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I was downstairs in the “shop” last night putting a coat of stain on a small woodworking project I started over the weekend. I have an old stereo receiver and a couple of speakers down there to give me something to listen to while I tinker. While I was working I was listening to Herman Cain, a local talk show host. Herman Cain is the founder and former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, and serves on the boards of several international corporations. Herman’s show is syndicated, but I’m not sure how many stations he is on throughout the country, but you can also visit his website, www.hermancain.com. If you can find his show he is well worth listening to.

Herman had just returned from Italy where he was at a board meeting of one of these corporations. Yes, the evil corporation had a board meeting in Europe! How dare they! When he got back the AIG bonus story had just started to break, and of course, that is about all we have been hearing about for the past few days.

Herman had a somewhat different view of the situation, as he often does. His point, that the AIG Bonus controversy shows just how incompetent our legislators and bureaucrats are. It is unbelievable that they would invest Billions of dollars into a company and not have any idea of what liabilities the company had and how they would spend the money.

If you were an investor and were going to pour $160 Billion into a company the normal process would be, after the terms of the agreement were determined, to perform “due diligence” to make sure what you were investing in. You would have your accounting people examine, even audit, the company’s books and make sure you fully understood what assets the company has and what outstanding liabilities the company has accumulated. This is just good business sense!

Do you think that our legislators and the Obama Administration would do such a thing. No, they were in too much of a hurry to find out what they were getting into or to put any “strings” on the use of the money by AIG. The same way they were in too much of a hurry to pass the Omnibus Spending Bill to take the time to root out the earmarks. Despite Obama’s promise during the campaign to eliminate earmarks, post bills on the internet for the public to examine for a week before they are voted on by the legislature, and providing us with “Change you can believe in.” Yeah, right! In fact the bail out bill was rushed through the House and Senate so fast that most all of the members never even read the bill! I find that not only incompetent but criminal!

I have heard our President in several speeches blame the economy on “corporate greed.” Sure, there was some of that in play, but when you get right down to the root cause, it was the government, in particular the Democrats, changing mortgage rules that allowed the corporate greed to take hold. I have documented on this website many of the policy changes going back as far as the Carter Administration that were the roots of the mortgage meltdown. I have many posts on this website of the way Presidents Carter and Clinton set up this disaster with the full support and aid of the congress.

AIG had contracts for the payment of bonuses to certain employees, this was well known before the bailout money was sent to AIG, but no one in the government paid any attention. Now that it has been made public and they look like the idiots they have polished up and brought forth their indignation for the television cameras! Their answer, they’ll tax the recipients of the bonus money at a 90% tax rate to get the money back. Sounds like armed robbery to me. But after all, they would never admit that they screwed up. I heard today the measure has passed the House, hopefully cooler heads will rule in the Senate.

I’m telling you now, we need to replace the whole lot of them. We need to vote every last one of these scoundrels out of office!

God Help Us!

With only 3400 miles on rear tire on the ZRX1200R, it was shot. It had a very thin flat spot in the center but plenty of tread on the sides. My riding is typically around town and to and from work, too much straight riding and not enough turns. When I bought the bike a year ago it was going to need a tire pretty soon, but pretty soon came very quickly, as the second day I had the bike I discovered a drywall screw in the rear tire. I replaced the tire, with the same type that was on the bike, a Metzeler Sportec M1, a sport bike tire.

The M1 is a very soft tire and gives great grip but poor mileage. So I started looking around for sport-touring type tire for a replacement. After looking at a number of tires and reading lots of websites and reviews, I decided that I wanted to try a dual compound tire. Further investigation led me to the Bridgestone BT-021. I gave Ken’s Motorcycle Tires a call, got two on order and this past Saturday they were mounted up.

Of course, since I had new tires on the bike, it rained all weekend.  It was Wednesday evening before I could try out the new tires.  I set the air pressure at 42 rear and 40 front and took them out for a ride. The first thing I noticed is they are a bit taller than the Metzelers. Maybe, because the M1s were worn out, but probably more than that, the seat is noticeably higher than it used to be.

On the road they give a much smoother ride than the M1s. Even with the higher air pressures of the Bridgestones they seem to absorb the small surface imperfection bumps that used to come through the seat. I also notice they have less nibble, tendency to follow ridges and pull to the side when going over ridges in the road. The M1s always pulled a lot when running over tar strips.

They seems to handle pretty well, they don’t turn in as quickly or aggressively as the M1s, but at the same time it the Bridgestones seem to provide a more stable line through a corner. I didn’t want to really lean the bike over this soon, the mold release compounds on the tires are really slippery. I will wait until I have a hundred miles or so on the before we do some real cornering.

Overall, I like the ride, and the handling is very stable, I think these are going to be some good tires for my riding style.

Of all the pork barrel spending included in the Economic Stimulus Bill, there is actually something left out.  Apparently the Senate dropped a requirement that contractors working on “infrastructure” projects for the Government use E-Verify to assure that their employees aren’t illegal aliens.

Looks like the Senate slipped this one buy the media, hey?  Well, they knew about it.  There was an article in the Chicago Tribune last week that describes this fact.  Wonder why I didn’t hear this on the news?  Maybe, they didn’t want me to hear about it.  Maybe I would be outraged over it?  You bet!

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-kass-11-feb11,0,657719.column

I find this particularly interesting in light of President Obama signing an executive order that requires the contractors that participate in government infrastructure projects hire union labor.  Is that talking out of both sides of your mouth or what?   When I heard about the executive order the other day I thought it was just Obama paying off the unions that supported him during the presidential campaign, but now, with this, maybe it was just window dressing.  Or, I guess the unions can now hire illegal aliens for these new jobs.  That assures that the Economic Stimulus will stimulate the economies of Mexico and Central America! Good deal!

People, it time to start a “fire them all” campaign.  If we start now we may be ready for the 2010 election cycle.  When I say fire them all, I mean,  it is time to replace all of our members of Congress and the Senate.  I know, there are probably some good ones in there, but a clean sweep is a clean sweep.  Let’s get them all out of there and start over.   My boss years ago was not a big fan of lawyers.  He used to say, “We need to put all the good lawyers on a ship and put all the bad lawyers on a island.  Then, nuke the island, and sink the ship just in case.”  That’s what we need to do with the Congress and Senate, just get rid of them all!

How can we get this started?

Very soon now the weather will be warming up and it will be time to ride again.  Can’t wait!  This winter I have been working on a few improvement projects for the ’08 Ultra Classic.   The biggest problem I have seen with the ’08 has been poor handling.  The bike feels squirrelly in the corners, feels like the rear tire is going down.

This is my third Harley Electraglide.  I started with a ’96 Classic with an 80 C.I. EVO.  In ’05 I upgraded to a Twin-Cam 88 C.I. Classic.  Both of these bikes handled fine and showed no signs of the wobbly rear end.  The ’08 was different.  From almost day one I noticed the funny wobbly feeling of the rear end when cornering.    I kept checking the rear tire thinking it was loosing air and getting soft.  However, it wasn’t.  I did some reading on the H-D forum sights on the Internet.  I found that I was not the only person having this problem.  Apparently many people do, but not everyone.

The Electraglide has a rubber mounted engine.   The engine is attached to the frame in the rear at the swing arm and at the front with a single motor mount attaching the front of the motor to a cross member in the frame.  Both of these attachment points are rubber isolated.  Since the vibration of the V-Twin engine is mostly up and down this causes the engine to shake up and down pivoting on the rear attachment at the swing arm.   Harley also uses a couple of adjustable links that go between the engine and the frame to help stabilize the engine and also allow for alignment of the drive train.  These links allow the engine to move up and down but not from side to side.  The only thing that holds the rear of the engine and the cornering stresses of the swing arm are two rubber bushings.

Having read up on this problem it seems that the cure is to add an additional adjustable link at the rear of the engine.  There are several of these devices available.  Shopping around I found that the True-Track device seemed to be of high quality, good workmanship, and easy to install.  I ordered one and installed it.

The True-Track Stabilizer attaches to the oil pan and to the frame cross member under the oil pan with the adjustable link between the two brackets.

The installation takes about 15-30 minutes. In my case it took the full 30 minutes. The directions make a big point of making sure the cross member is straight before you try to mount the dog bone attaching bracket. My cross member needed some straightening before the dog bone would fit properly. So after about 30 minutes I was ready for a test ride.

Took the bike out for a short test ride and it certainly seemed better, much better. The next day Barb and I took a short ride since the temperature had gotten up to 64 degrees. I worked my way over to GA 108, a curvy road that has pretty nice 60 MPH sweeper turns and a great place to try out the True-Track. It worked great. The bike tracks nicely though the curves with no wobble in the rear. You can put it into a constant radius curve and it will just about go through on its own! Very nice.

One thing I did have a small problem with is ground clearance.  On my first solo test ride I had no problem with the True-Track dragging.  On our Sunday ride when I went out of the driveway riding two up, the dog bone bracket hit the pavement.  I have a small gutter along the street at the bottom of the driveway and when I leaned the bike over turning out of the driveway, the bracket hit the edge of the driveway.  I had no problems on the road.  On several of the turns I leaned the bike pretty far over but nothing dragged the pavement.

Combined with the new Progressive Suspension air shocks, I think we are ready for riding season!

For more information on the True-Track Stabilizer visit www.true-track.com

I sometimes listen to All Things Considered on National Public Radio on the way home from work.  Mainly just to see what the most liberal of the liberal media is up too.

I recalled hearing a piece about four years ago on NPR about the Bush inauguration and how it cost $42 Million.  The NPR reporter was making a big deal about the Bush Administration spending $42 Million “in these hard economic times.”   I didn’t think that four years ago we were having hard economic times!  It seemed pretty good to me back then.  Yes, we were spending on two war fronts, but overall the economy was in pretty good shape four years ago.  Certainly nothing like they describe today.  I repeatedly hear the media describing our current economic situation as “The worst since the great depression.”

Listening to NPR recently I heard a number of reports from and about the Obama inauguration, but not a single comment about the purported $175 Million that it cost.   Quite the contrary, NPR was portraying it as  glorious celebration of a truly historic even.  So yesterday I searched the NPR website looking for something commenting on the cost of the Obama inauguration.  Didn’t find anything, not even a fact on how much it cost.

So, I wrote them the following short email:

————— Original Text —————–
Date : 1/31/2009 5:05:40 PM

Four years ago I recall a piece on George Bush’s $42M inauguration being excessive spending. I haven’t heard anything about the $175M that was spent on Obama’s, especially considering that it has come out that some of the financial institutions that received bailout funds contributed to the Obama inauguration!

Pretty concise I thought.  Here is the response that I received:

Dear Robert,

Thank you for contacting NPR’s All Things Considered.

We are grateful for your comments to NPR News. We have read your e-mail and your thoughts will be taken into consideration.

NPR is always delighted to hear from listeners. Should you require additional assistance or have a question, please respond to this e-mail and we will do our best to assist you.

Thank you for listening to All Things Considered, and for your continued support of public broadcasting. For the latest news and information, visit NPR.org.

Sincerely,
All Things Considered

Looks pretty much like a form “blow-off” message to me, doesn’t it to you?  I guess NPR has consumed the Koolaide too!  Am I surprised?  Not really!