Private Mars Rocket II

There is an area retail business which I shall not name that is being ran into the ground by the owner. It's a shame, really. The business has a good location and an adequate physical plant. (The place could use a new carpet and some paint, but there's nothing structural wrong with it.) There's no immediate competition, and a nice built-in market.

Yet they are failing. In part, this is due to a lack of consistency. They've had a series of managers and employees, resulting in wide swings in product quality and availability. The owner closed a revenue-producing section of the place for no apparent reason. What's worse, he's now kept his current hours but some of those hours have reduced services. Nothing pisses off a customer more than to walk into a place that's open but be told "we don't do X on these days."

As a result, the owner appears to be attempting to strong-arm more money out of existing customers. This attempt failed with a customer of my acquaintance, resulting in further lost business. The spiral continues downward.

So, I watched number 4,751 of the 6,821 scheduled debates in the Republican Presidential nominee race. This one was focused on foreign policy, and hosted by the People Who Brought You The Apparently Unnecessary War In Iraq (tm). (Full disclosure - at the time, I was for the war in Iraq. I was wrong.)

Now, I'm not voting Republican, and my ranking of the Republican candidates generally follows John Scalzi's* and this debate merely solidified my opinion. For those not clicking through, Scalzi's Top Three are, in order from least to best, Gingrich, Romney and Huntsman.

Although all three of these individuals hold opinions on foreign and domestic policy that I find objectionable, they all three seem willing to take into account objective reality**. The objective reality that Gingrich recognized was that we simply can't deport 11 million people without the kind of police state that you'd see in the old Soviet Union. Ain't gonna happen.

More to the point, we probably don't want that to happen. Do we really want to deport somebody who was brought here as a child? Or somebody that's been here productively for years? Simply put, we need to 1) look at each case individually in some way that's more efficient than the court system and 2) recognize that a lot of illegal immigrants don't want to stay. For those, a guest worker program would be perfectly acceptable.***

The question will be whether Republican primary voters want reality to get in the way of their ideology. We won't have that answer for several months.




* It's scary how much I end up agreeing with the guy. Just scary.
** In Romney's case, since he holds no ideology at all, he's easily persuadable.
*** Yes, guest workers suppress wages paid to American citizens. Since we've been playing that game since 1607 and the settling of Jamestown, it doesn't look like we're going to stop any time soon.