Gateway Blog

New advertisement from the city of Las Vegas features a chinchilla uprising:

Enjoy!

Annoyed by that GM ad where they swear they’ll build awesome cars now and love you long time, even though they’re the exact same yahoos, but now with taxpayer money? Yeah, these guys were too:

Hat tip to RedState.

I needed a laugh, and the Casual Mafia delivers:

As my wife blogged, Jack in the Box has a new website, so I snagged a snazzy widget from “Jack’s Office.”  Thanks, hon.

Economy got you down? Need something new to listen to for spring?  Used to listen to heavy metal, but always thought the so-called “nu” style really meant “crappy”?   Never fear, there’s plenty of great music hiding out there, and what’s better than knowing about some bands that hardly anyone else does?

Band listing and YouTube clips after the break…

Continue reading ‘The best metal bands you’ve never heard of’ »

Today is a good day to be a Missourian:

Jefferson City – The Missouri House voted on Wednesday to approve a resolution urging members of Congress to reject the Federal Freedom of Choice Act. The measure passed by a vote of 116-40.

from http://www.house.mo.gov/news.aspx?id=220

A lot of people probably had not thought about the Smashing Pumpkins for years, until the Hyundai ad during the Super Bowl this weekend.  One of the last big bands of the 90s to implode, they finally broke up in 2000 after two disappointing albums, Eva Adore and Machina: The Machines of God.  But did you know that just before breaking up, they released an album straight to MP3, and that it was actually pretty good?  Called Machina II/The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music, it was an unfinished sequel that was published only on vinyl, and very few copies were made.  From what I understand, copies were given to the head of the Pumpkins’ fan club, with instructions to release the album for free on the Internet.

I found this a while back, just poking around on the Internet.  Although there are some rough cuts (some songs are demos), it nonetheless contains some very good music.  My personal favorites are the songs “Satur9,” “Soul Power,” and “Glass.”  I definitely recommend anyone to take a look, after all, it’s free!

Download it here

Do you think we should pay higher taxes?

Then surf on over to Treasury Direct and give them some money.  Your own money.  If you really believe that’s what needs to be done, then I’m sure you’re already clicking away.

But somehow I suspect that you’re not doing that.  Why’s that?  Because you don’t want to give your money, you just want them to take it from everyone else.

As you may have read, President Obama has announced that he will seek to place strict limits on executive pay for corporations that receive bailout money.  This would fulfill a longstanding dream of the Left: having a centralized power – the government – determine how much individuals should make.  Doing so with unpopular executives during rough economic times is an opportunity they don’t seem to be willing to pass up – it’s a great beginning.  From there on down, it’s just a short slippery slope to a bureaucrat telling you how much you will be allowed to make, and it won’t be based on your talent or how hard you work.

* You get what you pay for. I used to work for a public university that refused to pay market wage for IT professionals, since, for many positions, it tended to be well above what most of the landed aristocracy tenured faculty made.  As a result, many positions requiring highly-skilled workers, such as database administrators, were frequently unfilled or staffed with basically unqualified workers.  Imagine this same concept applied to a man or woman whose decisions will directly affect tens of thousands of employees and retirees, their families, etc.  Wouldn’t you want the best person for that position?  And isn’t that worth something, even a whole lot?

* It’s not addressing the actual problem.  Since the problem is that credit markets have frozen up, exactly how does executive pay work its way into the discussion?  Oh right, it serves as a distraction, keeping the public’s attention on a boogeyman instead of on the corrupt government that created the problem and perpetuates it.  Much like the hate focused on Immanuel Goldstein kept the Inner Party in power in 1984.  Who needs Orwell when Obama is happy to be Big Brother for reals?

* You wouldn’t do this in professional sports. Think about it – how crappy would Major League Baseball be if the American League had salary caps and everyone in the the National League were free agents?  The AL would suck and the NL would be full of studs (except Chicago, they’d still be the Cubs).  Think how much worse it would be if the Commissioner decreed that all players would be paid the same thing. You know what I mean:  hardly anyone would be headed to Cooperstown.

Get the idea?

Update: I just wanted to point out that I think that giving massive amounts of public money to private companies was and is a bad idea.  For one thing, it distorts markets and disincentivizes good and responsible business.  Secondly, it encourages businesses to collude with politicians, leaving consumers and shareholders out in the cold.  Finally, the idea of throwing good money at bad rarely works.  And when it does (sort of), it’s incredibly expensive.

For the record, I am sick and tired of hearing Republicans and right-leaning pundits go on about how voters punished the party because it spent too much time handing out pork.

This makes no sense on several levels. First, most voters do not pay much attention to myriad bills passed in Congress. What they do pay attention to is things like the price of gas and whether or not they have to worry about losing their jobs.  This is not to say that spending taxpayer money like an unending slush fund is in any way acceptable, it’s just that I don’t think this was what was foremost on the minds of angry voters in 2006 or 2008.

Second, if the voters thought the GOP was too profligate, why would they think the Democrats would be any better? Everyone knows that the Democrats love to throw taxpayer money around. Remember what a big deal it was that Clinton announced “the end of welfare as we know it”?

Finally, this view ignores the problem that everyone was tired of the most visible and identifiable Republican, the President himself. For almost his entire second term, Bush seemed rudderless and (even worse) ineffectual. From Katrina to the dark days of the war in Iraq to the oil shock, he acted like someone completely overwhelmed. He finally showed leadership in Iraq with the surge, avoiding defeat for our country and an almost certain, horrific civil war in Iraq (many thanks also to John McCain, who was a lonely advocate at the time). But by then, many had written off the war as lost, and worse. An unhinged far Left and its media allies further poisoned things, with virtually no pushback from the Administration.

So what advice do I have for the Party? Mainly, what it needs to do is to provide genuine leadership and, importantly, competence in solving the nation’s problems. Time to roll up our sleeves.