Sen. Schumer brags up health bill pork

Senior Democratic New York Senator Charles Schumer isn’t shy about the pork that’s in the new health care bill passed by the Senate this week; in fact, he’s bragging up the pork. “Every state got something,” Schumer said, according to a recent Bloomberg.com article.

Less concerned with New York jobs than with maintaining a Dem majority, Sen. Schumer has also been quotes in other reports as saying that any state that didn’t get something in the ObamaCare bill “didn’t have a very effective Senator.”

By which he means Republicans, who stood by principal for the first time in maybe a decade or so and refused to play ball with the majority. That’s why the vote was only 60-40.

Target experience puts Wal-Mart in driver’s seat

My wife and I were out this weekend, shopping for Hanukkah gifts. She was looking for gifts for me, I was looking for gifts for her. You get the idea.

Anyway, we were at Target and I spotting a sharp-looking Armitron, so my wife decided to make that my gift. Trouble is, the watch came with a cheap-looking and clammy-feeling rubber/plastic band. So we looked over their selection of leather watch bands to find something more appealing.

When I found one I liked, we moved to the jewelry counter to ask them to put the new leather band on the watch for us – something I’ve done all my life, whether shopping at Target, Wal-Mart, ShopKo or even K-Mart.

The young man, who couldn’t have been much older than 17 if that, pointed out a sign on the counter.

“We have a new policy,” he explained. “We don’t do that anymore. Target figured our time was too valuable to mess with putting bands on watches. There’s not enough money in it for us.”

Now, jewelry counters in department stores always have the right tool to pull off an operation like changing a watch band, which requires a VERY SMALL screwdriver to pull back the little pin. It’s not something one can do at home very successfully with a tweezers or something, since the metal is too thick to get the pin down. And it’s hazardous to try; you can cut yourself fairly easily in a failed attempt.

Of course, with the proper tool, it’s a breeze, which is why we went to the jewelry counter in the first place. So I was shocked that this teenager who probably makes seven dollars an hour or so, felt his time was “too valuable” to help out a paying customer.

I very nearly canceled the entire purchase, but I loved the Armitron so much, I just decided not to buy the watch band.

“We’ll go for that to a store that actually cares about customer service,” we told him.

The next day, we went to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart employees tend to make less than those at Target, but guess who was a whole lot more interested in having us leave their establishment happy?

That’s right; Wal-Mart sold us a nearly identical leather band and put it on for us with a smile and a “thank you for shopping Wal-Mart!” even though the watch had been purchased elsewhere!

Take that, Target! Customer dis-service like that is why Wal-Mart is more successful than you, and will remain so. And don’t worry… I’ll never ask a Target employee to install a watch band for me again… I’ll be getting all my future watches… and wrist bands… at Wal-Mart from now on.

Obama about to go crazy over CO2

Let this be said upfront and blatantly: Carbon dioxide is not not not a “dangerous pollutant.” It is what plants from trees to grass and everything in between need to survive, and in fact, plants give us back what we need to survive after absorbing it: oxygen!

But don’t let basic scientific facts get in the way of a good scare-em-into-taxation policy! The EPA this week, under direction from the Obama Administration, is set to formally declare carbon dioxide… what we breathe out… a “dangerous pollutant.” This EPA finding would give the Fed almost unchecked powers to regulate corporate emissions and tax violators, effectively enacting the cap-and-trade concept without a vote ever being taken.

This is blatant abuse of Federal authority, not to mention bad and faulty science.

Here’s the skinny on CO2, extracted from Wikipedia:

CO2 is a trace gas being only 0.038% of the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is used by plants during photosynthesis to make sugars, which may either be consumed in respiration or used as the raw material to produce other organic compounds needed for plant growth and development… As of March 2009, carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere is at a concentration of 387 ppm by volume… Five hundred million years ago carbon dioxide was 20 times more prevalent than today, decreasing to 4-5 times during the Jurassic period and then slowly declining with a particularly swift reduction occurring 49 million years ago… There is about fifty times as much carbon dissolved in the oceans in the form of CO2 and carbonic acid, bicarbonate and carbonate ions as exists in the atmosphere.

It’s a trace gas and was 20 times more prevalent in the past as compared to now.

It seems the Obama Administration, however, has taken some intellectual weight loss Austin-style and just fallen for anything that falls out of Al Gore’s mouth without question or discernment.

Someone should declare Al Gore’s utterances a “dangerous pollutant.”