Before we begin, allow to us to recount a titillating three hours of our life we’ll never get back, courtesy of what was once one of the finest retailers in America; we promise its pertinent to our point.
As we’d been unable to repair one of the hose reels mounted to the outside of our home, we asked TLJ to stop by The Home Depot and purchase a replacement unit featured on their website. We specified in writing a part identical in manufacture (Liberty) and design to the broken reel so as to eliminate any mounting issues and make use of replacement parts we already had on hand in the event of future repairs.
Imagine our surprise when TLJ brought back, with the active assistance of Depot personnel, a reel with the same SKU as the item requested, but manufactured by a different company (Hampton Bay). Sure enough, when we went to install it, the mounting holes were different. Not wishing to drill additional holes into our cedar siding, we checked the Depot website to ensure the reel we wanted was in stock…
…and drove the 15 minutes to exchange the hose reels. Amazingly, after an additional 20 minutes spent scouring the store, we discovered, contrary to The Depot’s own computerized inventory, our product wasn’t in stock.
Determined to provide Depot an additional $79.97 of our hard-earned money, we contacted the store in Eldersburg, MD (about 25 minutes away) to inquire whether they in fact, as indicated by their website…
…had the Liberty hose reel we wanted in stock. Our incredulity at an associate in Lawn & Garden immediately picking up the phone was rapidly replaced by all-too familiar frustration as we were informed this particularly unhelpful hardware man was working with a customer, and we were promptly placed on hold…for 25 minutes…quite literally until the moment we pulled into the parking lot! At which point we inquired what could possibly have occupied him with a single customer for so long…other than assembling a riding lawn mower. English being his second language, he either didn’t understand, or possibly didn’t appreciate, our thinly-veiled sarcasm.
Our frustration only increased when the Eldersburg manager (a) didn’t offer any meaningful apology for our 25 minutes on hold, and (b) confirmed her store didn’t have any Liberty model #704 wall-mounted hose reels in stock either, her store’s computerized inventory control system notwithstanding.
Still undeterred, this once-loyal Depot customer drove “home” to order the reel of our dreams online, enduring the entire purchase process only to be informed, after the fact…
…the product is no longer available online; or evidently anywhere ELSE within The Home Depot empire.
We remember when, living in Atlanta in the mid-’80’s, Depot was the greatest shopping experience on the planet. Now, almost every time we enter the store we have flashbacks to Hechinger, Circuit City and S&H Green Stamps.
Which brings us to, as the late, not-so-great Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story, and four or five related items which are a cross between Your Tax Dollars at Work and We Get the Government Dimocrats Deserve; stay with us until we finish.
First up, courtesy of the WSJ, a snippet from Katherine Archuleta’s November 8, 2013 blog post immediately after assuming authority over the OPM:
Holy cow; a cross between Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Buckwheat!
My first week at OPM is already over and it’s been an intense, exciting, challenging and informative first five days on the job. I’ve had the chance to meet the senior staff and their support teams. I’ve also learned a great deal about all of the intricacies of OPM’s departments and how much everyone at OPM does on a daily basis. So, for that, thank you. Your work is important and impressive. We couldn’t run this agency without you.
I thought this would be a good time to talk to you all about a few of my priorities and goals for my time at OPM.
First and foremost, I want to be your champion. I want the American people to know who you are, and what you do, and how that makes a difference in their daily lives. I am going to represent you across the country, because you deserve the recognition.You deserve to have people know how hard you work and that you dedicate long hours to very difficult issues.Federal employees deserve to be recognized.
I want to tackle some of our most pressing issues to ensure that we are able to serve to the best of our ability. In my first 100 days at OPM, I plan to work with my team to create a plan for handing I.T. modernization across the agency, especially for retirement. I’ve had the chance to meet and talk with our new CTO, the CIO and others every day this week, and I can say that there are some fantastic ideas in the mix.We’re definitely on the right track.
As Wikipedia notes, before heading the OMP…
“She had previously served as National Political Director for Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. Prior to that, she had been Executive Director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center Foundation in New Mexico, had co-founded the Latina Initiative, had worked at a Denver law firm, and had worked in the Clinton Administration.“
Forgetting for the moment homeless dudes taking photos of the First Marxette serving at a soup kitchen while sporting $530 designer sneakers…
…ain’t one of the genuinely needy 5%, we’d argue whether anyone, poor or not, actually “NEEDS” a cell phone, or a phone period for that matter?!? Someone “needs” to make a call; what’s wrong with toll-free (within the continental United States; i.e., not Guadalajara, Tegucigalpa or Lagos) public phone booths?!? Worried about access to emergency medical services, fire department, police…or maintaining contact with or sources of illegal substances…er,…we mean…”relatives”; howz ’bout cell phones which offer free 911 service and incoming calls?!?
But we digress! Fourth, submitted for your perusal, the real impact of…
“…President Obama dropped by Nashville last week to claim Tennessee as a state where “the law has worked better than we expected” and “actually ended up costing less than people expected,” so let’s test the reality of those claims. As a baseline, in 2015 premium increases for Tennessee plans ranged from 7.5% to 19.1%.
For 2016 BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee—one of the state’s two major insurers—is requesting a 36.3% increase. One product line from Community Health Alliance Mutual is rising 32.8%, while another from Time Insurance Co. hits 46.9%. Offerings from Cigna,Humana and UnitedHealthcare range from 11% to 18%. If this means ObamaCare is working better than the President expected, then what, exactly, was he expecting?…”
No, not denial; rather everything is proceeding precisely…
…according to plan. When the time is right, the sheep will be dying for single-payer, government-run healthcare…and shortly thereafter dying from it!
Fifth, courtesy of Jeff Foutch, Breitbart reservedly relates how…
“If the rule of law still meant anything in Obama’s America, the President’s agenda of amnesty for illegal aliens would be in big trouble. It doesn’t, so the Administration just keeps pumping out amnesty documents, no matter how often federal courts order them to stop.
Team Obama even stooped to flat-out lying to a federal judge about the need for a temporary injunction to stop the amnesty printing press. Later they made a “surprise filing” to the judge disclosing that their previous statements were false, and – whoopsie! – they had already tossed 100,000 amnesty packages out.
So the news from Politico that “President Barack Obama appears likely to lose – again – in the protracted legal fight over his executive actions on immigration” doesn’t really mean much…”
Sounds great, huh?!? Yeah, about as great as…
Lastly, now they want to do the same to the world as they’ve done to America, as Sohrab Amari, writing at the WSJ, details…
“On Thursday, Western diplomats in Vienna missed another deadline in the years-long Iranian nuclear negotiations. The latest snag is Iran’s demand for immediate sanctions relief and the lifting of a United Nations arms embargo. The next day in Tehran, the regime issued other demands—namely, that the U.S. and Israel cease to exist.
…Quds Day is fun for the whole family. As one father told the semiofficial Fars News Agency in a video interview, “Our children who are less than a year old are tomorrow’s soldiers against Israel.” The infant son he held in his arms was dressed in camouflage gear, with a Yasser Arafat-style kaffiyeh around his neck.
As one suicide-bomber’s mother said to another suicide-bomber’s mother looking at their son’s baby pictures, “They blow up so young!”
Regime leaders joined in the festivities. The government’s representatives included the reputedly moderate President Hasan Rouhani,not-so-moderate former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani, his brother Sadeq, the head of the judiciary, and Gen. Ahmad Reza Pourdastan,commander of the Iranian army’s ground forces.
Mr. Rouhani said in a Persian-language statement on his website: “With unity, resistance, jihad and sacrifice, the Muslims, including the Palestinian people, will reach their lofty goals.” He didn’t specify those goals, but the “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” banners held up by marchers around him, seen in photographs published by regime media outlets, drove home the point. Mr. Rouhani went on to blame “the Zionist regime and the Global Arrogance”—a favorite regime nickname for Washington—for “bankrolling the strife” roiling the Muslim world…”
Forget the perverted policies behind the promotion of political patronage, bureaucratic bumbling, government giveaways, death panels and enhanced illegal immigration. THIS is what sticks in our craw the most at this moment: the President of the United States and his Secretary of State, in direct violation of their duties under the Constitution their sworn to protect and defend, conspiring to consume…
…not only the lone democracy in the Middle East, but the Beacon of Freedom to liberty-lovers across the globe.
Here’s the juice: having once been the envy of the retail world, The Home Depot is close to running its course. Unfortunately, absent a major course correction, America ain’t far behind. The way we see it, we’re a country:
1. being run, more and more each day, by utter incompetents, who:
2. cannot effectively manage the innumerable laws and regulations already on the books, so:
3. to distract from their ineptitude, are only too eager to place new, unconstitutional restrictions on hundreds of millions of law-abiding to combat the acts of crazed criminals and terrorists…who simply disregard them anyway.
That being said, in the words of the flawed-Father of the United States Navy:…up yours, Barry…
…we have not yetBEGUN to fight!!!
Meanwhile, back at the ranch with The Gang Who Still Can’t Shoot Straight, Jonah Goldberg has some inconvenient truths for those still enamored of The Donald:
“Which gets me back to the grifter thing.
I’ve written many times about how I hate the term RINO because conservatives should consider themselves Republicans in Name Only. The Republican Party is a vessel, a tool for achieving conservative ends. It’s nothing more than a team. Conservatism is different. It’s a body of ideas, beliefs, and temperaments. The amazing thing is that Trump is both a RINO and a CINO. I’m sure he has some authentic and sincere conservative views down in there somewhere. But the idea that he’s more plausibly conservative — or more loyally Republican — than Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Scott Walker, or any of the others is just flatly absurd. It is vastly more plausible that he is a stalking horse for his dear friend Hillary Clinton than he is a sincere conservative.
Trump supporters need an intervention. I want to sit them down at the kitchen table, reach into a manila envelope, and pull out the proof that he’s a fraud. The conversation would go something like this:
Immigration: You seem to think he’s an immigration hardliner, and he’s certainly pretending to be. But why can’t you see through it? He condemned Mitt Romney as an immigration hardliner in 2012 and favored comprehensive immigration reform. Hetold Bill O’Reilly he was in favor of a “path to citizenship” for 30 million illegal immigrants:
Trump: You have to give them a path. You have 20 million, 30 million, nobody knows what it is. It used to be 11 million. Now, today I hear it’s 11, but I don’t think it’s 11. I actually heard you probably have 30 million. You have to give them a path, and you have to make it possible for them to succeed. You have to do that.
Question: Just how many rapists and drug dealers did Donald Trump want to give green cards to?
Abortion: In 1999 he said, “I’m totally pro-choice. I hate it and I hate saying it. And I’m almost ashamed to say that I’m pro-choice but I am pro-choice because I think we have no choice.”
Man, it’s like he’s channeling Thomas Aquinas there.
Now he says he’s pro-life. But I’ll spare the mocking on this because at least he’s flip-flopping in the right direction, and I don’t like to second guess peoples’ professed religious convictions.
Obamacare: The man wrote in his own book and said elsewhere that he was in favor of Canadian-style socialized medicine — which would put him to the left of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and on pretty much the same page as Bernie Sanders.
Economics: People tout the guy’s business record. But he represents almost exactly what his supporters think he opposes. He’s a crony capitalist par excellence. He gives to whatever politician can grease the skids for his next deal — and he makes no apologies for it. He’s an eminent domain voluptuary. He abuses bankruptcy laws like a stack of homemade get-out-of-jail-free cards.
Parlez vous Conservative?
The most troubling defense is this claptrap that he “tells it like it is.” Well, first of all, no he doesn’t. He tells it the way you want to hear it, which is an entirely different thing. He is like William Jennings Bryan, only his cross of gold has an all-you-can-eat buffet under it, and looks remarkably like a capital “T.”
‘The people of Nebraska are for free silver, and I am for free silver,’ Bryan announced. ‘I will look up the arguments later.’ That is Trump’s approach. He’s saying what understandably angry people want to hear him say.
He reminds me a lot of Mitt Romney, at least in one respect. I always said that Romney “spoke conservatism as a second language” (a line some people ripped off, btw). That’s why Romney called himself a “severe conservative,” talked about how he “likes to fire people,” and anathematized the “47 percent.”
Trump is even less truly conservative, but he’s trying to speak in an even grubbier dialect of conservatism. And, having grown up in the tabloid politics of New York, he’s better at faking it.
Eventually, I suspect, this will be the cause of his undoing. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know about conservatism, and at some point he will say something that even his biggest fans will recognize as a damning revelation about the real man beneath the schtick. The only question is whether he implodes before or after he does permanent damage to the GOP’s chances in 2016.
The Conservative Heart
Look, these are rough times for conservatives, for reasons too lengthy, and all too familiar, to go into here. But none of our problems — demographic, political, cultural — can be solved unless conservatives take the cause of persuasion to heart. All of our problems can be fixed by convincing people to join our cause. That is what politics is about — persuading people that their interests and concerns are better addressed by coming to our side. And, given the degraded nature of our culture, I won’t deny that having a celebrity on our side has its utility. But it’s only helpful if that celebrity convinces people to switch sides. As a purely mathematical proposition, it is insane to believe that Donald Trump will convert more voters than he will repel…”
Read him in his own words and tell us again why you favor him for dog catcher, let alone President of the United States. Remember, Hitler was a rabble-rouser!
And in the Environmental Moment,
Is a mini ICE AGE on the way? Scientists warn the sun will ‘go to sleep’ in 2030 and could cause temperatures to plummet
“The Earth could be headed for a ‘mini ice age’ researchers have warned. A new study claims to have cracked predicting solar cycles – and says that between 2020 and 2030 solar cycles will cancel each other out. This, they say, will lead to a phenomenon known as the ‘Maunder minimum’ – which has previously been known as a mini ice age when it hit between 1646 and 1715, even causing London’s River Thames to freeze over…”
So much for settled…
…science!!!
On the Lighter Side…
Finally, as we’ve repeatedly pointed out, mere toleration of diversity isn’t nearly enough for Progressives; they want you to…
![Capt. John Paul Jones[8]](http://www.thedailygouge.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Capt.-John-Paul-Jones8.png)
Loading ...
You must be logged in to post a comment.