Government devours wealth

               To get us to vote a certain way government pretends to do what it does to help the little guy, promote jobs, and increase opportunities.  In reality, government destroys job opportunities for the little guy.  Take California where blue collar industries like Chevron get taxed at a 44 per cent rate.  White collar industries like Apple and Google get taxed at a 10 per cent rate.  Blue color industries are heavily regulated.  White collar industries get the green light.

               The bigger the government, the more vulnerable it is to outside influence and manipulation, and who are the expert manipulators?  The guys at the top.  George Soros has devoted his life to working the system.  He may not be the richest man in the world yet, but he’s close.      

               When gas prices spiked from 25 cents to 75 cents a gallon in 1977, President Carter felt our pain at the pump, so  he created the Department of Energy to ensure energy independence and availability. The department employs 116,000 employees including contract employees and spends nearly 30 billion a year.  Is that close to 1.5 trillion we’ve spent on solving our energy problems only to pay close to $5.00 a gallon today? 

               I have no idea how many people work at the department of labor, but I was astounded by the size of the building when I visited Washington a year ago.  I’m guessing it employs well over a hundred thousand of white collar people hard at work trying to make rules and regulations that likely depress the blue collar market.

               And big government impulses are not party specific.   Jim Talent (R-MO) just sponsored the Skilled Work--force Enhancement Act (H.R. 1824), a bill that purports to help blue collar workers.  My prediction is that the bill will increase the white collar work force in D.C. and in government centers across the country, but it will do little to promote blue collar jobs.

               The one thing that creates jobs for the little guy is free enterprise. What big government is good at is devouring wealth, creating poverty, and keeping the underclasses dependent.

Recapping the GM Scandal

We, you and me baby, gave GM 50 billion, 10 in the bailout plus billions more in tax shelters and paying off pension commitments. GM used $540 million of our hard earned money to build a plant in Mexico.  Remember the grand speech at Janesville, Wisconsin? Obama promised that if we gave GM the money, the plant there would stay open for the next 100 years. Instead of keeping that open, GM opened another plant - in China and will spend another 691 million to build another plant – in Mexico. 

What’s really creepy is that the Cadillac division of GM made a propaganda film, celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of the birth of the Chinese Communist party, paid for by, you guessed it, the American Taxpayer, you and me babe.

We spend over 50 billion to save a company worth 28 and they ship thousands of US jobs out of the country with the support of the unions, who sold out their members for an 18 per cent share of the company stock.  

Thomas Paine was right: Government is at its best a necessary evil; at its worst an intolerable one.

Obama's "Investments"

  Obama invested another $5 billion of our money to achieve his goal of having 1 million electric cars on U.S. roads by 2015. It makes me feel so good, warm and fuzzy all over to think that he cares so much about our environment. The first requirement of a good leader is that he shows us that he cares.

        Do you think he might know where we get the electricity to run the cars?   From burning coal!  From burning petroleum! From nuclear power plants!  I expect he does, but his friends like Al Gore have invested their fortunes in alternative energy industry, so he’s obliged to pay them off by throwing our tax dollars at them, indenturing our grandchildren to his grand legacy.

       He destroys the jobs of the coal miners, puts the kibosh on pipe lines and oil drilling, adds 1.5 trillion in new debt every year of his presidency, and we, we exult him, “our Lord and Savior, Obama.” We are such idiots to fall for such schmaltzy, emotionally driven policy.

           But, you’ve gotta praise him for stopping the military from waterboarding terrorists.  That was so inhumane.  It’s so much more humane to kill them with drones, and if a few non-militants of the population happen to be taken out as well, well, you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet.

          He’s ratcheting up the attacks in Pakistan, six already this year.  I wonder.  What is the psychological impact of the terrifying American death machines flying into your neighborhood and taking out your neighbors? Would the general population be more easily co-opted into anti-Western extremist groups? Do you think the Nobel committee might regret their hasty decision to give him the Peace Prize so early into his presidency?  Nope.  Norwegians have mush for brains, too.

Gerrymandering Gone Giddy

Had President Obama really been interested in immigration reform, he would have pushed it through during the first two years of his administration when he had control of both houses.  The Democratic Party owes way too much to the unions to threaten their financial support.  They cannot afford real immigration reform.    

Had President Obama really wanted to do something about gun control, he would have moved decisively right after the Newtown massacre when 60 per cent of the American public was enraged and sympathetic.  He didn’t do it because it would be politically imprudent, threatening Democratic control of the senate.
So why is he wasting hot air on the issues now?  Perhaps there was something going on behind the scenes that he preferred we not notice.  On the Thursday before Easter weekend, he signed an executive order establishing a commission to crack down on electoral problems across the country. The commission would, among other things, establish the number of polling places, manage the training a recruitment of poll workers, the voter machine technology, and the distribution of provisional and absentee ballots.
This executive order is a preposterous violation of the decentralized electoral process established by the constitution.  The framers did not want to give the central government the power to manipulate elections to insure they stay in power.  
What is telling is that the president did not appoint anyone to the commission who had actual experience in the electoral process.  He appointed two campaign finance lawyers. What is even more telling is that this administration has shown no interest in preventing or prosecuting voter fraud.  Think Black Panther intimidation, no problem,  Melouise Richardson who bragged about voting six times and insisted that it was her duty, not problem.   This administration actually sued states for trying to remove non-citizens from the voter rolls and states who passed voter identification laws.  It’s interesting to note that not one state with voter identification laws went for President Obama. 
The real irony of the situation is that the party of the president, the party famous for systematic voter fraud, is crying wolf.  No one denies that the JFK election was rife with fraud in both Illinois and Texas.  LBJ’s shenanigans are famous. Dead people voting has for years insured Chicago’s Democratic majorities.  Anomalies in the last election are glaring, precincts voting unanimously for President Obama, precincts where more people voted than were registered, a 116 per cent voter turnout rate when most precincts are lucky to get 32.
Election gerrymandering is a serious threat to our freedoms, and this is gerrymandering gone giddy.  Can it be stopped?

       My husband was 11 when Germany surrendered and American Soldiers occupied his home town, Hoff, Germany.  He loved the American occupation, first because it meant food.  He could wait outside the gate of the compound and, after breakfast, salvage piles and piles of pancakes to take home to his mother and sisters.  It also offered enterprise.  He followed the soldiers, picked up their cigarette butts, and when he had collected enough tobacco, took it to a farmer and traded it for eggs or milk. 
     But more important than anything else he was struck by the American soldiers themselves.  They walked tall.  Even the lowliest privates strode like Gods, full of a sense of self-worth, fully alive to themselves. 
     He recognized, even at that young age, the difference between and subject and a citizen.  Americans see themselves the equal of anyone, beholden to no one.  We have, over the last 40 years, allowed a group of politicians to entrench themselves into a kind of ruling class, and their rhetoric reflects that they have forgotten that truth, that citizens are beholden to no one.  So John McCain dismisses the Tea Party as Hobbits.  I campaigned for you Mr. McCain, twice, but the next time I see you I’m going to put my little hairy foot someplace where the sun don’t shine. 
     Diane Feinstein oozed disdain, huge purple globules of disdain, to think that Ted Cruz could question her knowledge of the constitution.  “I’m not a sixth grader. I’ve been on this committee for 20 years.” (As though her working for 20 to ban firearms were some kind of recommendation. As Cromwell told a member of Parliament:  "You have sat too long for any good that you have been doing lately. ... In the name of God, go!")
     Feinstein ended her tirade with, “I respect your views, Mr. Cruz.  I wish you could respect mine.”  She obviously does not respect Ted Cruz’s views.  She oozed contempt the entire hearing.  I wanted Cruz to school her once again on the meaning of “shall not be infringed,” but I’m afraid she might have come unhinged.
     President Obama stepped into that elite ruling class with ease. “I am not a dictator.  I cannot force the Republicans to do the right thing.” Do you sense the subtext?  “I, of course, know what is right.  Those stupid, unwashed masses who cling to their guns and their religion have no idea.” 
     This move from citizen to subject did not happen over night, but somewhere over the last 50 years we have lost what it means to be a citizen, fully independent, in no need of state largess.  There was a time when we felt no difference in the inherent virtue or value of the individual whether rich or poor, lawmaker or candlestick maker.   We have our Ivy League colleges to thank for that seismic cultural shift.   Progressives have worked tirelessly to increase the individual’s dependence on the government, hoping to make us forever grateful for whatever largess they might bequeath us. 
      My prayer is that we can shuffle off this coil of bondage and servitude and stand once again like my father stood, tall and straight, striding boldly into the storms that awaited him, knowing that he walked with God and needed nothing else. 

I have long pondered the attitude of atheists, thought that were I an atheist, crosses and crèches would arouse my humor, not my gall.  I would smile and shake my head in wonder that so many people can believe in such hogwash, and I would go merrily on my way, safe in the knowledge that I had not been so duped.

Why then do atheists protest so vehemently against religious symbols? 

This morning I read a meditation on Psalm 63 that served as something of an epiphany.  Perhaps the Psalm speaks more truth than I had thought.  “O God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as a dry and weary land yearns for water.”  Perhaps the core of every cell in our bodies is imprinted with a thirst for God, a hunger to know the almighty. 

Perhaps those cell walls are our intellect, our noble reason of which we are so proud.  It resists. “Silly, how could Jonah have been swallowed by a whale and lived to tell the story?  How could the blare of Joshua’s trumpet have felled the walls of Jericho?”

Perhaps the symbols of religion reawaken that longing to such an extent that they must be banned lest we fall into the humble pit of faith.

With regard to Israel, we need a little balance in reportage.  The lead story, top of the fold will tell how Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza strip killed a civilian and wounded 25 others, setting fires and causing chaos.  It leaves the reader with the impression that Israelis just bomb the Gaza strip willy-nilly, just for giggles. 

What the media will fail to mention is that the air strikes were retaliation for 4 Kassam rockets and 11 mortar shells that had been fired at southern Israel from Gaza (jpost.com). They will also fail to tell you is that the reason civilians are killed is that Hamas plants its artillery near hospitals and schools and residential areas so that if Israeli strikes take out Hamas rocket launchers they are bound to harm civilians. Hamas uses the innocent as human shields. 

The media would also have us believe that the Jews usurped the area from the “Palestinians.”  Actually Palestine was never a state or a country.  There were simply "Arabs" who moved into a geo-political area of the Ottoman Empire called "Palestine.”  About half of today’s Israelis are Mizrachim, descended from Jews who have been in the land since ancient times, about 3200 B.C.   

When Caliph Omar conquered Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt in 636 C.E. Jews, massacred in huge numbers, were forced to flee the inland villages towards the coast.  So it was not the Jews who usurped “Palestinian” lands; it’s Arabs that even today vow to carry out Calip Omars mission and drive the Jews into the sea. 

Let’s consider a modern day scenario.  Say the Europeans who settled in this country dispersed the native populations into Europe and other parts of the world.  Say they were persecuted everywhere, slaughtered, on the brink annihilation. Suppose the international community decided to take action and force America to provide the native populations a permanent settlement, a little piece of land half the size Washington’s Bainbridge Island, only 15 percent of which is arable.   What if the other residents of Bainbridge Island launched the 2,653 missiles and rockets at the natives supported and financed by the rest of the United states of America, all intent on pushing the natives into the sea? (That’s the number of rockets that were launched against Israel last year.)

Whom would you side with: the brutal Americans attempting to drive the natives into the sea or the persecuted peoples trying desperately to hold on to a little scrap of their homeland?