Three can keep a secret. If one of them is dead

The Great Wikileak has the TV news baying for the head of Julian Assange. Along with pseudo intellectual arguements about freedom of the press. Although hanging Mr. Assange out to dry isn't a bad idea, it's a side issue.
The real issue is the astounding foolishness of our government, putting zillions of secret documents on line, and allowing access by everyone in the government. Information sharing they called it. Classified is not information to be shared. That's why it's classified. The way you keep secrets secret is by not telling them to everyone. That's the "need to know" doctrine. And by not putting them on line in the first place. The real villains are the idiots who created the great classified database, and the Cabinet secretaries who signed off on permitting their department's secret documents going into the database.
With all the classified in the US government on line, one disgruntled PFC was able to carry a quarter million documents off base on a single CD. If all that classified had been real paper, locked in real safes, in secure locations, the PFC wouldn't have been able to move that much paper to the door, even with the aid of handtruck.
Let's see if the government is bright enough to do the right thing, namely destroy the classified database. Wipe all the disk drives, invalidate all the passwords, take the file pointers off the net. Classified should not be kept on computers, it is too easy to steal.
By the way, how long do you think your computerized medical records will stay confidential when the US State Dept cannot keep its classified off Wikileaks? Are we all looking forward to seeing our operations, prescriptions, X-rays, and doctor's opinions shared with our employers, our insurers, the media, and all the nosy neighbors?

Robin Hood with Errol Flynn

It surfaced in the $5 a DVD bin at Walmart. It's an antique, 1938. Talkies are only 10 years old. The Technicolor process was new that year. It's still entertaining. The colors have lasted, still bright. Lots of derring do, chases on horse back, sword fights, quarterstaff fights, non stop action. Characters are divided into good guys, bad guys, and love interest (Olivia deHaviland as Maid Marion). Claude Rains is a convincingly nasty Prince John. Basil Rathbone takes a week off from being Sherlock Holmes to be Guy of Gisborne.
Given the age of this flick, it's darn good. Better than the Kevin Costner version from a couple a years ago.

Computer security? do we have any?

US traitor Bradley Manning, while an Army private managed to access a zillion secret army documents and feed them to Wikileaks. Now it appears he was able to access 250,000 state department secret documents and they are appearing on Wikileaks at this very moment.
There are a few questions I'd like answered. Such as how does a low level Army enlisted man gain access to State Dept classified? And how does he gain access to so much of if? What ever happened to "need to know"?
Who issued this traitor a security clearance?
Why is all this classified on computers anyhow? It would be more secure if just one copy was hand typed using a manual Remington office typewriter. And the one copy kept in a safe somewhere.
As of this writing, the Wikileaks site is off the air due to a distributed denial of service attack, but the ever patriotic New York Times is going to publish the juicer items tommorrow.

"Bush Tax Cuts"

The subject of much talk, and a blizzard of disinformation. The real choices facing Congress are three, Raise taxes on all Americans, raise taxes on higher earning Americans, or don't raise taxes on anyone.
Does anyone think raising taxes on everyone will get the country out of Great Depression 2.0?
Does anyone think raising taxes on people who have serious money to invest is going to get us out of Great Depression 2.0?
Keeping everyone's taxes where they have been for the last 10 years is better than any kind of tax hike.
Even better would be to cut taxes. Worked for Bush. Might even work for Obama.

Of course raising taxes helps pay the vastly increased spending of the Obama administration.

What to fear in Korea

The current Shoot-Ex on the Korean border is a sign of weakness of the North Korean government. North Korea is attempting a power transfer to the third member of the Kim family. This guy, Kim Jung whats-his-face is a perfect zero. Nobody knows anything about him. Whether he has the stones required to run the nastiest dictator ship ever is unknown. North Korea is dirt poor, unable to feed its people, and yet maintains a humongous army, builds nukes and missiles. There has gotta be a LOT of unhappy campers up there. The rifle carrying privates in the North Korea army all come from somewhere, have family that is going hungry, and might not obey an order to fire on civilians. Nobody really knows.
In short, North Korea could come unglued, overnight. The army and police stop obeying orders, and what little national economy they have comes to a stop. People start dying for lack of food and water.
In this case, South Korea would be under enormous pressure to do something. Lot of South Koreans still have kin living in the North and they will demand their kinfolk be saved. So the South Korean army will drive north in trucks full of food and water and peace flags waving from bumper mounts. If it were just up to the Koreans, things would settle out, the north would become part of the south. But the Chinese won't like this.
China likes having North Korea. It gives them a border shared with a pliable client state. It lets them poke a stick at the Americans and get them all hot and bothered, at little cost to themselves. The idea of having a pushy economic rival, who is hand in glove with the Americans, on their border is anathema to China. To prevent this, the Chinese will send in peacekeepers.
Now we have the People's Liberation Army and the South Korean Army cruising around the same turf. The possibility for nasty shooting incidents is very great. We don't want to think about escalation. The PLA is very big and formidable, but so is South Korea, and the South Koreans have that American connection. A lot of Americans, like myself, have been to South Korea over the years, and brought back very favorable impressions of the Korean people. The Koreans have been loyal and faithful allies for 60 years. The US government would be under great pressure to back up the South Koreans. And that could lead to hostilities between the US and China, which is not a good thing.
I don't know just how to avoid a catastrophe here, but I can at least see the dangers involved.

The existential meaning of Standard Time

NHPR is having a fine time discussing a book about time. As you may or may not know, once upon a time each town and city kept its own time, 12 o'clock was when the sun crossed the zenith. Since the moment of local noon changes from place to place, the time would be different between Boston and Salem and Lexington and Hartford and every place.
Railroads needed time tables, both to let passengers and shippers know when to be at the station, but also to prevent head on collisions on single track lines. Creating an accurate time table is difficult enough (how many minutes to travel from East Overshoe to West Gumstump) but to then compute a time correction to account for the fact that East Overshoe is a few minutes ahead of West Gumstump, is just too much to keep straight and get right. Plus, what keeps the train on time is the train crew looking at their pocket watches, all set to railroad headquarters time. Train crew needs a time table with uniform times, the time indicated on their watches.
And so, the railroads met and carved the US up into the four time zones we still use. Then the station clocks were set to railroad time, and timetables printed in railroad time and that was that. Pretty soon passengers and shippers (nearly everyone) found it convenient to set their clocks to match the railroad clocks.
All this colorful history was too much for NHPR to cover. They bloviated about the deep inner meaning of standard time, the existential meaning of local time, the blessedness of having no time at all and other poetic subjects.

How many gallons does an electric car use?

Dunno. Word has it that Chevy Volts are piling up at the factory but they cannot ship them until EPA issues a mile/per/gallon sticker. Which seems kinda dumb. Plenty of Volts are gonna go to people whose daily commute is less than 20 miles, at which, if they plug in every night, they never need gasoline. Assuming the Volt's battery-only range lives up to Chevy's advertising.
But we have to have a gas mileage sticker in that window.

Clueless Clinton

Hillary was on the Sunday pundits and the subject got around to Gitmo. Hillary was all in favor of civilian trials, but she never mentioned the real reason we want to give a terrorist a trial.
We do trials to convince the rest of the world that good old whats-his-face is a nogoodnick and deserves what he got (or is about to get). We have a number of problems here. First problem, so much time has gone by that memories have faded and anger has cooled. We should have tried 'em all back in 2002.
Second problem, US judges are mostly from another planet and might well turn them all loose on a technicality.
Final problem, most of the Gitmo "detainees" are not guilty of crimes in the ordinary sense of the word. They are guilty of bearing arms against the United States, on foreign soil no less. If they were fighting for a recognized government they would be prisoners of war. Few Americans, jurors or military officers, are willing to convict people for fighting for a cause, even if the cause hasn't achieved the status of a legitimate government.
The final problem is these "detainees" are clearly dangerous. Over the years we have released a couple of hundred of ones that looked less dangerous. Something like a third of the released terrorists went right back to terrorism and got caught by the Americans a second time, in Afghanistan, doing terrorism.
In my estimation, the least bad option is to just keep them in Gitmo til they rot. I fear US judges will bungle civilian trials, and military tribunals will go easy on them.

Can they hide enough explosives to bring down an airliner?

Good question. I remember the aircraft that took a direct hit from an air-to-air missile and still flew back to base. It was a heatseeker that locked onto the engine flame and flew right up the tailpipe before exploding. Blew the back of the plane to shreds, but the engine kept running (good old P&W J75) and the single hydraulic system remained unpunctured.
Then there was the Boeing 737 that lost the entire roof of the cabin, from the cockpit right back to the galley. It landed safely.
My point is that Boeing airliners are extremely rugged and can shrug off a pound of high explosive. Can terrorists hide enough explosives in shoes or underwear or body cavities to actually damage an airliner? I doubt it.
Think about that as you do the electronic strip search or endure the TSA groping.
The real reason terrorists have not succeeded in hijacking an airliner since 9/11 is passengers. Now, post 9/11, passengers know that allowing anyone to take control of the plane means that they are all dead. And so, some misbehaving persons have been treated quite roughly by passengers. One case involved a fire axe applied to the perp's head, another involved so much duct tape that the perp suffocated.

Stenting for fun and profit

Back on the 4th of November my plain old primary care physician, Dr Silva in Littleton took my EKG in the course of a routine office visit. His sharp eye noticed something unusual in the EKG. He followed up with a stress test and a gamma camera scan. I had not complained of anything, this was a straight check of standard tests. The stress test and the gamma camera pictures convinced Dr. Silva to refer me to cardiologists. Some days later I was scheduled for an angiogram down state at Dartmouth Hitchcock down in Hanover.
I double checked the appointment time a day or two in advance and was told that my 8AM appointment has slipped to 10AM. We showed up on time and learned that emergencies had slowed things down. It was 4 PM before they got me into the Cath Lab for the angiogram. Results were confusing. The angiogram showed six places that might need s stent. The angiogram was not unpleasant, they started off with a big Valium and followed it up with a lot of happy juice fed in thru an IV. Didn't hurt a bit, and I was VERY mellow thru out a two hour procedure.
There was some discussion as to the proper treatment, either a coronary bypass operation or a LOT of stents. They didn't feel it was fair to ask my opinion while I was still zonked out on happy juice. So I got admitted for over night. Next morning the cardiac surgeon (nice guy) pitched the cardiac bypass (open heart surgery) and the the stent guy pitched stents. I picked stents, 'cause the coronary bypass surgery involved sawing my breast bone in half and pulling up my ribs to access the heart. Whereas stents go in in a matter of hours and you can walk out of the hospital in a day. An hour or two later Dr. Kagan told me he had access to the OR that afternoon and could stent me if I was ready. I was ready, he slipped three stents into my heart that afternoon. They popped me back in a room on the heart surgery wing after the stenting and all looked OK.
Except my blood pressure cycled from 210/106 (scary high) to 140/70 (not too bad) over a period of hours. They were reluctant to let me out of the hospital with the 205/106 reading lest I keel over with a heart attack on the way to the elevator, which would reflect poorly on Dartmouth Hitchcock.
After two days of pills and blood pressure tests they found a blood pressure medication that worked and managed to release me this afternoon with a raft of new prescriptions.
I have to complement the Dartmouth Hitchcock people. They worked very hard to get me well, and they managed to make my stay pleasant. Nurse and doctors were patient oriented and did a good job. Much better than Mass General which was my last hospital stay some 30 odd years ago.

The loudest noise at 60 MPH is the ticking of the clock

So went the Rolls Royce car ads years ago, back when Rolls actively marketed cars in the US. They used to do TV ads for Rolls. Haven't seen one for 30 years.
Actually, Rolls Royce sold off the car operation and makes its money on jet engines. And they are in trouble now. Aviation Week has a writeup on the catastrophic engine failure on the Quantas A380. Apparently the intermediate speed turbine failed, and flung turbine buckets out thru the engine casing, punching holes in the wing, a fuel tank and damaging hydraulic lines. Engine failure doesn't get worse than this.
Even worse, the Quantas engine failure looks to be related to the engine failure on Boeing's 787 program. Rolls-Royce may be in for an expensive recall and redesign.
Other problems showed up. The crew attempted to shut down the blown engine by closing a fuel valve. The digital engine control would not let them, it was programmed to keep the valve open in flight, lest the engine shut down for lack of fuel. Microprocessors can be really stupid sometimes.
Jet engine design is always a compromise between stoutness and lightness. The engine has to contain enormous forces and extreme temperatures. This calls for stout. To save on fuel, the engine wants to be as light as possible. Lightness reduces stoutness. It could be that the Rolls designers went too far in the lightness direction. This might be hard to fix, short of a complete redo.
What's worse for Rolls, is the A380 and the 787 can accept American engines and the airplane customer can order the planes with Rolls engines or American engines. Guess which engine maker is not going to be specified on future airliner orders?

Glen Beck needs a sense of humor

Watching Glen this evening. He was getting all bent out of shape about the press coverage that Prince William's and Kate Middleton's engagement were getting. He did a small rant about the media covering trivia.
Well Glen, in principle you are right. But, the Brits do such marvelous weddings and coronations. I enjoy the h**l out of them, every one. They are good fun and nobody gets hurt. What's not to like?

The internet is NOT secure, Anyone knows that.

Anyone except the TV newsies that is. Big story running today about internet traffic being diverted thru servers in China. Oh the horror.
Note to newsies, the public internet is PUBLIC, and anyone in the world can see the traffic. It's the World Wide Web. Putting anything on the web is same as posting it on the bulletin board down at your town supermarket. If you don't want to share it with the world. don't put it on the web. This goes for email, Facebook, Google, and just plain web cruising. If you don't want the whole world, including your employer, the IRS, and every noisy neighbor in the world to know, don't but it on the net.

What goes around, comes around

Obama comes home from Korea with a bit of egg on his face. He wanted to sign a Korea America free trade pact, but he wanted a few last minute changes and the Koreans balked.
Chickens are coming home to roost. George Bush negotiated the Korea free trade agreement back in 2007. But in 2007 the US Senate, of which Obama was a member, refused to ratify the agreement. Unions objected and the democrats caved to them.
Now, three years later, Obama wants to ratify Bush's old agreement, but with a couple of last minute changes that the Koreans didn't like. So, Obama comes home with bupkis.
What's worse, the original agreement, which the Koreans would have signed, is quite favorable to US automakers. It liberalized the Korean auto emissions standards to allow US built cars, that met US emissions standards, to be sold in Korea. The "minor change" Obama wanted, was a retention of a 2% US tariff on Korean cars. The Koreans are selling lots of cars with the 2% tariff, and/or building their cars in Kentucky, and the 2% tariff makes little difference in the number of Hyundai's sold here in competition with Government Motors.
For this insignificant tariff, Obama gave up a real opening of the Korean auto market to us. There are plenty of Koreans with money who would love to own a real Detroit car, say Corvette, or Cadillac, or Ford Explorer, just like they see in the movies. Right now such cars cannot be imported to Korean because of emissions laws. The Koreans were willing to essentially waive their emissions standards and allow Detroit iron in. And Obama didn't understand how important this is.
Stupidity can be embarrassing.

No pain spending reductions

Newt Gengrich on NBC this morning said the he and Clinton had balanced the US budget for years without inflicting enormous pain upon the voters. Today, the Democrats (progressive tax and spenders, all of 'em) protest that Federal spending reductions just can't be done because of the pain involved.
I think Newt is onto something here. Just reducing health care spending from 19% of GNP to 9.5% of GNP (a feat every other country in the world has managed) would free up a river of money that would solve the deficit problem.
Could it be that the Democrats are attempting to keep their tax and spend policies in place by predicting intense pain if they are not continued?

Northern Pass, Power to the People,

The Northern Pass project will run a new high voltage power line down from Quebec to Franklin NH. It will bring in 1200 Megawatts of clean Canadian hydropower to New Hampshire. Quebec has a vast surplus of hydropower which they have been exporting to the US for better than 50 years. Hydropower is a green as it gets, no CO2 emissions, no coal mines, no oil spills, no nuclear waste, freedom from fuel price hikes. Long as it keeps raining, we have juice.
To bring jobs to the North Country we need to offer reliable and low cost electricity to industry. No company is going to put in a plant without good electric service at a reasonable price.
The new power line will largely follow existing power line rights-of-way which mitigates the unsightliness. Big power lines are an eyesore, but adding a second set of towers side-by-side with an existing power line doesn't make much difference. A pair of side-by-side power lines is no more unsightly than a single line. We already have the single line, making it a double line doesn't change things much.
After much advocacy from anti-electric-power advocacy groups, the National Institutes of Health published a comprehensive study of the safety of electric power lines in 1999. The furor over power line electromagnetic fields was started in 1979 with the publication of a report linking leukemia to power line exposure. This study was inconclusive, and the effect reported was small. Numerous follow up studies failed to resolve the matter one way or another. Some studies showed no effect, some showed a small effect, and many showed different results depending upon the method used to measure intensity of the electromagnetic fields. These studies were all statistical, counting the number of cases of leukemia and using statistics to decide if the number of cases was abnormally high. Mark Twain once said there are lies, damned lies, and then statistics.
No laboratory experiments on animals has ever shown adverse effects from the electromagnetic fields around power lines. The science of physics and of chemistry shows no mechanism by which electromagnetic fields could alter the biology of humans or animals. The NIH report concludes that the risk from power line fields is unproven, probably non existent, but cannot be totally discarded because of those few statistical results.
Electromagnetic fields drop off rapidly with distance. A simple calculation shows the fields from your house wiring are as strong as the fields from a power line at the edge of the cleared right of way. So, even if there were some adverse effects, just keeping off the right of way keeps you safe.
So, in view of the great economic benefits (1300 construction jobs, $2.5 million/mile added to the tax base), the savings in fossil fuels, and carbon emissions, the Northern Pass project ought to go ahead. We need the jobs, we need the juice, and it's as green a project as there is.

Carnivale Cruise Lines

I gotta wonder how that Carnivale liner lost all power from an engine room fire. Did they have sprinklers in the engine room? Why does not a ship of that size have two engine rooms? Both with sprinklers.
We should be thankful that no one was hurt.

TARP prevents the sky from falling

Some people think that Wall St is the entire US economy. It's an easy thing to believe if you work on Wall St. For instance, Henry Paulson, Bush's secretary of the treasury was a long timer Wall Streeter, prior president of Goldman Sachs. Or Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, academic whiz kid specializing in the history of the Great Depression and prior head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.
Two senior guys, steeped in Wall Street saw the sky falling in October of 2007. Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, AIG ran out of money, Merrill Lynch (remember them?) went bust and got bought. These two guys feared that failure of the big boys would bankrupt everyone else on the Street. Street trading is incestuous, everyone trades with everyone else. If the biggies go bust and default on their debts to the smaller players, the small guys might go bust too. To Bernanke and Paulson, widespread failure on Wall Street might wreck the US economy and trigger off Great Depression 2.0.
So, being men of action, Paulson and Bernanke went to the Democratic Congress and said in effect, "The sky will fall on Tuesday". Congressmen believed them, and $750 billion TARP was passed to bail out the losers.
The alternative was to let the more foolish Wall St players to go broke as a warning to others. They tried this with Lehman Bros, and it was scary.
With hindsight, I think we should have let more Wall Streeters, the ones that didn't (still don't) understand the difference between gambling and raising capital to finance economic expansion, go under. It's clear that a lot of Wall Street business, mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps, and secondary mortgage trading is pure gambling. And I see no reason for taxpayers money, my money, to bail out gamblers who go bust. The economy doesn't need gambling.
Back three years ago, it was a harder call. Seeing famous old time Wall St firms go bust was scary and the urge to "do something" was strong. So something was done. The downside is everyone thru out the entire world now believes that the US government stands behind all the big Wall St firms. Which allows those firms to take bigger risks and borrow more than if lenders worried about them going broke ("counterparty risk" they call it). And makes us taxpayer liable for humongous debts everytime some Wall St executive makes a dumb bet.

Ask the right questions

The TV news is going crazy with the California missile launch story. They have been quoting the Navy, the Pentagon, NORAD, Boy Scouts of America, just about anyone, saying "We don't know nothing".
Questions they ought to ask.
1. Was this launch detected on radar?
2. Was the launch flash seen by missile warning satellites?
3. What is the predicted impact area of the warhead?
4. Did the payload achieve orbit?
5. What was the launch position? And when will we have ships and planes there?

Of course, a bunch of klutzy J school graduates wouldn't know any thing about it.

Waiting for "automatic" tailights to turn off

Yesterday, a dark and rainy day, I parked the Merc and started for the store. Then I noticed the car lights were still on. The car was being helpful, leaving the lights on long enough to get to the house. Except, fifty years of experience was saying, and saying loudly, you-left-the-lights-on-and-the-battery-will-run-down. So, I stood there, in the rain, waiting for the "automatic" mode to turn the lights off. Just to make sure the lights would really turn off.
Somehow, "automatic" is not improving my quality of life. I'm going back to "Off-Parking-Headlamp" control.

Town truck salted my road this morning

The true start of winter, sanding, salting, and plowing. It's starting early this year.

RINO sighting

Charlie Bass was on NHPR this morning. He thinks global warming is a problem and something oughta be done about it. Perhaps not Cap and Tax. Maybe an "Alternate Energy" program will reduce carbon emissions.
Arghh. The election is only 4 days past and Charlie is taking his eye off the ball. The real threat to our well being is the Federal budget deficit, not global warming. "Alternate Energy" means spending money on stuff that doesn't generate real power. It's ethanol, and windmills, and solar cells, none of which will keep my electricity on thru a cold winter night.
Whereas continued Federal deficits of the Obama size will destroy the worth of the dollar in just a few years.
Let's get real here.

So what do the Republican do now? Pt 2

Jobs, Jobs, and more jobs. Step one in the more job operation is to bring some stability to government policy. The private sector of the economy is waiting for the other shoe to drop. We have to stop that. Republicans should make it perfectly plain that there will be no new taxes, no new regulations, no more bailouts. The house ought to repeal Obamacare, just to make a point.
National debt is destabilizing. The current level is unsustainable for more than a another year or two. Everyone knows that. As long as everyone, business, consumers, and investors see the US dollar driving off a cliff next year, they ain't gonna create job one, they are running for the exits. Why do you think the price of gold is soaring?
Where do we cut? Healthcare. We spend 19% of GNP on healthcare. That could be cut in half and everyone would get all the health care they need. Every other country in the world manages on 10% of GNP and so can we.

So what do the Republican do now?

I suppose number one duty is to prevent the lame duck session of Congress, that will get going shortly, from doing any more damage. Despite the election, the old Congress remains in power until next year. The democrats will surely call a lame duck session to pass as much stuff as they can before next year gets here. Cap and tax, card check, appointment of democrats to every vacancy, more Obamacare, tax hikes, and who knows what else. Hopefully the Senate Republicans will be able to stop all or most of it.
Then next year, with a solid Republican House, what should the Republicans do? The house can pass anything it likes, but the Senate Democrats will be able to stall it, and the President can veto it. The Republicans have to convince the country that they are serious about cutting spending and getting the economy moving if they want to win in 2012. If the Republicans just vote thru things in the House and have them die in the Senate, or get vetoed, the public ain't gonna like it. And they will remember in November. The public doesn't care why nothing happens, they will turn the rascals out in 2012 just for doing nothing.
So what can a Republican house do that works, given a hostile Senate and executive?
For openers, they could vote down pork. For instance, the periodic "Farm Bills" lavish our tax money on farms largely owned by corporations. There are few family farms left, and not enough family farm voters to make it worth the cost of the farm bills. Same goes for the "Highway Bills" that benefit road contractors and real estate interests, and the "Energy Bills" which subsidize the oil and gas industry.
Tighten up, or even better, kill entirely, earmarks. Congressmen love earmarks because they act as bribes or payoffs to supporters. Voters hate them because it's pure waste money. Voters are more important to re election than paid off supporters.
Refuse to pass omnibus spending bills. Each executive department (Defense, State, HHS, Energy, and so on) get one, separate, budget bill. If the bill fails to pass, that department can no longer write checks. This way the voters and the newsies have some idea of how much money gets spent on what. An omnibus spending bill for the entire federal government is so damn big that nobody can figure out how much is going where. Break it up into smaller pieces and it becomes manageable. Divide and conquer still works.
Reduce appropriations for economy killing agencies like EPA. EPA was created to clean up airborne smog. That's been accomplished, the skies over our cities are blue again. They used to be yellow. Now EPA is full of bureaucrats trying to stay employed by making red tape to hinder economic growth.
Find some utterly worthless government operation and shut it down completely, lay off all the employees, sell the office, and burn the files. That will generate a flood of favorable press, AND scare the bejesus out of the rest of the bureaucrats. A scared bureaucrat is a good thing.

Tax cuts for corporations that ship jobs overseas

Have you heard that sound bite recently? In fact it's getting to the point where the noun "corporation" is always followed by "that ship jobs overseas". A sign of corporation hatred common to the Democrats.
It's really too bad, corporations provide jobs, health insurance, and a flood of products that make life comfortable. If we in the North Country could persuade a corporation to locate a new plant up here we would be better off. Corporations are a good thing to have around, and it's counterproductive to bash them.
As far as "shipping jobs overseas" this is free market competition. When overseas factories produce goods at lower cost than domestic factories, they are going to get the orders. To create jobs here, in the US, we need to look at ways to lower the cost of doing business in the US. Taxes, red tape, jackpot justice, environmental impact statements, Obamacare, and a hostile attitude raise the cost of doing business here.

Words of the Weasel Pt 16

"Gridlock", as in "A republican win tomorrow will cause gridlock in Congress". This is always followed by a diatribe against the Republican party. The actual situation is the Democrats will no longer have the votes to pass their programs. That's democracy for you. There is no divine right of Democrats to always get their way.