Post Election Commentary

Because it's obligatory. And since I have nothing at the moment, I direct you to Iowahawk, who is much wittier than I am. Example:

It's also heartening to realize that as president Mr. Obama will soon be working hand-in-hand with a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard like Senator Robert Byrd to craft the incoherent and destructive programs that will plunge the American economy into a nightmare of full-blown sustained depression. As Vice President-Elect Joe Biden has repeatedly warned, there will be difficult times ahead and the programs will not always be popular, or even sane. But as we look out over the wreckage of bankrupt coal companies, nationalized banks, and hyperinflation, we can always look back with sustained pride on the great National Reconciliation of 2008. Call me an optimist, but I like to think when America's breadlines erupt into riots it will be because of our shared starvation, not the differences in our color.

RTWT. I found it hilarious, in a graveyard-humor sort of way.

Postal Match Results

The October postal match results are here.
I did not embarrass myself (yay!), finishing:

Class 1 Rimfire pistol, Iron sights, 1st place
Class 2 Centerfire Pistol, Iron sights, 2nd place
Class 3 Rimfire rifle, Optical sights 8th of 19
Class 4 Centerfire rifle, optical sights, 1st place.

There seems to be someone else using the name Billll, with 4 Ls. Either that or Traction Control seriously fumble-fingered the data. Or maybe I have an admirer. Or a stalker. Or something.

Guns-N-Politics

Worked at the gun show today for the state NRA affiliate. Sold multiple NRA memberships to people who still had money left over after buying guns and ammo. The pistol merchant, whose table I peruse as I walk by on an ordinary day was invisible behind 2 layers of customers. My favorite powder and shot merchant was out of my flavor of powder.

Obama has promised to bankrupt the coal industry by making the stuff prohibitively expensive. If you buy electricity from someone who makes it from coal, your power bills can be expected to skyrocket. Likewise if you work for someone who uses coal based electricity.

Pollsters work for industry when they're not trying to get someone elected, and a bad record of predicting the election won't help their credibility on Nov 5th. You can expect the BS to diminish as the election gets closer, but really accurate numbers won't come out until Nov 4th when the pollsters can claim to be surprised at how many people changed their minds at the last minute.

Should Obie win, I'll predict a re-run of 1933 when the US, in a deep recession, elected an economic ignoramus who expanded what should have been a 3 or 4 year recession in to a 15-20 year nightmare, complete with a world war.

I don't expect McCain to fix everything either, but I do expect that he'll do less damage.

Home Economics

Of a sort. I've been told I can get back on my motorcycle the 16th of this month, if I promise to be very careful. Still, no drinking until January, which depending on how the election turns out, is not good.

In the coming hard times, however, the paper that knows best how to get to the good times, the Wall St. Journal, has a piece on what the best whiskeys might be if your portfolio isn't supporting the better single malts.

Sampling Whiskies

GOOD/VERY GOOD

Teacher's Highland Cream $16.99
Robust, chewy malt taste gives this whisky ballast. Above deck, the Scotch gets dressed in the elegantly restrained smokiness of the lightly peated Ardmore single malt.

Ballantine's Finest $13.99
A rich, rounded, malty sweetness balanced by dry herbal notes.

GOOD

J&B Rare $18.99
A grassy-green young whisky in which you can taste the light and flowery Knockando single malt, one of its constituent parts.

White Horse $12.99
A soft whisky with hints of vanilla, cinnamon, and caramel.

I don't normally drink whiskey, but this description of Teachers is enough to pique my curiosity.
Might make a good Christmas present.

Fixing the Economy

At least if you're a public employee whose pension fund has been chronically short, there's help on the way.
Stolen shamelessly from insty:

Colo. public employee pension fund plunges $10B. "Colorado PERA had been hoping that investment gains would help resolve its long-term underfunding problem." I'll bet they had. Hope is not a plan.

UPDATE: Taxpayers To Fund Public Pension Shortfalls. "While most people have watched their 401K values drop with the stock market over the past several weeks, taxpayers may have spend millions more propping up pensions paid to county and state retirees." I don't think that will play well, politically.

Now if your 401(k) has taken a hit recently, you know there's a way to fix it: Steal the shortage from the taxpayers.

There was a strip in the old comic "Pogo" in which the characters were playing Russians during the Khrushchev years. That would be the 50s for you kids. One of the characters cites a Russian proverb to the other:"The shortages will be divided among the peasants!"

I guess that's true here, too.

Quote of the Week

Found at Insty, but singularly appropriate on the eve of an election:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck."

Robert Heinlein

Interesting

Law Dog notes that an increasing number of his friends are splitting the ticket by voting for the Republican for president, then voting for the Libertarian on all the lower offices.

As the Democrat party is hijacked and converted to the Social(ist)-Democrat party, and the Republican tent is pitched farther to the left, the electorate, like nature, abhorring a vacuum, drifts toward voting for Libertarians, Constitutionists, and other small, conservative groupings.

This, I believe, is the way for those parties to actually get somewhere. Quit running spoiler candidates for president, and get your people elected to the more mundane offices. Convince the electorate that you're not a bunch of whackos with solid, honest candidates, then go for the big one. Meantime, vote Republican on the top slot and keep the really big whackos out.

Deja Vu

For quite some time now I've observed that neither party really wants to win a presidential election. Every 4 years, the Democrats nominate some pathetic barking moonbat that no rational person would want to be seen with, and the Republicans dig up some party apparatchik, dull and boring enough to lose to him. Both parties did that this year.

Alas, the best laid plans go often astray, and someone gets elected anyway.

This year the trick may have been played to its logical conclusion. The radio news and American Thinker was reporting that in Florida, while the Dems are otherwise doing well in the early voting, Obama is losing.

It must really suck when your old yellow dog won't acknowledge you, but when the word gets out that you hate white people in general and Jews in particular, and admire Castro, you're not going to do well in Florida.

I Voted

I voted today.

Well, strictly speaking, D'Wife took our absentee ballots down to the county election office and turned them in. We could have gotten the little oval stickies you get, which encourage people who shouldn't to vote themselves, but heck, every park bench, tombstone and vacant lot in the country already sports one, so why bother?

Pin Shooting

I took the weekend off from the world, and kicked back. The club match was a bowling pin shoot.

For those of you who have never heard of such a thing, here’s how we do it in our neck of the woods. 2 tables are set up at about 7 yards from the line of fire. There is probably an official table type defined by the National Pin Shooting Nobbelers, but we use wooden saw horses and wooden doors. The edges of the doors are up near eye level so the 5 bowling pins set near the near edge are easy to see against the backstop.

This is a timed event. Two shooters take the line, and assume a “low ready” position (gun drawn, halfway raised). When the timer goes off, both shooters attempt to clear their table of the pins, and that means the pins must be on the ground, not lying on the table. I don’t know what a pin weighs, but it’s a bunch. The first thing you need to know about pin shooting is “bring enough gun”. A .380 pocket pistol isn’t going to cut it. A 9mm is about as small as will work, and something bigger is definitely a plus.

Murphy looks over this event. If you tap a pin just so, it will fall over, and spin on the table, coming to rest with the rounded top pointing right at you. Hit this, and it will spin some more, coming to rest….. get the picture?

The second thing you need to know is where your gun shoots. I saw more than one person nicking one side of the pins or the other, over and over, and not even knocking them down. For a real treat, imaging 5 carefully placed shots, each one entering the edge of the door, exactly beneath the pin, until the far edge of the door is completely shot out.

On that note, I will mention that I had brought some ammo for my .357 that I had loaded a bit light. Now a .357 will happily take .38 special, and that can be loaded to various levels, depending on your application or inclination, from “cowboy action” at the light end, to +P on the high end. Normally I load .38 brass, which is easy to find, to +P, which I think gives me the most bang for the buck. I wanted to get rid of the lightly loaded stuff, as I had made it in error, and frankly that stuff would have drawn snickers from the cowboys. NOTE 2: do not use cowboy action ammo on bowling pins. They will laugh at you. Fall over, yes, fly off the table, not so much.

Bowling pins are tough. If everybody would use a 9mm or .38 special, you could shoot the same pins all day. A .45 will damage the pins if you use hard ball ammo. A .44 magnum will cause shattered pieces of plastic to fly off the pin as it flies 2 yards back off the table. A .45 with soft lead wadcutters will bounce off the pin, fly back 7 yards, and bounce harmlessly off your sneakers. In its defense, it will knock the pin over.

Oh yeah, how did I do? Well, I’m plenty accurate, but I need to work on the speed. Individually, I finished lower than usual. More practice is indicated. I’ll be picking up more bullets, primers, and powder at the gun show this weekend.

Who Ya Gonna Believe?

Like having 2 news sources in one. Today at Drudge, in the top left corner:

AP SHOCK POLL: OBAMA, MCCAIN EVEN...

and in the middle, this big headline

'LANDSLIDE LIKE REAGAN'


Now both Battleground and AP have the two even, and Zogby has Obie 10 points up. Zogby has been known to favor the left, but then so has AP. Obie and Joe are campaigning like the Devil is close behind them with a handful of IOUs, which makes me think that Zogby has been jiggering the numbers, and they know it.

One other thing: The big headline is suggesting that Obie will win in a huge landslide, but Reagan was not a Socialist who relied on vote fraud to get elected.

Your 401(k)

Some of my readers may have a 401(k) to which they contribute. If you are employed, your employer may contribute also, and the contributions are tax-free until you withdraw them.

The democrats, however, are adding up the costs of all those hopeful new programs, and want to change all this.

Under Ghilarducci's plan, all workers would receive a $600 annual inflation-adjusted subsidy from the U.S. government but would be required to invest 5 percent of their pay into a guaranteed retirement account administered by the Social Security Administration. The money in turn would be invested in special government bonds that would pay 3 percent a year, adjusted for inflation.

The current system of providing tax breaks on 401(k) contributions and earnings would be eliminated.

So, instead of getting around 15% on my 401k investments, I'll get a government bond at 3%. Why don't they just kick me straight in the groin while they are at it? Seriously, this is what passes for a reform to Democrats?

But look, instead of one of those unreliable and soon-to-be-nationalized financial outfits managing your 401(k), you get the inimitable services of Social Security department, which your ill-gotten (tax deferred) money is in competition with.

All this makes a powerful argument for complete privatization of the retirement system, phasing Social Security out as quickly as is practical, and letting people manage their own retirement.

Now, yes, if you were 20-something and just getting started with your retirement account, and had it all invested in a market index fund that tracked the Dow Jones 30, you’d have lost about half your investment in the last 6 months. I’m guessing that would be about $500. If you were 65.5 and getting ready to retire, you’d probably have your account managed by someone who knew what they were doing, and only be down abut 10%, which is where I’m at. Just not that old.

Peru adopted this system in the early 1990s and it produces retirement incomes about 6 times what US social security gives.

A Piece of History

You got a real piece of history there, mate. Ed Roth's Orbitron, found in Mexico, and now restored.

The New Mussolini

Back in the 20s Benito Mussolini pushed the idea that the best form of government was a benevolent dictatorship. As proof, he describes a citizen with a problem petitioning an elective democracy and getting only partisan bickering. The same citizen petitioning a dictator would get a solution producing the greatest benefit to the greatest number almost immediately.

On that basis, Benito ran for office on the platform that he would be Italy’s Dictator, solving problems without recourse to an endlessly bickering parliament. It was a strong appeal in a country where every city block had its own party, and it got him elected.

He was immensely popular with the press and the rest of the left, both in Italy and in the US, to the point that Studebaker even named their current model the Dictator, except in countries with governments that frowned on that sort of thing, where it was rebadged. Bypassing the parliament turned out to be quite easy mostly resulting in endless bickering with Benito’s Fascists in the majority.

90 years later Obama is proposing the same thing, without the title of dictator, which has fallen into some bit of disrepute over the years. For him, no tax is too large, and a huge, crippling energy tax will certainly fill the bill. This sort of thing has been proposed in the past, but some democrats, notably those from states where energy comes from coal, saw the folly of this and wouldn’t support it. See? Endless bickering.

The Obama solution for this is to have the EPA declare carbon dioxide to be a “dangerous pollutant”, which would impose heavy taxes and penalties on anyone producing it.

Mr. Grumet said that come January the Environmental Protection Agency "would initiate those rulemakings" that classify carbon as a dangerous pollutant under current clean air laws. That move would impose new regulation and taxes across the entire economy, something that is usually the purview of Congress. Mr. Grumet warned that "in the absence of Congressional action" 18 months after Mr. Obama's inauguration, the EPA would move ahead with its own unilateral carbon crackdown anyway.

This applies no matter how large or small the producer, thus not only Excell Energy, our local electricity producer would be hit with “pollution penalties”, and you know who winds up paying those. But you, Joe six-pac with your car, your power boat, your motorcycle, your lawn mower, your leaf blower, or gas grill, are now a producer of “dangerous pollutants” and the taxes will be levied against you, and against the polluters who sold you the hydrocarbons you used to produce them. You know who will be chipping in to pay the gas station’s share, now don’t you?

The EPA hasn't made a secret of how it would like to centrally plan the U.S. economy under the 1970 Clean Air Act. In a blueprint released in July, the agency didn't exactly say it'd collectivize the farms -- but pretty close, down to the "grass clippings."

Speaking of Excell Energy, if the power bills at US manufacturing plants get too high, the sensible thing to do is move the plant somewhere with lower energy costs, like China or Mexico. To compensate for this, the Dems propose extending unemployment benefits.

They think of everything.