Assorted gripes and moans

The News & Record of Greensboro has reduced the size of the newspaper recently. They changed from four sections to two sections on some days. On Mondays and Tuesdays, national and local news sections have been combined into one section. On the same days Sports and Life have been combined into one section. On Mondays, Sports is the front of the second section and Life is the back part. On Tuesdays, the Life section is in the front and the Sports is in the back part of the second section. The explanation by the N&R is that there is more sports to report on Monday. The unofficial explanation, as offered by a customer, is that the News & Record thinks that their readers are too stupid to find Sports if they don't put it first on Monday. Why not just leave it in the same place everyday and let people get used to it?

After altering the size of the paper a few weeks ago, this week they raised the price. They took a 50% price increase from 50 cents to 75 cents for the daily paper. I am not sure how the newspaper business works, but in the restaurant business if you cut your portion size and then hike the price 50%, you are about to lose a bunch of customers.

I was talking about the newspaper price the other day at the restaurant with a couple of employees. I told them that the News & Record wouldn't be worth 75 cents if they had a dollar billed taped inside every copy.

The federal government will soon be the majority owner of General Motors. Ford, Toyota, and other manufacturers should immediately file suit to stop this. One does not need to be a Harvard trained lawyer to realize that the government that regulates your business being the owner of your competition is wrong.

If they can hold out without any government help, Ford is my new car company. The chances that I want to buy a car from a company owned by the federal government and a labor union are zero.

Chrysler is merging with Fiat. The company that brought us the 426 Hemi engine and the Barracuda will soon be producing cars with all the appeal of a sardine can.

The federal government will soon be the largest stockholder in Citibank. The government cannot maintain roads and bridges, guard the borders, educate children, or deliver the mail, yet they think that they can run a business. Those who disagreed with my assessment of Obama as a socialist should now remove their heads from their asses and take a look around.