Archive for October, 2011

Jocelyn Benson

Imagine this: It’s the final two minutes of a football game, and the score is 42-3. The losing team’s coach complains that the rules for scoring touchdowns are unclear. The referee agrees with the coach, invalidates the other team’s touchdowns and cancels the game.

Sound strange?  It should. It is not fair to change the rules in the middle of the game. But that’s exactly what happened last week when, thanks to legal games and gimmicks from State Rep. Paul Scott (R-Grand Blanc) and his team of attorneys, a state court cancelled his recall election and eliminated the opportunity for voters to make their voice heard.

This decision invalided a long and concerted effort by a group of citizens who worked hard to follow the law.

Unhappy with several votes from Scott to cut funding for their children’s education, 12,000 of his constituents signed a petition this past summer that would allow citizens in his district to vote on whether to recall him in the next election. The voters followed all of the rules, and Michigan Director of Elections Chris Thomas rightly accepted their signatures as valid. The recall question was to be put before the voters this November.

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Herman Cain

Do you know why candidates for office tend to be reluctant to propose detailed plans? Because they know the plans will be flyspecked and picked apart by just about everyone. Inviting criticism doesn’t help you to get votes.

But fear of criticism prevents you from conceiving solutions to problems. So even if avoidance of criticism helps in propelling you to an election victory, how are you supposed to effectively govern? How are you supposed to fix the problems you told everyone you were going to fix?

That’s why I’m happy to see so much criticism of the 9-9-9 plan I’ve proposed. It shows that people are thinking seriously about a substantive idea. When people stop obsessing over “gaffes” and campaign strategy, and start honing in on fixing the country’s economic problems, we are getting somewhere.

This is not to say, of course, I’m going to leave poorly founded criticisms of the plan unanswered. Certain objections to the plan are circulating in the usual places, driven by the same kind of thinking that has left us with a stagnant economy, $14 trillion in debt and mounting entitlement obligations. These criticisms deserve responses, and here they are:

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Jake Davison

Why isn’t anyone describing Steve Jobs as a billionaire, corporate robber baron whose products depend on oil (plastics)? Just because the Justice Department never got around to investigating and witch-hunting his success before he passed away? Because Apple’s brand is so hip and anti-corporate that Apple is somehow not an international corporate behemoth that has a near monopoly on several products?

Last I checked, Jobs still hadn’t allowed Apple to be organized by the United Software Workers of America. Do you get a pass from class warfare rhetoric if you invent the 21st Century as Jobs did? Unlike the car, which most Americans have been able to afford for 75 years, are we still simply too impressed by and grateful for our laptops, iPods, iTunes, iPhones and iPads? Perhaps it will take another generation before we turn on Apple. People used to think Henry Ford was a hero too.

Jobs didn’t just “expect the best.” He was often a whip-cracking despot who could drive his workers to the brink of physical and mental collapse in order to achieve his status as a “visionary.” His products could never have happened in a union shop. Steve Jobs created hundreds of thousands of jobs. He also destroyed tens of thousands of jobs of those who worked for his competitors by making their products irrelevant. If you worked at IBM in the 1980s and got laid off, thank Steve Jobs.

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Dan Calabrese

Here’s a very simple question: For what reason would a business hire additional employees?

If the company runs according to sound principles, there is only one possible answer. It would hire additional employees if it needs those employees to do something that will ultimately enhance the profitability of the company.

That’s it. There is no other acceptable answer.

Now, why is Chrysler hiring 2,100 additional employees? Is it because rising demand is pushing its capacity, and it needs to get more people cranking out more cars to sustain its soaring profitability? No. Bankrupt and bailed out by the taxpayers just two years ago, Chrysler is still losing money.

Chrysler is hiring 2,100 additional employees to buy labor peace. The UAW represents 26,000 Chrysler employees, and wants that number to be larger. So in order to get the UAW to agree to smaller signing bonuses, a suspension of cost-of-living increases and a host of other things Chrysler desperately needs, the money-losing automaker agreed to increase the size of its unionized workforce by nearly 10 percent.

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Robert Laurie

Monday night, over 1,000 people gathered at Detroit’s Spirit of Hope Church to plan the “spontaneous” demonstration known as “Occupy Detroit.”

The protest will begin under the Spirit of Detroit statue on Friday afternoon at 4 p.m. So far, more than 3,000 people have announced their intention to charge up their iPhones, hop into their Priuses and head to the event, just as they have in cities nationwide. Once assembled, the spoiled throng of malcontents plans to carry a few “Eat the Rich” signs through Detroit’s financial district to Grand Circus Park, which they intend to occupy for an indefinite period of time.

“Spontaneity” never enjoyed such thorough advance planning. Nor has it been the subject of so much Big Labor funding.

If Detroit’s gaggle of Marxists, socialists and anti-capitalists follows the precedent set in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, it will enjoy the backing of, at least, the AFL-CIO and SEIU. It will also be aligning itself with the views of self-proclaimed communist and former Obama “Green Czar” Van Jones, as well as global socialist billionaire George Soros. All have helped organize the “occupy” movement.

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David Karki

Now that the Republican presidential primary field has been set, the contest is really about one thing only: whether the beltway GOP establishment and the media can force a liberal Mitt Romney upon the conservative base, thereby setting up a general election that will be no choice at all and ensure that those currently in power stay there regardless of its outcome.

To be sure, the most prevalent sentiment among conservative primary voters is not so much for any particular candidate but against Romney.  I’ve often thought that if a candidate simply changed his surname to NotRomney, that line on the ballot would win in a landslide.

This is due in part to overall dissatisfaction with the entire field; one cannot help but look at the group and think “if this is all we can come up with when the nation hangs in the balance, the Republic is finished.” It’s hard to look at any of them and see them reversing, rolling back, or undoing anything Obama has done to so badly damage the country. Most of them won’t even try, and the couple that just might don’t strike you as ones who would succeed.

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Dan Calabrese

I’m not going to give any helpful advice to marijuana smokers (other than quit getting stoned, you idiots), but if they learn something as a result of my mocking them, there’s always that.

Despite their insistence that pot-smoking is not harmful, there is much evidence to the contrary. And the latest such fact in Michigan is this: Marijuana smokers make very bad laws. Very silly laws, too. We’ve already dealt at length in this column with the ridiculous “medical marijuana” initiative of 2008, which legalized getting stoned for a phony reason, and did so in such a way that no municipality in the state – save for Ann Arbor, of course – wants it happening within its boundaries.

Now we venture to Kalamazoo, where pot-smokers have strapped their thinking caps to the few brain cells they have left and come up with this one: Local voters will be asked on Nov. 8 to approve a ballot initiative that would make enforcement of marijuana laws the lowest priority of local police.

That’s right, man. If we can’t get it legalized, we’ll make sure the fuzz have to bust all the other crooks before they come for us!

Well. Of all the ideas I’ve heard in my time, that’s one of them.

What better way to determine the allocation of law enforcement resources than to have a committee of 74,000 people make the call?

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Brett Noel

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Herman Cain

I’m not surprised I got a question like this from Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC. Given the mindset of Mr. O’Donnell and most of his colleagues, it’s to be expected that he would cite my statement – that Occupy Wall Street protesters have only themselves to blame if they are unemployed or lacking wealth – and ask if I wanted to apologize for saying so.

Not a chance.

In fact, I would add this: Anyone who abandons these protests and tries taking my advice is almost certain to end up better off. That’s because it’s empowering to you when you stop blaming other people for your situation, and start taking responsibility for yourself.

Another name the OWS protesters use for themselves is the 99 percent. This is in contrast to the 1 percent of the population whose greater wealth they resent. Their premise is that the 1 percent has been exploiting them, and now the 99 percent is fighting back.

Well.

No one has to tell me about the challenges involved with pursuing success when you are born without a lot of advantages, or to a family without a lot of money. That is the story of my life. I achieved success in business because I worked hard, studied hard, set goals, honed my strategy, weathered setbacks and kept at it no matter what. Sometimes those setbacks occurred because, at least it seemed to me, someone didn’t treat me fairly. But I quickly learned that this, too, is part of life. Complaining about it won’t help you. Devising strategies to overcome it will.

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James Melton

After initially getting big play on liberal websites and almost nowhere else, the Occupy Wall Street movement is finally getting attention from the mainstream media – which is what its organizers wanted. Good for them, right? Not really.

When Oscar Wilde said “the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about,” he could not have known about today’s cable news, talk radio and social media. These days, when those doing the talking misrepresent and mock you in front of a national audience, that’s a problem. And, oh boy… OWS, which is just now getting started in metro Detroit, has trouble on its hands.

Fox News, predictably, has been apoplectic. Sean Hannity recently had Ann Coulter on his show to talk about “the destructive Occupy Wall Street protests.” Coulter, true to form, was more than happy to describe OWS as a “classic mob uprising.”

Rush Limbaugh has not given the protesters even that much credit. “Parasites” is a word he has used to describe them. Recently, CNN’s Alison Kosik used her Twitter feed to describe the purpose of OWS as “bang on the bongos, smoke weed.”

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