A break in the clouds
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Today’s liberal double standard alert
The argumentative part of me wants to say, “there you have it, lefties. You wrote books about assassinating President Bush, you called him Hitler, you made ‘art’ depicting him as a monkey, and every other demented thing you could think of. See how you like it when it’s your messiah getting the treatment.” Frankly, I don’t care to stoop to their level.
I see that some people are trying to make a buck off this.
While I’m not a frequent visitor of her site, I noticed today that Michelle Malkin has some examples of the tolerant left’s treatment of our 43rd President.
The funniest 8-ton door you’ll see all day
If you have ever watched the movie War Games, and/or you don’t live in North Dakota, you may have the impression that nuclear missile launch facilities were hidden. Wrong. Travel central North Dakota and you’ll discover that neither are hidden or secret, there are signs pointing to them, and that people in the area find them rather commonplace. Even so, taking a tour of this park corrected a lot of misconceptions I had about life in the missile wing.
North Dakota has recently opened a state park Minuteman site, which I haven’t had the opportunity to visit. You can find out more about it by visiting the websites for it at either OscarZero.com or the State Historical Society’s page. Even cooler: our state site is called the Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile State Historic Site. Chalk one up for the Gipper!
Forklift fail or forklift win?
One of my favorite “daily visit” sites is failblog.org. It took off from the FAIL meme: You take an image of someone doing something dumb, making a hilarious mistake, or just generally failing at something. Paste the word FAIL on it in an Impact style font. Post and share the hilarity.
An alternate of it is WIN. While I question the means of attachment of this weight to the forklift, I have to admit it displays a certain innovation. While it would probably qualify for failblog.org, I wouldn’t put this in the “dumb” category. Thus I couldn’t decide if this was a FAIL or WIN, so I thought I’d make my own failblog.com-worthy image and let you be the judge:
Capitol A’fair and a new perspective on a familiar subject
I also managed to spend ten hours on the road this weekend, go underground into a Minuteman missile launch control facility down in South Dakota, visit the emergency room back here at home, and spend Sunday sedated. There’s never a dull moment around here, it seems…
You can never get it back…you can only let it go
My wife and I took our boys walking downtown today. They’re so precious, and we live in a city where we can take them walking in any area we want and not have to worry about crime or most other dangers. We’re truly blessed to be raising our little family in the Bismarck-Mandan area.
We’re also blessed to have each other and the two most handsome little tow-headed boys ever. Walking along on a perfect July night with my 1 yr old Sparky holding my finger, life couldn’t get any better than this. Well, except if we’d set the camera on my wife’s new phone to something other than “grainy postage stamp” resolution first.
As for me, I’ll never have to get it back. I’m never gonna let it go.
Easy being green
The wet year we’ve had so far has brought back the frogs’ song in many parts of town. From one of my River Road adventures a while back, I thought I’d provide another link to the frogs enjoying a cool North Dakota evening.
Lunchtime at the capitol
What did you do for lunch?
An illustration of how we’re moving too fast, regardless of the direction
Rather than act like so-called “professional” journalists, I’ll document this a little bit:
Link: President Obama was looking for a dog in November.
Link: Bo the Dog shows up at the White House in April, six months later.
Bonus: Another broken promise, since Barack Obama promised to adopt a shelter dog.
Dog fans: Bo has his own WIkipedia page.
I’ve made it clear I’m against government-run health care. What they’re trying to do now isn’t even about health, care, it’s about control. But regardless of whether you agree or not, don’t you think we could take more time to overhaul one sixth of the US economy than it takes to select your kids’ pet?
If you agree, please download this full size graphic I made and pass it along (without modifying it, please). Let’s put the pressure on before we find ourselves stuck in a system that was forced upon us in haste and which none of us will want!
Congratulations to 94% of North Dakotans: you got a 70 cent per hour pay cut this week. (updated)
Take this quote from Job Service of ND employee Michael Ziesch, via KX News: “Most employers have already been paying above and well above min. wage esp. to retain qualified employees. Even in the job offers we see, that employers post with our agency, only about 6-percent of those offers, that include a wage, include a wage that is at or below minimum wage.”
So who makes up that six percent of North Dakota workers? According to Mr. Ziesch: “…most of the minimum wage jobs are held by the very youngest employees in the work force and some of the older employes in the work force.”
So, congratulations…those of you who are trying to support a family of six just got an effective 70 cent per hour pay cut, as the wage floor has been brought up. All in the spirit of making liberals somewhere feel good. Here’s why this is such a sad, sick joke (as are most liberal policies):
Suppose you are some poor guy who’s working a minimum wage job — maybe even two — to support a small family. You’ve got age and a little experience on your side, making you a more dependable and responsible employee than some teenage kid working his first job. It’s allowed you to work your way from $6.50/hr starting to $7.25/hr due to a series of incentive raises that you’ve earned for being a good employee. You’re not exactly “movin’ on up like George and Weezy,” but you’re advancing.
Next comes the latest federal feel-good program, the minimum wage increase. Now everybody is making what you are…including the 16 year old that sauntered in yesterday to apply for a job. In the mean time, the price of goods and services that you purchase for your family is going to go up to absorb the increased labor costs of the store from which you buy them. Effectively, you just got a pay cut.
According to that Job Service fella, 94% of North Dakotans are included in the pay cut group. These are the people who are not making minimum wage, or at least they were not prior to the jump to $7.50/hour. What if you make $9 or $10 per hour? You now effectively make $8.25 or $9.25. You went backwards because the bottom wage just came closer to what you earn.
When I’ve tried to make the argument against the idea of huge numbers of North Dakota employees making minimum wage, I have heard the argument that many of them are making “just above minimum wage” and don’t figure into the statistic. Guess what? Those are the people hardest hurt! If they were making $7.50 an hour last week, well above the minimum wage, they just got reset to zero. The minimum wage just went up, not everybody’s wage. Maybe they were making $8.00 an hour, not bad for entry level work. Now they’re barely above the minimum. For the 6% workers we’re told were “lifted up” by this increase, 94% of workers were brought down.
Let’s take a fictitious fast food restaurant, and call it BurgerBama. It pays most of its employees, high school kids who will likely leave after graduation, a minimum wage of $6.50/hour. Suddenly Congress, in its infinite wisdom, passes a law telling BurgerBama that it must pay its employees at least $7.50/hour. The cost per employee just went up by over a dollar an hour! How, you say? FICA and other taxes paid by the employer are based on the employee’s earnings, which just went up by 15%. By the time you factor in all the costs of having employees above and beyond their salaries, you’re looking at a potential 20% increase in the cost of having minimum wage employees.
Now, if your business doesn’t employ minimum wage earners, or at least many of them, you won’t feel this as seriously as others. In the case of retail or fast food work, however, the majority of the business’ labor base will be affected. That means the cost of those hopey-changey BurgerBama cheeseburgers has to go up by 20% just for their profit margin to remain equal! Thus the cost of goods and services will be increasing to absorb this humanitarian liberal hike in the minimum wage. That means that the increase never really had much effect; the people getting the 15% raise will be paying 15-20% more for the goods and services they need to buy with those wages.
This is how supposedly “compassion-driven” legislation works, folks. While I’m sure plenty of politicians are out there patting themselves on the back for “helping the little guy,” the vast majority of workers (especially in North Dakota) just got punched in the wallet. The question is: how many actually know it?