Why Romney's $100 million IRA is No Big Deal

I’m not a Romney supporter.  I think you need more qualifications than perfect hair and lots of friends on Wall Street to be a good president.  That said, this story about how he got $100 million bucks in his IRA is meaningless.

When Romney was running Bain Capital they had a policy of letting the employees buy into the deals they were doing.  Imagine if you can, a company where every employee from the CEO to the mail room girl to the guy emptying the trash, could buy into the benefits of making a good business decision. Bain Capital was in the business of fixing broken companies.   Every deal they did required them to go in and find a better way of doing business for whatever company they bought.  Now imagine every employee having a piece of the action, which could make them big bucks, if and only if the company they were fixing proved to be a long term winner. 

One of the first benefits I see is that everyone would be on the same page.  Hidden agendas would be few.  Wasted effort would be at a minimum.  There wouldn’t be a staff of human resources flunkies running around trying to come up with team work seminars and “motivational speakers”.  Everybody who had a piece of the deal they were working on would know that a good decision today would make the difference between a great payoff in the future or a personal loss in the market.

Too much is being made of this “L” shares business.  Companies have preferred shares, always have.  Normally they go to preferred people.  At Bain everybody got the same ratio of preferred to common stock.  If you worked the mail room and had $1,000 bucks to invest you got the same ratio as if you had perfect hair and were the boss.  Obviously the boss had more cash to invest than you, but he got the same deal as you did.  When everybody working together made everybody a pile of money, you got your share too, just like the bosses and the big money investors.

I don’t want Romney as my president.  However, if anyone at Bain is reading this, I have an MBA and a back ground in finance, banking and management.  Drop me a line anytime.

Whoop Dee Doo! Whoop Dee Doo!

After having the blog up 'only' 6 years I've had 75,000 visits.  I'm going to catch Genn Reynolds any day now.

(thanks for all the extra clicks mom)

The three most responded to posts were:

#3 Sayings

#2 The Baroness

#1 Christian Bookstore

The ranking was based on the number of comments on the old blogger comment log. Christian Bookstore won out mostly because of the 225 plus spam messages in Chinese.

To those of you who've been around, thanks for reading my 651 posts.

Response to Farah

I now spend $160 a month in gas to go to a job that pays me less money per hour than what I earned as a college student. When I was a college student gas cost me less than 90 cents per gallon.

Property taxes on my house for a year, now cost me more than I make a month in wages. When I bought the house 12 years ago they were $50 a month.

5 gallons of milk today costs more than my grandfather paid for a cow.

I've decided that Obama (and all Democrats) really does love poor people more than Republicans. He is creating more of them than anyone else in American history.

I saw something today that mimicked a Reagan campaign slogan form 1979:  “Are you better off than you were 4 years ago”?  Good question.  I reflected over not just the last 4 years but the last 40.  After serving in the army in WWII my grandfather left the farm for the auto factories of Detroit.  He only went as far as the 8^th grade in school and a factory job was about the best he could except to do.  40 years ago would have been 1972.  My grandfather was working for Fisher Body making about $15/hr then or about $30,000 a year.  Which was quite good in the early 70’s.   A nice house could be had for less than $20,000 and a new car cost less than $5,000.  If you want today’s prices all you have to do is add a zero. 

My grandparents were big on education so everyone finished high school and college was pushed on my parents.  My grandparents saved money to help pay for me and my siblings college.  All of us kids have post graduate degrees. 

To answer the question, no I’m not better off than I was 4 years ago.  I don't even enjoy the same standard of living my parents and grandparents enjoyed when I was a kid.  Honestly I was better off 40 years ago.  Back then there was hope for the future.  Today not so much.

40 years ago Detroit was an inspiration to the world.  Today it’s a testament to 60 years of the Democratic Party’s administration and vision for America.  If you want to know what America will look like after 4 more years of Obama, just look at Detroit today.

Alma Mater Matters

 The college I received my BBA from is a private Christian School.  Recently they’ve been in the news on the receiving end of some bad publicity from the homosexual lobby, also known as the press.

The schools rules haven’t changed much in the last 50 years or so.  Basically if you want to have sex, you have to be married.  No other sex is permitted.  Marriage is defined as a man and a women.  That as they say is pretty much that.  There are any number of other rules required of the students which are a statement of acceptable Christian conduct that you wouldn’t have to follow at other schools, such as no drinking, drugs, etc.

Now you can be an alcoholic and go to school there.  They even had an AA group when I was a student.  You can be a single mom and go there, I knew a few who did.  You can be divorced.  You can even be gay and still be a student.  I knew and was friends with more than one person who were gay/lesbian when I was a student 20years ago. 

In fact every rule I can remember being on the books was broken while I was there, sometimes by students, sometimes by staff.  I remember kids getting kicked out as well as a couple of staff people that lost their jobs for gross public violations of the code of conduct.  If you choose to flaunt the rules and draw attention to yourself, you were at risk of getting the boot.  Some of us broke the rules frequently and it was suspected that we were violating major stuff, but we were never caught because the people in charge of busting kids weren’t interested in nit picking if you had a beer and felt up your date.   HOWEVER if you just had to be stupid and PUBLIC about your sins, you’d get their attention fast.

So it’s no surprise that a chick; who according to other students  had had a two year history of several other “attention” getting methods, like cutting her self,  multiple suicide watches  etc, decided to come out as a lesbian on facebook and then publicize her “gayness” around campus, was asked to take down her “out and proud” banner or be forced to move off campus. 

The girl didn’t say she was having gay sex, only that she is proud to be gay.  Therefor she hasn’t technically broken the rule about sex.  Although one could make the point that you don’t know if your gay without doing it, at least once.  None the less, the school is letting that slide, for the time being.  All they want is an end to the disruptions this girl has been causing like “being romantic” towards other girls, who apparently don’t want her approaching them. 

Yep.  The school is sick of playing the attention getting game with this girl.  They want her to either go to class and get along without the drama, or move off campus.  Notice, she will still be allowed to finish her degree.  The press is all over it.  You’d think that the school was burning witches at the stake. 

When dealing the homosexual Nazis, remember no matter what they say,  it’s not about “tolerance” or acceptance.  Its about the unconditional cheerleading that your supposed to do for anyone that is gay.  No matter how disruptive or disagreeable they are.  If you don’t affirm them, you’re the one with a problem, not them.

Brits and Guns

I saw this story about Prince Harry in the daily mail and had to comment.

Prince Harry yesterday scaled down a military exercise in Jamaica out of respect for the families of servicemen killed in the worst land attack the British Army has ever suffered in Afghanistan.

The prince, who recently qualified as an Apache attack helicopter pilot with the Army Air Corps and hopes to be deployed to the front line himself later this year, had been due to abseil down a rappel tower with the Jamaican Defence Force at Up Park Camp, Kingston.

A sombre looking Harry, 27, did, however, take part in a live firing exercise during his visit - and more than proved his metal - although the engagement had a very different feel to the more lively events of recent days.

If I read the story right, the news is that Harry was due to do some rappelling as part of a training exercise but he changed his mind, "out of respect for the families of servicemen killed in the worst land attack the British Army has ever suffered in Afghanistan".  How does not going through with a PT exercise show respect to your fallen comrades? I'm not calling him a coward, but I fail to see how not doing a basic task is "honoring" in any sense of the word.

It should be noted that the paper went into great detail about the princes shooting skills. I note that the distance was 25 meters but they kept harping on the fact that the gun could shoot 300 meters. Why, its not important in the least and it tells you nothing about the prince's shooting. The article showed his targets and reported that his score was almost perfect.

What they didn't report was the difficulty of the task or the parameters of the exercise. For a bit of perspective, 25 meter targets are common for shooting tactical situations. The reason is that most shooting for blood against human targets occurs from 7 to 25 yards. Using 25 yard targets is standard. In most shooting exercises I've participated in or supervised over the years, there is a time element. If you have 10 seconds to get off all 8 shots and you score as Harry did, you've done very well. If you have 2 min to get off the shots, you've done poorly.

The story tells us two things, Harry didn't go rappelling and Harry shot a gun. As is very common in the press when reporting on firearms, nothing of importance was related because they have no idea what they are talking about. This is a frustration of mine. I suppose the British press should get off lightly for not having a clue about this topic, but I find it is common in the American press as well. What really sets me off though, is when I encounter this type of foolishness by gun industry writers. For an example, please see every product review I've read in Guns and Ammo for the last 25 years.

As for Harry, if the paper wanted to do something cool, they should have taken pictures of him blowing stuff up with his Apache.

How's That?

I've been having template issues for some time now.  At first I thought the problems were related to my changing to Windows 7 and back to using IE for a browser.  I had an guest suggest I get rid of "the truth laid bare" and it would speed things up.  So I decided to try and address some other issues at the same time.

The first problem has to do with the unreliability of the comments loading.  After the first of the year, when I started posting more regularly, my page visits tripled, but the comments remained almost nill.   I have noticed that I have to hit "refresh" several times to see the comment button come up.  I have no idea how to fix this.

Another issue has been "AnderToons".  Half the time the link is broken.  I did try loading the most recent code on his website, but that made more of a mess and still didn't work.  I've taken that off all together.  If there is a way to keep the toons and have everything work, I'd like to know.

I deleted a handful of blogs that don't post anymore.  I'd be happy to link them back if they start posting, just drop me an email.

I'm all ears when it comes to any other suggestions that would make this blog better.  Drop me an email if you still have problems with the comments.

Does this make me a racist?

Richard Cebull

So what?

I'm having a hard time seeing what the big flap is about this.

Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Cebull apologized Wednesday for sending a racist email about President Obama from his office to a few friends.  "To say it's inappropriate and stupid is an extreme understatement," Cebull said Wednesday afternoon in his courthouse chambers in Billings.

My first thought was, "Everyone is having such a fit, what was the joke?"  It took awhile but I did find it.  Are you ready, brace yourself. The Tribune said the email text read as follows:

"Normally I don't send or forward a lot of these, but even by my standards, it was a bit touching. I want all of my friends to feel what I felt when I read this. Hope it touches your heart like it did mine.
"A little boy said to his mother, 'Mommy, how come I'm black and you're white?' His mother replied, 'Don't even go there Barack! From what I can remember about that party, you're lucky you don't bark!'"

Why is this racist?  I really want to know.  Is it racist because it mentions race?  Is it automatically racist because it is about the president?

I get why its in bad taste.   Commentators aren't saying Judge Cebull should be removed from office over "bad taste" or even slander.  They are saying he's a racist.  Forwarding an email to 7 people "proves" it.  I don't see how.  I also don't see why he should be kicked out of office over this.  After all there is currently siting on the US Supreme Court a judge, who refuses to recluse herself on a case, even though she was one of the lawyers who worked on legal basis for the for the Obama Care law.  In my mind that is a much larger breach of ethics, and an impeachable offense.  Yet we don't hear a peep out of the media on that.

There’s this comment on Judge Cebull’s Wikipedia entry:

Cebull acknowledged that the content of the email was racist, adding that he did not consider himself racist because he hardly ever goes to Klan meetings anymore.

Why is it OK to take a pot shot at the judge, but not the man of questionable, everything, including his origin, now in the White House? Is it racist to still call it the "White House" with a half black illegal occupant?

You Might be a Wuss IF...

Hey Billy what did you do this weekend? 

Got my butt kicked by a 71 year old man.

But such a situation took place over the weekend, prompting a pair of elderly golfers to go ballistic with a metal golf-ball finder. According to the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office, Ronald Richardson and Donald Nieto, both 71, were teeing off at the ninth hole at the Shalimar Pointe Country Club when four teens disturbed their Saturday by blasting a loud air horn.

How lame are you when you have to "punk" some old fart with a air horn in the middle of his back swing?  Then you forget to take your jacket and go back and he catches you and whips your butt.  The article says police aren't releasing the names of the "youth's" involved in the "crime".  No kidding, talk about a serious blow to their "street cred". 

It looks like the two old duffers are in legal trouble for administering what amounts to a public spanking.  Is it a good use of public funds to prosecute this "crime". A better solution is to make them preform some community service, I mean other than the one they preformed by paddling the punks back side.  I think you could do a series of PSA spots with two old fats beating the backsides of gang bangers and let the teens in the area know that when they get caught that they will get some of the same and have the vid posted on You Tube so all their buds can see how tough they are.