Funniest question of the day …

So the minimum-wage workers at fast-food restaurants in 50 cities are going on strike. 

Some news station posed the question: 

                Would you cross a picket line at a fast-food restaurant?

About laughed my ass off when I heard that.  Really? 

We’re about to launch an attack on Syria which could inflame Russia and much of the Middle East, Muslims are burning Christian churches in Egypt, while black teens are killing each other with wild abandon in Chicago,  and killing others because they have too much time on their hands. 

Meanwhile, the most important issue of the day is how bad do you want a Big Mac?  Are you willing to cross a picket line to get one? 

Seriously, local media sent reporters into the street to interview people on that pressing issue. 

The world’s on fire and we’re getting ready to pour more gas on it.  Do you want fries with that? 

Listen, I don’t give a rat’s patoot if every fast-food joint in the country closes today or tomorrow or forever.  Most of their food is over-priced high-calorie crap anyway. 

I don’t blame them for selling this garbage – it’s what some people want, and wolfing down a couple thousand calories at a sitting once in a while isn’t likely to kill you.  Not good for you, for sure, but not instantly fatal.  Still, if Mickey D’s is your home away from home for far more than just coffee, all the Lipitor in the world may not save you.  Your fat ass is fried, just like your food.   

I also don’t blame them for all the fat kids who grew up on Happy Meals.  Idiot parents stuffing their kids with Big Macs and Whoppers created those little porkers, not McDonald’s or Burger King. 

However, that some states allow parents to use food stamps to do this is positively criminal.

But I digress … this is about the minimum-wage workers at those places and their strike for higher wages – actually double what they make now – and that they want to unionize. 

The net/net is that I don’t care if a bunch of slackers who man the counter or drive-thru window, or even those who attain the exalted “Fry Chief” title, walk off their jobs.

I feel for older people who find this work all they can get at their age, or those who’ve suffered a setback and are just now scrambling to make ends meet.  This is an unpleasant interim gig for them. 

But I have zero compassion for young adults who think they can make a career out of flipping the basket on the fryolator when it dings.  Or refilling the condiment dispensers.   

It’s not like they’re “there” anyway.  Most of the young ones are just watching the clock waiting for their shift to end so they can do something more intellectually stimulating.  Like sending naked pix of themselves.   Maybe spouting teen-angst haiku in 140 characters or less.  Checking out who is checking them out while they see who is checking out someone else.  Or simply holing up in mom’s basement for hours of video games or online porn. 

Who can blame them?  Life is so hard.  The stress is terrible.  It’s tough to have a dead-end job at minimum wage, especially when you have loftier goals.  Like not working at all and still getting paid enough to do whatever you desire. 

That’s what they actually want.  They think a union is going to deliver that for them.  They’ll make decent bucks.  They’ll be protected from getting fired for, say, being rude to customers, or not showing up at all, or making videos of themselves tampering with the food.  And they can keep slacking along, doing the minimum, and get by into their 30s. 40s and 50s if need be.   

Good luck with that. 

There’s a reason why fast food companies – most of them franchises anyway – pay minimum wage or a little more.  The work isn’t worth more.  Honestly, a robot could do most of it.  And frankly, most franchisees aren’t making a ton of bucks unless they own a number of outlets; in many cases, the franchise owner and family members are also putting in time behind the counter to break even.   

These aren’t high-margin businesses at the store level. They don’t have any control over what they can charge for their offerings, and it’s a fiercely price-competitive marketplace.  Double their staff costs and they’ll shut down or reduce staff through increased automation.  Force unions on them and like small businesses everywhere they’ll just shut the doors.

There’s also a reason why people earn only minimum wage.  The market doesn’t value them that much.  They don’t have marketable skills desired by others willing to pay more for their services.  That’s not the market’s fault; it’s the potential employee’s fault. 

The unions and community organizers behind the strikes like to push that a lot of people making about minimum wage in fast food places have “some college.”  One article  reported that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says that more than 42 percent of restaurant and fast-food employees over the age of 25 have at least some college education, including 753,000 with a bachelor's degree or higher. 

So what?  “Some college” doesn’t guarantee a better paying job, any more than a degree in some arcane subject means you’ll make a living at it.   

If your only marketable skill is pushing buttons with pictures on them and giving back the correct change the register displays to you, anyone can do that.  In fact, it doesn’t even take a human. 

Want to see your replacement?  Go to any self-checkout line in a grocery store.  That will be taking your place shortly.   It won’t whine, complain, and skip work.  It also won’t join a union. 

I’ve been watching the strike coverage online off and on during the day.  There’s 31-year-old Shantel Walker trying to live on what she makes at a Papa John’s in Manhattan.  Well, duh.  You can’t do it.  I’d have figured that by the time you’re 31 you’d have realized that.  Especially in New York City. 

So here’s a career tip for Shantel.   Get off your ass and train for or learn how to do something that pays better.  That’s your responsibility, not your current employer’s.  Oh, and move.

Next? 

Now for all of you reading this, you do realize why all this is going on, and why now, don’t you? 

Obama’s popularity is finally starting to tank.  People are getting a bit tired of the class warfare stuff, especially since the economy is still in the crapper.  Unions are losing members.  Small businesses are reacting to ObamaCare by reducing employment for hourly workers – a lot of them minimum wage – to less than 30 hours a week.  The youth are not as highly motivated to vote or get involved politically as they once were, since a lot of them still don’t have jobs and are saddled with a ton of college debt.

Then there’s the immigration debate.  And let’s be honest, a lot of people working at the bottom rungs of the fast-food and restaurant may have – shall we say – left their “documents” at home.  So a doubling of the minimum wage – or the promise of that – may be very appealing to them. 

If you’re the Democrats and the unions, what do you do?  You need something new to take to the streets.  The celebration of Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech only lasts so long, and had to share the stage with some awful black-on-white crimes.  The changes to the Voting Rights Act haven’t actually set the public on fire. 

So you need a new target. 

About 13 million people are employed in the fast-food and restaurant industry.  That’s a pretty rich target to hit.  And that’s why this is news. 

Enough is enough ...

The murder of a random man by three teens who were “bored.”

The fatal shooting of a baby in a stroller by a teen robbing the baby’s mother.

The beating death of an 88-year-old WWII vet outside a VFW club by two teens robbing him.

All this against the 50^th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech in Washington, D.C.

In that speech, Dr. King said he dreamed of a day when people would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” 

Well it’s long past time to do just that.

Let’s just drop all the pretense and political correctness and judge everyone by what they do, not why, how they were raised, their age or their race.  When you pull out a gun and kill someone who is not a threat to you, or beat a defenseless person to death, I don’t really care to know anything more about you.  Your sob story or perverted rationale is irrelevant to me, and certainly to your victim. 

You are simply a murderer.  You are someone who should be permanently removed from society, and better yet, from breathing the same oxygen as the rest of us.  If you’re old enough and callous enough to commit a murder, you’re old enough to pay for it with your own life.   

I’ve had enough of all the excuses.  I’m fed up with the revolving door on teen murderers getting a break because they are only 16, or poor, or stupid, or come from a broken home.  They crossed one of the few bright lines in our society, perhaps one of the earliest of all taboos, and knew they were doing it when they killed someone. 

These aren’t youthful mistakes; these are cold, calculated murders that send a chill up the spines of decent people everywhere. 

Breaking a window with an errant baseball is a mistake; you can always replace a window.  But killing someone you don’t know with a gun or by beating them to death in the commission of a crime or for sport?  That’s not a mistake.  You can’t replace the life you took, and frankly there’s no amount of counseling or “rehab” in juvie or real prison that will bring that life back. 

We need to treat teens who murder like a virus.  Which is what they are.  We need to stop them before they become cultural idols and infect others.  And we need to stop them before they reproduce.   

Most of all, we need to step up to the problem and ignore the handwringing and certain global outrage when we execute a few of these monsters.  Which we should do in an expedited fashion.

After all, “justice too long delayed is justice denied,” again according to Dr. King. 

In the meantime, we’ll have to listen to all the BS.  I’ve had my fill. 

I thought my head would explode when the mother of one of the teens who killed the Australian jogger blamed the “community” for the murder.  Apparently, if we’d kept her kid more entertained this might not have happened.  It’s our job to keep potential teenage killers busy so they don’t go around and shoot innocent people, right? 

I know we’ll hear the excuse for the teen that shot a baby between the eyes in front of its mother that she refused to give up her purse.  I mean, he gave her every opportunity to do the right thing – he threatened her, he threatened her baby, he even shot the mother in the leg and still she wouldn’t give it up.  She didn’t leave him any other choice but to kill her baby.   Wait for it …

I can’t imagine what the excuse will be for the teens that beat the 88-year-old vet to death while he was sitting in his car.  But rest assured there will be one.    

Now, all of these crimes involved black teens, something you probably already knew from seeing pictures on TV or online.  Less covered – except for the jogger – was that all the victims were white.   

Some people – not the black community or most of the media of course – have suggested these should be treated as hate crimes.  For the record, I’ve never been a fan of hate crimes legislation.  These laws have always appeared redundant and silly to me and more a comment on political correctness run amuck than anything else. 

Plus, they seem to be applied arbitrarily, which is not how equal protection under the law is supposed to work.   How does beating up someone because of their race, religion, gender or sexual preference make that beating somehow worse?  If you kill someone for one of those same reasons does that make that murder somehow more noteworthy than any other murder? 

As for arbitrary:  How is it that a black person killing a white person is just a regular crime, but a black person killed by a white person is automatically considered a potential hate crime? 

Trust me, if the jogger had been black and the three teens that shot him in the back were all white don’t you think Jesse and Al would be screaming racism?   If the white woman and child who were shot had been black and the shooter – who had shot someone else in a robbery 10 days earlier – had been white, what do you think they would have had to say?  And if the 88-year-old vet had been black and the two teens who beat him to death had been white ….

Well, you can bet Eric Holder and Obama would be on TV promising the full weight of the Federal government to investigate.  They wouldn’t give a damn about the age of the perpetrators.   

Instead, what do we hear?  Crickets. 

So much for “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” 

The excuses are over.  Unequal treatment under the law cannot be tolerated.  And teens of any race who commit murder should be tried as adults and if convicted executed as adults would be.

Enough is enough. 

Squirrel!

Between the umpteenth call for an “honest discussion on race” – which is never really honest nor a discussion – and the general mismanagement of the truth by the media, I’ve been stuck.

I’ve started and stopped so many pieces.  I get focused on one thing and then – damn – somebody tosses out another heaping pile of crapola masquerading as fact I just can’t resist.

Maybe that’s the plan.  If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. 

That seems to be this Administration’s policy.  And the media plays right along.  So much bullshit is being shot in the air; it’s hard to think it’s a coincidence. 

So in an effort to break out, here are some quick hits:

Trayvon. 

I am so sick of hearing about Trayvon.  Especially from those who couldn’t be bothered with the facts, and certainly from his parents who didn’t give a rat’s ass about him until he was shot. Now he’s a “symbol.”  Okay, I’ll go with the symbol analogy if they insist.

So here’s what Trayvon symbolizes for me:

• A punk gangsta culture that glorifies bad behavior …
• A black community that only hears and sees what it wants to believe …
• A media willing to withhold facts and twist the truth to follow a narrative …
• Shameless black leaders who will do anything to keep themselves in the spotlight …
• A baseless cause célêbre for charlatans and nit-wits not interested in facts …

Look, Trayvon was no innocent youngster who was accosted and shot by a rabid racist just for being black.  He was a gangsta wannabe who picked the wrong guy to whip up on – somebody who had a gun.  Tough luck, Trayvon.  If it wasn’t George Zimmerman who punched his ticket now, it would have been someone else later on for sure.

Did he deserve to die that night?  No.  Could his death been avoided?  Sure.  He held all the cards and played a bad hand. 

Next? 

George Zimmerman.

The media had it in for him from the beginning.  NBC even got caught editing his 911 call to make him seem like a racist.  They had to invent the term “white Hispanic” to keep the race baiting angle alive. 

It was a near perfect storm for the media – black kid shot because he was black in a gated (read: “white”) community; white town watch cop wannabe with a gun exacting vigilante justice;  white police resisting charging the white town-watch guy; Obama getting involved “If I had a son …”; racism, the South, prejudice – it had it all.    

Except that was all bullshit as it turns out. 

Zimmerman was no racist.  Far from it. He tutored black kids.  He took a black girl as his date to the prom. His mother is Hispanic; his father white. He wasn’t exacting vigilante justice – he was defending himself against a younger, taller, more athletic man who was beating the crap out of him.  The reason police initially didn’t want to arrest and charge him was they had no probable cause – and as it turned out that was the right decision.    

That people were surprised when he was acquitted – despite all the judicial misconduct by the judge and prosecutors – honestly astounds me.  The fact that some were outraged at ”the injustice” of the outcome shows that some among us simply aren’t that bright. 

Unfortunately, they vote. 

Riley Cooper. 

When is a racial slur not a racial slur?  When a black person uses it against someone who isn’t black.  Or when a black person uses it in everyday conversation.   So in the Trayvon fiasco, Trayvon calling Zimmerman a “creepy ass cracker” wasn’t racist.  As a Southerner, cracker is definitely a racist term – perhaps the white equivalent of nigger.  But on the stand, a black woman friend of Trayvon’s didn’t see “creepy ass cracker” as racist. 

Fast forward to a white Riley Cooper who has had a few drinks at a Kenny Chesney concert and gets captured on somebody’s cell phone referring to a bunch of security guards as niggers.  Now had he been at a rap concert, he’d have heard the word nigger a lot – from performers.  He’s probably also heard the word used a lot by his black teammates referring to themselves or other blacks. 

But no, he was at a Kenny Chesney concert.  And now it’s a big deal. 

How will his black teammates respond?  Will they forgive him?  Will fans forgive him?  How will his career be affected? What can he do to atone properly for such offensive behavior?  

Please remember that Riley plays for the Philadelphia Eagles.  This is the team that took Michael Vick – a man who tortured and killed dogs as part of a dog-fighting business – and made him their starting quarterback when he was released from prison. 

Is calling someone a nigger as bad as killing dogs for sport?  Apparently so if you’re a white guy. 

   

Now, I’m not saying Riley should have used the word.  It was in supremely bad taste and uncalled for, and frankly as a public figure he should know better. So he did a stupid thing in the heat of the moment.  But let’s get real.  When multiple black basketball players can call somebody a faggot or worse and get a slap on the wrist and a fine, and a convicted dog killer can be a celebrated quarterback, where’s the proportionality? 

The straight poop. 

A newspaper article the other day was about how tough it is for poor women to afford disposable diapers for their kids.  Some poor women skipped changing their kids’ diapers, or rinsed and reused them to make ends meet.   

And before you ask, the reason they have to use disposable diapers is because some of them don’t have access to a laundromat.  Plus, some laundromats don’t allow people to wash diapers. 

Now of course a charity has sprung up to provide free disposable diapers to poor women – and that’s what the article was really about. 

I suspect that free disposable diapers will eventually become an entitlement.  Environmentalists will go nuts because of the landfill issues, but advocates for the poor will cheer. 

Plus it’s certainly easier and more politically correct to give away free disposable diapers than to tell poor women not to have children they can’t afford in the first place.   

On a related note:

Summer school lunch programs.

That’s not free meals for kids in summer school.  That’s free meals throughout the summer for school-age children, because their parents won’t or can’t feed them otherwise.   

Some parents have become so dependent on schools to feed their kids breakfast, lunch and in some cases dinner, they can’t imagine having to pick up part of the load when kids aren’t in school.  So they don’t.  According to news articles, even during the regular school year, teachers know to stock up on energy drinks and snack bars for Mondays and the days after holidays because a lot of their students don’t get fed at home on the weekends and holidays.

So where’s all the food stamp money going?  Not to feed peoples’ kids, apparently. 

This is simply outrageous.  But it’s a sign of the times.  Nobody wants to deal with the root cause of all this – people having children because they can, not because they can afford them financially or are prepared to take care of them. 

You’d think some brilliant person in Health & Human Services would have figured that out by now.  It’s pretty simple. 

But we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings now, do we? 

Prejudice against the poor. 

A new one from this week’s newspaper.  Seriously, there was a story about some study that showed people are disgusted by the poor and the homeless, and don’t want to have anything to do with them, even though they feel guilty about that. 

How unfair. 

Just because someone off their meds is wearing five wool overcoats in July and screaming at the sky about aliens beaming cosmic rays at them is no reason to cross the street.  Go on, walk right up to them and shake their crud-caked hand while they pee themselves and shriek invectives at you. 

After all, they’re just like you and me. 

And the poor? 

Well, there but for the grace of God … deciding to stay in school and getting a degree … not getting pregnant out of wedlock … not having a litter of kids by different baby mommas and poppas … not having a drug or alcohol problem .. and having a work ethic – well except for all that, there go you or me.

Sorry.  The Bible says the poor will always be with us.   Yet it never said we should try to increase the number of them.

However, we seem to be making it more advantageous to be poor now than at any other time.  That means fewer people are opting to take the steps to avoid being poor. 

Does that mean the poor and homeless disgust us?  No.  But it may mean that we’re all suffering a bit of donor fatigue when it comes to footing the bill for personal irresponsibility. 

That’s it for now.