Random Thoughts

Empathy: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Have you been wondering why President Obama empathizes with the grunge occupying Wall Street?  Bill Whittle on PJTV may have the answer.  The occupiers, he says, are members of the self-esteem generation.  That’s the generation that has been told, practically since birth, that they are too smart to fail.

It is also the generation, Whittle says, that has been brought up in prosperity financed by their parents, grandparents, and the federal treasury.  Their practical experience is nil, but their egos and their belief that they are entitled to live well on someone else’s dime are well developed.

The president lived with his maternal grandparents.  (His grandmother was vice president of a bank.)  He was sent to a prestigious private academy in Honolulu.  He attended Occidental College, Columbia University and Harvard Law School with the help of federal financial aid.  Community organizing and an undistinguished career in politics round out his “work” experience prior to becoming president.

Any other questions?

Chicago has a skunk problem

According to the WSJ, residents of Itasca, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, are battling a massive skunk infiltration.  Homeowners are unable to enjoy their yards.  Dogs are repeatedly victims of skunk encounters and animal and pest control companies are thriving while resident costs soar.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is also faced with an expensive pestilence. Union contracts obligate the city to pay high salaries for short working hours.  Garbage collectors, for example, earn about $70,000 a year for 5 1/2 hour work days, making Chicago’s cost per ton for trash disposal the highest in the nation.   Inefficiency and featherbedding abound.  Remember the joke about how many workers it takes to change a light bulb?  In Chicago it takes three to change the bulb on a streetlight—a driver, a laborer, and an electrician.

Mayor Emanuel is trying to reduce the city’s $636 billion budget gap, but says it is too early to talk about eliminating jobs.

Chicago politics have always exuded an odor of corruption.  That makes it difficult to determine just where the most noxious fumes are being emitted.

Theater of the Absurd

Nancy Pelosi said the floor will be littered with dying women because heartless Republicans are opposed to tax funded abortions.  VP Joe Biden averred that unless the president’s new stimulus bill passes the streets will be carpeted with raped women.

Harry Reid stated that “private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers, and that’s what this legislation is all about.”

It is good to hear Reid own up to what Stimulus 2 is really “all about” (jobs for the Democrats’ important constituency of unionized public sector employees).  However, according to the Labor Department, he suffers from a math deficit. Contrary to “doing just fine,” the private sector has lost 2.5 million jobs since 2008.  To check out the rest of Biden’s dubious statistics see this Washington Post Fact Checker article.

Unable to run on their record, Democrats hope to frighten voters by portraying Republicans as Satan’s emissaries.  Remember poor old Grandma pushed off that cliff!  Vilifying the opposition is a strategy used liberally (no pun intended) by both political parties, but there is a point where the tactic becomes a parody of itself.

The Democrats have reached it.