Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Maybe the dems should just shut up

I'm getting such a hoot out of the campaign. The dems just don't know who to blame for their failure anymore. 'Course, they can't quite let go of George W, but that's wearing a little thin with the public. I love it when you tell a dem, "Hey, the Comrade has been in office two years now. When does the hope and change begin to kick in?" Then they say, "It took years to dig this hole. It will take years to dig out of it."

Or dig it deeper, maybe? They should probably just shut up if they have no further information. They just make themselves look worse and more incompetent every time they open their mouths.

Apparently the Comrade was interviewed by Rolling Stone magazine. Maybe the Comrade is taking his supposed "rock star" persona a little too seriously? Anyway, all he did was continue to blame other people for his failure.

Let's face it, those of us who know anything about economics saw this coming. (Don't believe it? Check out my blogs right here for Spring, 2009.) We kept saying, "He's going to what? Blow a trillion dollars on earmarks? So a year from now, the net result will be that we'll still be in a recession, but a trillion dollars more in debt."

And guess what happened? Even against the "expert" pronouncements of people like Paulie Krugman and Robert (Third) Reich. Fancy that.

Harvard now says the recession was over in Spring. Maybe it was. The economy -- the free part of it -- has this uncanny and almost unlimited ability to heal itself. However, you might notice, there's been no growth. Consumer demand has not increased, unemployment has been 9.6% or thereabouts for a year or so, and overall annual economic growth was 1.6% -- very low. Gee, wonder why?

Could it be because the Comrade's policies have made growth: 1.) unprofitable; 2.) uncertain; 3.) more expensive than necessary; 4.) socially unacceptable. I mean a successful person just may find him/herself categorized among the Fat Cats, a target for presidential insults and uncontrolled taxation. So Atlas shrugs. Seems like there's just no way to stop it. Socialism doesn't work in the USA any better than it's worked anywhere else. And the dems are surprised? They may be the only ones who are.

Had to laugh at the latest "explanation" the dems are giving for their failure and their undeniable unpopularity -- yes, they're finally beginning to recognize it:  Nobody likes them anymore. As John Kerry explained the other day as delicately as possible, the population of the USA is just stupid and uninformed. The Comrade takes that one step further, claiming that our stupidity and uninformedness makes us prey to people like those on the air at Fox News. Horrors!

However, what you don't see coming from the dems is any explanation for their failure, no willingness whatsoever to review why they've failed, no apologies for plundering the public treasure, no promises to try to get a handle on reality. Just more of their same old crap:  "If someone's wrong here, it's got to be you." Their egos won't allow them to question their own irrational ideas and attitudes.

All the Comrade and others can come up with is some drivel that goes like: "Well, if everyone agreed with me instead of disagreeing, then everyone would agree with me and everything would be just fine."

The problem he has is larger than a problem with proper media spin. The problem he has is with reality. Reality doesn't agree with the Comrade's fantasies of what he calls "hope and change," and most of us ignorant, uninformed, and disagreeable peons out here in the hinterland have to live with the reality of the despair and stagnation that he's worked so hard to bring about. Reality won't yield one iota to his charisma.

On the positive side, I'm looking forward to a total "massacree" of dems on November 2. And please, if you're having a hard time figuring out who to vote for -- still have that link here to the roll call vote on socialized medicine. If your rep voted for socialized medicine, you can pretty much assume the rep is an incompetent who shouldn't be be allowed anywhere near the Capitol for any reason.

Save the Republic.

Monday, September 27, 2010

Obama-Pelosi-Reid tax hikes - It's not their money

It occurs to me that I haven't mentioned the Bush Tax Cuts -- or the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Tax Increases -- very much. The Comrade and his two congressional Chief Stooges and the dwindling number of the supporters want to extend the tax cuts to those making less than $250,000 per year, while the so-called "rich," who make more than that, will have to cough up more money. The Republicans (and everyone else) want to extend the tax cuts to everyone.See, we're all supposed to hate and envy the rich and want to take all their money, like the dems do.

First of all, the Comrade et. al. claim that giving the over-$250,000 crowd the tax cuts will "cost" the government XX amount of dollars. Forget for the moment that extending the tax cuts for the middle class will "cost" much, much more. They say that their opposition will have to find some way to pay for the tax cuts.

Are you rolling around on the floor laughing, yet?

What ticks me off is the point of view. First of all, the tax cuts "cost" the government? That money doesn't belong to the government to begin with. It's citizen's money -- money citizens earned through hard work. The government only steals it from them for purposes of "redistribution" to the suck-ups and sycophants who support the SEIU, dem party, and all the rest of theiir screw-off useless hangers-on who can't/won't find a real job. ("My dog ran away. I'm traumatized. I need food stamps and an income and subsidized housing." Or, "I'm too goddamn stupid to understand how birth control pills work. I have 14 kids, all from different fathers. You have rescue my children from the neglect and ignorance I'm inflicting upon them!" May be better for everyone to let these folks go. It would improve the quality of the gene pool.)

Second, those who want to extend the cuts need to find some way to "pay" for them, the dems say. Why the hell don't the Comrade and pals find some way to pay for their flamboyant spending sprees and all the "free" goodies they give away before they legislate them? Better still, they voted for this bullshit; let them pay for it. No one else wants it. Let them and their kids and grandkids carry that burden forevermore. Let them be slaves to the state -- they volunteered. They make too much money anyway for what they do -- show up every three days and vote the way the Speaker tells them to? Hell, any mentally-deficient orangutan could accomplish that. And maybe it takes a mentally-deficient orangutan to interpret whatever kind of unintelligible gibberish Pelosi spews from time to time.

Interesting, too, last night I was looking up information about deep water oil drilling for something I'm working on. According to Wikipedia, "Oil and gas leases are the US's second-largest source of revenue after income taxes."

So the Comrade has issued a dictatorial order to end all those leases. Why not shoot yourself in the foot, idiot? I'm sure that also is "costing" the government money. And once again, due to a failure to comprehend how money is actually made, the feds no doubt need to steal more and more income from private citizens to pay for the fossil-fuels-bad fairy tale -- all tied in to global warming fantasies.

Is this administration capable of doing anything positive? Anything at all? It really looks like the Comrade is making a multi-pronged attack to try to destroy the USA. Either that or he's fatally stupid. And looking at who he hangs around with.....

Well, they've trotted out resident buffoon Can't-Keep-It-Zipped Bill Clinton to entertain the followers of Barney Fudd. Can you just picture what was going on behind the scenes there? Probably extremely X-rated, no? Did he bite his lower lip and pretend to cry if Fudd doesn't get re-elected? A-w-w-w. He feels your pain. And apparently he's determined to keep causing that pain.

Anyway, enough for now.

Save the Republic.

A tired, worn-out philosophy

Well it seems I'm the only person in North America who likes the Republican Pledge to America. I did find it interesting -- and predictable -- that the Comrade said the Pledge reflects "a tired, worn-out philosophy." You mean the philosophy presented in the Declaration of Independence? Tired and worn-out?

Maybe he should give it a try first.

Watched Fox News Sunday with Boehner and Kevin McCarthy, then Steny Hoyer. The Republicans, Boehner and McCarthy, faced some pretty tough questions and criticism about the Pledge from Chris Wallace. Then Wallace really went to town on Steny Hoyer.

The main complaint against the Pledge seems to be that it doesn't outline any specifics. That's what I like about it (see the preceding blog.) Arriving with proposed legislation already in hand is kinda like what the Comrade and the dems have done the last couple of years. It's called "top-down" government, kind of like codified law. The other type of government is "bottom-up," it comes from the voter base, basically, and "the custom of the country," or what's known as common law.

Codified law refers to the situation when a person sits down and writes out all the laws, just out of his own head or somewhere. Often legal experts, judges, etc., are involved, and almost always, the head of state. Then they just present this big wad of law to people. Kings usually govern this way, and oligarchs.

Then there's common law. A lot of common law is based on judicial precedence. That is, suppose we're neighbors having a dispute about whether or not you stole my rake. Well, for many years, everyone in the neighborhood has borrowed each others tools and utensils, and if the owner didn't ask for the rake back within, say, 90 days, the borrower got to keep it. That's just the way things have always been done. But I loaned you my rake, forgot about it over the winter, but I want it back now. So we go to court.

Whose rake is it? By common law, it would belong to the borrower because he possessed it for 90 days before I asked for it back. By codified law, the judge would refer to the law books on property ownership and rights.

American law is made up of both codified and common law. We started out with the Constitution, which doesn't really outline any laws -- just the shape of the government and its processes. Many states wrote down a bunch of statutes -- codified law -- which more than likely have been greatly modified by judicial decisions. But much existing law sprang from common law, and many states still recognized the validity of common law through most of the 20th century. But I guess that's pretty rare now. It does leave a lot to judicial discretion, and given that federal judges are appointed rather than elected....

Anyway, what I'm talking about it is top-down vs. bottom-up law. Do you want the congresscritters to spend all their time crafting 2,000-page bills that lock us all into certain acceptable modes of behavior, or do you want law to grow from the ground up, where and how it's applied?

I don't think it's possible to write a law that can cover every single situation for the same reasons that I don't think it's possible to design and legislate an economic structure. You can't have that kind of centralized control and authority AND personal freedom at the same time. If you declare that skies must always be blue, you'll never see another drop of rain.

Don't now how better to explain it. I'd rather see as little law as necessary and the smallest government possible. That seems to be what the Pledge is going for, too.

And poor Steny Hoyer. All he could do was blame George W for ..... everything. Who needs some new ideas?

Save the Republic.

Friday, September 24, 2010

An explosion of ideas

Well, Thursday was an interesting day. Abracadabrajab once again proved that he's profoundly and dangerously mentally ill and should be restrained. He doesn't believe in the Holocaust or in 9/11. But he's looking forward to those 72 virgins. Maybe don't feed him for a couple days to re-acquaint him with hunger and give him some anchor in reality.

I didn't listen to the Comrade's speech (didn't really listen to Abracadabrajab's either, in full). Apparently the Comrade is still saying to Iran, "Hey, come on over to the White House. We'll talk."

Again: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The Comrade doesn't get it. Abracadabrajab doesn't want to be friends. He'd rather vaporize the planet. A more productive approach might be to help Israel vaporize Abracadabrajab first. But we don't want to piss off any crazy militant muslim terrorists. After all, what did they ever do to us?

On the positive side, the Republicans came out with their Pledge to America at almost the same moment the Comrade was addressing the U.N. I found it interesting that they unveiled the Pledge at a lumber yard, also that the guy who owns the lumber yard is so incredibly articulate. Not criticizing anything about this. Sort of a Joe-the-Plumber touch. It's nice that the Republicans are working so hard to look connected to people outside the Beltway.

The Pledge is actually pretty nice. I wonder who wrote it. Nice typefont... Poor Richard? You can download the whole thing in a PDF file, but I don't have the address at hand. Just google it. Pretty quick reading, apparently in keeping with the promise to make political stuff manageable.

Anyway, I read the whole thing and found it actually kind of compelling. I really, really hope they mean it. They didn't make a lot of promises, and I've heard Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, and Paul Ryan (Young Guns) on TV all day, explaining that "These are things we can do right now in congress, even before the election."

Well, not all of them. There's a bunch of stuff in there that talks about reforming congressional rules and somehow I can't even imagine Pazzo Pelosi or Harry Reid endorsing any of it. For one thing, the Pledge doesn't support the idea of writing legislation behind closed doors and then disallowing any debate and/or amendments. You really do need a majority to set that to rights.

Also went to the American Spectator web site to see what kind of opinion was raging there amongst the commentators regarding the Pledge. Kinda predictable. The libertarians believe you should just blow up Washington and start over (or maybe not); the moderates are in a "show me" frame of mind; and no one thinks the Pledge goes far enough. They want specific solutions.

I don't. I kinda like the vagueness of it. At least I prefer that to the other party's approach -- coming in with a full-blown agenda and detailed proposals thousands of pages long that, apparently, were just left on the House's doorstep in the middle of the night by some kind of Beltway Tooth Fairy (likely sponsored by George Soros or one of his minions.) I like that the Republicans aren't over-promising and that they're allowing some space for political realities.

And here's also a key point:  If people are free to find their own solutions to their own problems, they will come up with a billion different solutions.  Things no one has even thought of yet. I much prefer that to the government locking us all into one way of doing things. If you bring-your-own-bill, you might end up having to defend something that secretly you know really sucks, but it's yours.

And here's an example of another dangers:

The dems say: "Here's a massive bill to nationalize the American health care industry."

Everyone else says: "I don't like it."

The dems say:  "Well, where's your plan then?"

That's kind of a fallacy, you know. If you go back and write your own massive bill to control the health care industry, you're conceding the dem's point -- that the health care industry needs to be federally controlled. Either way, you end up with socialized medicine. See? It's a trap. I'm glad the Republicans didn't fall for it.

The truth is, the health care industry doesn't need federal control, except to protect against things like fraud or outright criminal activity -- and the insurance industry has been subject to plenty of that. But let people find their own solutions. Including insurance companies. Let them develop all kinds of policies, anything anyone is willing to pay for. What's wrong with that?

That's freedom. It's unpredictable. It unleashes everyone's imagination, their knowledge, their capabilities in general. Then you get 35 or 50 or more solutions, and you can bet that at least a few will be positively brilliant.

You know, it's because of our freedom that America is such a great country. I'm not being sappy and weepy here. It's true. If people are free to attack any problem -- any challenge at all -- you get like an explosion of really cool stuff. 'Course some of it will be junk, but it's worth sorting through the junk to find the gems.

I used to be a magazine editor. Look at it this way:  You have all those blank pages to fill every month. You can drive yourself nuts writing stories, racking your brain for new ideas and then searching for some expert to develop them for you, or you can see what comes in "over the transom" and invite others to help you and let them do their own thing on it. ('Course, you do the final cut....) But it's amazing. You find out how many people can do a better job at things than you can, come up with lots of neat ideas. It's astounding the talent that surrounds us all.

So rather than having an ironclad list of resolutions and proposals all ready to jam through congress by twisting arms and making threats, just free up the process and let it go. The results will be positive -- better than anything we've ever seen. You can depend on that. I think this is what the Founding Fathers had in mind.

Save the Republic.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

You say carrot sticks; I say potatoes

Watching Glenn Beck today about how food is being regulated in the USA, among other things. Quite apart from the fact that the blockheads in the government have absolutely no right at all to tell us what to eat, they also apparently don't know what's good for us.

Had a couple classes in world history. Remember the plagues in Europe? One of the most severe was brought to Europe by the fleas that infested rats on merchant ships. Another of the plagues was measles. Yeah. Measles. That'll bring you to your knees.

Oh well, Europe was not in such good shape when these diseases hit. Due to improvements in agriculture, much of the arable land was in cultivation, meaning it could sustain more people, meaning the population was growing to a level where it was just barely sustainable -- even with the improvements in agriculture. So nutrition was kinda bad and then the plagues hit, in waves for about a century? Not sure. But if you want to know what it was like, read Boccaccio or things like "Diary of the Plague Years." It's pretty well-documented.

Anyway, about this same time, Columbus and others had the crazy notion that they could get to India by sailing west. En route, they crashed into North and South America. A couple of the immediate benefits resulting from this accident was the European discovery of [trumpet blast here] Potatoes!!

Potatoes grow almost anywhere. They can be difficult to cultivate, but the American Indians had it pretty much under control. And potatoes helped to rescue Europe from starvation and disease. Really.

You know, you can live on potatoes and nothing else. To remain reasonably healthy, you'd have to eat about five pounds of potatoes every day. However, potatoes are loaded with vitamin C, several B vitamins, and starch for ready energy.

Carrots and apples don't have these same kinds of nutrients, at least to the degree as are found in potatoes.

So, to finish the story, people in Europe started growing potatoes. The plagues diminished. The population had been at least decimated due to the plagues, but it came back and potatoes helped to sustain all these people. In one notable and very unhappy example, the British and Scots masters of the Irish left the Irish with little more than potatoes, and the Irish survived, until the blight.

And salt? Please. Just about every living thing needs salt to live. Ever hear of salt licks? They're areas of natural salt that are a magnet for all types of wildlife. Farmers even put out blocks of salt to help their animals survive. I worked at a factory many years ago that was very hot in summer and couldn't be air-conditioned because the manufacturing process required heat. So there was a dispenser of salt pills at every water fountain. Otherwise, you could sweat yourself into unconsciousness. Joggers, beware.

And did you know that if you don't eat cholesterol that your body manufactures it? Yeah. There's a reason eggs are so full of cholesterol. The embryo chicks feed on the cholesterol until they hatch. You need cholesterol to live. As aforementioned, if you don't eat cholesterol, your body manufactures it. You can't live without it.

Don't even get me started on tomatoes, another innovative veggie found first in the Americas. At first, the Europeans believed they were poisonous. And just a few days ago I was looking into food sources for a few exotic things that provide hard-to-find nutrients, and tomatoes kept coming up as a source. Also packed with Vitamin C.

Potatoes are by far the most-consumed vegetable in the USA, with, and this is a pure guess, corn and tomatoes as runner-ups. Combined with solid proteins taken from meat, children grew and bigger and stronger here than anywhere else for many decades. Look at the statistics going back a couple hundred years. I'm not making this stuff up.

So is Michelle Obama an ignorant butthead or what when it comes to nutrition? You decide.

Save the Republic. And my french fries. Actually I prefer potato chips -- the crunchier the better. (Potato chips -- first created by an innovative chef for some dignitary at, curiously enough, a place called French Lick,  Indiana. It was and still is a resort area, named after the natural salt deposits found there, which drew all kinds of critters from all over the place.)

A muddy campaign

Just briefly because I've got some paying work to do....

Do believe this is going to be one very nasty campaign season and glad it's only a little over a month long. See, the dems have nothing to run on. What are they going to say?

   "I"m one of the people who sold my vote to Pazzo Pelosi for socialized medicine!"

   "I voted for three separate stimulus package, ensuring unemployment would hover around 10% forever!"

   "I was a staunch supporter of cap-and-trade. We all need to pay a whole lot more for electricity!"

   "I packed the defense funding bill with loads of crap for special interest groups!"

   "I think it's rather tribal and primitive to suggest defending the nation's borders!"

   "I'm a firm believer in raising taxes! That certainly will get the economy going (to hell)!"

Are the dems going to tell the voters all this? As if the voters aren't already painfully aware of it.

No, the dems don't want to talk about issues. Instead, they'll accuse Republicans and other conservatives of... witchcraft, wanting to do away with the Dept. of Education (good idea, what does it do, anyway?), dressing up like Hitler on the weekends, and the biggest disgrace of all -- clinging to the US Constitution.

The dems have nothing to run on. They have done nothing that the public wants. If they mention what they have done, they'll probably be bombarded with rotten tomatoes, tarred and feathered, or ridden out on a rail. (I just love these 19th Century expressions of disapproval.)

So I guess this will probably be a pretty dirty and name-calling campaign. All the dems can do is try to make the Republicans look worse than they are -- and that would be a stretch.

And, of course, the Republicans will win big. I'm sure that's even beginning to sink into the Comrade's dense skull.

Save the Republic.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Your nose is gonna grow....

Very strange thing. Presidents I hate, I can never remember their names. It's like their existence in the White House is so repulsive I just have to block it out. So far, I've forgotten the names of three presidents:  Jimmy Carter, Bill "Can't Keep It Zipped" Clinton, and the Comrade. (I only forget them while they're in office....)

Hmmm, let me find my piece of paper with the cusswords all over it, where I tried to write down the quote from Bill "Can't Keep It Zipped" Clinton directly. OK, here it is, but probably not word-for-word:

"The Tea Party is funded by people who want to weaken the federal government so big business can do just about anything it wants...."

That was from a morning show when I was still half-asleep, but he repeated the same message later on, on Greta Van Susteren.

My response:

"Right, @&*#%%$@* [fill in anything you want to call Clinton here].  That's called freedom."

Freedom is exactly weakening the federal government so we can do just about anything we want.

'Course, good ol' Can't-Keep-It-Zipped would have a major problem with that. He is a model for what I described a couple blogs back as the empty-headed blockheads who believe for no good reason at all that they were born to rule.

On Greta, Can't-Keep-It-Zipped added a sinister twist of some kind. I didn't write that down. Maybe it was his facial expression, a sudden lopsided lunge forward, or the weak-sister non-threatenting way he makes a fist with his thumb sticking out. Anyway, the connotation is that business [and the rest of us as well] will do nothing but evil and greedy things if we don't have the Comrade's boot on our necks. And I couldn't watch the whole show. I'd just eaten dinner, didn't want it coming back up.

What an asshole he is.

A friend of mine who's also very political and tries not to be, keeps telling me he gave up on the USA's survival when Can't-Keep-It-Zipped was elected to a second term. I tend to agree with him. I pretty much stopped listening or caring about anything political until 9/11. And for years after that, as long as we were doing what we could to destroy Iraq and Afghanistan, I didn't much care what else the government did -- assuming they were doing their worst. After all, I'm getting older. I don't have to live with it for much longer.

I pegged Can't-Keep-It-Zipped and his tubby wife for sociopaths even before "The American Spectator" brought that up. I still think so. It was the way they attacked people they didn't like -- like the people who ran the travel office at the White House. The Clintons had promised that plum job to a buddy. The WH Travel Office had been a non-political post and under direction of the same people for a couple of decades. However, the Clintons had every right to replace the sitting director and appoint their own guy.

And they did. But rather than do it forthrightly, they accused the Travel Office of all kinds of dirty under-the-table dealings, kick-backs, graft, etc., trying to totally assassinate the people who had been running it. That was unnecessary, vicious and despicable. And the people who ran the Travel Office, as it turns out, were completely exonerated of the Clintons' trumped-up charges.

And as it turns out, that was their general style. Hillary grew up not far from where I grew up. I don't know. Chicago seems to attract the twisted, provides fertile ground for political corruption, I guess.

I never liked the Clintons. I can't imagine how sick Monica Lewinski must have been to be attracted to such a flabby half-baked ham as good ol' Can't-Keep-It-Zipped. You know? Like, ick. Hold your nose and blow, or what?

Did notice when Can't-Keep-It-Zipped was on Greta, he's lost weight and also his big red nose has gotten somehow bigger and redder.

Yup. When you get on TV and tell some big ones, your nose is gonna grow.....

Save the Republic.

Monday, September 20, 2010

Going to extremes

Watched some of the political shows today -- it's still Sunday as I write this. Anyway, it seems that the dems have developed a new talking point to be repeated over and over and over again, since so few of them are capable of independent thought.

The dems are saying that the spate of conservative Republicans running this November are "extremists." I guess particularly the Tea Party people and those they endorse are covered under this umbrella.

So having begun the day with a good laugh, I'm in a pretty good mood.

Have I lost the "narrative thread" here? I mean, when did it become "extreme" to cut back big government and try to stay on budget? Especially in America. By contrast, I suppose nationalizing the auto industry and seizing control of the financial and health care industries has become the new "normal" under the Comrade's Reign of Terror.

Like, who's extreme here? Let's not lose perspective.

Have the dems actually gone so far over the edge, like lemmings over a cliff, that they forgot what country they live in? For example, Pazzo Pelosi has shown absolutely no kind of economic, moral, or political compass at all; the philosophy she lives by is "Get their vote even if you have to defecate on the Constitution, break a few arms, and terrorize the junior congressional members." It's all OK with her. Pete Stark is a living demonstration of "insufferable arrogance" and Waxman appears to have a Napolean complex. Poor Arlen Specter, 314 years old, just couldn't picture retiring and diligently kissed every available ass just to stay in office. And that didn't work, either.

So I ask again, Who's extreme here? Or are they just pathetic?

On the other hand, I have a book somewhere about the radicalism behind the American Revolution, and how the ideas and concepts upon which the USA is based was then, is now, and always will be radical ideas. Because there will always be the rabid and vicious few -- often heavily armed -- who "know better" than anyone else about how we should all live our lives.

Sorry, but that just looks like an ego problem to me. Seems to me that those people -- the power-mad -- are the crazies. They're basically playground bullies who naturally gravitated toward the bigger arena of politics as they outgrew the swings and the teeter-totter.  Probably the result some deep-seated psychological problem.

And I guess that's the price of knowing how to act like you have self-esteem, rather than actually earning it. Of course, earning anything is contrary to anything the Comrade and his pals envision. However, they may grant you a ration of government cheese or something if you pretend to take them seriously.

But, extreme or not, I'd rather just be free.

Save the Republic.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Off with their heads?

When I was in high school I took a class on Russian history. What was really dismaying was the way the communists killed the entire royal family -- Nicholas and Alexandria and all the kids, including Anastasia, as it turns out.

Big question all of us teenage scholars had about that was, why? Was it really necessary to kill them? Couldn't you just exile them or something?

But look at the French Revolution, too. Not only did Louis and Marie lose their heads, but also their tailors and chambermaids. Uprooting the whole monarchial household and the horse they rode in on.  And again, why? Just bitterness? A punishment? What?

Well, so now Charlie Crist, Governor of Florida, started a new trend in the USA that goes some way to explain it. Crist ran against a very conservative guy, Marco Rubio, in the Republican primary for the US Senate. Crist lost. Rather than congratulate Rubio, Crist turned around next day (practically) and announced he was going to run anyway, as an Independent. So there, Marco! Just try and stop me! Do believe Rubio's currently polling ahead of both Crist and the democrat now.

As noted a couple days ago, Christine O'Donnell won a surprising upset in the Delaware Republican primary for the US Senate, defeating Mike Castle, who is a former governor and has served in the US House for about 100 years. To date, Castle has forgotten his manners -- never called to concede and congratulate O'Donnell, as is customary. Perhaps he's holding out for a re-count?

A little while back in the Republican primary in Alaska, Joe Miller won against incumbent Lisa Murkowski. Murkowski announced today to her disaffected following that she will run a campaign anyway as a write-in candidate. Good luck with that. Believe me, the system is so rigged against third-party interlopers, it's kinda like the dems and Reps have forged an iron-clad lock on every election.

This was reported all day on Fox, and discussed to death, mostly that all these upset winners were endorsed by the Tea Party -- which is friend to neither established party, rather only to their own ideals of limited government. But I liked Greta Van Susteren's characterization of these rejected senate wannabes "digging their fingernails into the arms of their chairs" to hang onto their political prestige, rather than face... what?... having to find another job in the economy they helped create?

Anyway, now I get it! If we just guillotined the sore losers, or stood them up against a wall and mowed them down, life would be a lot easier. The Russians and French were just clearing out the deadwood, making sure the Old Guard couldn't tamper with the future.

What astounds me is the ego. I mean, how many times do voters have to say, "Get the hell outa my face!" A certain amount of elitism here? Seems the established Republican leadership as a whole was none too thrilled to have O'Donnell threatening to claim a seat in one of the nation's hallowed chambers. Maybe they're afraid she'll show up hauling a double-wide trailer?

Anyway, all this stuff just convinces me that this housecleaning has been delayed far too long. We seem to be dealing with politicians who have become so used to ignoring the peoples' will that they just refuse to come to grips with their new reality.

Another interesting thing from history. You know, if the slave states hadn't seceded when Lincoln was elected, which threw the nation into Civil War, the slaves probably wouldn't have freed for many more decades, if at all. Abolishing slavery required a Constitutional amendment, which wasn't going to happen with slave states still in the union. It was only because the slave states pulled out that the remaining free states could vote to abolish slavery forever.

So there's a certain wonderful historic parallel and irony about a raving socialist being elected to the presidency and setting off a passionate backlash of recommitment to American principles of liberty and free market capitalism.

And if it means bumping off a few "moderate" (semi-socialist) Republicans in the process, so be it. At least we don't behead them here. And in every case, the rejects could sustain some honor and self-esteem by just gracefully bowing out. No, they volunteer to try for a second public humiliation. Oh well. They never learn, do they?

O'Donnell was at some Republican conference in DC today called "Valu Day" or something like that, conjuring up a blue-light sale at WalMart. Saw snippets of her speech. She said something like, "We're not taking our country back... We ARE the country."

And don't you forgit it.

Can't say how much I love this country. Jefferson predicted with serene confidence that "the people" would always rise to protect their liberty. It really works.

Save the Republic.

Friday, September 17, 2010

Atlas is beginning to shrug

A poll or survey or something came out today claiming that one out seven Americans now have incomes below the poverty line. Not sure exactly what the poverty line is -- it used to be something $21,000 per year for a family of four, but that was more than 10 years ago, I think. Anyways, good to know I'm not alone, sitting here trying to figure out how to pay both the summer electric bill and my cable/internet/phone bill this month. Trying to figure out something else to do to make some money. Forget looking for a job. $8.00 an hour just won't do it, even if I could find something for $8.00 an hour.

Anyway, just wanted to point out.... THIS PROVES MY POINT. Socialism doesn't work. Not even 60% socialism doesn't work -- or whatever the exact statistic is for government control of the US economy since the Comrade took office and started "transforming" the nation. Remaking us on the shining model of Uganda or someplace.

I do wonder precisely where the tipping point is between what we've been told is a "mixed economy" and a socialist dashing-headlong-into-a-totalitarian-controlled economy, which is where we seem to be now. I repeat, I'm rather surprised the USA went down so fast. But I guess that's what happens in a fast-moving, extremely sensitive and responsive economy. No big backlog of reserves, which is expensive to maintain because it's dormant and tends to go obsolete pretty quickly. Know what I mean? You've got to actively deploy all your resources, not sit on them waiting for a rainy day. Dangerous and risky to run so flat-out, but there it is.

I wrote a magazine article a while back about selling or merging a company. The audience was small business owners. I interviewed a gentleman who bought and sold businesses, arranged mergers, etc., and quoted him saying, "How many business owners lay awake all night worrying about whether or not they've made the right choices? Many have invested everything they own in their business, and their employees depend upon them to succeed."

Not really a weepy scenario, but you should have seen the response. A lot of readers wrote and emailed, very appreciative that someone understood them. Almost a love-fest, and I'm not making fun of them at all. They carry a heavy load and take it very seriously. That requires some real courage.

Anyway, something I find very interesting about the current economic situation relates to the novel, Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. Since it's been continuously in print since it was first published in 1956/58 or about then, and since I went to Amazon.com and noted a healthy sales ranking for it once again about a year ago, I'm assuming it has a pretty wide readership. Whether readers agree with Rand entirely or not. I would say that 200 years from now, scholars will look back and say that book was probably the most influential work of fiction in the 20th century, but I digress.

The story in Atlas Shrugged goes that the government keeps getting bigger and bigger, more and more corrupt, more and more intrusive. Many industries are regulated out of existence, and everyone is taxed too much. And oddly enough, the "Robber Barons" begin to simply disappear. They're just here one minute and gone the next. Their companies either fold or go to hell in a hand basket, mismanaged by others (or, in the real world, by federal regulators), and the whole damn country slides into an inexorable decline.

I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but it's sufficient to say it's all on purpose. The business owners  actually are on strike. They just refuse to play the game anymore and walk off the field. In the novel, this strike was more or less instigated and promoted by certain people.

In real life, it's happening kind of by accident. Businesses can't get loans. Many businesses are terrified of what proposed regulations will do to their operations and operating expenses -- regulations like all the crap involved in socialized medicine (Try it! You'll like it!); the threat of crap-n-tax and of the end of the Bush Tax Cuts. There's so much unemployment generally that consumer demand is way down across the board.

If business owners aren't going on strike deliberately, then they're shutting down or moving out simply because the burden of doing business in the USA is simply too heavy to carry, and the probable returns are not worth the effort.

Who knew that Atlas shrugging was part of the "invisible hand" mechanism that controls free markets? How very cool. Reality rears its ugly head.

FYI, Ayn Rand lived through the revolution in Russia, its "transformation" from a backward and stagnating imperialistic giant into an industrialized, backward and stagnating imperialistic giant. Ayn Rand witnessed first hand communism being implemented as a way of life.

Another interview I did once for a very different publication was with an elderly woman who had lived in Moscow in the 1920s. She was a kid then. She said her family lived across the street from a food storehouse of some kind. The party members who ran the place -- redistributing the wealth -- used to pile up sacks of flour inside, near or in front of a back door. So this lady, as child, and her sister used to go over to this back door every so often. Loose flour sometimes sifted through the cracks around the door, and the two little girls would lick their fingers and try to dab up the spilled flour from the pavement. It was something to eat.

And I'd like to note that the Ukraine, a Soviet state, has the potential to produce more wheat than the USA.

I imagine Ayn Rand's experience was similar to the woman I interviewed, though I also believe Ayn Rand was a little older at the time, a little more consciously aware of what was going on around her.

And, sadly enough, in Atlas Shrugged, she's proving to be right on the money.

On a happier note, why is the Comrade picking on John Boehner? I like John Boehner. Bob Scheiffer and others apparently have grilled Boehner about smoking cigarettes and about his tan. The Comrade smokes and so do I. As a matter of fact, the Comrade's smoking is probably the only thing I like about him.

Boehner's constant tan seems to be quite the scandalous hot topic in the mainstream media. Yeah, unemployment at 9.6% and probably getting worse, almost $13 TRILLION dollars in debt, and Iran's Abracadabrajab is building an atom bomb. Let's focus all of our attention on John Boehner's tan.

Pazzo Pelosi, House Speaker, is Boehner's counterpart in the House, he being Minority Leader. The Republicans have taken one tactic in the election campaign urging people to throw Pelosi out. If the Republicans win a majority in the House, Boehner will replace Pelosi as Speaker. The last I heard, Pelosi had a public approval rating of 11%. That is, 11% of the country actually approves of the job she's doing, so presumably the remaining 89% don't. So I suppose the Comrade and others are trying to make Boehner look somehow worse than Pelosi. Because of his tan?

Bulletin for the democrat National Committee:  It's really not what's on the outside of your head, but what's inside that counts. Once again, the American public is one step ahead of the dNC..

Save the Republic.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Cuppa tea, anyone? Everyone?

Looks like the Tea Parties (I'm capitalizing them now) have been chalking up some rather surprising victories in the primaries -- mostly Republican primaries.

The latest and apparently the greatest was Christine O'Donnell, who won the Republican primary for the US Senate seat in Delaware yesterday -- V.P. Biden's one-time seat. She was running against Mike Castle, who's been in the US House for 18 years. No one thought O'Donnell would win. The "score" was something like 53% O'Donnell, or about 30,500 votes for her, vs. about 25,000 votes for Castle. The pundits who track and predict these things had predicted a total turnout in the primary of about 35,000 voters and that Castle would surely win.

They were wrong.

And even while O'Donnell was accepting the victory and thanking her crew of workers, the Republican National Committee was saying that it would not support her campaign against her democrat opponent.

See, O'Donnell has had financial troubles for what seems to be many years. She had trouble paying off a student loan. She defaulted on her mortgage. Oh, for shame! That puts her in the same category of probably 30% to 45% of the entire adult population in the US.

Saw a brief interview with her before the primary vote, and she was asked about her difficulties. She owned her money problems and said that because of that, she can relate to what most people are going through in this economic recession.

Yeah. Really. I'd rather vote for her than for some elitist who was either born with a silver spoon in his/her mouth or discovered the benefits of marrying rich -- and that pretty much covers about half the elected federal officials now in office. Maybe that's why they're in such a quandary about tax cuts -- a loss of 10% or 15% in their incomes wouldn't have much impact on them at all. But most other people will definitely feel the pain.

I was rather sadly disappointed in the Republican National Committee. Mainly because the decision made them look just as power-mad and short-sighted and elitist as the Left. If Republicans sever ties with the Tea Parties, they'll be dog meat by 2012. They don't get it, either? The population is sick of politics-as-usual.

Now it seems the Republicans have turned and have agreed to support O'Donnell, but perhaps reluctantly and meanly. Cronyn, I think, said that the Republicans don't believe she can win the senate seat, and that their money is better spent elsewhere. But let's not count O'Donnell out. She drew twice the turnout that was predicted and she beat a guy with much better name recognition and years of government experience -- maybe two counts against him in the current political atmosphere.

And what the hell good would Castle be? He voted for Stimulus, I believe, as well as crap-n-tax. He's about as effective a Republican as the Twit Sisters from Maine -- both nominal Republicans but usually voting reliably with the dorks on the other side of the aisle.

If the Republican Party is smart, they'll listen to the electorate and try to restore their commitment to American political values. That seems to be what voters want -- in Delaware, Alaska, South Carolina, Nevada, and on and on. Quite possibly it's just that the Republicans are scared of making such a commitment? They'd rather keep the status quo? Too bad, because they and the dems may be the only ones who do, and they're beginning to look like an isolated minority.

Save the Republic.

Achieving sustainability

The world "sustainability" has become a buzzword for green -- that is, environmental -- initiatives. What it really means is finding a way to continue to survive. In the US, everyone has been patting themselves on the back for working so hard toward sustainability. So let's apply this concept to business and commerce, too, shall we?

I've mentioned before, I admire greed. I wish I was greedy enough to devote a little more of my time to purely money-making activities. Alas.....

Greed is also the label that the Comrade and his kind paste on "personal incentive." Most people, sane people, anyway, do things mainly because they believe they will benefit from their activities somehow. They can be greedy for love, greedy for praise, greedy for Cocoas Puffs. Anything they value. (Huh, what, exactly are politicians greedy for? Just a thought.)

In business, and in ALL business, whether it's manufacturing, professional services, non-professional services like a day-job, whatever, usually what people are going for is money, something a little above and beyond what it costs them to do business. "Buy cheap; sell dear" and so forth. Otherwise, why would they do it?

Even unions understand that people can't really work for less than it costs them to live. Unions require a certain level of sustainability for their members. Of course, now they've gotten way ambitious and probably rather pie-in-the-sky, but that's another story.

The happiest people in the world must be those who've managed to make money doing what they like to do.  You will find a lot of millionaires in this category. Many of them simply love the challenge of it -- beating the market, taking a failing company and turning it around, inventing stuff. They've found that golden path of creating/producing/serving something that other people are willing to pay them for.

They've managed to sustain themselves, to get their personal passions and interests to give them back more than they invest in them.

"Profit," that vile and disgusting mark of triumphant greed, is basically nothing more than sustainability. A business must make a profit to survive, or can it afford to survive? Oh, if you can't make a living selling those unique landscapes you spend your weekends painting, you'd probably still do it. But unless you can sell a painting for more than your cost of materials, time, skill, and imagination, your painting thing just isn't sustainable. It becomes a hobby. You have to sustain yourself doing something else.

Profits aren't evil. Profits represent the good health of business and ensure its sustainability. If a business isn't making a profit, it has to become nothing more than something you might do in your spare time, funded by money you get doing something else that is profitable.

If some authority type, like say, the feds, makes your business unsustainable by, say, a ridiculous amount of minute regulation, or by compelling you to spend your profits on stuff that may/may not be necessary to conduct your business.... your business may no longer be sustainable. Many businesses right now find themselves in that situation. The feds are grinding them into the dirt, stopping their profitability, turning commerce into something like a hobby that they may or may not be able to afford to continue.

And if you do make any kind of profit (filthy lucre!) you can bet Uncle Sam will be at your front door with his hand out -- and clutching a pistol and/or threat of imprisonment in the other hand.

Yet if we aren't allowed to sustain ourselves, who will sustain us? Even the government lives off the profits of American business. That is, all of our hard work and labor sustains not only ourselves, but also the government. The government has no other source of income but us.

So exactly what the hell is up with the marxists? Shit for brains, maybe?

Like, way back in the 1960s and 1970s there was this very socialist newspaper columnist named Nicholas something. I'll never forget reading one of his columns one day where he raged against some "fat cat" corporation, demanding:  "This corporation employs 30,000 people! What good are they doing?" Had to laugh at that one.

Save the Republic.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Never Forget

The wounds don't seem to heal.

R.I.P. to all who lost their lives on 9/11/01

Save the Republic.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Class wars just don't play in America

I think I finally figured out the Comrade. I mean, the way he thinks. It's very foreign to me and I would guess to most other Americans.

He sees everything through the lens of "class." Even about the expiration of the Bush Tax Cuts -- the Comrade says something to the effect that extending the tax cuts to everyone would "be giving a break to millionaires and billionaires."

Oh yeah. Millionaires and billionaires who make $250,000 year? Kind of a contradiction in terms, no?

But the main point is his reference to "millionaires and billionaires." I guess "fat cats" has been overworked. The Comrade is counting on the American public to start foaming at the mouth and hating and resenting millionaires and billionaires just as we're supposed to hate and resent fat cats.

Was thinking about that, about how that marxist argument just doesn't play well in the USA and never has. Why, do you suppose?

Marx lived in culture with classes based on birthright -- dukes and barons and princes and all that crap. They owned the land, basically, pretty much along with the peasants who worked it for them -- former serfs. Or, in Russia, actual serfs. Being "born to the manor" or into a titled family pretty much determined if you were rich or if you were going to grub around in the gutters your whole life.

We never really had that kind of system in America. Even in the early days of the republic, when a few people suggested abandoning this bizarre contrivance, the US Constitution, and adopting a tried-and-true system of monarchy. The Founders and general citizenry at the time rejected the idea of established social classes, birthrights and all that jazz -- although a version of this was perpetrated in the slave states for quite a while, with black slaves taking on the role of "peasants."

Ever hear of the Society of Cincinnatus? This was a kind of American Legion type of deal for veterans of the American Revolution. They wanted George Washington to lead their ranks. And if you rummage through historical artifacts, I'm sure you'll find a few images of Washington with laurels on his head and wearing a toga, and somewhere nearby the title "Cincinnatus." Anyway, George Washington refused the honors, because he said he didn't want to endorse or support any kind of organization -- even a social one -- that could serve as the groundwork for a privileged class.

Thomas Jefferson wrote the Code of Virginia -- all the state's initial laws as it became a state rather than a colony. He did something very interesting by abolishing "entailment." Entailment meant that an estate could survive even if a family didn't. That is, if Richard Henry Lee or family accumulated 800 acres of land and 500 slaves, the government could not guarantee that thiis heritage would be kept whole and intact, as estates were in Europe.

Like if Richard Henry Lee gambled away this huge family estate, he gambled it away. End of story. The land might be broken up and sold in smaller parcels, the slaves sold off to pay his debts. Under entailment, Lee would be relieved of this estate by the Crown (or government), who could assign it to someone else as some kind of political plum or to show favor. Just this simple prohibition by Jefferson against entailment ensured that the government of the USA -- or Virginia, anyway -- could never establish or sustain a ruling class. Every generation would pretty much have to take care of themselves, with or without family money.(Of course, since then, congresscritters have contrived all kinds of other ways to hand out plums and favors.)

Virtually every millionaire or billionaire in America was self-made. Astor organized the fur trade and later got into railroads, like Vanderbilt. Rockefeller discovered new uses for "rock oil" and refined kerosene from it to replace whale oil for lamps, later gasoline, etc. Joe Kennedy -- at least as my dad told the story -- made his fortune as a bootlegger. Ford developed the auto industry. And on and on.

Of course, the children of these millionaires and billionaires were just born lucky -- but how many of them are still rich? I mean, Gloria Vanderbilt was reduced to selling blue jeans. Second and third generations are notorious for not doing much on their own, except maybe killing themselves young on booze and fast living. It's hard to get rid of huge fortunes, though. You can put the money in a savings account and live pretty high off the interest. And most millionaires have set up a charity foundation of some kind with their spare cash.

The thing is... Karl Marx was all hot under the collar about the rich because he, like most Europeans, had no chance in hell of ever being rich himself.

In the USA, you can get rich if you work hard enough. You really can. Most people don't want to work with such devotion simply to amass a big pile of money, though. Most people prefer family life and being able to fish or travel in their spare time. That is, they prefer to have spare time. Millionaires usually have to work their butts off to become rich. They have to be single-minded to exclusion of almost everything else. They have to develop certain sets of skills that most people really would rather not bother with.

So I don't hate the rich, and I doubt that most other Americans do either. Being rich is a choice in the USA. Like choosing if you're going to wear a blue or red tie, wear black or brown shoes. Can you really hate people for the personal choices they make about how to live their own lives?

Apparently the Comrade hangs out with lots of people who do hate the rich for their choices. He also lives off that bizarre Marxist thing about how the rich get rich "off another man's labor." But look at it this way -- if the rich didn't give you a job, would you be working at all? Earning anything at all?

And it's interesting.... The Comrade lives in a world made up of only the rich and enormous corporations, and  "the people," who according to his strange mindset, all want to be unionized.

See, it's that European class divide thing again. The truth is, for every huge corporation in the USA, there are probably four or five (or six or seven) hundred small businesses, often family-owned, employing anywhere from two to maybe 500 or even a couple thousand people. And they're still considered "small businesses." These are the "fat cats" and "millionaires" we're all supposed to hate and resent and bury under taxation.

Actually, these are our neighbors.

Ir's the Comrade's world-view that's all wrong. He's been hanging ALL HIS LIFE with marxists and radicals who don't have any better grounding in reality than he does. He himself says he sought these people out and apparently bowed at their feet, kissed their rings, and soaked up all their venom like a sponge.

So the Comrade can go on spouting his hatred and trying to stir up a vicious envy and class hatred, but it just doesn't play very well in America.

We don't hate the rich. We all want to be rich. We know we do have a shot at it, too, if that's where you want to go. But most people are happy with a certain level of comfort and security and don't go for millionaire status. It's just too damn much work.

Save the Republic.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

The definition of "insanity"

Didn't see the Comrade's speech. Not even sure if he delivered it yet. Assuming he did, since it's late afternoon and everyone on TV is talking about "investing" $500 BILLION more in.... pork, basically.

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." I first heard that from Dr. Phil, but I read recently that Einstein was the first to say it. And it doesn't take a genius to recognize that it's true.

Let's see if I've got the dem message:  "The US was losing 750,000 jobs PER MONTH during Bush's last year in office. The Stimulus hasn't worked as well as we wanted, but it's helped. It's saved or created XXX number of jobs."

They all memorize the Comrade's speeches and repeat snippets of them over and over again, like a mantra against the impending doom (for dems) of the upcoming election, so it's easy to quote them. They don't all agree on how many jobs have been "saved or created," though. Guess it depends upon how active a fantasy life each of them has.

But doesn't it look like the Comrade and friends are totally bankrupt? I mean, apart from having an empty treasury. The way they look at it, if you can't solve a problem by giving away other peoples' money, there's just no solution.

And isn't it funny? The USA being such a rich country -- and it really is -- that we ran out of other peoples' money so fast? I mean, it took most European nations decades to hit the lows we've reached in just about 20 months. Everything's bigger and badder in America.

And insurance companies have raised their rates 9% or so. Sorry, haven't got a source for that, missed the first part of the report. That will only go up, you know, as socialized medicine encroaches.

By the way, let's not forget about the disaster of socialized medicine. We're sitting here with that hanging over our heads like the blade of a guillotine, and the dems still can't figure out why businesses aren't hiring.

Are these guys like monumentally stupid, or what? It's all that Kool-Aid.

Save the Republic.

Monday, September 6, 2010

The source of all power

It's Labor Day. Shouldn't we have miles of workers shouldering hammers and sickles marching past the White House, and the Comrade saluting them? Oh, wait. That wasn't the USA. That's May Day in the Soviet. Sorry about that....

Just thinking about work. Why is it hard to find work? It's not like there's nothing that needs to be done. So why isn't there any work?

Picture this:  half a continent, a land mass that's roughly 3,000 miles east-to-west and about 2,000 miles north-to-south. Indigenous tribes live here with varying levels of technological development. Mostly they're hunter-gatherers with some agriculture. Very little and pretty shallow mining. Not too many roads, and those only local, unpaved. No communications beyond the tribe, really.

Can we call this "wilderness" just for the sake of convenience?

Then 600 years later, this wilderness transformed into the most developed and technologically advanced society in the world. Along the way, spinning off ideas and technologies that have pretty much become the standard of everyday life all over the world.

And why did people come here? To experience the ancient forests? For the thrill of traveling steerage in an old wooden ship across the North Atlantic? There wasn't anything here. Lots of potential -- maybe, no one really knew for sure -- but not even a decent harbor.

What drew most people here was the promise of freedom. That was the beacon. All that wilderness served as a magnet for people who weren't happy with the place they were born for one reason or another. Facing an indifferent wilderness was preferable to all the political bullshit and the social and economic regulation they left behind. The absolute need to clear forests -- with only a saw and an ax -- just to build a house and to plant enough food to get through the winter (fingers crossed) seemed much better than what they knew about the Old World.

Despite all the hardships, they could be free here. They gladly faced living under pine boughs and eating squirrels for the first couple of seasons, no roads, only the haphazard chance of trade, no communications... But they knew they if they were left alone they could fix these kinds of problems, and they did.

Now large voting segments of the population whine about losing their $90,000 yearly pensions when they retire at age 50. They think it's inhumane not to have "free" medical care available every time their kids fall off a swing. Somebody (else) needs to give them a job.

Hey, folks, what are we missing here? I mean, what have we lost along the road to prosperity?

We don't need Uncle Sam to fix our problems. We never did. The Founders understood this. Uncle Sam can't do a damn thing but pass laws and bully people. Now, however, seems many people are convinced that the Comrade, or someone, has some kind of magic wand.... We need him, or someone, to "save" us from... what? The fat cats aren't giving me enough money? Having to spend eight hours a day answering someone else's telephones? Really, what a nightmare!

Oh well. I was just thinking about the monumental labor that's already been applied to this wilderness. From that perspective, whatever stupid little problems we're confronting now are, genuinely, stupid and little.

All we need is freedom. Get rid of the crushing taxes and unintelligible tangle of useless regulations, the anal-compulsive nanny staters trying to herd us toward some kind of moronic and frankly, totally gutless, emotional dependency. The big issue now seems to be how to divvy up the spoils an out-of-control state believes it has some "right" to seize from the people who created it.

No. No. Governments have no "rights." Governments have only powers, and these powers are only lent to them by people with rights. We also have the right to take that power away when it begins to destroy us.

Only people have rights. We're the ultimate the authority, not the pompous, power-hungry thugs in DC.

We can fix whatever's ailing America as long as we're free. We always have. But we've got to be free, and we have the final say about that.

Save the Republic.

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Tax cuts or tax credits?

Well, I guess the Comrade is going to give a speech some time this week on economic policy. I mean, it's pretty hard to avoid the realization that the dems are sunk due to the Comrade's existing economic policies. Anyway, he's probably hoping that if he tosses the public a few crumbs and smiles big nto the camera, we'll all be charmed into dopiness and vote for the dems.

Apparently no one knows yet what the Comrade is going to suggest. However, watched Tim Kaine, who's head of the DNC, on Fox Sunday, and maybe gleaned a few ideas.

One of the biggest fights right now is over the Bush Tax Cuts. That is, George W got us a couple tax cuts while he was in office, and these are due to expire at the end of this year. Congress will have to vote to extend those tax cuts or they'll just go away. Net result:  we'll all be paying higher income taxes.

Nancy Pelosi, in typical style, was asked about this impending tax increase. She explained in a very comical and absolutely brainless way that failing to extend the tax cuts wouldn't be a "tax increase." Don't be silly! She went on for some minutes, waving her hands around, about how not extending the cuts would just take off something that was taken off.... wandering aimlessly into the weeds and making you wonder what the hell she was smoking. (This is on YouTube and worth watching for a laugh.)

Anyway, according to Tim Kaine, the Bush Tax Cuts should go away.  But wait! They'll be replaced by "carefully targeted tax credits" that will be designed to stimulate small business.

I can't wait to see what the Comrade and the merry marxists believe will help stimulate small business. That should be funny. Maybe more accurate versions of TurboTax?

Be that as it may, I'd like to take this opportunity to explain the difference between tax cuts and tax credits.

Suppose you get a tax cut of 10%. Whoopee!! That's 10% more of your own money that you can spend any way you want. Same for businesses. You could use that to pay off your credit cards quicker, buy that new appliance, fix the roof. Businesses can, maybe, hire another employee, upgrade their office or production equipment, get the parking lot blacktopped and striped, buy a new delivery vehicle, etc.

But, by contrast, suppose you get a tax credit. Well, a credit on what? Very likely, the tax credit will be offered to those who buy, or install, or invest in something "green." After all, GE is going broke and the Chicago Carbon Offset ExScam could use a shot in the arm -- all those friends of the Comrade and Al Gore, you know.  They aren't rich enough yet and can't bear the thought of having to get a real job. We don't have enough windfarms trashing the horizon. So try planting a tree in the lobby in the interests of creating more oxygen to supplment your HVAC and maybe that will qualify.

OR, the tax credit might be for employing an illegal alien. Hey, it could happen! Think of the undocumented as "democrat voters." The dems have been working diligently toward that goal.

Or, the tax credit might be for retraining a laid-off UAW member;

Or, the tax credit might be available only to unionized companies;

Or, for contributing to George Soros's Tides Foundation or the heirs of Acorn.

And you can bet your booty that having gotten a whiff of "carefully targeted tax credit," right now the halls of congress are clogged with lobbyists climbing over each other to secure a credit for their industry. Lotsa pay-offs are embedded in this kind of system. I suppose Chris Dudd could use some more cash before he retires.

The key point here is that the main difference between a tax cut and a tax credit is CONTROL.

The government can't control what a private citizen or a small or large business does with the additional money they retain from a tax cut.

On the other hand -- YOU DON'T GET A TAX CREDIT UNTIL YOU CONFORM TO THE GOVERNMENT'S REQUIREMENTS.

See??

So, take your pick. What's going to help you, as an individual, more? What's going to jumpstart the economy? What's going to boost FREE enterprise and support America as America?

On the other hand, what's going to give the Comrade and the merry marxists tighter control over the economy, more opportunities for graft and corruption, and allow some soul-less bureaucrat to conjure up a bunch more suffocating regulations?

This isn't rocket science.

Save the republic.

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Eco-freak, among others, freaks out

Very strange. A few blogs back I was talking about a couple shows on TV, both featuring more or less what the world would be like if there were no human beings. The series on History Channel focused on the decay, things collapsing, weeds and forests reclaiming the cities, etc. The series on Discovery Channel seemed somewhat happy that now the planet could live in peace.

Then this nutcake (he's literally probably constituted of wheat germ) today attacks the Discovery Channel's HQ in Silver Spring, MD, apparently hoping that somehow they would do the show that he wanted to see: How the human race stopped reproducing to keep from corrupting the planet.

The guy arrived in couture de rigeur for crazy blow-em-up types -- carrying a gun and wearing a vest decorated with pipe bombs -- and took a few hostages. The building was very quickly evacuated and no one was hurt. Kudos to the Montgomery County police, who only a few years ago had to deal with that malicious sniper who shot randomly at people throughout Maryland and Virginia. The cops shot and killed the doodlebug as he was drawing a pistol in the direction of a hostage.

So there's one small step toward cleaning up the planet.

I've said before that many of the crazier tree-huggers seem to operate on the theory that human beings don't belong on earth. So I was right. Thank you, Al Gore and all those other jobless and useless people who live in sequoias and occupy themselves by fabricating doomsday scenarios to scare the hell out of innocent bystanders. You wanted crazy; you got crazy.

Then there was the Comrade's rather tedious, but happily very short, speech about US combat troops leaving Iraq.

I took notes, chiefly:  "Now blaming the war for economic depression instead of George W?" And "Now he wants the VA? Didn't he suggest soldiers get their own private insurance?"

So now as we close the chapter on the War in Iraq, we appear to be opening a chapter of a whole new set of lies and deception.

Curiously, a couple days prior to the Comrade's speech, saw side-by-side graphs of how much the War in Iraq cost vs. how much the Stimulus Package cost. Guess what? Stimulus wins by about $1.5 BILLION.

Amazing, isn't it? You can fight and win a whole war, complete with air and naval support, miles-long columns of marines and army. You can fight for, what was it now? eight years?, and still not spend as much on that as Pazzo Pelosi and the Comrade can set aside for pork barrel projects.

I swear, these idiots simply astound me. It's the apparently bottomless depth of their irresponsibility and arrogance, the complete disconnect between their brains and the real world. It's amazing. How can anyone be quite so stupid and gain any kind of public support? I can't understand it.

Christina Romer -- or whatever -- the chubbette with the relentlessly perky smile, a leading White House economic "analyst" -- has already resigned and gone back to Sovietland University or whatever. I guess she would prefer going back home voluntarily to being tarred and feathered. The rest of them should take a lesson.

I just hope when the Republicans sweep in November that they don't get so self-congratulatory that they forget why they were elected. Remember, congresscritters, we the voters are the only friends you have to worry about.

Save the Republic.