Mike Rowe's Job Market

I’ve been a fan of Mike Rowe’s ever since accidentally seeing him as a guest on Fox News. Rowe is known for his work on the Discovery Channel series Dirty Jobs and the CNN series Somebody's Gotta Do It. He recently received the Independent Women’s Forum “Distinguished Gentleman” award, and the report on his acceptance speech is here. He expands on five major themes and closes with:

“We don’t need American Idols,” he said. “We need American icons. Icons of work. The country needs a parapateia [turning point, or as Rowe put it “a reversal of fortune or a sudden change in circumstances”]. We need to tell better stories of men and women who master a trade. We have to stop telling kids to blindly follow their passion and show them the opportunities that exist. That was the big, overarching message of ‘Dirty Jobs.’ The message that the headlines that ultimately caught up to: There is dignity in all work and opportunity is alive and well.”

Rowe talks about

finding people who were willing to show up early and stay late and learn a skill that was actually in demand. The business of recruitment was a difficult thing. Everywhere I went on the road was ‘Help wanted’ signs. The least I could do was to shine a light on some opportunities that typically go ignored.

The statistics back Rowe up. There are currently 1.5 trillion dollars of student loans on the books, and seven million jobs available, 75 percent of which don’t require a 4 year degree. But they do require training. Rowe wanted to provide such training as a way to begin to bridge the gap between goals and completion, college and a job, and failure and dignity.

Help wanted. In demand. Opportunities. The Tea Party is all about free markets, and Rowe is doing a lot to bring them back in focus. The rest of the report at The Federalist is here; Rowe's speech is linked at the top of the page, including the video. 

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Antifa and liberty rallies

image credit: patriotpost.us

The headline: “Violent Communist Antifa Thugs Swarm 

‘We The People’ Rally In Philadelphia.” 

This weekend, a rally in support of law enforcement was overrun and co-opted by the “Antifa” thugs in Philadelphia. I probably participated in a few dozen rallies in the early Tea Party days, and the worst was when a table of ultra-left Lyndon LaRouche supporters popped up, protesting that President Obama’s policies were not sufficiently liberal. That was nothing compared to yesterday’s rally in Philly, as reported by NoisyRoom blog: 

A ‘"We The People" rally was held in Philadelphia yesterday. There were not that many patriots there, but hundreds of violent communist Antifa thugs swarmed the rally. They were there for a fight and they got one.

Conservative groups had planned the rally in support of ICE and police officers. Hundreds of black-clad, masked Antifa radicals descended upon them near the Independence Visitor Center on 5th and 6th Streets. There were approximately 80 conservatives in the mix and they were vastly outnumbered. The media is calling the Antifa goons counter-protesters. 

That’s not what they are. They are vicious communists who intend to beat conservatives into cowering and staying silent.

The police commissioner stated that only four were arrested. One of them punched a police captain if you can believe it (and I do). One injured person was put in a van for their safety as well. After violence broke out the crowd soon dispersed.

There were crazed hippy liberals in attendance too. One guy with fluorescent pink hair and pepperoni pizza leggings showed up to ‘protest Nazis’. There were other leftist nut cases there as well.

The police arrested the Antifa communists and put them in a police van while their supporters shouted: “We got your back, man!” The Antifa thugs were shouting profanities at the police while they were being arrested. No one ever accused communists of being classy.

This could easily have broken into a major clash and with the Antifa terrorists outnumbering the conservatives the way they did, it would have ended very badly. There was blood splattered on the sidewalks as the two groups were separated. The Washington Post is reporting only 30 conservatives were there versus 300 Antifa goons. Take that for what it’s worth – WaPo has a credibility problem, to say the least.

. . .

The report closes:

Everywhere that conservatives meet, Antifa is showing up to get their violence on. It’s getting worse, not better and the gathering in Philly shows that. Our Founding Fathers would be ashamed and incensed over all of this.

As others have pointed out, "Antifa" [anti-fascist] really should identify as "Pro-fa," which is why I put the term in scare quotes. Anyway, the rest of the report is here, and it is as much an indictment of media bias and propaganda as it is about "Antifa" and the event itself.  

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Today's chuckle

(Except it's not funny....) Anyway, there's lots more fun at PowerLineblog here.

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Tucker Carlson’s Ship of Fools

image from Amazon

Jeffrey Lord may have been fired from CNN for no good reason, but he continues to publish on various websites, including American Spectator. Yesterday, he posted his review of Tucker Carlson’s bestselling Ship of Fools. It’s a rave, and I am posting a few paragraphs, either for those who are interested in reading the book or those who want a short précis instead:  

A serious look at a serious American problem by a serious thinker

A truer examination of a serious American problem could not be had.

In his new book,  Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution, Tucker Carlson gets to the heart of the seriously bad situation that confronts America.

Ship of Fools is, says the opening flap of the book, “the story of the new American elites, a group whose power and wealth has grown beyond imagination even as the rest of the country has withered. The people who run America now barely interact with it. They fly on their own planes, ski on their own mountains, watch sporting events from the stands in skyboxes. They have total contempt for you.”

In thumbnail, that could not possibly be a more accurate description of American elites, not to mention the reaction they produced: the election of Donald Trump. As someone who long ago left the precincts of Inside the Beltway Washington, D.C. to come home to the wilds of Central Pennsylvania, it was plain what was coming down the pike in November of 2016. This area was awash in Trump signs. They were everywhere, even hand-painted on the sides of barns. As it were, this was a sure sign of what Tucker describes this way:

Trump’s election wasn’t about Trump. It was a throbbing middle finger in the face of America’s ruling class. It was a gesture of contempt, a howl of rage, the end result of decades of selfish and unwise decisions made by selfish and unwise leaders. Happy countries don’t elect Donald Trump president. Desperate ones do.

Bingo.

Read the full review here.

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Election fraud, corruption, and jihad

image credit: huffingtonpost.com

Robert Spencer is a leading authority on Islamic jihad, and his column yesterday is about what’s going on with the Florida, Arizona, and probably a few other states with election results still not confirmed. He compares the corruption of our electoral systems to terrorism :

The theft of elections, even defying court orders to stop while the whole world is watching, is a new low in American politics, and testifies to the Left’s overriding lust for power. The Democrats have never recovered their equilibrium after losing to Donald Trump in 2016, and now appear to be willing to stop at nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to neutralize Trump and regain their hegemony.

. . .

The election fraud in Arizona and Florida is a continuation of the Kavanaugh hearings. Just as the outrageously false allegations of sexual assault and rape against Brett Kavanaugh did, the election fraud demonstrates that there is no low to which the Democrats will not stoop to gain and hold power. They will even affect a self-righteous mien of moral superiority while stooping.

The lesson that conservatives are meant to learn is not just that the Left will stop at nothing, but that the Left is unstoppable. Republicans and conservatives can vote for “drain the swamp” candidates all they want -- but the swamp will not be drained, as those candidates will not take office even if they win.

The intention is to intimidate and demoralize conservatives, induce them to give up and get out of this dirty game. This is, in a word, terrorism.

Read the full article here.

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Medicare For All and socialism

image credit: americanliberalreview.com

There has been any number of articles and analyses concerning the proposed “Medicare For All.” A recent on-line report can be found at Forbes here; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “dodges questions” on how to pay for it here (spoiler: she doesn’t know); and the NY Times explains what is good about the policy here (what a surprise!).

Yesterday, Justin Haskins published an accessible analysis at Townhall entitled “Socialists Won’t Rest Until We Have Single-Payer Health Care. We Must Stop Them.” The quote marks are there because that’s the title of the article, but they could be interpreted instead as scare quotes. Excerpts:

The 2018 midterms could someday be remembered as the beginning of the Democratic Party’s full embrace of creating a single-payer health care system in the United States. For the first time in American history, a large number of Democrats, many of whom identify as socialists, openly campaigned for the creation of a government-run health insurance model.

For instance, Democratic Socialists of America member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who won 78 percent of the vote on Election Day, championed Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) “Medicare for All” proposal, calling it the “ethical, logical, and affordable path to ensuring no person goes without dignified healthcare.” According to Ocasio-Cortez, “Medicare for All will reduce the existing costs of healthcare (and make Medicare cheaper, too!) by allowing all people in the US to buy into a universal healthcare system.” 

Ocasio-Cortez says she supports a universal system that would include “full vision, dental, and mental healthcare - because we know that true healthcare is about the whole self, not just your yearly physical.”

The cost of enacting such a radical program would be astronomical. Researchers at the Mercatus Center say Sen. Sanders’ plan would cost $32.6 trillion in its first decade, and they note that even if Congress were to double taxes paid by individuals and corporations, it wouldn’t be enough to pay for the program. That should terrify you, especially since the U.S. government’s deficit for the 2018 fiscal year was $782 billion and the national debt now stands at a $21.7 trillion.

But as shocking as the price tag for single-payer health care would be, it pales in comparison to the numerous health care-related problems that would be created by such a model. For starters, the government has an absolutely terrible record of providing health care. One example is the Veterans Health Administration, which is run by the federal government. It routinely suffers from underfunding and long wait times, which has forced the agency to allow veterans to go elsewhere to receive care. As the Military Times notes, “About one-third of all VA medical appointments today are … conducted by physicians outside the department’s system.”

. . .

If the federal government can’t properly run the VA system or Medicaid—or even the Post Office—why does anyone think it could manage one of the largest industries in the United States today?

Much more about the VA, mortality rates, and other scary stats are here.

RELATED: Veterans in the greater Cleveland are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Via Breitbart:

The 10 worst cities for veterans included Ohio metros — Cleveland (#92) and Toledo (#95). California contributed San Bernardino (#94) and Fresno (#97). Also at the bottom of the pack were Philadelphia (#91), Baton Rouge (#93), Baltimore (#96), Memphis (#98), Newark (#99), and Detroit (#100).

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Morning or Mourning in America?

cartoon credit: politicalcorrectnessrunamok.blogspot.com

The recounts continue in Florida, Georgia, and Arizona. More ballots are mysteriously popping out of closets, trunks of cars, magicians’ hats. Macron just insulted President Trump again. Etc., etc. Feeling worn down?

Sally Zelikovsky has something of a post-election pep talk at American Thinker. She concludes:

Warriors don’t retreat just as they are making inroads. We may not be fighting a kinetic war, but it is our destiny to fight this ideological war for the soul of this country.  It is just as vital and, in some ways harder, because the enemy is an internal hegemon--progressivism.  Fortunately, it no longer hides in the shadows.  

We see its face every day. It is tenacious, brazenly mendacious, ferocious, avaricious, ubiquitous; it is relentless and merciless. 

This is not a war with swords and guns, but of words and actions.  My father fought against NAFTA for 30 years.  Trump couldn’t have changed NAFTA without the efforts of people like Dad.  The president can’t do all he has to do in the next two years without us either.

The midterms were a mixed bag and left us feeling pretty lousy.  And it’s not over given the looming morass of election challenges.  We also face the exhausting reality that the left will not stop until they take down a president who has our back in a way I’ve never seen in a political leader, let alone a president. Are we going to let this happen? 

America’s conservatives are at a crossroads.  We can tack to the right and commit to a new “morning in America,” emboldened by the power we have as the People, by judges and representatives devoted to  conservatism, and a Senate majority that can punch back working in tandem with a fearless and indefatigable President.  Or, we can tack to the left, where we’d be “mourning in America” because we let the light go out on this beacon on a hill.

The full article is here.

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