17 September 2012

We're Supposed to Believe a JUNK YouTube Video Did this?

Think about this for a moment.  In countries where the majority of the people don't even have computers, supposedly they're all sitting around watching YouTube Videos disrespecting Mohammed?  Anyone who's seen this video can see that it's CLEARLY an amateur job that could have been put together by kids, yet this is the video that's causing mass rioting all over the world?
In the meantime, when Bill Maher put together a professional FULL FEATURE FILM absolutely SLAMMING Islam, nope, nothing nada!  How does this make any sense folks?    No it seems to me that these people are being purposely riled up to protest on this garbage video while the majority have not even seen it.  In the mean time, instead of our leaders condemning the Riots, the Killing and the all out chaos, INSTEAD .... they're out there "apoligizing" for this video, as if "WE THE PEOPLE" put this dammed thing together! The truth is that this is something that is being used to manipulate people.  To what end, I have no idea but even the Libyan President is saying that all of this was planned!

Romney Can't Help Himself, He Sees a Problem He Fixes It.


On the night of July 6, 1996, 14-year-old Melissa Gay, daughter of Bain Capital executive Robert Gay, went missing in New York City, after going out without permission. Gay went to Mitt Romney, his business partner, and explained the situation.  Mitt Romney, immediately took charge and paid for his 50 employees to fly to NYC and put them all up in a Hotel to assist in the search.
"And so I said," Romney recalled when asked about the incident during a town hall meeting in March 2012, "‘Let’s close the firm, let’s close the company. Let’s all of us fly down to New York and try to find her.’ And so we closed the business, we went home and packed our things, we got a hotel near the airport where we all went to, we set up a headquarters, we met with the detectives with the New York City Police Department, we hired a private investigative firm to help guide us through this process."
Gay, Romney, and team literally fanned out on the streets of Manhattan in suits and ties, distributing 300,000 fliers and asking passersby point-blank if they had seen the missing girl. Their efforts quickly paid off in the form of a phone call from a private residence in Montville, New Jersey, where it turned out Melissa was staying, after going to an all night Rave Party without her parent's permission. She was retrieved by police and reunited with her parents in the early morning hours of July 12.
"She's OK," Robert Gay said in a statement to the Associated Press. "How can you ask for anything more than that?"

Yet people say that "Romney can't relate to people with problems"?  Just watch the video and judge for yourself.

Here Comes Inflation, AGAIN!

Here we go again guys, the Fed is up to no good, and on a Rampage printing money as fast as it can run the presses.  I guess we learned nothing from the 70's and how Inflation got out of control with excessive Government spending.  With all this money flooding the system, Food, Gas and Energy prices, which are already at an all time high are going even higher!  This action will undoubtedly Further push down American's disposable income, which in turn will cause even more job losses!  I mean let's face it, if you're having to spend $100.00 in gas just to go to the restaurant, you probably can't afford to go to that restaurant anymore right?  As Investors business Daily says, 
The government's addition of $1 trillion a year to our nation's debt hangs over this economy like a dark cloud, keeping entrepreneurs and big businesses alike on the sideline. The "fiscal cliff" we're about to go over will sock Americans — especially entrepreneurs — with a tax hike of almost $1 trillion. That's why the economy's dead — not insufficient Fed money printing."
 But don't worry there's a bright side to all this money printing, I'm sure that within just a few years of the coming inflation, we could do like the Germans did in the 1920's and use all that extra cash as a heating source for our homes. Hey at least no one will freeze to death in the Winter of 2016!

10 September 2012

Government Motors Losing Almost 50K on Every Volt


Nearly two years after the introduction of the path-breaking plug-in hybrid, GM is still losing as much as $49,000 on each Volt it builds, according to estimates provided to Reuters by industry analysts and manufacturing experts.


Cheap Volt lease offers meant to drive more customers to Chevy showrooms this summer may have pushed that loss even higher. There are some Americans paying just $5,050 to drive around for two years in a vehicle that cost as much as $89,000 to produce.
At this price as little as $199 a month for the lease, it represents an absolute bargain for the Driver, but an absolute Boondogle for the Taxpayers who funded not only the development of the car, but also Government rebates handed back by the Government! ~ Added by NoSocialism.com
And while the loss per vehicle will shrink as more are built and sold, GM is still years away from making money on the Volt, which will soon face new competitors from Ford, Honda and others.
GM's basic problem is that "the Volt is over-engineered and over-priced," said Dennis Virag, president of the Michigan-based Automotive Consulting Group.
And in a sign that there may be a wider market problem, Nissan, Honda and Mitsubishi have been struggling to sell their electric and hybrid vehicles, though Toyota's Prius range has been in increasing demand.
GM's quandary is how to increase sales volume so that it can spread its estimated $1.2-billion investment in the Volt over more vehicles while reducing manufacturing and component costs - which will be difficult to bring down until sales increase.
But the Volt's steep $39,995 base price and its complex technology — the car uses expensive lithium-polymer batteries, sophisticated electronics and an electric motor combined with a gasoline engine — have kept many prospective buyers away from Chevy showrooms.
Some are put off by the technical challenges of ownership, mainly related to charging the battery. Plug-in hybrids such as the Volt still take hours to fully charge the batteries - a process that can been speeded up a bit with the installation of a $2,000 commercial-grade charger in the garage.

PLANT SHUTDOWN
The lack of interest in the car has prevented GM from coming close to its early, optimistic sales projections. Discounted leases as low as $199 a month helped propel Volt sales in August to 2,831, pushing year-to-date sales to 13,500, well below the 40,000 cars that GM originally had hoped to sell in 2012.
Out in the trenches, even the cheap leases haven't always been effective.
A Chevrolet dealership that is part of an auto dealer group in Toms River, New Jersey, has sold only one Volt in the last year, said its president Adam Kraushaar. The dealership sells 90 to 100 Chevrolets a month.
The weak sales are forcing GM to idle the Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant that makes the Chevrolet Volt for four weeks from September 17, according to plant suppliers and union sources. It is the second time GM has had to call a Volt production halt this year.
GM acknowledges the Volt continues to lose money, and suggests it might not reach break even until the next-generation model is launched in about three years.
"It's true, we're not making money yet" on the Volt, said Doug Parks, GM's vice president of global product programs and the former Volt development chief, in an interview. The car "eventually will make money. As the volume comes up and we get into the Gen 2 car, we're going to turn (the losses) around," Parks said.
"I don't see how General Motors will ever get its money back on that vehicle," countered Sandy Munro, president of Michigan-based Munro & Associates, which performs detailed tear-down analyses of vehicles and components for global manufacturers and the U.S. government.
It currently costs GM "at least" $75,000 to build the Volt, including development costs, Munro said. That's nearly twice the base price of the Volt before a $7,500 federal tax credit provided as part of President Barack Obama's green energy policy.
Other estimates range from $76,000 to $88,000, according to four industry consultants contacted by Reuters. The consultants' companies all have performed work for GM and are familiar with the Volt's development and production. They requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of their auto industry ties.
Parks declined to comment on specific costs related to the Volt.
The independent cost estimates obtained by Reuters factor in GM's initial investment in development of the Volt and its key components, as well as new tooling for battery, stamping, assembly and supplier plants — a price tag that totals "a little over" $1 billion, Parks said. Independent estimates put it at $1.2 billion, a figure that does not include sales, marketing and related corporate costs.
Spread out over the 21,500 Volts that GM has sold since the car's introduction in December 2010, the development and tooling costs average just under $56,000 per car. That figure will, of course, come down as more Volts are sold.
The actual cost to build the Volt is estimated to be an additional $20,000 to $32,000 per vehicle, according to Munro and the other industry consultants.
The production cost estimates are considerably higher than those for the Chevrolet Cruze, the Volt's conventional gasoline-engine sister car, which Munro estimates at $12,000 to $15,000 per vehicle.
Production costs typically include such items as parts, material, labor and the cost to run the factory, according to manufacturing expert Ron Harbour, who heads the North American Automotive Practice at Michigan-based consultant Oliver Wyman.

COST PENALTIES
The Volt costs more to build for several reasons, mostly related to the car's richer content, complex technology and still-low sales and production volumes.
The basic model has a higher level of equipment and features than the Cruze, which is assembled in Lordstown, Ohio, and has a starting sales price of $17,925. The Volt also has a number of unique parts, including the battery pack, the electric motor and the power electronics.
Some of GM's suppliers also impose cost penalties on the automaker because the Volt's production volume remains well below projections.
Still, as the company wrestles with how to drive down costs and increase showroom traffic, Parks said the Volt is an important car for GM in other respects.
"It wasn't conceived as a way to make tons of money," he said. "It was a big dip in the technology pool for GM. We've learned a boatload of stuff that we're deploying on other models," Parks said. Those include the Cruze and such future cars as the 2014 Cadillac ELR hybrid.
The same risky strategy — gambling on relatively untested technology — drove massive investments by Toyota Motor Corp in the Prius hybrid and Nissan Motor Co in the Leaf electric car.
Toyota said it now makes a profit on the Prius, which was introduced in the United States in 2000 and is now in its third generation. Sales of the Prius hybrid, which comes in four different versions priced as low as $19,745, have almost doubled so far this year to 164,408.
Other such vehicles haven't done nearly as well. Nissan's pure-electric Leaf, which debuted at the same time as the Volt and retails for $36,050, has sold just 4,228 this year, while the Honda Insight, which has the lowest starting price of any hybrid in the U.S. at $19,290, has sales this year of only 4,801. The Mitsubishi i, an even smaller electric car priced from $29,975, is in even worse shape, with only 403 sales.
Toyota's unveiling of the original Prius caught U.S. automakers off guard. GM, then under the leadership of Rick Wagoner and Bob Lutz, decided it needed a "leapfrog" product to tackle Toyota and unveiled the Volt concept to considerable fanfare at the 2007 Detroit auto show.
The car entered production in the fall of 2010 as the first U.S. gasoline-electric hybrid that could be recharged by plugging the car into any electrical outlet. The Obama administration, which engineered a $50-billion taxpayer rescue of GM from bankruptcy in 2009 and has provided more than $5 billion in subsidies for green-car development, praised the Volt as an example of the country's commitment to building more fuel-efficient cars.

NEXT-GENERATION CAR
GM's investment in the Volt has so far been a fraction of the $5 billion that Nissan said it is spending to develop and tool global production of the Leaf and its associated technologies and the reported $10 billion or more that Toyota has plowed into the Prius and various derivatives over the past decade.
But there will inevitably be more development costs for future generations of GM plug-ins and it could still could be years before GM sells enough Volts to bring the cost down to break even.
The average per-car costs for development and tooling will drop as sales volume rises. But GM will need to sell 120,000 Volts before the per-vehicle cost reaches $10,000 — and that may not occur during the projected five-year life cycle of the first-generation Volt.
Parks said the company also is continuously reducing production costs on the current Volt and its successor. "There is a strong push on the cost of the Gen 2 to get the car to make money and to be more affordable . . . Virtually every component in the next-gen car is going to be cheaper," he said.
One obvious way to pull down costs is to push up volume — but GM is paying a hefty price to do so.
The automaker just ended a special Volt lease program that offered customers a low monthly payment of $279 a month for two years, with some high-volume dealers dropping the payment to $199 a month after receiving incentive money from GM, with down payments as low as $250. The company said about two-thirds of Volt customers in July and August leased their vehicles, compared with about 40 percent earlier this year.
Before GM resorted to discounting Volt leases, sales were averaging just over 1,500 cars a month. A huge part of that reason was consumer push back over the price, according to Virag of Automotive Consulting.
Volt's nearest competitor, the Prius, is priced at $24,795, with a newer version, the Prius Plug-In, starting at $32,795.
Parks said the sales pitch for the Volt was "difficult" because of the sticker price and the car's technical complexity. But the discounted leases have helped lure more non-GM buyers into Chevy showrooms. Their number-one trade-in: Toyota Prius.
Raymond Chevrolet, in suburban Chicago, sells an average 1,000 Chevys a month, including three to seven Volts. Dealership president Mark Scarpelli said that "some people who like the concept of an electric vehicle find it cost-prohibitive."

(Reporting by Paul Lienert, Bernie Woodall and Ben Klayman in Detroit; Editing by Martin Howell & Theodore d'Afflisio)

Boyfriend, You Know When It's Over

03 September 2012

New Obama slogan has long ties to Marxism, socialism - Washington Times

New Obama slogan has long ties to Marxism, socialism - Washington Times
I don't think Obama is a REAL socialist, he's more of a Statist, kind of like how the Nazi's treated the economy. You have Government working very closely with big business, where profits are private, but losses become Public.  Very similar to Bush's "Too Big to Fail" policy with the banks.

In a way, it's almost a "Reverse Robinhood".  Robinhood stole from the wealthy tax collectors, who had "stolen" their wealth from the poor.  Robinhood gave that money BACK to the poor, and while Obama talks about taking money from the wealthy and giving it to the poor, instead he's given his biggest campaign contributors such as the CEO of Solyndra, hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

In a way, I think it's an insult to "true" socialists and "true" communist to call Obama a Socialist, because indeed he is not.

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