MAD AS HELL AND...

A couple of weeks ago we related the strange story of filmmaker George Lucas trying to build a new movie-making studio in the Broken State of California only to have the Wacko Liberal and Environmental Nuts stop the studio cold while losing thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in tax revenues in the process….

Even the Great George Lucas Who Is A Liberal Politically Is Fed Up With the Wacko Liberal and Environmental Nuts in the Broken State of California – Oh, George….Building A New Movie Studio in California That Would Create Thousands of Jobs and Generate Millions of Dollars in Government Revenue Isn’t Going To Work in the Broken State…Because Those Morons Want To Freeze In Time This Moment Because They “Have Made It” and That Means Everyone Else Can Go To Hell! – Yes, California Is Now Run By the Stupidest People To Ever Walk On Planet Earth…But George We Know Of Lots of Places That Would LOVE To Have That New Movie Studio Of Yours!, Mad As Hell And…

Now the Marin Independent Journal is reporting that the…

“Fat lady just finished singing” in Lucasfilm soap opera, Nels Johnson, Marin IJ

….and if you want to know why the Broken State of California is doomed and is being destroyed by the Wacko Liberal and Environmental Nuts just read the following few paragraphs from the above Marin IJ article on the deep-sixing of the new George Lucas film studio:

“”As you know, Skywalker had hoped to implement a restoration project for the Miller and Grady creeks in connection with its precise development plan application for a studio at the Grady Ranch, pursuant to its master plan approved in 1996 by the county of Marin,” Anderman told the agencies, including the state Department of Fish and Game, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Service.

“We have engaged in a process with all of the agencies addressed in this letter and have very sadly and reluctantly concluded that the creek restoration we had hoped to fund and implement would not win the support of all the agencies,” Anderman continued.

“We have therefore decided to abandon our plans to build the digital production studio at Grady, and accordingly, hereby withdraw all our applications pertaining to the creek restoration project.”

Lucas, who had great success restoring the old Bulltail Creek watershed at Skywalker Ranch where old vehicles, tires and other debris once lined creek banks, planned to spend $50 million to $70 million restoring the Miller Creek watershed, a more far-reaching and expensive effort than development approval required.

The Lucasfilm attorney noted that after unanimous approval by the Planning Commission of a project scaled down from the one approved in 1996, the Board of Supervisors was scheduled to weigh in on April 3 in light of an appeal by developer Thomas Monahan and other Lucas Valley Estates residents who live next door.

“On the evening of Monday, April 2, 2012, the (regulatory) agencies issued a memorandum on their review of the 90-percent-complete design plans for the creek restoration. In the memo, the regional water quality control staff raised new issues and suggested they were reconsidering the fundamental design approach of the restoration project. The design has been under review for over a year and the approach had not been questioned in earlier plan reviews at 35-percent and 75-percent-complete plans,” he said. Further, a review of correspondence received by consultants indicated the “first mention of such concerns did not arise until March 23, 2012,” a month after environmental documents and project development were approved by the Planning Commission.

But Anderman’s timeline of events apparently does not include a Dec. 8 letter by water quality and fishery officials to CSW/ST2 Stuber-Stroeh of Novato, one among several dozen Lucasfilm consultants. Regulators called plans to fill the creekbed risky and said that “the permitting agencies cannot … permit the proposed channel fill concept for Miller Creek” because steep areas upstream could deliver powerful flows awash with sediment and destroy habitat, among other problems.

Lucas Valley Estates attorney Michael Graf, who also represents the SPAWN fishery group in its lawsuit against county planning policies in the San Geronimo Valley, warned the county several weeks ago that some Lucasfilm consultants, bowing to regulatory concerns, were working on a new creek plan not under consideration by county officials, thus providing “strong grounds for a legal challenge.”

Anderman’s letter said the water quality board staff first notified Lucasfilm consultants of its change of heart via email at 6:28 p.m. the night before the supervisors’ hearing, with a copy to Graf.

Whyte, assistant chief of the water quality agency, said her staff is working on a response to Lucasfilm’s letter in order to “clarify the record.” She declined to elaborate on specifics, adding her agency worked closely with Lucasfilm and that “things are a little more complicated than they appear at first glance.””

Yes, we are thinking the same thing you are: These are some Very Stupid People in the Broken State of California!

Uhhhhh, NO, things are NOT more “complicated than they appear” BUT rather the REAL reason that George Lucas is not right now spending several HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS building a new movie studio in Marin County, California is because….

The Wacko Liberal and Environmental Nuts in the Broken State of California with GROUND ZERO for these Idiots being Marin County, California are So Damn Stupid that they will destroy the entire Damn state of California and their own children’s future as they chase their Fantasyland Dreams of having every single action of human beings being regulated by over-educated Morons that on the Very Best Day of their lives could not defend or even fight for the American Republic in a time of war!

We feel the Pain of the Idiots George Lucas and BRAVO to you for telling these Wacko Liberal and Environmental Nuts to take their Bullshit and stuff it where….

The Sun Doesn’t Shine!

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Oh, Bill O’Reilly….Robert Reich a “Communist?”

Please, Robert Reich may be a Liberal Wacko Nut and Reich may have spent his entire adult life on either the payroll of a university or the government BUT…..

Robert Reich is NO Communist!

Here’s how we got to here…

Why Anyone Should Care That Bill O’Reilly Calls Me A Communist, Robert Reich, Business Insider

“Bill O’Reilly, the tumescent personality of Fox News, said on his Friday show “Robert Reich is a communist who secretly adores Karl Marx.” (This came after Fox News’ Neil Cavuto called me a “sanctimonious twit” for suggesting the rich should pay more in taxes.)

O’Reilly’s accusation is odd, to say the least. If we were living in the 1950s, amid Senator Joe McCarthy’s communist witch-hunts, the claim might have some bite and cause me injury. But these days it’s hard to find a full-throated communist anywhere in the world.

O’Reilly’s accusation isn’t even logical. How can he know if I secretly adore Karl Marx, if it’s a secret?

For the record, I’m not a communist and I don’t secretly adore Karl Marx.”

Since several of us here at Mad As Hell And… have had the pleasure of seeing Robert Reich speak on many different occasions and we have met Reich a handful of times going back his days of working for Brother Bill Clinton as U.S. Labor Secretary we have to agree that Bill O’Reilly if off-his-rocker on this one because if Robert Reich is a “Communist” then the word “Communist” has lost all meaning and is no longer effective in identifying REAL Communists like Fidel Castro and the Nutcake now running Venezuela into the ground!

One thing that we know for sure about Robert Reich is that he is smart and he has the ability to see forward into the future which is always a nice attribute to have when you are working on a college campus which is often filled with Complete Morons that are often lucky to get their shoes tied in the morning.

Look no further than Robert Reich’s ability to see the future than his great book from 1992 The Work of Nations which very accurately identified what was actually going to happen over the past two decades which has been dominated in OUR country by large American corporations that no longer see the United States of America as just another market to be dominated and most certainly in many cases not a “home country” that should receive any kind of special attention over say….Burma, Brazil, India or any other country where consumers and/or businesses buy products in the marketplace.

Call us silly or naïve, but we here at Mad As Hell And… are AMERICANS First and if the choice is between turning another BUCK or hurting OUR country or OUR employees…..we ALWAYS put OUR country and OUR employees ahead of turning the Buck.

The Work of Nations, Robert Reich, Amazon.com

Scott London did a great review of Robert Reich’s book the Work of Nations in 1993 shortly after the book came out and you judge for yourself if Reich was right or now on what was about to happen in America and around the world:

Book Review: The Work of Nations, Scott London

“We are living through a transformation that will rearrange the politics and economics of the coming century,” says Robert Reich. As we move into the borderless economy, the notion of national products, national technologies, and national corporations will become increasingly meaningless. The only thing that will remain rooted within national borders are the people who make up a nation. This shift has enormous political implications, according to Reich. It means that the traditional idea of national solidarity and purpose can no longer be defined in purely economic terms. It also leads to fragmentation, Reich argues, as “those citizens best positioned to thrive in the world market are tempted to slip the bonds of national allegiance, and by so doing disengage themselves from their less favored fellows.”

What we are witnessing today is the end of what Reich calls economic nationalism — the notion that the members of a nation succeed or fail together and that they share a responsibility for the economic well-being of their country. This has been the guiding logic of Western economic thought for the better part of two centuries, Reich observes. It has given us such concepts as gross national product, national economic growth, and national competitiveness. The trouble is that the picture presented by economic nationalism bears almost no relation to how the economy is organized today. “That the strength of the American economy is synonymous with profitability and productivity of American corporations is … an axiom on the brink of anachronism.”

Reich describes two developments that have been crucial to this transformation. First is the changing nature of business among the highly competitive advanced industrialized nations. Standardized mass production is giving way to products that are custom tailored. Reich calls this a shift from “high volume to high value” production. Today, specialty steel mills are replacing mammoth plants; one-of-a-kind machine tools are being routinely produced; plastics are molded to order; and telecommunications networks are designed for individual corporate clients. The result is that large corporations are breaking up into independent, specialized units. This calls for creative specialists with extensive skills and education, not, as in the past, a large work force with only general skills.

Second, many large companies have lost their American character. Today, for example, it is increasingly common to find a company headquartered in the United States, but with research, design, and production facilities spread over Japan, Europe, and North America; additional production facilities in Southeast Asia and Latin America; marketing and distribution centers on every continent; and lenders and investors in Taiwan, Japan, and West Germany, as well as the United States. As production and services move freely across borders, the decision to locate a facility in Detroit, Munich, or Osaka depends on where a company can find the most talented and experienced workers. Moreover, whether it invests in Wall Street, London, or Tokyo depends on where the returns are highest.

The combination of changing labor requirements and the rootlessness of big corporations leads Reich to talk about the growing disparity of economic prospects among Americans. He maintains that the economic well-being of Americans no longer depends on the profitability of the corporations they own, or on the prowess of their industries, but on the value they add to the global economy through their skills and experience. Increasingly, it is the jobs that Americans do rather than the success of abstract entities like corporations, industries, or national economies, that determine their standard of living.

Reich divides American jobs into three broad categories for assessing their contribution to new the global economy. These are “symbolic- analytic” services, routine production services, and “in-person” services. The first of these is carried out by what Reich calls “symbolic analysts” engineers, attorneys, scientists, professors, executives, journalists, consultants and other “mind workers” who engage in processing information and symbols for a living. These individuals, which make up roughly twenty percent of the labor force, occupy a privileged position in that they can sell their services in the global economy. They are well-educated and will occupy an even more advantageous position in society in the future.

Routine production workers and in-person service workers will fare much worse in the new economy, according to Reich. Routine production workers include those who perform repetitive tasks — assembly line workers, data processors, foremen, and supervisors. Examples of in- person service workers are waitresses, janitors, hospital attendants, and child care workers. These two categories of workers do not compete in the global work force and are at a considerable economic disadvantage. This is especially true of routine producers. The future of service workers is less clear cut since their services are in demand by symbolic analysts.

The economic fates of Americans are beginning to diverge, Reich observes. “All Americans used to be in the same economic boat. Most rose or fell together, as the corporations in which they were employed, the industries comprising such corporations, and the national economy as a whole became more productive — or languished. But national borders no longer define our economic fates. We are now in different boats, one sinking rapidly, on sinking more slowly, and the third rising steadily.”

The “stark political challenge” presented by this new economic picture is the prospect of deepening social divisions. “America’s problem,” Reich says, “is that while some Americans are adding substantial value, most are not. In consequence, the gap between those few in the first group and everyone else is widening.” The symbolic analysts are becoming increasingly insulated from the rest of Americans through intensified residential segregation by income, a widening gap in educational opportunity and achievement, a less progressive tax system, and more privatization of services, from child care to personal security. “In this way,” Reich notes, “symbolic analysts are quietly seceding from the large diverse publics of America into homogenous enclaves, within which their earnings need not be redistributed to people less fortunate than themselves.”

Improving the economic position of the bottom four-fifths of the American work force will require that the fortunate fifth share its wealth and invest in the wealth-creating capacities of other Americans. Reich offers a number of proposals toward this end: 1) instituting a progressive income tax; 2) providing opportunities for all Americans to become symbolic analysts by investing in education at all levels; 3) increasing the numbers of Americans who could apply symbolic analysis to production and in-person services; and 4) addressing the plight of the long-term poor.”

Robert Reich was right in 1992 on what was going to happen over the next two decades and although we would disagree on Reich’s proposals to “fix things”….

1. Instituting a progressive income tax – What America needs most of all is fundamental tax reform which will get rid of all the Complete Bullshit that is all of these deductions, credits, write-offs, etc. that are weighing down the U.S. Tax Code and put into place three or so income tax brackets that taxes ALL money one puts into his/her pocket at the same rate.

2. Providing opportunities for all Americans to become symbolic analysts by investing in education at all levels – America spends a fortune on education and we get less bang for the buck than the 20 or so countries that are now outperforming our children so “more money” is not in our opinion the answer to “fixing” education but rather holding OUR teaches and kids to much higher standards which means the Bullshit needs to end in the classroom and political-correctness needs to be tossed out of our schools.

3. Increasing the numbers of Americans who could apply symbolic analysis to production and in-person services – Huh? Does that mean more pre-job and on-the-job training for American workers so they can better compete and succeed in the 21 st century economy? If so, we agree with that…

4. Addressing the plight of the long-term poor – The BEST thing for the long-term poor is a JOB and even better a GOOD PAYING JOB and when the Federal and many State Governments in America are waging and All-Out Attack on Business in OUR country it is too Damn easy for American companies to say something like….”OK, that’s it. We are headed to “X” country.”

Bottom-Line on Robert Reich: Robert Reich a “Communist?”

NO….not even close.

C-Span co-founder Brian Lamb interviews Robert Reich back in March, 1991 about his book The Work of Nations and as with every interview we have seen Brian Lamb do it is Damn entertaining TV!

The Work of Nations: 21 st Century Capitalism, C-Span Video, March 29, 1991

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With the American People now sending over $50 BILLION DOLLARS a year to Afghanistan to conduct a war that has…

NO DAMN ENEMY

….we read the two following very interesting and very disturbing stories on the United States and its “war” in Afghanistan:

U.S., Afghanistan Draft Pact for American Role After 2014, Bloomberg.com

AND

Republican lawmaker, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, says Karzai denied him entry into Afghanistan, The Hill

What the Hell?

So the United States of America has made a “pact” with the puppet government it installed in Kabul that is easily one of the most corrupt governments on Planet Earth to do what exactly past the American pullout in 2014?

Oh, the American People will have to keep sending their hard-earned money to Afghanistan to the tune of Billions of Dollars a year or the “puppet government” led by “president” Karzai will fall flat on its ass so it is either the American Republic pony up and see OUR hard-earned Billions of Dollars flow to Afghanistan or the “puppet” government in Afghanistan will come crashing down…….with probably much of the Billions of Dollars that was sent to Iraq that no doubt ending up in Swiss bank accounts…but even worse than the money flowing to Switzerland so lots of folks can lay around the South of France with the American People’s money it seems that some of the money that Americans send to Afghanistan flows to the people we are fighting in the country which makes Perfect Damn Sense because if you have…

NO DAMN ENEMY

…then you need to make Damn sure you give money to someone so they can fight you and if this sounds like an I Love Lucy episode with the US Government sending money into Afghanistan that is then skimmed off to fund the operations of the Taliban and other people OUR U.S. Military is fighting we can report that it is not an I Love Lucy episode but rather….THE TRUTH.

Did you catch Brian Lamb’s Q&A on C-Span on Sunday night? If not you can watch it below:

Oh, it was a REAL doozy with Lamb interviewing author Douglas Wissing who spent many months in Afghanistan on the frontlines of the “war’ there and here is the book that Wissing just wrote:

Funding the Enemy, How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban

Oh, that’s just great, but Hell if you have NO DAMN ENEMY and the only way you are going to make flag officer is to find someone for the United States of America to fight then best Damn way to do that is to give money to someone and let them start shooting at you and the “WA-LA” you have an ENEMY and that is what we now have in Afghanistan…..an ENEMY that we are funding and if the American funding of Afghanistan ended….

The ENEMY would as well!

Below is the Overview of Douglas Wissing’s book Funding the Enemy, How U.S. Taxpayer Bankroll the Taliban, and if you are an American Citizen and you just ate we would recommend you wait a few hours before reading further because you will be up-chucking your food shortly….that is if you actually give a Damn about the American Republic and your children and grandchildren:

“With the vague intention of winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan, the U.S. government has mismanaged billions of development dollars, bolstered the drug trade, and dumped untold millions into Taliban hands. In Funding the Enemy: How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban, investigative journalist Douglas Wissing mounts a scathing critique of how America lost the war in Afghanistan.

During Wissing’s research and field work in Afghanistan’s warzones, a drumbeat of off-the-record and offhand remarks pointed him to one conclusion: “We blew it.” The sentiment was even blazoned across the U.S. military’s fortifications, as Wissing saw at Forward Operating Base Mehtar Lam in insurgency-wracked Laghman Province: “I glanced over at a concrete blast barrier while waiting for a helicopter,” Wissing says. “Someone had spray-painted in jagged letters: ‘The GAME. You Lost It.’”

“The sense of the war going terribly wrong had been building for months as I encountered problem after problem in Afghanistan and Washington,” Wissing recalls. “Officially, everyone stayed on message. But the soldiers, contractors and government staffers told another story in the mess halls, barracks and armored vehicles trundling through Taliban country. They laughed that we were financing both sides of this war, and the Taliban was doing a much better job with our money.”

Wissing learned American officials regularly funneled money to opium kingpins and Taliban warlords in a ballooning culture of corruption. Afghan bigwigs skimmed hundreds of millions from lucrative security, aid and logistics contracts, blithely playing both sides as they paid off insurgents. Development goals served twisted ends. In one frontline base in eastern Afghanistan, soldiers intimated to Wissing that U.S. officials in charge of building Afghan schools failed to arrange for teachers, allowing tribesmen to convert the empty new buildings into homes, businesses—even brothels.

“General Petraeus likes to say that money is a weapons system,” Wissing explains. “But there is virtually no data to support a correlation between development aid and reduced insurgency. We’ve paid dearly in blood and treasure for a solution we’ve been asked to take on faith. And it’s failed.”

Wissing’s approach demanded months of hanging out in the peculiar world of American soldiers in the remote mountain operating posts, where mortar attacks punctuate the hiss of the base’s cappuccino maker and the blare of ubiquitous big-screen TVs. Wissing saw how commissary surf-and-turf nights alternated with terrifying close calls with rocket attacks and IEDs. He endured mountain-slope slogs in a hundred-degree heat in fifty pounds of body armor. He shared poignant front-line ceremonies to honor the fallen returning home.

With vivid scenes reminiscent of Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Dexter Filken’s Forever War, and Michael Herr’s Vietnam War-era Dispatches, Douglas Wissing’s Funding the Enemy takes the reader down on the ground in frontline Afghanistan. It draws on the voices of hundreds of combat soldiers, ordinary Afghans, private contractors, aid workers, talking heads and government officials. Wissing writes what he saw: U.S. taxpayer dollars flowing into Taliban coffers, courtesy of scandalously mismanaged U.S. development and counterinsurgency programs, to disastrous military and social effect.”

Yes, now you know what YOUR $5 Billion Dollars a month of hard-earned money is doing in Afghanistan….

Funding the Damn Taliban that would have very little to NO DAMN MONEY if the America was not pouring $5 Billion Dollars a month into Afghanistan!

Yes, these are Some Very Stupid People and Some Very Ambitious People as well that would trade putting another star on their shoulder for “X” number of American soldiers getting killed just like the U.S. military generals did in Vietnam which was another Massive Multi-Billion Dollar Boondoggle that President Johnson and President Nixon could not stop once it got rolling because the TRUTH is just like in Afghanistan there are…

Way Damn Too Many People Making Lost of Damn Money on the War in Afghanistan Just Like A Helluva Lot of People Made A Helluva Lot of Money in Vietnam Even Though They Never Got Within 2,000 Miles of the Country….As Is the Case With Afghanistan Today!

President Nixon could not stop the War in Vietnam

AND

President Obama cannot stop the Stupid War in Afghanistan even if he wanted to…

Yes, that is OUTRAGEOUS…but that is the Bizarro-Land that is America in 2012 when OUR “Elected Leaders” play stupid Damn games….War on Women….Interest Rates on Student Loans….. while the American Republic is piling up Trillions in Debt and….

Nobody Gives A Damn.

The other crazy story from this week is that the “president” of Afghanistan, Karzai, prohibited an American congressman from visiting Afghanistan…

Republican lawmaker, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, says Karzai denied him entry into Afghanistan, The Hill

….which is the same Damn country that the American People are now sending $5 Billion Dollars a year to prop-up the Toady and Puppet Afghanistan “president” Karzai.

You are right….You could not make this Bullshit up if you tried!

No, it doesn’t get any stranger than a U.S. Congressman not being allowed into a county where the American People are sending $5 Billion Dollars a month to unless of course you don’t count people in the US Government talking about a Social Security Trust Fund that has NOTHING IN IT, but they claim it has over $2.5 Trillion Dollars in it!

Only Very Stupid People could make a $2.5 Trillion Dollar Plus mistake….

Oh, saying that the Social Security Trust Fund has $2.5 Trillion Dollars in it when it has….

NOTHING IN IT….except for paper in a filing cabinet

….is really just One Big Lie? Yes, that is right….

Just like the Bogus War in Afghanistan which NO ONE in Washington DC can stop…

Since there are way too many Damn people making way too much Damn money off of US Military personnel fighting in a war that has….

NO DAMN ENEMY

…except for the enemy that we create and then fund!

Yes, Stop the Damn Madness!

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Mad As Hell And… Quotes of the Day – Tuesday, April 24, 2012 – Frank Borman

“I’ve long said that capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.”

And

“Had that rocket not fired, I’d still be orbiting the moon. Forever. And I really didn’t want to do that.” — Spoken of the Apollo 8 mission during the documentary When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions

And

“Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit.”

And

“When you’re finally up on the moon, looking back at the earth, all these differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend and you’re going to get a concept that maybe this is really one world and why the hell can’t we learn to live together like decent people?”

And

“Exploration really is the essence of the human spirit, and to pause, to falter, to turn our back on the quest for knowledge, is to perish.”

And

“It’s a vast, lonely, forbidding expanse of nothing rather like clouds and clouds of pumice stone. And it certainly does not appear to be a very inviting place to live or work.”

Wikipedia:  Frank Borman

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