Friday, December 21, 2012

Barker's Newsbites: Friday, December 21, 2012


Raise your hand if you watched last night's CMA Country Christmas special last night!

Well, never you mind if you missed it... it's being rebroadcast on ABC tomorrow (Saturday) at 9:00 p.m. and again on Sunday at 4:00 p.m.!

DVR it! It's a fantastic special... reminds me of Christmas specials of... er... yore!

(*HUGE FRIGGIN' GRIN*)

Hey... do any of you guys have any money left... or at least any checks left...?

Let me just throw this out there for ya...

Every so often you learn something new or at the very least get a laugh out of reading Usually Right... right...???

I'm sure all of my friends donate heavily to various charities. In fact I know for a fact that one of my best friends donates literally thousands of dollars to good causes just over the Christmas Season itself!

That said... if you can spare it... and if you wanna say "thanks Bill" for the occasional "huge friggin' grin" put on your face motivated by something I've posted... open up your wallet one more time and send a few bucks to my favorite charity:

P.O. Box 1893
Memphis, TN 38101-9950

(*LIFTING A CUP OF CHEER TO DANNY THOMAS*)

4 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-21/american-dream-fades-for-generation-y-professionals.html

Generation Y professionals entering the workforce are finding careers that once were gateways to high pay and upwardly mobile lives turning into detours and dead ends.

Average incomes for individuals ages 25 to 34 have fallen 8%, double the adult population’s total drop, since the recession began in December 2007. Their unemployment rate remains stuck one-half to 1% point above the national figure.

(*CLAP...CLAP...CLAP*)

Three and a half years after the worst recession since the Great Depression, the earnings and employment gap between those in the under-35 population and their parents and grandparents threatens to unravel the American dream of each generation doing better than the last.

* O-BAM-A! O-BAM-A! O-BAM-A!

“This generation will be permanently depressed and will be on a lower path of income for probably all of their life - and at least the next 10 years,” says Rutgers professor Cliff Zukin, a senior research fellow at the university’s John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development.

Michael Greenstone, who was chief economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers in 2009 and 2010, says the shift to a downwardly mobile society may be lasting. “Children are not earning as much as their parents, and I think we’re laying the seeds for that to continue into the future,” he says.

Only one-fifth of those who graduated college since 2006 expect greater success than their parents, a Rutgers survey found earlier this year.

Little more than half were working full time.

Just one in five said their job put them on a career path.

* BUT, HEY... AT LEAST IF THEY DON'T MISS ANY OF THEIR COLLEGE DEBT REPAYMENTS THEIR CREDIT RATINGS WILL REMAIN STRONG!

(*GUFFAW*)

* YEAH, FOLKS... I'M SAYING A HUGE PERCENTAGE OF HIGH-COST COLLEGE DEGREES AREN'T WORTH THE PAPER THEY'RE PRINTED ON...

(*FROWN*)

About 61 million people, one-fifth of the U.S. population, work at jobs where median earnings declined since 2007 even as the 1.2 million households whose incomes put them in the top 1% saw their pay rise 5.5 percent last year.

* HEY... WASN'T... er... BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES LAST YEAR...???

(*SMIRK*)

* HEY... THERE IS SOME GOOD NEWS, THOUGH! READ ON...!

Law schools are turning out about 45,000 degree holders a year for about 25,000 full-time positions available to them, according to the National Association for Law Placement Inc. in Washington. The class of 2011 had the lowest placement with law firms, 49.5%, in 36 years.

* HEY... I DOUBT IT WAS PURPOSEFUL... BUT GOD BLESS THE OBAMA ECONOMY ANYWAY!

(*CHUCKLE*)

William R. Barker said...

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_higher_ups_skate_on_benghazi_wJCPjRnLyDs1KliJUrlbsL

What really happened in Benghazi on Sept. 11 this year? Three months after the US ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were killed by a howling mob of Islamists in a country we helped liberate, and as a new round of congressional hearings begins, an independent panel has come forth with its report and the answer is . . . we still don’t really know much more than we did before.

* THAT WAS THE POINT OF THE REVIEW... (*SMIRK*)

The Accountability Review Board’s report did confirm, yet again — contrary to what the Obama administration told the nation for days after the attack — that there was no spontaneous protest against an obscure You Tube video outside the Benghazi compound that led to its sacking.

Nor was there adequate security, despite Ambassador Chris Stevens’ urgent requests. Instead, State, citing “budget constraints,” chose to rely on “grossly inadequate” local militias to protect the consulate (which is now widely believed to have been a secret CIA interrogation center and rendition prison).

“Systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department resulted in a Special Mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place,” concluded the commission, co-chaired by retired diplomat Thomas Pickering and former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen.

The report absolved the U.S. military, saying we lacked adequate forces in the region to be able to come to Stevens’ rescue in time.

(Pathetically, the nation that once commanded the Mediterranean Sea with its Seventh Fleet now can’t get airplanes from bases in Italy to Libya in a timely manner.)

* SO THE REPORT STATES...

* THE REPORT LIES.

* AGAIN, FOLKS... IMAGINE AIRFORCE ONE HAD GONE DOWN IN BENGHAZI. IMAGINE AIRFORCE TWO HAD GONE DOWN IN BENGHAZI. IMAGINE A PLANE CARRYING MICHELLE OBAMA... AND SASHA AND MALIA... HAD GONE DOWN IN BENGHAZI...

(*SHRUG*)

A few heads have rolled, including that of the State Department’s security chief, but the higher ups who were party to the fiasco — including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, UN Ambassador Susan Rice and President Obama, on whose desk the buck putatively stops — are unscathed by the fog of lies that has shrouded Benghazi ever since the outrage.

(Yes, Rice had to take herself out of the running to replace Clinton at State — but that apparently had less to with her Benghazi “misstatements” than with attacks from the left, perhaps abetted by a Washington smear campaign orchestrated on behalf of John Kerry, who’ll now get the job.)

In fact, Clinton — preserving her political viability for a possible 2016 White House run — is so loath to take the fall for the disaster on her watch that she’s suffered a miraculous concussion and “just can’t” testify before the congressional panels looking into the fiasco.

Sure, she’s “accepted responsibility” in a generic way, the same way Attorney General Janet Reno “accepted responsibility” for the fatally botched 1993 assault on the Branch Davidians in Waco.

Nowadays, “accepting responsibility” means never having to say you’re sorry, much less resign — or even show up in front of Congress.

So is this how Benghazi ends — with a few bureaucrats shuffled into retirement or re-assigned elsewhere in the vast Foggy Bottom sinkhole, there to collect their pensions and paychecks at taxpayer expense.

This bloodless report adds next to nothing to what we already knew — or suspected — about Benghazi. Nor does it honor the memories of those who died there defending a patch in the desert that was nevertheless sovereign American soil.

Mistakes were made. We’ll try to do better next time.

Ambassador Stevens and the others — Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods — deserve better than this.

William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/336277/looming-port-strike-michelle-malkin

The grip of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) extends from Boston to Florida to Texas and all points along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts.

Are you ready for a fiscal cliff? The union bosses of an estimated 14,500 workers at 15 ports are preparing to send the economy plunging back into recession over changes in productivity and efficiency rules.

The NY/NJ ports — which handle cargo valued at $208 billion a year — could come to a standstill.

National Retail Federation executive Jonathan Gold issued a desperate statement: “The last thing the economy needs right now is another strike, which would impact all international trade and commerce at the nation’s East and Gulf Coast container ports. This is truly a ‘container cliff’ in the making.”

* FOLKS...

It’s not about jobs.

* FOLKS...

It’s not about safety.

* FOLKS...

It’s not about improving dockworkers’ living standards.

The looming, long-planned East and Gulf Coast port strikes are about protecting Big Labor’s archaic work practices and corrupt waterfront rackets.

Don’t believe the union sob stories. ILA members are among the highest-paid union workers in the country. Starting pay for dockworkers is $20 an hour, with a top straight-time pay rate of $32 an hour. Seniority and overtime bonuses are generous, with ILA members earning an average of more than $124,000 a year in wages and benefits. According to my sources, despite overwhelming industry concessions on wages and benefits, port watchers view the likelihood of a strike at “probably 70%-85% now.”

* TO BE CONTINUED...

William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

The sticking points of the heated ILA–USMX (United States Maritime Alliance) talks are “container royalties” (a fee per ton of containerized cargo that carriers pay to ILA members) and “custom and practice.” Reporter Carl Horowitz of the National Legal and Policy Center broke down the container-royalty dispute this fall: “In 2011 these royalties amounted to $232 million or about $15,500 per worker at Atlantic and Gulf Coast ports. This arrangement was established in 1960 when New York Longshoremen sought to protect themselves against job losses resulting from the introduction of automated cargo container weighing. It’s been a ticket for inefficiency.”

In other words, it’s a ridiculously outdated surcharge on business to cushion the blow of modernity to workers.

Unions, of course, siphon off a large chunk of the royalties — more than $20 million last year alone, according to the Supply Chain Digest. The trade publication points out that “ILA workers receiving those hefty checks today have no real connection to the perceived threat from container traffic to manually loaded freight and handling work that started the whole program in the 1960s.”

USMX hasn’t even called for eliminating the outdated fees. It just wants to cap them.

Under the industry’s contract proposal the ILA’s average hourly rate would [actually] increase to more than $55, including overtime and container royalty.

* AND...

Workers would still not be required to pay premiums on their health-care plans, as most private employers now require their workers to do.

The additional “custom and practice” items that the ILA seeks to preserve are a recipe for corruption. Don’t take industry’s word for it. That was the conclusion this year of the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor. Decades of favoritism, nepotism, and Mafia-friendly hiring practices have bred inefficient and criminal conditions that benefit “a privileged few.” The union protects no-show and no-work jobs, 24-hour paid work for eight-hour-a-day-or-less clerks, and unlimited paid vacation for shop stewards. ILA has demanded that multiple crane operators be paid for the work of a single operator. And the commission’s hearings exposed ILA bosses tied to mobsters and family members being paid more than $400,000 a year, often billing for more than 27 hours a day.

(*SNORT*)

Retailers have begged Big Labor–lovin’ President Obama to intervene.

Good luck with that. The cozy White House pow-wow with union bosses immediately after Election Day tells you all you need to know about which side Obama champions.

Union bosses and their Occupy Wall Street henchmen will be ratcheting up their rhetoric about “greed” and “fat cats” as they move to ring in the New Year by bringing the American economy to its knees.

Now you know the rest of the story.