Congress, Do Your Job, Can Him.

When the Founding Fathers came together to build this country, they knew that human nature would always tempt politicians to go astray. They pondered about the congress having too much power, and if that happened Congress would control the country by its legislative power thus nullifying the executive and judicial branches. In a stroke of genius, they came up with the three branches having equal but separate power.

What happens when one of the three branches usurps the power of the others? In the year 2012 nothing. Our Congress and Supreme Court are abdicating power to the Executive Branch. This very plainly pisses me off, and it should you too.

Our President -0 is doing just that. He is rough riding over Congress and has tried with some success to do it with the Supreme Court too. Where is Congress in this matter? Instead of the Executive administering the government by the laws enacted, it is doing it by executive fiat, the Executive Order. Where is Congress? Why are they not outraged? Why are they not holding the President’s feet to the fire?

Well Grumpa Joe, you are just a fanatic racist who doesn’t like this president because he is black. Bullshit.

I despise this president and all before him who refuse to control our southern border.

I despise this president because he sided with a foreign government (Mexico)  in a lawsuit against a State in the Union (Arizona).

I despise this president because he devised a clandestine program to set the country up to destroy the Second Amendment; he called his program Fast and Furious. When Congress did finally act against him, he declared his papers confidential under executive privilege. We accused President Nixon of burglarizing an office, and he was relentlessly pursued by the press and Congress until he resigned in disgrace over the matter. Nixon’s act did not result in Border Agents being killed with guns we allowed to cross the border.

I despise this president because he refuses to acknowledge a need for voter identification, but demands attendees to his speeches verify their identity with official ID’s.

I despise this president because he pretends to deport illegal aliens, but is only putting them into a holding pattern until they can disappear into the underground of the USA.

I despise this president because he tolerates Sanctuary Cities in order to hide and protect illegals.

I despise this president because he has taken the Welfare Reform Act and arbitrarily gutted a major requirement without any discussion by Congress or the Supreme Court. Why isn’t the Congress filing suit to bring this to the SC?

I despise this president because he places more credence in the hopeless United Nations than he does in the US Congress.

I despise this president because he deliberately usurped the First Amendment right of freedom of religion in his omnipotent health care act.

I despise the president for his sneaky and lawless way using the UN over his own Congress to get our military involved in Libya, and Syria.

I despise the President for allowing special interest groups to control his agenda.

I despise the president for a stupid green jobs program that dictates his energy policy.

I despise the president for using agencies like the EPA to sneak regulations into effect that usurp  Congress.

I despise this president for taking over a private sector company to reward his supporters.

I despise this president for believing all people are too stupid to take care of themselves. What ever happened to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and human potential?

I despise this president’s demonization of capitalism and the rich. I can only wonder why he hates himself so much? After all, he is rich and he uses the capitalist system to sell his phony life story.

I despise this president for wanting to make the USA into Europe.  Europe has been working at light speed to catch up and be like the USA while remaining socialist; which by the way, is proving to be a disaster for them.

I despise this president for declaring that America is not a Christian Nation.

I despise this president for bowing to foreign leaders.

I despise this president for being a pansy with Iran.

I despise this president for throwing Israel under the bus. Have you looked at a map of the mid-east? Israel is a small dot in a vastly huge area. They are surrounded by Arabs. Why are the Arabs so bent on annihilating them? Why is this president so bent on letting that happen?

So where the hell in Congress in all of this? Why don’t they wake up and do something to show us they are an equal entity? Why don’t they bring impeachment proceedings against the president? They are totally afraid to even utter the word. I realize that there are two houses in Congress, the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Fathers wanted debate and argument between both houses on laws. They required  both houses to agree on a law before it can be enacted. Unfortunately, at this moment we have a Democrat Senate, and a Republican House of Representatives. The House of Representatives has passed many laws but they are stonewalled by the Senate. What we see in this process is exactly what the Founders envisioned.

What we need is a creative House that determines how to ally with the Senate or the Supreme Court to get past the blockages that make it seem inept. What we need is a Newt Gingrich to consult on the matter, he would know how to provoke the two houses into action.

Many of my rants above are impeachable offenses, but where is Congress?  They are out looking for Mitt Romney’s tax returns, and  attacking Republicans for a comment made by candidate Aiken about abortion. At the same time they stick their heads into the sand about our president’s record on late-term abortion and saving babies who live in spite of a botched abortion attempts.

Folks, we have a huge job ahead of us, but it can be accomplished. How? Just like a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, this one begins with firing President -0.

Ten-Dollar Gasoline Forces America to Lose Weight

Evil-Oil does it again. They are jacking around with the price of oil because of the uncertainty in the Mid-East. Meanwhile POTUS is silently cheering on the crisis. His dream of forcing us into so-called “green” cars is closer to reality. For every dollar increase on a gallon of gas, he sells another Gov’m’nt green car.

Where was he when gas was eighteen cents a gallon and Gov’m’nt Motors was producing gas guzzling rust prone junk heaps? Not born yet, I can’t blame him for that one. POTUS does own the UAW, however, and they made the cars that we didn’t really want. They even called strikes against GM for the purpose of getting their piece of the pie. Now that the UAW owns Gov’m’nt Motors they want ten-dollar a gallon gas too.

Obama’s insistence on electric cars is way out of line with reality. He is legislating technological development. My bosses used to play that game all the time. Instead of redesigning a product to meet their quality requirements they placed the burden of finding a technological solution on the engineers. Often the solution was beyond our capabilities and didn’t happen until the science caught up to the problem years later. Obama believes that by forcing the gas prices to rise to ten dollars that we will rush out to buy Hybrid cars.

Does the math support that premise? Assume that a standard car gets 25 mpg, and a hybrid gets 40 mpg. Sounds great doesn’t it? Assume also, that each car is driven twelve thousand miles per year. With ten-dollar a gallon gas, the annual dollar savings between the two cars is $1800. Sounds good doesn’t it?  The difference in price between a standard car and its hybrid counter part is around four thousand dollars; the electric costing more. The payback for that extra expenditure would be 2.2 years, not bad.

How long do the hybrid batteries last? No one knows for sure at this point, or they are hiding it from us to keep from scaring buyers off. The cost of replacing the batteries is four thousand dollars.

How do hybrid cars get their advantage? Of course by using the batteries while creeping at low speeds like in stop and go traffic.  For long distances and speed they switch to gasoline power. How do they get good mileage with gasoline? One way is to downsize the motor. The Toyota Prius is a good example of that. The car uses a small four-cylinder motor. Most performance freaks like myself will reject the Prius because it is a gutless wonder. I’ve had my fill of under powered small cars from my VW days. I got great mileage, but I couldn’t take the need for a constant downshift to get the thing moving. Larger SUV Hybrids make more sense, but they come at a higher premium than the small cars. Batteries also weigh a ton, and the car uses energy to carry that heavy  battery.

What about a plug-in hybrid car?  You can charge it daily to keep the efficiency up. This will cost extra in electricity. At this time, the stats show that the current fleet is about 600,000 hybrids in the USA. If those cars needed to be charged, 450,000 of them would consume all the extra power capacity we have  today. The remaining 150,000 cars would require a new power plant be added to the grid.  Think about that one. If every one of the 143,000,000 cars in the US were all-electric and the entire fleet needed the grid for a charge,  how many extra power plants would we need to add?

What would we use to power all those new plants; solar, wind, nuclear, or coal?  The new plants won’t come cheap, and they won’t come fast. A bird wouldn’t be able to fly ten feet before he was chopped to shreds with a windmill blade if we added enough mills to power the fleet. Photovoltaic cells would cover every square mile of unused land and every roof in America, but we’ll get our food from China so that’s okay. Nuclear makes some sense, but the cost of the plants is exorbitant. The safety issues are horrendous, and the danger of releasing radiation into the atmosphere far outweighs any coal related pollution. Not to mention the potential of accidents from nuclear waste. Think about Chernobyl’s all around the country. I often think about my own situation in Chicago. We have one plant forty miles west of here and another one fifty miles to the east. A third one is just north of the city. If any one of them has a Chernobyl like accident, the entire city of Chicago would be an unusable ghost town for thousands of years, Lake Michigan would be permanently polluted, and a new interstate would be needed to skirt the radiation belt around the city. Six million people would have to find new homes immediately, and a million would die early from radiation poisoning.

The USA has been lucky, in that we have never had an accident like Chernobyl, but Harrisburg came close. We build our plants with stricter safety standards than the Russians did. That is why they cost as much as they do.  Disposing of nuclear waste is another hazard. Obama says we should  do like the French do. They deal with nuclear waste effectively. Really? What do they do with it? One thing they do is to reduce the amount of waste by recycling the spent fuel and extracting usable fuel.  Eventually, they kick the can down the road by burying the unusable material.

The government of France made a decision to go into the power business in the early nineteen seventies, and they have developed regulations and  facilities to deal with their reactors. I had to deal with the French power organization dubbed Electricite de France (EdF) during my engineering career. I can vouch for them as being fanatically rigid and steeped in bureaucracy with great resistance to change. During this same period, our country decided to pull back from nuclear power. The end result is we are way behind on development. Our plants were designed and built for a forty year life. Many of the early plants are already decommissioned. Plants built after nineteen seventy are at the end of life stage. What will we do when they must  go off line?

My points with all of this dialogue is that developing an energy policy is an absolute necessity for the USA. It won’t be easy, but a plan has to be developed and followed. We can no longer kick the can down the road. Secondly, converting the country to electric cars comes with a huge price tag and a huge change in lifestyle for all of us. It won’t be easy remembering to plug the car into an outlet every time you make a stop. By the way, where are the outlets?

In the meantime, if you don’t like the prospect of paying ten dollars for a gallon of gas, find a Chinaman who will trade his “Flying Squirrel” (bicycle) for your gas hog SUV. Now that’s an energy policy that will serve many objectives:

1.) We lose our dependence on foreign oil by giving up the car.

2.) We become physically fit by riding a bicycle.

3.) We lose weight and become healthier.

4.) Our air is purer, because we burn less fuel.

5.) We use less generated power because we watch less TV, surf the net less, BLOG less, and we go to bed earlier from the exertion of riding the bike.

We can’t lose with that kind of energy policy.

Insanity-Doing the Same Thing Over and Over and Expecting a Different Result

The creative side of my head keeps telling me to draw a cartoon depicting a hybrid semi-truck. Before I go to the trouble to make the drawing, I felt it wise to find out how much oil truck use as compared to cars. The current gov’m’n’t  push is to conserve oil by telling us buy expensive hybrids that will increase gas mileage from 29 mpg to 48 mpg.

Now, more than ever, I am convinced the USA can live without the Department of Energy. For the last week, I have been researching the Internet for data regarding the amount of fuel used by various modes of travel. This should be easy, I thought; just go to the DOE site and search. Wrong. I needed to visit many websites for each type of transportation to find one simple number. How much fuel do the cars, trucks, trains, ships, and planes in the USA consume within one year?

What I have learned is that every time Barack Obama or one of his denizens begins spewing rhetoric about man-made global warming and the oil shortage, it is best to change the channel. Another reason for channel flipping is any dialog about the urgency to sell your gas hog in favor of a hybrid.

There is one thing this research did for me. It made the USA Energy Policy stand out. The policy is to make everything run on oil.

Oil is the organic compound breathing life into the modern era.

The hybrid trade off for me is about 170 horsepower and a lot of comfort. Hybrids with high mileage are tiny puddle jumpers that run on four cylinders and weigh less than three thousand pounds.(A puddle jumper in my day weighed 1800 pounds, how did the  Prius get so fat? Batteries?) I spent twenty years driving puddle jumpers at a time when even the most Left person in the country had not awakened to the fact that maybe burning gasoline will pollute the air.

At my current age, I want enough horsepower to climb a hill without the need to downshift four times and have to crawl to the top. I also prefer a seat large enough to handle my wide body, air conditioning to minimize discomfort, a quiet cabin, and a trunk large enough to carry my luggage.

Here is the chart I made using the data gleaned from many sources. Even I have a hard time believing what I see.

Chart by Grumpa Joe May 18, 2011, Data from various Internet sources

Here are some questions to ask:

  1. Why on earth are we picking on cars to save oil when trucks, ships, and trains consume more than cars?
  2. Why isn’t Obama pushing the truck industry to buy hybrids?
  3. Is there such a thing as a hybrid truck?
  4. Why do we buy oil from the other side of the world when the largest polluters are the ships hauling the oil?
  5. Why is Obama pushing high-speed passenger service when he should be pushing high-speed electric freight?
  6. Is Obama aware that the country’s average mileage for a car is 18 mpg? (Most likely tilted to the low end by illegals buying two hundred dollar cars that are low mpg.)
  7. If diesel-electric locomotives are so fuel efficient, why don’t we use the same principle on semi-trucks?
  8. If all electric trains are so much more efficient than diesel-electrics why aren’t we pushing for that?

The questions can go on and on, but no one is asking them.  Instead, we get a bunch of BS from our leader about the urgency to trade in the SUV.

Converting Dollars to Cents

Government"s Idea for HealthcareIt is not that I don’t trust big government with my health care dollar, it is that I don’t trust big government with any of my dollars. I see a record of tired old ideas that have failed to produce the utopian society that they were invented for.

 Take education, as an example. We spend more dollars per student than any country in the world, yet our kids can’t read. Why?

 Take Medicare as another example. It is a system that is limited to the senior population. Yet, Medicare is broke. Why? One reason is that over the years it has been expanded to include too many non-seniors.

 Take the DEA as another example. Are we really winning the war on drugs?

How about the Department of Energy. Invented by Jimmy Carter to reduce our dependence on foreign oil in  the 1970’s. Have we seen an effect yet? I could go on and on with every department in the government and report a dismal record of expenditures. Why do we insist on continuing these stupid lame policies?

The cartoon above depicts my vision  of how our tax money will be used by big government on healthcare.