America Rising

This video has made the rounds on the internet. Awesome. Expect more of this sort of thing between now and November 2.

Customer Service 101

Adam Graham takes a fresh look at the Congressional leadership’s dismissive attitude toward the raucous town hall crowds. What we are witnessing, he says, is a fundamental ignorance of the first rule in customer service: “The Customer is always right.”

Those of us who have worked customer service know well that many Americans get quite nasty when things go wrong. Those who are getting out of hand at town halls have likely gotten out of hand over not getting tomatoes on their salad. But it never occurred to me to tell a customer irate about his computer warranty that he was being un-American.

Most customers kept it under control and often said: “I’m not mad at you. You didn’t create this problem.”

At town hall meetings, however, voters are talking to some of the people who helped create the problem. Yet our members of Congress think they are the public’s masters, not their servants. Customer service representatives from every industry in this country may have to field the wrath of people dissatisfied with the product, the service, or the company policies, but members of Congress apparently should be immune from such wrath by virtue of them being members of Congress.

In 2010, the customers just might take their business elsewhere.

Pelosi’s Made-Up Numbers

Wow, the recession is worse than I thought. Did you know that 500 million Americans lose their jobs every month?

Millions, billions, gadzillions — what’s a few numbers among friends, eh?

Okay for Thee, But Not for Me

If the Democratic health plan is so great for the nation, why have its authors exempted Congress from it?

The irony here is that under the health reform he is sponsoring, it is unlikely that Sen. Ted Kennedy would have gotten the treatment he needed for his brain tumor if his case had to be reviewed by some cost-effectiveness board.

The likelihood is that if Ted Kennedy were British and subject to the tender mercies of that nation’s National Health System, he’d be dead by now.

The Dems’ Health Plan

And this is supposed to be an improvement??!!

“Spending Like Drunken Sailors”

How many times have we used that expression to describe how Congress uses our tax dollars? Actually, as Glenn Reynolds notes, we should be so lucky.

I think that expression is actually unfair to drunken sailors. Drunken sailors generally spend cash that they’ve already earned themselves, rather than running up debt to be paid by others. If our politicians started spending like drunken sailors, it would in fact represent a dramatic improvement.

Amen, bro.

D. C. Dictators

An IBD editorial excoriates Rep. Barney Frank and his fellow politicians, who are agitating for more control over the engines of capital in a bid to “save” them.

Frank, one of the chief architects of the housing mess that’s brought us so low, isn’t satisfied merely with pretending he and his Democratic pals aren’t to blame for all this. No, exploiting voter anger over the now-infamous AIG bonuses, he also wants to dictate to American capitalism what it can earn and what it can’t.

This is the kind of thing that normally happens in Third World countries ruled by tinhorn dictators, or in fascist states, where the democratic rule of law has collapsed. Not the U.S.

Yet, that’s where we find ourselves today, isn’t it? Democrats in Congress, who steadfastly rejected virtually all efforts to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as they went on the wildest, most irresponsible lending binge in the history of finance, now pose themselves as the saviors of fallen capitalism.

The hypocrisy is nothing short of stunning.

Values vs. Laws

Thomas Friedman comments on the current clown parade in D. C., quoting Dov Seidman, a corporate ethics consultant:

What makes a company or a government “sustainable,” he added, is not when it adds more coercive rules and regulations to control behaviors. “It is when its employees or citizens are propelled by values and principles to do the right things, no matter how difficult the situation,” said Seidman. “Laws tell you what you can do. Values inspire in you what you should do. It’s a leader’s job to inspire in us those values.”

Right now we have an absence of inspirational leadership.

And most of the country senses it.

Congress Tramples the Constitution

This week Congress responded to public anger over the AIG bonuses by passing a law imposing a 90 percent tax explicitly on the AIG execs. But as an editorial at Investors Business Daily notes, such a a law violates the bill of attainder prohibition in the Constitution (Article I, Section 9).  This shocking disregard for plain constitutional limits bodes ill for the republic.

You don’t have to like or agree with the AIG bonuses to understand that Congress is doing something it shouldn’t under the Constitution. Once a precedent is set, Congress will be able to go after anyone or any group, at any time, for any reason.