I saw some great stats recently of the amount of cabinet members who worked in private business prior to being appointed. This administration is trying to run GM and AIG and is supposedly focused on creating jobs. The problem is, none of them have any experience in creating jobs. Take a look at this chart:

8% of Obama’s cabinet worked in private business. The lowest other than him was 32%, and that was Carter. This is not the team we want trying to create jobs.

I read an article on the New York Times website about how much employers must pay in unemployment insurance. It’s really quite a bit more than I would have expected. I know my company keeps people on, sometimes for as long as 2 years, as contractors before hiring them on full-time. I suspect this is partially to avoid these types of problems where you hire someone and need to fire them in 45 days and don’t want to be subject to the unemployment penalties.

If small businesses have to be worried about a half percent increase in what they pay in unemployment insurance when they need to fire someone for incompetence it’s no wonder they are hesitant to hire new people.

From the article:

Here’s how it works in Illinois. The important point for business owners to know is that when the state pays out claims to a company’s former employees, that company’s unemployment tax rate goes up. For each business, the state calculates how many dollars have been paid in compensation over the previous three years and adds on about 48 percent through various calculations. The result is that in Illinois, you end up paying for incremental compensation claims at a rate of $1.48 for every dollar that a former employee collects.

If you haven’t seen this yet it is a campaign video by Carly Fiorina who is running Tom Campbell in the Republican primaries. If you have to ask, she is from California. By her points, I don’t think I really want him representing us in Congress. Watching this video, I’m certain I don’t want her representing us for anything.

Hat Tip: Michelle Malkin

I’ve recently spent a bit of time discussing the budget deficit and how it is going to effect us, as well as unemployment and all the stimulus spending. Recently Paul from The Loud Talker sent me some beautiful charts that show where things have been recently. Check out his whole article on the deficit and take a look at these charts.

If anyone thinks that those deficits are needed, think again. They are going to kill our economy.

I thought they told me if we passed the government stimulus package unemployment would peak at 8 percent. I guess they were wrong.

56 year old Donna Jackson was home alone when Billy Dean Riley threw a chair through her back door. She shot him one time with a shotgun. She didn’t miss. This is yet another great story of a women protecting herself and her property with a firearm. Who knows how it would have turned out if she didn’t have the shotgun, or didn’t know how to use it.

“There’s a man at my back door,” she told the dispatcher. “He’s trying to get in.”

She said Riley was hollering and appeared drunk.

“I have a shotgun, and I will use it,” she warned.

“He is banging on the door,” Jackson told the dispatcher. “It’s a patio door, and it’s not worth a nickel. I can hear him banging. He’s going to get in.”

Loud noises can be heard on the 9-1-1 audio.

“He’s crazy. He’s crazy,” Jackson said. “I’m taking the safety off the gun, ma’am. He’s acting crazy. I don’t know how he got in here. He had to have come from the very back. Oh cr-p, he’s coming around the front.”

The dispatcher asked, “Is your front door locked?”

“Yes, ma’am,” she replied, “but it’s only got a lock on the handle.”

Then the dispatcher asked, “Do you have a place where you can go inside your house and lock yourself in a room?”

“Uh, not really,” Jackson said calmly. “I’ve got a big shotgun. I’m not going into a tiny bathroom.”

Loud crashing noises can be heard on the audio tape.

“I don’t want to have to kill this man, but I’ll kill him graveyard dead, ma’am,” she told the dispatcher.

The dispatcher replied, “I understand.”

“Alright,” Jackson replied as she prepared to defend herself.

Jackson stood in the kitchen with her lights turned off, remaining calm and updating the dispatcher. The man continued banging as dogs barked.

“Oh cr-p, he’s breaking in,” Jackson said. “He’s breaking in now.

“I have the gun on him. He’s breaking the window. I’m going to kill him.”

She continued, “He’s walking across, back and forth on the porch. He looks to be an older man. I don’t want to kill him. … He’s kicking the door. Please hurry. Please hurry. He’s going to make it in. Please hurry, ma’am. He’s kicking the door. Please hurry. I think he’s drunk. He doesn’t know where his pickup’s at.”

Jackson prayed, “God, I don’t want to kill this man. Oh dear God.”

‘I’m so sorry, Father’

She told the dispatcher, the sheriff deputies “need to hurry. He’s going to break this thing open. If he does, I’ll have to kill him, ma’am. I don’t want to kill him.”

The dispatcher responded, “I understand, ma’am. You have to protect yourself.”

“I’m trying to stay away from the window,” Jackson said. “It’s off safety, ma’am. All I’ve got to do is fire.”

Riley picked up a plastic patio chair in the backyard and hurled it through the sliding door, shattering the glass. Several loud crashing sounds can be heard on the audio as he forces his way into Jackson’s home.

Jackson said calmly, “He’s gotten in the house. I’m going to shoot.”

“Oh God,” the dispatcher replied.

After another loud crash, Jackson’s shotgun blasts.

The shot killed the intruder instantly.

This was clearly not something she wanted to do, but when someone crashes into your house in the middle of the night you don’t know what they are going to do. Protecting yourself and your loved ones is the most important thing you can do.

Obama spent his State of the Union address talking about our fiscal problems and how he wanted to fix them. He then released his budget for this year. We are going to have a 1.56 trillion dollar deficit on a 3.8 trillion budget, the highest in history. He’s calling for increased jobs spending:

The jobs initiative largely mirrors last year’s stimulus bill, but is about one-third its size. The president is asking for nearly $300 billion for recession relief and job stimulus. The budget paints a remarkably dire picture of a federal government that will have to borrow one-third of what it spends next year as it runs a deficit that still would total some $1.3 trillion.

What a great idea, since last year’s stimulus package worked so well at creating jobs. Unemployment went from 8 to 10 percent from the time the stimulus package was passed last year until now.

Obama went on to say, “What I reject is the same old grandstanding when the cameras are on, and the same irresponsible budget policies when the cameras are off,” the president said. “It’s time to save what we can, spend what we must, and live within our means once again.” It is a little bit entertaining to me that he can say this with a straight face. Who is he talking to? He just submitted the largest budget in our history with a 1.56 trillion dollar deficit.

Republicans weren’t impressed with the proposals.

“They’re not willing to do big ideas. They’re doing ideas that create perception but don’t do anything big,” said New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg, senior Republican on the Budget Committee. “The spending freeze for example. You’re talking what, $10 billion on a $1.6 trillion deficit?”

Obama’s proposal spells out plans to have a 700 billion deficit in 4 years, “fulfilling” his promise to cut the deficit in half. What a joke. That is bigger than any deficit we had before he took office. I’m not impressed. If Obama were serious about getting us out of this mess, the deficit would be 0, not 700 billion. He, along with the rest of Washington, clearly doesn’t know what the word “budget” means. I don’t get to spend money I don’t have, I really wish they would stop spending money they don’t have.

Here is a stat that is pretty telling. To have a 0 deficit based on the projections in Obama’s budget, we’d have to go all the back to the amount we spent in….wait for it….2004. I know, huge sacrifice. Just do it. The growth in government recently has been staggering, and it has to stop. I’m sick of fancy speeches and smooth talking, I want some real action.

Reader Nathan Skirvin sent in this Time Magazine article detailing a problem with the laws in Miami-Dade country forcing ex-Pedophiles into living in tent communities under a bridge because it is the only place legally far enough from restricted zones.

County officials, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union, hope the law will prod states and perhaps even the U.S. Congress to craft more-uniform laws to prevent the kind of residency-restriction arms race that Florida let local governments wage. “The safety of Floridians has suffered as local politicians have tried to one-up each other with policies that have resulted in colonies of homeless sex offenders left to roam our streets,” says state senator Dave Aronberg, a Democrat running for state attorney general. The excessive rules, he adds, “have the effect of driving offenders underground and off law enforcement’s radar.” Aronberg is co-sponsoring a new bill that would establish uniform statewide residency rules fixed at 1,750 feet — studies show that in many cities, over 50% of available housing is within 2,500 feet of schools — and include the sweeping no-loitering zones.

Theoretically, Florida’s 1995 legislation should have pre-empted more-severe local ordinances. Yet most state politicians didn’t want to be seen as coming to the rescue of sex offenders. Governor Charlie Crist, now a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate who is facing a more conservative opponent for the GOP nomination, has largely ignored the municipal laws as well as the Julia Tuttle eyesore, even as it has become a cautionary symbol of how restrictions can backfire.

This current situation doesn’t sound safe for Miami-Dade county citizens to me.

Recently, a couple weeks ago or so, my wife pointed me to this article on CNN detailing the way inmates convicted for some especially heinous sex crimes are held indefinitely *after* they have served their entire sentence. These individuals are given no indication of when, or if, they will be released. The legislators enacting the laws, and the supreme court, have called this justice, I’m not convinced.

The confinement these people are being subjected to, for an indefinite amount of time, is, according to the law, for rehabilitation. The Supreme Court has declared this practice acceptable so long as it serves on as a way to rehabilitate the convicts and not to further punish them.

I’ve spoken before about the way ex-convicts are treated and why these felons are repeat offenders and it seems to me that the state has a somewhat lackadaisical view of what constitutes punishment, perhaps even a hypocritical one. Let’s take, for example, a murderer who is serving 10 years. If this murder misbehaves during his 10 years, perhaps he becomes embroiled in a prison brawl in the cafeteria and stabs a fellow inmate with a home made knife… like you might see on television, he would likely be ‘prosecuted’ within the confines of the prison and if found guilty would most likely have additional time tacked onto his sentence or be placed in solitary confinement. In this case the prison sentence has determined that further restricting this individuals contact with the outside world is the appropriate way to discipline them. In the case of the sexual deviant, however, the state believes it is not punishment to further confine someone who has served their entire sentence, so long as they are being rehabilitated.

Not only is it clear that the prisoner’s confinement for rehabilitation is a form of additional punishment, It is obvious that the current implementation of this rehabilitation is horribly inefficient and not in the best interest of tax payers. Rehabilitation costs the government somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 million dollars annually, 150,000$ a year per individual. For the state governments implementing these policies this money comes after the massive cost of boarding and caring for these prisoners while they served their actual sentence.

The solution seems obvious to me. We should ship these prisoners directly to rehabilitation when they are taken into custody to serve their sentence. I don’t see why they should pay their time twice or I as a tax payer should pay for them twice. At the end  of their sentence we should release them. If it is decided that they have ben rehabilitated then we can move them into the regular prison population for the remainder of their sentence.

I hear you. You are thinking, “Well, hot shot, what are we going to do with people who have finished serving their time and haven’t been rehabilitated yet?” For them I think we already have solutions in place. Use of chemical castration drugs is a well established practice for ex-felons convicted of sex crimes, though not a practice I generally approve of, it also feels like a second punishment to me. I think the only responsible thing for us to do is to release these individuals into society and have them meet periodically with a parole officer and have them visit free rehabilitation sessions until they are deemed to no longer be a danger to society. This solution would allow tax payers to still save money because we would only pay for the counseling / therapy and it would provide the newly released criminal the freedom they deserve for serving the entirety of their sentence.

Any better ideas out there for both punishing these criminals and reintroducing them into society after they have done their time?