A good story from our Progressive friends (slightly rewritten)

Just because an item is catchy doesn't mean it's accurate.

Here's one that I've seen before, picked up this time from Mid-Atlantic States Labor:

Joe Smith started the day early having set his alarm clock (MADE IN JAPAN) for 6am. While his coffeepot (MADE IN CHINA) was perking, he shaved with his electric razor (MADE IN HONG KONG). He put on a dress shirt (MADE IN SRI LANKA), designer jeans (MADE IN SINGAPORE) and tennis shoes (MADE IN KOREA).

After cooking his breakfast in his new electric skillet (MADE IN INDIA), he sat down with his calculator (MADE IN MEXICO ) to see how much he could spend today.

After setting his watch (MADE IN TAIWAN) to the radio (MADE IN INDIA) he got in his car (MADE IN GERMANY) filled it with GAS from Saudi Arabia and continued his search for a good paying AMERICAN JOB.

At the end of yet another discouraging and fruitless day checking his Computer (Made In Malaysia ), Joe decided to relax for a while. He put on his sandals (MADE IN BRAZIL) poured himself a glass of wine (MADE IN FRANCE) and turned on his TV (MADE IN INDONESIA), and then wondered why he can’t find a good paying job in AMERICA .

Y’all gotta Keep this one circulating, please.!

OK, great union made in American fodder, right?

Let's take a shot at rewriting it:

Joe Smith started the day early having set his alarm clock (MADE IN JAPAN ) for 6am; he woke to Sirius, the American-engineered satellite radio network. While his coffeepot (MADE IN CHINA) was perking, he sat out sugar from Louisiana and cream from Wisconsin. Meanwhile, he shaved with his electric razor (MADE IN HONG KONG), after having lubricated his beard with a shaving gel produced in Illinois. He put on a dress shirt (MADE IN SRI LANKA), designer jeans (MADE IN SINGAPORE), and tennis shoes (MADE IN KOREA). He complemented these with an American-made L. L. Bean jacket, a leather belt produced in Texas, and underwear manufactured in South Carolina.

After cooking his breakfast of American-produced bacon and eggs in his new electric skillet (MADE IN INDIA), he sat down with his programmable calculator (MADE IN MEXICO) that runs on an American-manufactured AMD chip to see how much he could spend today. Later tonight he would upload the data using an American-made Cisco software program into his American-made Quickbooks program.

After setting his watch (MADE IN TAIWAN) (necessary because he was replacing the American-made battery) to the radio (MADE IN INDIA), which was still tuned to Sirius, he got in his car (MADE IN GERMANY) that had recently been tuned up by an American automobile technician who added new American-made platinum spark plugs, traveled on four American-made tires, and had been repainted by an American enterpreneur. He filled it with GAS from Saudi Arabia (because US energy companies have virtually been prohibited from realistic exploration and development of new oils fields in America) and continued his search for a good paying AMERICAN JOB.

At the end of yet another discouraging and fruitless day checking his computer (Made In Malaysia) and running software designed in America's Silicon Valley, Joe decided to relax for a while. He put on his sandals (MADE IN BRAZIL), poured himself a glass of wine (MADE IN FRANCE), grabbed an American-produced frozen dinner, and turned on his TV (MADE IN INDONESIA) to watch the wide variety of entertainment produced in America and exported to the rest of the world.

He wondered why he can’t find a good paying job in AMERICA. He considered for a moment that he should have enrolled at the community college to update his skills, but then dismissed the thought. You should be able to find a decent-paying job with a high school education, right? Didn't the government owe you that?

Moral of story: it's never as simple as the so-called Progressives would like you to believe.

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here: chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.” The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...

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