Unanswered Threats And Misdirected Blame: Predictable Byproducts of the Obama Doctrine

I was reading the comments on a friend’s Facebook wall this week, and one of the commenters outlined the Obama Doctrine as (and I’m paraphrasing) “Cuddle up to our nations’s enemies, and screw over our nation’s friends.”  I thought it was a nice start, but I would elaborate a bit more, and phrase it this way:

Get cozy with the enemies of freedom.  Vilify those who stand up to those who commit real evils.  Attack longstanding institutions, beliefs, and concepts.  Oppose the existing order based on the notion that “change”, simply for the sake of change itself, is both good and desirable.  Never miss an opportunity to use the bully pulpit to lecture, even when you don’t know what the hell you are talking about.

5 sentences.  6 years of decline, destruction, and ruin, actively concealed by a campaign of gaslighting and deliberate misinformation, with the assistance of a fourth estate concerned first and foremost with making sure that it gets invited to all the right parties.  And of course, clichés, clichés, clichés.

Who can forget the images of Obama making kissy-face with one of Satan’s newest chew toys, Hugo Chavez?  Or shaking hands with Raul Castro a few years ago before his unilateral betrayal of every single soul killed or tortured by the Castro Brothers and their cohorts?  Or the images and apologetic rhetoric uttered in Turkey, and before the United Nations, in which he expressed regret for America’s crimes and evils to peoples and nations who never met a form of torture (REAL torture), rape, and savage, brutal murder of innocents that they liked.  Or when he stood before Tucson and bemoaned the death of civility, when much of his political career has been built on the political slander of those he deems to be his enemies.

As a head of state, he has barely been able to conceal his contempt for beleaguered counterparts, whether it was the legitimate leader of Honduras, who was fighting off an attempt by a predecessor to subvert the law and hang on to power, talking trash about the Israeli Prime Minister, and childishly committing every diplomatic and protocol snub possible, before taking the extraordinary action of shutting down US air travel to the country, or parading the Dalai Lama past the White House trash, and in front of press photographers.

As a leader, he has never failed to divide those he fancies himself leading.  From his infamous, and telling derision as a candidate of “those” people, bitterly clinging to their Bibles and guns, to attacking industries like coal, which have had the largely thankless job of keeping the lights on, the homes and apartments of their self-appointed betters warm in the winter and cool in the summer, their foods, beverages, and medicines refrigerated, and their security systems powered up, so that they could decide for the rest of us that the ability to do so relatively inexpensively is somehow unfair to the rest of the world, and irreparably harmful to the planet, and must therefore be made prohibitively expensive.  He didn’t hesitate to interfere with existing bankruptcy laws in the case of GM and Chrysler, and turn the body of secured transactions law on its ear, damaging the predictability and uniformity of existing law which makes the finance necessary to modern business possible.  He has never missed an opportunity to vilify the police, even when he didn’t have all the facts.   And no document, be it the Declaration of Independence, or passage of scripture has been safe from his selective and…unique…interpretations.

Law is not safe from his actions.  He has demonstrated over and over again a belief that “emergencies” are legitimate justification for unilateral action, such as his bypassing of bankruptcy law in the case of GM and Chrysler, leading to the involuntary and costly bailout by the public in the case of the former, and the quick sale and stiff arming of secured creditors in the latter.  He has repeatedly shown contempt for the notion of Separation of Powers, by unilaterally declaring Congress to be in recess, in order to appoint individuals who Congress would not confirm, by appointing agency heads who have repeatedly ignored and openly defied Congressional oversight and legal discovery promulgated by Congressional committees.   He has issued Executive Orders which exceed the power of the executive, and which directly encroach upon power and authority specifically enumerated to the legislative branch.  And he has deliberately set his Justice Department upon the states, in order to prevent the states from enforcing laws that his administration has deliberately decided not to enforce, by virtue of concepts such as “prosecutorial discretion” which have been so stretched and deformed in order to cover this application as to be unrecognizable, and to interfere with the exercise of power and authority specifically reserved to the states, be it taking action to preserve the shoreline from oil spills, to requiring state issued ID to vote, to denying state issued ID to foreigners who are not lawfully here in the country.

He has reversed long-standing policies because they are old, and because he deemed them to be “ineffective”, without any apparent, let alone due and sufficient regard to the underlying reasons for such policies.  No matter how many people the Castro regime has killed, no matter how much misery it has inflicted upon its people, and no matter the fact that its two biggest sponsors are now completely unable to prop it up any longer, the time has come to treat it as if it were a rational and responsible state actor, because the President says so.

But one of the hardest pills to swallow has been the audacity of a dope who has never been able to resist commenting when the occasion and the office made it inappropriate to do so, and his silence when a real leader would have understood that the right comments were not just appropriate, but necessary.  Occasions which allowed him to comment on racial matters were occasions to hold forth, and lecture a nation that was less racially polarized at the start of his Presidency than during it, and to make it more so.  We all heard him say that the Cambridge Police acted stupidly when they had the audacity to ask someone breaking into a home to show ID and prove it was his own.  We all know that if he had a son, he would look like Treyvon Martin, and that the man who killed him wasn’t entitled to legal due process, and the presumption of innocence.  We all know that gentle giants like Mike Brown might commit criminal acts, but it was ok to speak in terms that seemed to justify the mayhem and destruction that followed the grand jury’s refusal to indict the police officer who shot him.  But we also witnessed a man, who was already at the podium when he learned of the Ft. Hood massacre, and gave a bizarre shout out to a guest before grudgingly acknowledging the wanton and religiously motivated murders of service members by one of their own, who would have been removed from the service before the saturation and primacy of political correctness as a consideration for all actions taken.  We were baffled by the religiously motivated beheading of an Oklahoma worker by a jihadist coworker, and the President’s letter of encouragement to the murder’s mosque.  And we all watched and waited for DAYS for a response to an act of cyberterrorism against an American corporate subsidiary of Sony. The response, when it came, was classic Barack Obama. The usual platitudes about how mad it made him. (At least he spared us any discussion of how he “will not rest until…”. Maybe even HE realized that such a remark would have been way too much before hopping Air Force One for yet another incredibly generously subsidized two weeks + off at the taxpayers’ expense in Hawaii.) The dubious notion that his involvement in the decision-making would have been enlightened and meaningful. (“I wish they had spoken to me first.”) And of course, the blame for the wrong people, when his administration has demonstrated repeatedly that it considers the defense and upholding of American interests, and American considerations to be a distant second to the ability to subordinate them to others, especially those who would have their way not just at the expense of those interests and considerations, but to deliberately harm them.

From his “I’m outta here, suckers, thanks for the trip” Presser:

THE PRESIDENT: Well, let me address the second question first. Sony is a corporation. It suffered significant damage. There were threats against its employees. I am sympathetic to the concerns that they faced. Having said all that, yes, I think they made a mistake.

“I’m sympathetic, but I have neither their liabilities or responsibilities in this matter. In fact, I never had to worry about making a payroll, keeping the lights on and the doors open, or dealing with laws and regulations churned out with frightening regularity by people who may be thousands of miles away, and who labor under the mistaken belief that the rest of us have nothing better to do than spend their days making sure that they first comply with those laws and regulations. And I am delightfully unburdened by the likelihood that I will suffer any legal consequences for the theft of employees’ personal data, or the career consequences of taking actions which could compound the liability of this corporation in this matter. But I also have sufficiently lowered the average American’s expectation that the Norks will suffer any retaliation by our government. All of this makes me extraordinarily well-suited to pass judgement on Sony Pictures’ decisions in this matter.”

In this interconnected, digital world, there are going to be opportunities for hackers to engage in cyber assaults both in the private sector and the public sector. Now, our first order of business is making sure that we do everything to harden sites and prevent those kinds of attacks from taking place. When I came into office, I stood up a cybersecurity interagency team to look at everything that we could at the government level to prevent these kinds of attacks. We’ve been coordinating with the private sector, but a lot more needs to be done. We’re not even close to where we need to be.

And one of the things in the New Year that I hope Congress is prepared to work with us on is strong cybersecurity laws that allow for information-sharing across private sector platforms, as well as the public sector, so that we are incorporating best practices and preventing these attacks from happening in the first place.

But even as we get better, the hackers are going to get better, too. Some of them are going to be state actors; some of them are going to be non-state actors. All of them are going to be sophisticated and many of them can do some damage.

“If only we had more uniformity in the ever-changing and dynamic medium that is the internet. Then it would be much easier for all governments to monitor and access private and proprietary information, just to make sure that no one is going to do anything bad with it. And the best way to accomplish this is by sharing more control over this innovation that OUR country built with other nations, many of whom have an interest in using it to harm us, but that like totes won’t happen, because bad actors will always be prevented from being bad actors when there are laws against it. After all, just think about all the times that I let the law restrain me from doing what I wanted.”

We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States. Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don’t like, or news reports that they don’t like. Or even worse, imagine if producers and distributors and others start engaging in self-censorship because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be offended.

“Unless, of course, someone makes a stupid, crappy little youtube video offensive to muslims and their beliefs, in which case we can publicly blame them for the shameful and unnecessary death of an ambassador, and the security detail that came to his aid while waiting for help I never sent. In that case, it’s perfectly ok for me and those who work for me to disparage and deride that expression of freedom of speech, because it made for a useful distraction from my negligence.”

So that’s not who we are. That’s not what America is about. Again, I’m sympathetic that Sony as a private company was worried about liabilities, and this and that and the other. I wish they had spoken to me first. I would have told them, do not get into a pattern in which you’re intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks. Imagine if, instead of it being a cyber-threat, somebody had broken into their offices and destroyed a bunch of computers and stolen disks. Is that what it takes for suddenly you to pull the plug on something?

Because it makes perfect sense for business leaders to come to me, as if I have a clue what I’m talking about, and as if I have even a scintilla of interest in actually supporting businesses that haven’t paid the proper “respect” to campaign coffers or my associates and bundlers, or are part of the great “green energy” grift which I supported generously with taxpayer money for little or no return on that “investment”. I mean, let’s face it. There is only one story that is acceptable during my reign, and that is those that I am involved with, and that doesn’t cast me in a bad light. And threats that I clearly have no idea how to respond to must be answered with a “proportionate”, rather than an unquestionably decisive and overwhelming response, because the discretion necessary to determine what is “proportionate” allows me to maintain the illusion that I know what I’m doing. And just as soon as I figure out how to cyberattack a country where even electricity is as rare as food, or a contrary remark, I’ll make sure that I do so. Unless I have figured out that it is easier to find someone else to complain about.”

So we’ll engage with not just the film industry, but the news industry and the private sector around these issues. We already have. We will continue to do so. But I think all of us have to anticipate occasionally there are going to be breaches like this. They’re going to be costly. They’re going to be serious. We take them with the utmost seriousness. But we can’t start changing our patterns of behavior any more than we stop going to a football game because there might be the possibility of a terrorist attack; any more than Boston didn’t run its marathon this year because of the possibility that somebody might try to cause harm. So let’s not get into that way of doing business.

“Only I get to fundamentally change how you live. And my weaknesses and shortcomings should never result in the loss of freedoms that I didn’t take from you through my own deliberate actions. When you stop driving, or using electricity, or heating your homes, or eating what you want and not tree bark and gruel, it will be because I have determined that it is good for you, not because some sawed-off little runt with a messiah complex is offended by your choices. Now get back out there before I have the IRS audit you cowards.”

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Washington State: Hotbed of Labor Unrest

We have illegal immigrant farmworkers going on strike to protest farmers bringing in migrant farmworkers legally:

The striking farm workers, mostly indigenous Mixteco and Trique Mexicans who migrate each year from California, had made repeated demands over wages, working conditions and other issues.

But at the core of their angst is the pending arrival early next month of some 160 guest workers from Mexico to prop up the farm’s existing workforce.

“There’ve been rumblings … (over guest workers) in the past, but I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” said Alberto Isiordia, state monitor advocate for the state Department of Employment Security.

While growers in Eastern Washington have used the federal government’s H-2A program over the last five years to legally bring guest workers into the country, this is the first year Sakuma or any Western Washington fruit grower will use it.

Many of the Sakuma farmworkers — who don’t speak English or Spanish —

say they are in the country unlawfully.[Emphasis Added]

Of course they are. And if you haven’t completely surrendered your ability to think to the rampant idiocy and pro-amnesty nonsense, you’re probably thinking “Why is this a thing? If you’re illegal, the last thing you should be doing is calling attention that fact by protesting over your employer using workers who have been brought in legally. But seeing as our society and our government have been actively undermining the law for some time now, I not only expect people to support these illegal immigrants doing the striking and protesting that Americans just won’t do, I expect that before long, the NLRB will be investigating and going after the farm for not “bargaining in good faith” and “undermining their labor organizing activities”. I sure am glad that in a labor climate where many Americans are unemployed and many more are underemployed, community organizing, and “improving” labor conditions for people who are breaking the law in the first place simply by being here is a priority.

But then, I’ve learned to not count out the native ability to mix stupidity and audaciousness into a big ol’ pot and serve up heaping helpings to the neighbors either. Case in point? Seattle fast food workers demanding “a living wage” for saying “You want fries with that?” and failing to firmly secure the lid on the cutomers’ sodas.

The minimum wage in Washington state is $9.19 per hour. The organization “Good Jobs Seattle” says the strike is part of a nationwide effort to raise the pay for fast food workers to $15 per hour and to give them the right to organize without retaliation.

Now, I’ve heard a few of this group’s spokespersons on the radio, and as someone who has worked from age 15, I get the impression that many of these folks just don’t get it. It’s a cinch that none of them has taken an economics class, or had a lemonade stand as a child. When I hear a 23-year-old whining that she can’t afford an apartment all to herself, and has trouble making ends meet, my first reaction is “And why do you think that fast food is a CAREER?” With the exception of managers, it was never intended to be a career. It was a place for people to learn work skills (especially teenagers) that they could continually build on, and move on to jobs that can and should be careers. But frankly, when I hear them talk about how they would have more money to put into the economy if they made more money, it doesn’t take too long to realize that they have never considered that the prices their employers have to charge in order to pay their wages have limits on their elasticity. Whenever I’m in Seattle, I try to avoid eating in fast food establishments because the prices reflect the already-higher costs of doing business that are imposed upon their employers. If you increase wages (which are already frequently above minimum wage) to $15 an hour, and the Quarter Pounder Meal goes up to $8, it shouldn’t take a rock surgeon to understand that McDonalds is going to sell a lot fewer of them, which in turn means that they will employ fewer people. Yeah, if they get their way, a few of these strikers may get a significant raise. And several more will get pink slips. And that says nothing about what those increases in costs might do to other products and services they buy; it is foolish to believe that all other costs and prices will remain static, especially in a city where the Mayor is silly enough to attack a potential employer, Whole Foods, for not paying its workers enough, when they have consistently been named one of America’s best places to work, and when the bicycle-riding, granola-munching tool in the mayor’s office has failed to calculate all benefits offered to those employees into his dubious calculations to make his assertion.

But stupidity is pernicious. Like rust, it never sleeps. And this morning, I was treated to the story of a ballot initiative in the City of SeaTac (where our major airport this side of the mountains is located) to raise the wages of some workers who work at the airport. One of the people favoring it was a gentleman who works for one of the contractors at the airport that fuels the aircraft. His rationale went like this:
Many of the jobs being performed by contractors and their employees at the airport used to be done directly through the airlines, which, when adjusted for inflation, paid wages about a third higher to the employees doing the work as they do now, and that just isn’t right. The host rightfully discussed deregulation, and the very competitive nature of the business. His guest countered by alleging that he’d “heard” that the airlines still pay the same dollar amount to the contractors to do the work, and that the difference is being held up there. The host went on to point out that if the costs have to be raised, it may drive some of the carriers away from the airport, or make it so expensive that consumers will go elsewhere. The guest than said that he didn’t believe that they would have to raise prices to make up the difference, because “all businesses put money away to deal with emergencies”. The host pointed out that this isn’t a one-time charge, this would be an ongoing increase in expense. They went to a break, and when the host came back, a caller phoned in, and asked how it is a city has the authority to identify certain workers as being worthy of a higher minimum wage than other people. I thought it was a fair question, especially since the idea is being championed by people who seem to think that others can simply make more money out of thin air to pay for them. On the other hand, these people vote, and when you ponder that for a second, some of the things Congress does in terms of spending start to make a perverse sense.

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Friday Night Sleep Tight Thoughts: Sticky Fingers Edition

What do you get for the kleptocratic statist who has everything?

Your children.

MSNBC host and whackjob (BIRM) Melissa Harris-Perry wants you to know that we don’t spend enough on education because we just don’t realize that our children belong to everyone.

http://www.mrctv.org/videos/shorter-melissa-harris-perry-all-your-kids-are-belong-us

Of course, when you are aligned with a mindset that thinks it acceptable to kill your own children, it was probably inevitable to look upon other people’s kids as a resource for redistribution.  Afterall, it’s hard work maintaining a culture of filth, stupidity, and subservience when those most in favor of it have fewer children than those who oppose it.  And the idea that we need to pay even more to a system that already is failing and giving us dumb kids is precious.  But than, government is the only place where incompetence, illogical, and failure is rewarded.  The saddest part of this is that the majority of the people on the receiving end of this pitch are the product of …public schools, and will likely accept the opinions of the “experts” on this matter.  All it typically takes is saying that “IT’S FOR THE CHHHHIIIIIIIILLDREN!!!111!!!”

Next, who can forget that classic Obama knee-slapper “I do think that at a certain point, you’ve made enough money.”?

Well, it was probably only a matter of time before our great father Obama would let us know that “At some point, you’ve saved enough money.” too.  And thankfully, under his watch, government is right there to tell us when that is.

From The Hill:

President Obama’s budget, to be released next week, will limit how much wealthy individuals – like Mitt Romney – can keep in IRAs and other retirement accounts.

And remember, comrade, the government has NEVER arbitrarily changed the definition of “wealthy” when there was money to be confiscated taxed.  Like when the 16th Amendment was passed to tax only “the wealthy”.

The proposal would save around $9 billion over a decade, a senior administration official said, while also bringing more fairness to the tax code.

The magic of government accounting…that fantastic world where taking someone else’s earnings, levying a not-insignificant handling charge, then distributing it to some one who didn’t earn it, or spending it on such profound endeavors as alcoholism rates among Chinese hookers, and federally funded sex-education classes for Kindergarteners is “bringing fairness to the tax code”. It should go without saying that what is being “saved” is the government’s ability to buy votes with someone else’s money.

The senior administration official said that wealthy taxpayers can currently “accumulate many millions of dollars in these accounts, substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement saving.”

Ahh, yes. That new benchmark of “fairness”, an arbitrary determination of the OWNER’S “needs”, decided entirely by a government that refuses to live within our means…meaning that it is really talking about ITS needs. (Those lavish vacations and hookers and blow for the Secret Service don’t come cheap, doncha know) While this same mantra has met with limited success among people who refuse take responsibility for their own safety, and don’t want YOU to either, I think it’s safe to say that government’s determination of “need” in this matter will meet with even less success than the drumbeat about not “needing” a Sig or a Glock or an AR for hunting.

Under the plan, a taxpayer’s tax-preferred retirement account, like an IRA, could not finance more than $205,000 per year of retirement – or right around $3 million this year.

I can remember when $250,000 a year was the government’s benchmark for “rich”. Can you?

Romney, Obama’s 2012 opponent, had an IRA several to many times that amount, leading to questions about how the former Massachusetts governor was able to squirrel away so much money in that sort of retirement account.

The problem is not everyone donates money to the President like the heads of Solyndra, Sun Power, and other “green energy” graft schemes. Sometimes, they actually earn it through hard work. And this is why this Administration is clueless about finances. Because it NEVER occurs to them that while you might be limited in annual contributions to IRAs, not all IRAs are simply glorified bank accounts. Some are managed investments, that take risks with the money in order to get increased returns. But again, unless you made your fortune from government or your association with it, all these people see is money that they want.

And for your last thought…

I was eating lunch today and reading about another gun manufacturer that made the decision to leave one of the states that has gone full retard after Sandy Hook and passed blatantly unconstitutional gun “control” laws.  As this had been going on for a few weeks now, I have had a certain measure of amusement in watching this, but then I thought “If I were totalitarian narcissist with delusions of adequacy who chaffed at the restraints that the Constitution necessarily placed on me, and I might want to resort to a desperate ultra vires act against an industry that could be a threat to me realizing my aspirations of power, would I want to have to “seize” facilities scattered across states in all regions of the country, or would I want to only have to concentrate on one region?

Suddenly, it was less amusing than it had been a few minutes before.

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How DID The Republic Survive As Long As It Did…

…without our self-appointed intellectual betters to tell us how we are just too stupid to see how enlightened they are?

From the finely polished turd file, we have this latest entry from New Age manure merchant and elitist twit, Deepak Chopra. 

Now, on the one hand, I’ve gotten used to people who would have trouble finding a clue if it was nailed to the back of their hand pretending to greater intellect and wisdom (based on the consensus shared by their peers, and rarely by any objective measure or observable criteria other than the sound of their own voice) than that possessed by my friends, associates, and myself.  They played this game in the last election, when it declared that opposition to Barack Obama was simply the result of our racism, and not his razor-thin resume, and record of making principled stands on nothing other than preserving a mother’s “right” to snuff her baby.

Well now, Mr. Chopra insists that Obama has the answer that we need as a nation in one word: “Evolve”.

Of course, the piece hits all the predictable points, such as Romney pointing out the uncomfortable truth about the President:

One foresees that a simple message may prevail over a complex one. The simple message, which Romney endlessly repeats, is this: The President is a nice guy, but he’s in over his head, and his wild spending has bankrupted the country.

Now keep in mind, Mr. Chopra chooses not to demonstrate the level of denial of many Obama supporters; he doesn’t refute this message.  He tries to recharacterize it as he extolls the virtue of what he thinks Obama’s winning message is:

The complex message, which comes from Obama in mixed, varied, and confusing in ways, is this: We must revamp America in order to meet the future.

The only thing that is complex about the Obama message is the choreography that we see performed by those who would have you believe that there is still HOPE and CHANGE instead of historic and unprecedented failure and decline at the hands of someone incapable and unwilling to change either.

Because Romney has blame, impatience, and angry frustration on his side, he may succeed in his uphill climb. Already most of what the pundits told us – that Romney had been damaged in the combative primary race, that the conservative base is opposed to him, that the religious right is suspicious of him – has proved invalid. Republicans are rallying en masse behind the simple message, while seething underneath is an irrational hostility to Obama that no sensible person can quite fathom.

What is overlooked or avoided in this suspect analysis is the fact that the President has had 3 and a half years to “revamp” America, two of which with majorities in Congress that should have gotten him all his little collective salvationist heart required to get these things done.  What it has gotten us less drilling on federal lands and in the Gulf of Mexico (and climbing gas prices to go with it), a coal industry facing annihilation, which WILL see electricity prices skyrocket (a promise kept), and the worst labor market since the great depression, with the historic and unprecedented benchmarks of no new net jobs and a downgrade in the country’s credit rating.  To ask for more of the same would be like being donkey punched by an entire football team, only to ask them to do it again.

And to allege that Romney has blame on his side is cheeky, considering that instead of correcting his failures during the last three years, the President, who asked us for the job, and was briefed repeatedly throughout the campaign, gave us excuses about what he “inherited”.  Any negative has always been someone else’s fault, usually his predecessor.  And while there is angry frustration and impatience with the failure that is this administration, I believe to say it is on Romney’s side is projection…it certainly exists, but it isn’t because of anything Romney has said or done.  This is the result of an administration that put a priority on regulation, making the engines of prosperity off-limits or so restricted as to be ineffective.  It also carries the taint of irony, as it was the undertone of the campaign of HOPE and CHANGE that the President ran in the last campaign.  Romney’s momentum isn’t for a great enthusiasm for his message thus far as much as a resignation to the understanding that he represents the lesser of two evils, and the prospect of at least retaining competent management for the economy for the first time since January 2009.  Given the record that the President dares not run on, the hostility towards him is hardly” irrational”, and to suggest that those who realize this, and aren’t willing to acquiesce to a brilliance that simply isn’t in evidence is insulting.  The fact is that despite a gradual dumbing down of the population which has been exploited by those who have decided that they are our betters because they have been “trained” to rule, the average person still has a better grasp on basic economic truths than any 12 graduates of Harvard Law or the Kennedy School of Government, if only because the finite nature of money is something that they can’t escape by printing money or raising taxes.

Chopra goes on to list the factors that he wants the reader to believe that Republicans aren’t capable of addressing, while avoiding the fact that the only answers that Democrats seem willing to give are “Spend more, tax more, government more”.  These answers demonstrate a disbelief that the American people can and will come up with their own solutions if government is scaled back, and pulled off the backs of on whom the burden of making it all work.

It’s a tragic irony that the Republican Party has become the domain of white blue-collar workers, because they are the worse off and the ones who need Obama’s vision the most.  All governing classes come from the elite (after all, both candidates have Harvard degrees, just as all the leading contenders in 2004 went to Yale). The difference is that the Democratic vision is fostered by an elite that wants to retool our whole society for the benefit of the greatest number. The Republican Party wants to benefit well-off white males.

Of course, the governing class doesn’t have to come from the “elite”, and there are members of Congress who do not fit this classification thanks to the very same Tea Party that he holds in such disdain.  That is why the Republican Party is typically as hostile to it as the Democratic Party is.  And the desire to “retool society to benefit the greatest number” is nothing of the sort.  It is merely the latest incarnation of a “benevolent” spirit in government that looks to be generous with as much of other people’s property as it can, in order to purchase as much power from those voters as it can.  The elephant in the room is and always has been that entitlements have NEVER been the Federal government’s to give, and the longer that it has been able to engage in this generosity, the better it has been for government, not the subjects of its supposed benevolence.

Somehow, after forty years of reactionary conditioning, the working class has been persuaded to support rich white males while ignoring their own best interests.

  Or maybe they realize that all the left has offered is envy and gilded chains, and that isn’t in anyone’s best interests but the Democrats.

Abortion and gay marriage are typical red herrings, as are foreign wars and stoking mass fear about terrorism.

Or abortion is a crime against the nation’s charter and a betrayal of our most cherished ideals, and gay marriage is an insult to the struggles and sacrifices that characterize the real civil rights gains our country experienced in the last century, which cheapen that history, and pretend that the morality that its proponents pretend is neutrality is of greater benefit to society than what they want to replace.  But then, I doubt Mr. Chopra is sufficiently well-versed in American history, law, and the philosophy of law to truly grok the significance of that which he would trivialize.  And considering the man he is campaigning for got us into Lybia’s war, over the objections of Congress, and still has troops in Afghanistan, is waiving Osama Bin Ladin’s bloody dress to anyone who’ll  listen, GITMO is still open for business, and American citizens still have to consign themselves to nudie scans and being felt up by unionized government subcontractors when they fly around our own country, the cheap talk about the distractions of foreign wars and terrorism is just that.  Cheap and talk.

 For all that, America must evolve on all fronts.

Why is it that we keep having to suffer the self-righteous opinions of British twits like this man and Martin Bashir?  Seriously, if we wanted to live like EUROPEONS, we never would have fought and won two wars against the Crown.  If I wanted to know how to fail, I still wouldn’t ask either of them.  There are plenty of Democrats here who I could take seriously.

Obama realizes this quite clearly; hence his programs for alternative energy,

The wind power that is proving to be a boondoggle, to such a degree that its biggest cheerleader, T. Boone Pickens has bailed on the idea, and the generously taxpayer-funded failures like Solyndra , or the taxpayer money frittered away on foreign auto companies like Fisker, or the brilliant idea of subsidizing biofuels which are harmful to engines, incredibly inefficient, and perform the stupid government trick of turning food into fuel, making food that much more expensive for the very same people who Democrats keep purporting to help?

 a cleaner environment,

And all it will cost is energy bills that will necessarily skyrocket for the average consumer, and businesses who will either go out of business, or cut their work force, further depressing an economic already gasping for air because of choking regulations and the anticipated costs of ObamaCare.

 infrastructure repairs,

Which, shockingly, as it turns out, were not so shovel ready.  But, hey, since that wasn’t HIS money, its ok to laugh about it, right?

universal health care, and on and on.

An exercise in the usurpation of power that the Federal government was NEVER intended to have, which will drive up costs until private insurers are out altogether, and which will necessarily reduce the quality of care, and destroy the most innovative health care system in the world.  But given the fact that the Federal government has done such a bang-up job with the Postal Service, Social Security, and Medicare, I’m sure that we can count on that quality, efficiency, and careful stewardship of our money to carry over into this latest venture in to the nanny state.  After all, the NHS has done wonders in Great Britain, right?

Nothing offered by Romney is remotely commensurate. One prays that in his heart he is the moderate, sensible person that the extreme right hates and fears.

If the “extreme right” had the numbers and the power that our good friend Mr. Chopra would have us believe, there would be no doubt that Mr. Obama will not be re-elected…because he never would have been elected to begin with, as he would have had a competent candidate opposing him in the LAST election, and someone other than Romney facing him in this one.

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Stupid Is As Stupid Does

For a man who claims he can do nothing about rising gas prices, he sure is doing everything he can to drive them up.

“And when the price of oil goes up, prices at the pump go up, and so do these companies’ profits,” he said. “Meanwhile, these companies pay a lower tax rate than most other companies on their investments — partly because we’re giving them billions in tax giveaways every year.”

Of course, when the dollar is recklessly and irresponsibly inflated by a government addicted to buying votes with entitlements it has no business doling out in the first place, those dollars are worth less (and continue to be so until they are worthless) so it takes MORE of them to buy the same thing you used to be able to buy with fewer dollars.  So now the barrel of crude that used to sell for $67 now sells for over $100. 

This means that you pay more at the pump to fill your tank, demonstrated to great effect with my last fill up.  This also mean that to maintain the same profit margin, which for oil companies is a very small one (the government makes more on a gallon of gas than the oil companies do), they have to raise prices.  It also means that the amount of dollars in profits goes up, thus giving them “record” profits, but it does not mean that the percentage of profit goes up at all.  Even a three-year old will understand it when you substitute dollars with a medium that they can relate to.  And just like when any other tax on a business goes up, this additional cost of doing business will be passed on to the consumer.

I just can’t wait for $7.00 a gallon gas, can you?

But then, that’s been his plan all along.

 

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Everyone Gets A Trophy, Part 247

For every solution, we have the Federal Government.

From the WaPoo, we have this lovely sign of the apocalypse:

Employers are facing more uncertainty in the wake of a letter from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission warning them that requiring a high school diploma from a job applicant might violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Now the story points out that the letter does not have the force of law, and is meant to be taken as a “suggestion”. However, anyone who has ever had to deal with a regulatory agency knows that today’s suggestion is tomorrow’s mandate. And since this idiotic suggestion opens up a whole new avenue of enforcement opportunities (i.e. new budgetary considerations), I fear we can expect this coming soon to an employment application near you.

Also from the article:

The “informal discussion letter” from the EEOC said an employer’s requirement of a high school diploma, long a standard criterion for screening potential employees, must be “job-related for the position in question and consistent with business necessity.” The letter was posted on the commission’s website on Dec. 2.

Now, on one hand, I’m trying to think of what job you could perform without reading skills or math skills. I mean, even the person running the fryer at Mickey D’s has to know how long to set the timer for, right? And a basic knowledge of chemistry made slow days as a stock clerk infinitely more interesting. (Bombs, anyone?  You couldn’t bowl with frozen turkeys and two liter bottles of soda all the time.)

But then, on the other hand, I think of the misspellings we see on fast food signs, or the time when we had that “special” person making our customer service experience a memorable one, courtesy of a public education system that will, when pressed, admit that it doesn’t even do as well as it used to (when our grandparents had to learn LATIN and actually read the hardcore literature prior to a successful matriculation, and now we’re lucky when the kids get out knowing where their own state is located on a map).  I know, I know.  These dedicated experts will always tell us that the answer is to pay teachers more, but I find myself less and less convinced by that reasoning. (And before my friends who are teachers decide to jump down my throat, yes, I understand that there have been other developments changing how you do your jobs, and expecting much more from you than should be expected, but in an age where so much knowledge is literally at our fingertips, how can you be in any way complacent with the almost constant dumbing down of your charges?)

It may be endy, but it certainly isn’t funny.  When government is the only employer, then it will be appropriate for the government to dictate what the minimum requirements for employment will be.

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The People Who Don’t See It My Way Are Greedy! And Other Examples of Leftist Myopia

In the last few weeks, we have been assaulted with images of the “Occupy Wall Street” protests.

Together with the misnamed “I am the 99%” persons, these people, and those supporting them have mounted a rhetorical full-court press on Capitalism, and those who defend it as being “greedy” and “immoral”. This is one more chapter in a battle that has been playing itself out for a few years now, starting with the lead up to Obamacare.

In a nutshell, the deep-thinking intellectuals of the Left, and their cousins, the Feelerati, decided that since those running the evil medical system believe that they should be paid for the knowledge and their services, and that because not everyone could afford the cutting edge treatments available to some, that this was somehow an affront to the very notion of being American, and extrapolated this dubious thinking into a narrative that had people literally “dying in the streets” for want of treatment (a blatant falsehood as anyone who has EVER been in that special purgatory known as a hospital emergency room can tell you) and that if you opposed a government “solution” to this “crisis” whereby the federal government makes sure that everyone is insured, no matter how much it will cost the rest of us, you didn’t really have “American” values and you also hated Jesus. No Constitutional argument against this spectacular bit of wrong thinking was valid. You don’t think the government has the authority to do it? What about the general welfare clause, you greedy hater? (And aside from the fact that the Congress itself didn’t bother to even go to this degree to justify this action, choosing instead to take the position it could do whatever it wanted, this argument was never even considered as a defense in the various court cases where the law has come under fire, it was a great argument in favor of this power grab.) Then came the self-righteous and the sanctimonious. I call them the hand-wringers. They are the ones who care so much it hurts. Just ask them. While some of them are sincere enough to actually donate their own time and money to the causes that move them, many more are the ones who make a great show of their concern for others, and therefore just know that the only way to address these “problems” is to allow them to use everyone else’s earnings to deal with it, and the power of a bloated and corrupt government to inefficiently deliver this assistance to those who are never allowed to forget who is “aiding” them. No legal or Constitutional impediment will stand in the way of these people when it comes to this “right”. They want what they want. The force of their want gives them moral authority, and if you doubt it, they are only too happy to inform you that Jesus would be all for Obamacare, so if you oppose it, you really are evil. Never mind that the same Jesus who displayed an affinity for and warned against the harming of children wouldn’t support the “right” to murder children in the womb with the sanction of privacy, and that no other policy of government must breach the impenetrable “wall of separation between church and state” that Justice Hugo Black, channeling Thomas Jefferson, had “discovered” in the late 1940s, thus proving that everyone in the Federal Government, including Jefferson himself, who used to attend Sunday services in the capitol building, had fundamentally misunderstood. This was different, because they were certain that Jesus, who never commanded his followers to aid each other through the auspices of government, was on their side. This was about charity, which everyone knows starts with government.

Flash forward to Occupy Wall Street and I Am The 99%. Now we have the crusade against “greed” and the finger wagging that insists that people like me can’t possibly be Christians when we support those greedy banks and bankers, because that’s just “immoral”. Yet when I look into the motives of the occupiers and the 99%s, I find these claims less than compelling. Take the poster above.  “We are getting nothing while the other 1% are getting everything.”  Now many people know that life is work, and that nothing comes for free.  But not these people, who have fallen under the sway of greed’s ugly and slightly retarded sister, envy.  The problem with envy is that you get so busy counting the other guy’s money and good fortune that you lose sight of your own.  Before you know it, a great black beast is digging its spurs deep into your back, and no amount of what you can take from others will be enough.  But envy isn’t the only thing clouding the judgement of these crusaders. 

The Occupy Wall Street website also lists demands.  A quick perusal of this list reveals that Envy’s big sister is right at home with those who would condemn her.  How else do you classify those who want debt forgiveness and student loans for all?  This says nothing of the other demands, all of which can be boiled down to this phrase: We want government to GIVE us everything worth having.  Forgive my student loans.  Give me a college education.  Give me a job and healthcare. 

These demands are made without regard for the cost, because it is presumed that someone else will bear the burden of paying for it…a presumption that is silly on its face.  Even if they are correct about being the 99%, the 1% cannot possibly have the wherewithal to pay for these “demands”.  And these “demands” are the epitome of greed.  “Screw the law.  Screw predictability.  Screw what others worked for.  I want what I want.  And I want it NOW!”

I want you to get your wagging finger out of my face, and for you to stop promoting your envy and your greed as “American Values”. 

Get a shower.  Stop whining and work the job that is “below” you if that is all that’s available.  Don’t take out $100,000 student loans for Masters of Fine Arts unless Mommy and Daddy are paying the bill, or your rich Aunt is going to leave a chunk of change and be courteous enough to drop dead at the same time you graduate.

And stop crapping in the parks and on cop cars, unless you don’t mind the rest of us seeing how far we can drive our feet up your butts.

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Yeah, About That False Equivalency…

This really isn’t all that shocking. After all, “This is what democracy looks like!” is what these fine upstanding citizens and Rhodes Scholars are only too willing to chant when gathered in large groups, sometimes with fists pumping the air. The thing is, they’re right. Democracy is a large, undisciplined group, its members wanting what they want, with no checks or stops on their behavior. Whatever 50% plus 1 thinks is appropriate, without regard for the law and without a whit of consideration of the idea that someday, they might be part of the 49%.

And it’s why the Framers designed something different.

From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking.

-James Madison, The Federalist No. 10

Now, the Occupy crowd has excuses why it isn’t interested in seeking change through participation in the existing political process, ranging from “they are all corrupt” to “the corporation’s influence the political process, and that’s why we’re Occupying Wall Street and not Bwarney Fwanks’ office in Washington D.C.”

However, it is all nonsense. While the brighter lights among them would die before admitting that the Tea Party laid this lie bare when it worked to elect over 100 candidates to Congress in the last election, it demonstrated what a “small” representative “silly”, “racist” group of “insane” citizens can do. And if the Occupiers are really 99% of the country, as they so boldly claim, then electoral change shouldn’t be too difficult at all.

They don’t forego this route because it is impossible. They forego this route because they don’t want to do that. Because the rest of us (Wait! I thought they were 99%?) won’t “vote in our best interests”. What is our best interest? Why, what THEY say it is, of course. Which brings us to the irony. They only want democracy when it is a mob. They don’t trust the ballot box, and will do anything to invalidate electoral results that are between them and what they want. A great example?

Wisconsin.

Shocked when the “democratic” process in the state brought an end to the free-for-all for public sector unions at the public trough, they banded together and massed at the capitol in Madison, and proceeded to throw a months long temper tantrum, complete with intimidation, lawlessness, and futile recall efforts funded with millions of union dollars.

And now my perpetually misguided friend Rutherford wants to paint the Occupy! nonsense as equivalent to the Tea Parties. It is silly and wrong, but he’s never let that stop him when he feels he has it all figured out. Of course, I don’t recall any Tea Party gathering where they told the participants how to get out of hand cuffs, or passed out condoms, “expressed” themselves with defecation, or the participants rolled over to people’s residences to “protest”.

I’m not surprised, though. It isn’t like the community organizer in chief sets a good example for them.

Its funny, but I don’t hear so much anymore about how “democracy” made Egypt a better place. But then, much like the Occupiers here, the protestors there were being used by people who wanted “democracy” to accomplish for them what they couldn’t accomplish on their own.

Its funny where you find wisdom sometimes. Especially when its lurking right under your nose, or has been in your ears for years.

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When in Rome, Speak Mandarin

“The envious man thinks that if his neighbor breaks a leg, he will be able to walk better himself”– Helmut Shoeck

“Envy is counting the other fellows blessings instead of your own”– Unknown

“Where you see valid achievements or virtue being attacked, it’s by someone viewing them as a mirror of their own inadequacy instead of an inspiring beacon for excellence.”– Vanna Bonta

“If you think spreading money around by force seems like an odd definition of fairness, you’re not alone.”– Arthur C. Brooks 

From the pResident’s taxpayer-funded campaign stop “listening tour” stop in Alpha, Illinois this past Wednesday, comes this convenient exchange with a plant “student” with another question about fairness.

Q My question is about Social Security. I know that one of your ideas to fix the solvency of it is to reevaluate the equation that determines the COLA, the cost-of-living adjustment. But as the law stands right now, we are only taxed on the first $ 107,000 that we make.

THE PRESIDENT: Right.

Q That means every dime that I make is taxed for Social Security.

THE PRESIDENT: Right.

Q I don’t make $ 107,000. (Laughter.) But that means that—

THE PRESIDENT: Somebody said you will—

Q Someday, I hope.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, you sound pretty smart. It sounds like you’re going to do just great.

Q Thanks. But that means that people like Mitt Romney only pay into Social Security on the first one-tenth of 1 percent of what they make.

THE PRESIDENT: Right.

Q Can we look forward to you telling the Republicans that it’s time that the wealthy pay their fair share? (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: Well, first—this is a very well-informed young man here. (Laughter.) You’re exactly right that the way the Social Security system works, there’s what’s called—there’s basically a cap on your Social Security, which there isn’t, by the way, on Medicare. But Social Security, it only goes up to the first $ 107,000; and you’re right, somebody who makes—who has net assets of $ 250 million and are making maybe $ 5 million a year just on interest or capital gains or something, just a fraction of it’s going to Social Security. I think there’s a way for us to make adjustments on the Social Security tax that would be fairer than the system that we use right now.

I do think, in terms of how we calculate inflation, that’s important as well.

Aside from the astonishing assertion that the pResident thinks, there is much that is revealing in both the question, and the answer.  While a FOX reported stated that this “student” was wearing a “Volunteer” tag, it doesn’t make me believe that he doesn’t believe in the essence of his question, that being that anyone who makes more than $107,00.00 a year is no longer “paying their fair share”.  Why do I believe this?  Because he is in the heart of the beast that is the system of higher indoctrination, where he is almost certainly surrounded by other mushy headed young people, most of whom have the luxury of living off of Mom and Dad’s money, as well as student loans, which are all guaranteed by Uncle Sugar.  In other words, they are fat, dumb, and happy on other people’s money.  Of course it would be only “fair” to make some people pay more if for no other reason than they make more.  The only difference between these students and the professors who constantly indoctrinate them is that someday, the students will have to actually start earning an honest living, and finally figure out that all that redistribution means that sooner or later, they have to pay, with little or no say over what is done with the product of their labor.  Add in the payments on those student loans, and a few of them may finally have some moments of clarity that override decades of brainwashing conducted by teachers, by professors, and by a complicit media. 

Further, the question is also believable based on the conflation between a tax for a specific purpose, i.e. FICA taxes, and taxes on income.  To be fair to the mushy head, since it is all taken from him, he may not have given much thought to the fact that there are different amounts deducted for different purposes on his pay advice, so it is understandable that he doesn’t look at a faltering economy, and an entitlement rushing towards insolvency at a breakneck pace and consider whether or not the government has any business providing the entitlement to begin with.  Instead, in a fashion that his professors would most assuredly be proud of, he instead concludes that the entitlement must be saved and that since that can only happen with massive infusions of cash, the rich must pay more, because there is a need.  What the “rich” might need is not a matter for consideration.  Unless today’s recipient receives far more than they ever paid in, this entitlement cannot possibly be “fair”.  And because he , and the OPM addicts in Congress and the White House perceive a need (to get reelected) the only possible solution is that other people must pay more into a system that hasn’t a hope of surviving according to current demographic data to begin with.  This only serves to illustrate that we have allowed entitlements to grow into envy, which has twisted the definition of what is “fair” from what used to be “what I earn is mine” into “what you earn is mine”, and transformed “want” into “need”, which is also determined by other people.  The result is a world where it is celebrated by a large part of the population when a candidate for President says “At some point, you’ve just earned enough money.” and when elected officials take it upon themselves to decide what you need, and scheme to confiscate and redistribute the rest, regardless of how much effort you may have put into earning it, and the fact that such an attitude discourages the kind of diligence that made it possible to earn in the first place all that they would take.

It isn’t just that the pResident and his envious groupies don’t have any real grasp on how capitalism works; it’s that we aren’t even speaking the same language as them anymore. 

The utopia they want to impose would fail.  History teaches us that there can be no other ending.  But rather than lingering on through the destruction and misery that their doomed-from-the-start experiment would bring, it would just be better if we decided to keep freedom, rather than surrendering it for whatever scraps the state would let us have.

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An Open Letter to The American Left (Government Shutdown Edition)

I wrote this post the on the evening of April 8, 2011, and was getting ready to publish it when the deal that was going to cut trillions billions millions not much at all was announced.  I shelved it because despite all the hyperbole and hue and cry about what was a totally foreseeable and avoidable crisis, it was avoided in the eleventh hour by a Congress that still wasn’t responsible enough to write a budget, but was afraid of the consequences of its deliberately dilatory behavior.

Since then, we faced a similarly foreseeable and avoidable crisis with the Debt Ceiling, and an intransigent Democratic Party that both refused to present a plan of its own, and then refused to “compromise” by any normal definition of the word, and which STILL refuses to see that the problem is with government spending and not revenue.  Instead, they offered platitudes about “balanced approaches” and “the rich paying their “fair” share”, despite the stark reality that every penny “the rich” make could be taken taxed and it still wouldn’t make up the deficit between what government takes in and what it spends.

This would have been infuriating enough, without the tacit agreement between “mavericky” establishment Republicans like Juan McCain and the Democratic Party to jump into the new post-Tucson civility and use every violent description their talking points writers could scribble about the one group of elected officials in Washington who had the gumption to refuse to go along with any plan that could be passed by the pResident’s artificial deadline because what was being proposed didn’t address the real problem in a meaningful way.  People who actually did what they said they were going to do and not nod admiringly at the Emperor’s new clothes were likened to “hostage takers” and “terrorists”, and breathlessly accused of putting the country at risk while their counterparts stomped on the gas pedal and flew past the sign warning of the close cliff’s edge, and without regard for the fact that by leveling these accusations at these elected officials was also leveling them at the people who elected them, or who wish they could have. 

And those who mistakenly believe that government’s purpose is to give them stuff paid for by other people are emboldened, meaning we get to hear how wanting to limit the size of government and stop the insane spending are threatening the future (while ironically, running up a ginormous bill today giving stuff away that my kids will have to pay somehow doesn’t) and how big government is somehow a laudable and desirable goal, like this insufferable tool’s verbal diarrhea:

Right now, Dr. King is slowly shaking his bowed head, and saying “I NEVER knew you.”

———————————————————————————————————————

Dear Liberals, Progressives, Socialists, Marxists, Communists and other assorted moochers:

I’m going to start this correspondence with a hard fact that you either haven’t heard, or haven’t given sufficient thought to:  As of March, 2011, the federal government has spent $927.3 billion while taking in $184.2 billion in revenue.

This is not a revenue problem; this is a spending problem.

You have worked hard to confuse the basic issues and conflate a loss of power over the dependent class that you have worked so hard to cultivate with a cataclysmic event of Biblical proportions.  Oh, I’m sorry.  Did I say Biblical?  I forgot how much the mere mention of the word in any form sends you in an almost tourette’s-like response about shoving religion down your throat, and the way that it interferes with your constant kowtowing and deference to Islam.  Maybe the next time you and that noted Constitutional Scholar, Lindsey Graham have lunch at a fundraiser, you can slip him the draft legislation to limit all that nasty free speech that you don’t like.  It isn’t like he’s got any real objections to such a concept.  For the right pri…campaign donation, I’m sure he’ll be eager to be your pupp…I mean, an eager advocate for such a bill.

Anyway, I’m writing this to call you out on your latest round of stupidity and hyperbole on the budget and the looming Federal government shutdown.  Do you have any idea how stupid you all look, pissing and whining about the Republicans not wanting to borrow money to pay for things the Federal government shouldn’t be doing?  I mean, even if this wasn’t idiotic as a concept, there is the matter of your stupid execution.  After all, if killing babies, broadcasting pro-left propaganda, and empowering a federal regulatory agency to promulgate its own regulations on what we exhale is absolutely vital to the continued health and well-being of the Republic, you had all of 2010 to make it a reality.   12 long months.  365 days.   And no budget.  Time enough to take over health insurance, thus taking over the health care industry, but not time to sit down and write a budget that would have funded Planned Parenthood, an organization that took in 363 Million Dollars in taxpayer money last year, and then spent 170.4 Million Dollars on management and fundraising, and another 6.2 Million Dollars in International Family Planning.  While the 2008-2009 annual report had the organization losing money for the year, it netted a cool 85 Million Dollars in the previous year.  A look a the tax return for 2008 shows that the paid staff for the national organization averages in excess of $250,o00 a year…beyond pResident Obama’s ever lowering threshold for what is considered rich, and yet we haven’t heard a peep from you class envy pimps about this outrageous salaries.  Especially when other people who murder for money are considered criminals and immoral, even by you.  Your silence does not become you on this matter.

And for those of you who want to say that it is about providing health care to women, such as mammograms and screening for other cancers, I have one very simple question.

Where in the Constitution is Congress authorized to spend money on providing health care to some people of a specific gender?

Go ahead.  I’ll wait.  And if you are actually going to try “the good and plenty clause” argument with me, make it detailed.  Really.  Convince me.  Make your case.  Because I really want you to think about it, so you devote the same attention to the explanation why you are wrong.

And more funding for the EPA?  Seriously?  You want to give more money to people who have decided that every time you exhale, you’re releasing a pollutant?  While I’m all in favor of fining the living crap out of the Democratic Caucus every time they breathe, certainly you must see how stupid this is.  You want to further empower a federal agency that has already been told by Congress that it doesn’t have the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions (and thus destroy energy production and manufacturing) with a half-assed exchange scheme that limits these emissions when the developing world, which keeps expanding their own far more polluting capacities for production at an exponential rate does not follow or subscribe to this economic suicide pact at all? 

I have a better idea.  If you feel so very strongly about it, why don’t you go live in a lean-to in the middle of the desert, with none of those pesky trees and plants around you to emit all that oxygen at night.  Or if you are so willing to give up your well-being because you can’t afford to buy some of the Church of Gaia’s indulgences, you can always just kill yourself.  That will reduce your carbon footprint to zero, and the rest of us can go on living our lives without some addle-brained idiot screaming in our ears about our carbon footprint every time we get in our Ford Mustangs and do our damnedest to blow half the gas tank out the tail pipe as we smoke the tires.

And funding for NPR.  C’mon.  Its bad enough that these people and their audience stubbornly cling to the insulting fiction that they are unbiased.  That much anti-Israel hatred and condescension to Americans who don’t care for being dictated to is really tough to love, but making us borrow money that my kids will have to pay back so we can foot part of their bill?  No.  At some point, the madness has to end.   Let them get a few more minutes of underwriters’ advertising and pay their own way. 

This childish insistence that we have to keep borrowing money to pay for things that the federal government has no business doing needs to stop.  And holding actual enumerated functions hostage because you insist that we have to keep funding such things is inexcusable.

You wanna run out and have a tantrum in to the nearest microphone?  Knock yourself out.  You want to scream and howl because of a mere 60 Billion Dollars in cuts when what needs to be done is TRILLIONS in cuts?  Be my guest.  You want to howl about government being cut to the bone?  Then you need to understand that the only thing that will save this country is amputating the cash-hungry heads from the federal hydra that has been sucking the life out of prosperity for decades with a “War on Poverty” that has been a stunning and abject failure.

It’s time for serious people with serious solutions and your five minutes are up.  You can leave, or you can get the bums rush, but we’re sick of your nonsense.  Its time for you to go.

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