer contribution to Social Security Medicaid and Medicare.

Still other culprits include:

• Laws that threaten employers with lawsuits if an employee is terminated.
• Laws that establish conditions on new labor such as hiring quotas based on ethnicity or gender.
• Exceedingly generous terms for unemployment “insurance” that pay people not to work for almost a year.
• Labor union contracts and work rules that force employers to keep union labor in a job even if the work could be performed at a lower cost or though another means.
• Employer mandates and restrictions imposed by various regulatory bodies including the complexity and high cost of compliance.

Economist David Rosenberg, formerly of Merrill Lynch, expects the unemployment rate to keep rising in the near term. Furthermore, he believes that the manner in which the government counts unemployed workers actually understates the real number. For example, he cites the fact that 9.3 million Americans work only part-time, so “technically” they are not unemployed – but they fully-employed either.

Another significant problem with the “official” unemployment rate is the fact that the government stops counting unemployed people when their unemployment insurance runs out. Here is a group of people that have been out of work so long that their unemployment insurance has expired and yet, somehow, they are conveniently dropped off the statistics? How can the official number, ignoring this still very valid element, possibly be an accurate reflection of what’s really going on?

We can expect a flurry of speeches and activity out of Washington in the coming weeks and months as our elected officials attempt to publicize all their solutions but the bottom line is that unemployment is currrently running at 10% when economists try to tell us that America’s full employment rate is really closer to 5%. It is important that we keep the pressure on Washington and judge their policies based on their results. Yes, they may get kudos for their fine speeches but at the end of the day, if the unemployment rate does not begin to really fall back towards an accurate 5%, then we should demand new policies that include significant reductions in government spending, taxation, deficits and regulatory relief. In short, we should demand that government stop trying to fix the problem and let the free market, small businesses and entrepreneurs succeed where government has failed.

The Mustang Ranch, for those of you not familiar with its history, was a legal brothel operating a short taxi ride from Reno Nevada. In 1990, the government seized the enterprise in an attempt to collect $31 million in back taxes. The Ranch only sold two products: sex and booze. They had an established clientele and an excellent location with their close proximity to a large city.

So, beginning with an estimated base of $20,000 per day in revenues and all the brilliant advisors the government had at their disposal, they were an abject failure in operating this enterprise and later put it up for auction where it received just one bidder. It eventually sold to a private party for $1.49 million.

With Reno only a few miles away, how could the Government, with all its resources, lose money operating such a relatively simple business? The government moved in again in 1999 taking the position that the new owner was just a front for the former owner who had declared bankruptcy and fled to South America, which is where he is presumed to be today. In spite of the government’s bungling, the Ranch is back in business under private ownership and is operating at a profit today.

If the government cannot make a profit running a whorehouse, how confident are we in their ability to run a billion dollar automobile company? For that matter, how can we expect them to run the entire healthcare industry with its countless companies, products and services? Their most recent foray into the housing industry led to a housing bubble and the failure Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The collateralized mortgages and other toxic assets created under the government’s regulatory watch were sold to banks and insurance companies which we also had to bail out. The list of government failures seems to have no end. “Cash for Clunkers,” the Bridge to Nowhere, endless farm subsidies, $800 hammers. FEMA spent $5 billion dollars in the last year and a half trying to explain how they spent $29 billion in 2002 but can’t seem to provide us with the information. I imagine their strategy is to just delay and postpone their findings until we give up or die.

There is a mountain of evidence that we should stop asking the government to take over any business enterprise or bail out any industry and run it for any length of time. To do so is to further invite more disruption and long term inefficiency which we will be coerced into funding with higher taxes and deficits.

Still not convinced?

• A car company in Finland sponsored by Al Gore has received a loan from our government for $529 million but our banks who received money from the government’s TARP Program have still not found a way to begin lending to American small business.

• Congress publicly rebukes Detroit automobile executives for flying to Washington hearings on private jets yet shortly thereafter appropriates tax dollars to order more private jets for Congressional travel.

• The Federal Communications Commission’s plan to bring broadband Internet access to the three to six million Americans who don’t have access to the Internet. This bill requests $350 billion for this plan which works out to over $120,000 per user!

In each of these instances, we see examples of favoritism to the politically connected, hypocrisy or a lack of simple business economics at work.

On the surface it appears that in Washington, the right hand never knows what the left hand is doing but I suspect that the real answer is more complicated. Perhaps government bureaucrats, with no business training or expertise, make business decisions based on political considerations and endless CYA paperwork instead of economics. Or, perhaps it is an inbred government culture of simply demanding more tax revenue to fund inefficiency instead of a culture that innovates to reduce cost and increase efficiency? Perhaps it is a lack on internal accountability or the knowledge government workers have that no matter how inefficient they are there is still little chance they will be fired and that their above average wages and pension are safe.

So, as we move towards a final decision towards a government-run healthcare industry which will put your medical safety in the hands of the government and you relinquish your freedom to purchase or not purchase insurance and select your own doctor, please remember the simple lesson learned at the Mustang Ranch.

Excerpt:

First Lady Michelle Obama visited the headquarters of the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington Tuesday. She devoted much of her talk to “the growing threat of obesity, particularly childhood obesity” in the United States, and she touted HHS’s recently-announced plan to spend $373 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on plans to, among other things, improve the healthfulness of foods in vending machines.

The first lady did not discuss how such work might stimulate the economy or speed economic recovery. But she had glowing praise for the stimulus’ role in fighting obesity. “Congress and the president included $1 billion for prevention and wellness programs in the Recovery Act,” she told the crowd of cheering DHS workers, “and that includes funding for initiatives that will give communities the resources they need to address the obesity epidemic in their communities. This includes $373 million announced last month that would be available for communities that put together comprehensive plans to reduce obesity –- $373 million — and that would include everything from incentivizing grocery stores to locate in underserved areas; it could include improving meals at school; to getting more healthy, affordable foods into vending machines; to creating more safe, accessible places for people to exercise and play; and a whole lot more.”

How does this stimulate the economy? I understand how it allows socialists like Michelle Obama to primp and preen in front of crowds and cameras, but how does it help unemployed Americans to earn a paycheck?

I can’t think of a single example.

Can you?

How can you possibly expect that American citizens will take you seriously?  A key part of your campaign rhetoric was how irresponsible the Bush administration was with deficit spending, and that, in part, the reason for our financial crisis was that as a nation we were spending far beyond our means – and many of us agreed with you.  Then you became President and in less than three months you have agreed to increase our deficit and the national debt by $3 trillion.  To put that in perspective, that’s an increase in our debt of about $25,000 per household!  Furthermore, the impact of the spending, stimulus, pork – whatever you want to call it – is spurious.  The Wall Street Journal reported today that of those banks who received TARP money, lending is actually down dramatically from when they were given TARP money.  In talking with the bankers I know, they are telling me that the FDIC is pressuring them to be far more conservative with their lending policies.  Consequently, if you are giving banks lots of capital, but then restricting their ability to lend through regulation then why give them the money in the first place?

I laughed out loud when I heard that in your first cabinet meeting of your presidential career that you requested officials to look for ways to save $100 million.  When dealing with such vast amounts of spending it is difficult sometimes to remember to put things into perspective.  Allow me to help those of you who have never successfully run anything in your lives other than a campaign, to understand the math:  You have increased government spending by $3,000,000,000,000 and yet you are now calling for trying to save $100,000,000.  This savings represents only 0.0000333 of the $3 trillion.  If you asked one of those rich people that you are always complaining about (you know – the ones who make $250k a year) to save an additional 0.0000333 of their gross income it would amount to $8.33.  

Rescind spending and government waste, now!

At the time, Winnipeg’s top health officials said Sinclair never approached the triage desk to be registered in the queue to see a physician and staff didn’t know he was waiting to see a doctor.

It turns out that that isn’t true at all!

The tapes show a Health Sciences Centre employee at the triage desk spoke to Sinclair, before he was seen wheeling himself away from the triage desk towards the waiting area…

The 45-year-old died Sept. 21, 2008, and his lifeless body was found slumped over in his wheelchair. An autopsy showed he died of a bladder infection, caused by a blocked catheter – a treatable condition. Security tapes show Sinclair spoke to a uniformed worker in the triage area, but triage staff have no record of his name.

Nice.

And who was fired because of this negligence? No one. Who was reprimanded? No one.

If something like this happened in a private setting, such as a dentists office, you can bet that there would be firings, lawsuits and lost business. But the government doesn’t loose business when they screw up, since they have a monopoly over health care in the province, and you are forced to pay for it whether you like it or not.

Isn’t socialized medicine swell?