The Liquor Talking

It’s Monday, January 30. 2012 and I wish Google Maps would update their data!

The road between Billings and Colstrip seems to be getting longer every week.

What’s weird is that the odometer in Kate (my truck) still shows the same number of miles between my garage and the parking lot of the Super 8 in Colstrip. Between the 4 trips I’ve made between there and back, the times only vary by a few minutes (except that one time when the roads were ice).

This evidence aside, it’s pretty clear that the distance is increasing.

• I don’t get this at all.

  

  Florida recently enacted new laws that require people to provide a valid ID before being allowed to vote. Somehow, this is being said to “disenfranchise minority voters.” in other words, it’s racist.

  So help me out here. I’m pretty much as white as a white man can get, so I’ll admit that I don’t have a particularly deep understanding of racial issues. My ancestors first set foot on this continent in 1751 and like most Americans of European descent, I’ve got forebears who were Indian (Cherokee and Choctaw). I’ve also got a smattering of Mexican here and there up the line.

  But, I’m pretty much white, so you’ll have to indulge me if I’m ignorant about this race thing.

  How is making someone prove their identity prior to voting racist?

  Yeah, I understand the history of the “Jim Crow” laws and how they were designed and used to keep blacks from voting, but how does showing a proper ID fall into that category? Making someone show ID for buying booze isn’t griped about. No one has much of a problem with requiring ID to write a check or use a credit card.

  But requiring an ID to vote is racist.

  

  I guess my question is; Why do liberals oppose anything that would make it hard to commit voter fraud?

  Why?

  I’ll grant that low income, minority and younger voters tend to vote democrat. These people also buy booze, write checks and use credit cards too. Requiring ID for these purposes doesn’t seem to suppress these activities, but it’ll suppress voter turn out among these groups?

  I’m not following the logic here.

  So, lacking any logical argument or any empirical evidence, let’s trot out the race thing.

  

  According to MS Nweze, the new Florida laws are “Jim Crow at its best. Jim Crow, the wife, the chirren and all of ‘em. The whole Jim Crow family.”

  

  I could see the point if only non-whites were required to provide ID, but whites have got to show ID too. But by trotting out the race card, they appeal to the same bunch of mush-head whites who voted for His Obamaness so they wouldn’t feel like racists.

  By the way, how’s that “Hope and Change” thing working out for ya’?

• I kind of alluded to it Thursday, but I’ve pretty much had it with the current republican presidential candidates. The name-calling, distortion of facts and outright lies are bringing me down.

  
  So, I’m boycotting the republican presidential race this week. We’re going back to the pre-2012 policy of changing the channel whenever something about it comes on the TV. I’m not reading newspaper articles about it or listening to stuff about it on the radio. I’ll comment on any Reader Mail about it, but that’s the extent of my interest right now.

  I’ll check it out again next week, but if it’s the same crap I’m now seeing, hearing and reading about, I’ll extend the boycott for another week.

  The only exception is Ron Paul, who seems to want to address pertinent issues instead of irrelevant, National Enquirer crap. He’s been putting the smack-down on his competitors to be for sure, but at least he’s not being a craven prick about it.

  

• There’s a couple of things about the President’s State of the Union address that I gotta hit on real quick. Both regarding one of my Top 3 Hot Button Issues.

  

  First. His Obamaness threatened to reduce federal funding to colleges and universities that don’t take steps to reduce tuition costs.

  See, here’s where what I call the “anti-education crowd” gets a lot of its hay. Here we got the federal government telling state-run institutions to lower costs or lose federal dough. Not a word about improving the quality of the education, just make it cost less.

  Now, with three kids currently in college, I can fully appreciate the expenses involved in a college education. So, I can see where this presidential saber rattling sounds good. The price of a college education keeps going up.

  But so do the prices of a lot of things.

  

  Simply mandating that colleges cut costs demonstrates that His Obamaness is hugely disconnected from the reality of how a college works. Most state colleges are limited by law to increasing tuition only by the current rate of inflation. I would opine that the key to keeping tuition costs down is to get control of the inflation rate.

  But, I sometimes get silly that way.

  Truth is, tuition is only a part of the operating capitol for state colleges. The bulk of their funding comes from… wait for it… taxpayer money. The easiest way for states to reduce tuition is to shovel in more taxpayer dough. I’m not sure about where you live, but I don’t see an easy way for Montana to do this without raising taxes.

  So the logic is that in order to get federal taxpayer dough, the states have to cough up more state taxpayer dough.

  Yeah, thanks for that.

  The second part was where he talked about the Siemens Corporation opening a gas turbine factory in Charlotte, and forming a partnership with Central Piedmont Community College to provide the courses it needed for its skilled workforce.

  The company helped the college design courses in laser and robotics training. Siemens paid the tuition for students in the program and then hired them to work in the plant.

  This is a good thing. It’s a clear demonstration of how private industry knows how to get what it needs. It’s a case study in how private industry creates jobs.

  But he just can’t call it good and leave it alone. Now he wants the federal government to “give more community colleges the resources they need to become community career centers.”

  

  Please, please, please Mister President, please keep your government paws off of this kind of thing. Let private industry do what it does best. It’s pretty damned obvious that every job-creating thing the government pours money into (Solyndra, Beacon Power and now Ener1 to name but three) results in fail.

  Stick to wasting terrorists and pirates. You’re doing great on those things!