… unless you’re a conservative
Republican!
The musing and explorations of an agitated elder. Among my ramblings will be thoughts on U.S. politics, personal investing, RV camping, and discussions with others having interests in common.
Friday, January 24, 2014
"Relocate To New York . . . Unless . . .
A current New York
state ad being pushed by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) invites businesses to relocate
your business to the state of New York …
Thursday, January 9, 2014
Just More Tripe!
Outspoken Defenders Of The Liberal Left
Let’s see if we have this right,
“If (Governor) Christie's story is true, and Bridgette Ann
Kelly really lied to him, shouldn't every action she took during his
administration be under review? Why isn't Christie reviewing them?” “He’s responsible because it is his
leadership that created a culture which tolerated or encouraged such venal
behavior.”
Yet again the liberal left attacks moderates and conservative alike at
the drop of “you name it”, yet defends Obama and his administration vehemently
notwithstanding irrefutable facts to the contrary on each and every occasion of
similar behavior.
Before we recount the lengthy list of things the president says he didn't
know about, it's important to note two inescapable conclusions:
• Either the president truly has been
oblivious,
• Or, the president is not leveling
with us.
The first alternative is discomforting, at the least. For about a
century, the man in the White House has been the most powerful person on the
planet. And this one doesn't know what's happening on his watch?
More troubling may be the second possibility posed by Obama's avowed lack
of knowledge about the activities of his tax agents, health care officials,
spies and other federal apparatchiks. What if the president knew, despite his
statements to the contrary? What's that mean for a nation of laws?
Here's a partial list of things the president claims to have been unaware
of before they occurred: The NSA spying scandal, domestic and foreign; multiple
warnings about the Obamacare website disaster prior to its launch; IRS
targeting his political opponents; millions who will lose their health plans
and doctors despite his promise otherwise; Department of Justice spying on
journalists; the flawed security at Benghazi which resulted in the killing of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and another diplomat and the killing two embassy
security personnel; ATF running guns to Mexico which resulted in the death of Agent Brian Terry.
Finally, and perhaps the one destined to generate the most backlash, that
Obamacare will result in tens of millions of insured Americans losing their
current plans and being forced to replace them with policies costing
exorbitantly more.
Got it? If the right did it, it’s
wrong! If the left did it, it’s
perfectly acceptable.
With the 2014 elections less than twelve months from now and Governor
Christi currently a leading moderate contender, the liberal left jumped at the
opportunity to discredit him at the onset of the campaigns. It matters little that the Democrats have a
long history of similar behavior.
Pardon me if I dismiss the views and opinions of the propagandists of the left as "just more tripe!"
Sunday, January 5, 2014
Best Description Of Barack Obama Ever Written
A
friend and fellow conservative thinker recently sent this to me. It’s worth circulating again. Click here to read it on line or save it as I did for later or repeated
reading.
In
case you’ve forgotten, or perhaps did not know, Obama’s early mentors were schooled
by students of Saul Alinsky, The author of Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for RealisticRadicals.
Sun Tzu; (c. 6th century BCE) was a Chinese general, military strategist, and
author of The Art of War,
who wrote the following:
It’s past time to wake up
America! The liberals declared war on
the American way of life decades ago.
Obamacare Should Remind Us We Are Not 'Subjects,' We Are People
Opinion from Professor Laura Hollis - Notre Dame
Obamacare Should
Remind Us We Are Not 'Subjects,' We Are People
Laura Hollis is a professor at
the University of Notre Dame
November 20, 2013|10:42 am
The unveiling of the dictatorial debacle that is Obamacare absolutely
flabbergasts me. It is stunning on so many levels, but the most shocking aspect
of it for me is watching millions of free Americans stand idly by while this
man, his minions in Congress and his cheerleaders in the press systematically
dismantle our Constitution, steal our money, and crush our freedoms.
The President, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid (with no small help from
Justice John Roberts) take away our health care, and we allow it. They take
away our insurance, and we allow it. They take away our doctors, and we allow
it. They charge us thousands of dollars more a year, and we allow it. They
make legal products illegal, and we allow it. They cripple our businesses, and
we allow it. They announce by fiat that we must ignore our most deeply
held beliefs – and we allow it.
Where is your spine, America?
Yes, I know people are complaining. I read the news on the internet.
I read blogs. I have a Twitter feed. So what? People in the Soviet Union complained.
People in Cuba complain. People in China complain (quietly). Complaining isn't
the same thing as doing anything about it. In fact, much of the complaining
that we hear sounds like resignation: Wow. This sucks. Oh well, this is
the way things are. Too bad.
Perhaps you need reminding of a few important facts. Here goes:
1. The President is not a king. Barack Obama does not behave like a
President, an elected official, someone who realizes that he works for us. He
behaves like a king, a dictator – someone who believes that his own
pronouncements have the force of law, and who thinks he can dispense with the
law's enforcement when he deigns to do so. And those of us who object? How
dare we? Racists!
And while he moves steadily "forward" with his plans to
"fundamentally transform" the greatest country in human history, he
distracts people with cheap, meaningless trivialities, like "free birth
control pills"! (In fact, let's face it: this administration's odd
obsession with sex in general - Birth control! Abortion! Sterilization! Gay
guys who play basketball! -- is just plain weird. Since when did the
leader of the free world care so much about how people have sex, who they have
it with, and what meds they use when they have it? Does he have nothing more
important to concern himself with?)
2. It isn't just a failed software program; it is a failed philosophy.
People are marveling that Healthcare.gov was
such a spectacular failure. Well, if one is only interested in it as a product
launch, I've explained some of the reasons for that here. But the larger point is that it
isn't a software failure, or even a product failure; it is a philosophy
failure.
I have said this before: Obama is not a centrist; he is a central
planner. And this – all of it: the disastrous computer program, the hundreds of
millions of dollars wasted, the lies, the manipulation of public opinion, the
theft of the public's money and property, and freedom (read insurance, and
premiums, and doctors) -- IS what central planning looks like.
The central premise of central planning is that a handful of wunderkinds
with your best interests at heart (yeah, right) know better than you what's good
for you. The failure of such a premise and the misery it causes have been clear
from the dawn of humanity. Kings and congressmen, dictators and Dear Leaders,
potentates, princes and presidents can all fall prey to the same imperial
impulses: "we know what is good the 'the people.'
And they are always wrong.
There is a reason that the only times communism has really been tried
have been after wars, revolutions, or coups d'état. You have to have complete
chaos for people to be willing to accept the garbage that centralized planning
produces. Take the Soviet Union, for example. After two wars, famine, and the
collapse of the Romanov dynasty, why wouldn't people wait in line for hours to
buy size 10 shoes? Or settle for the gray matter that passed for meat in the
grocery stores?
But communism's watered-down cousin, socialism, isn't much better. Ask
the Venezuelans who cannot get toilet paper. Toilet paper. ¡Viva
la Revolución!
Contrary to what so many who believe in a "living Constitution"
say, the Founding Fathers absolutely understood this. That is why the
Constitution was set up to limit government power. (Memo to the President:
the drafters of the Constitution deliberately didn't say "what government
had to do on your behalf.") They understood that that was the path to
folly, fear, and famine.
3. Obama is deceitful. Just as the collapse of the computer program
should not surprise anyone, neither should we be shocked that the President
lied about his healthcare plan. Have any of you been paying attention over the
past few years? Obama has made no secret of his motivations or his
methods. The philosophies which inspire him espouse deceit and other vicious
tactics. (Don't take my word for it: read Saul Alinsky.) Obama
infamously told reporter Richard Wolffe,
"You know, I actually believe my own bullshit." He has refused to be
forthcoming about his past (where are his academic records?). His own
pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, told author Ed Klein, that Obama said to
him, "You know what your problem is? You have to tell the truth."
Did Obama lie when he said dozens of times, "If you like your plan,
you can keep it. Period!"? Of course he did. That's what he does.
4. The media is responsible. And had the media been doing their
jobs, we would have known a lot of this much, much earlier.
The press is charged with the sacred responsibility of protecting the
people from the excesses of government. Our press has been complicit,
incompetent, or corrupt. Had they vetted this man in 2008, as they would have a
Republican candidate, we would have known far more about him than we do, even
now. Had they pressed for more details about Obamacare, Congress' feet
would have been held to the fire. Had they done their jobs about Eric Holder,
Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the IRS scandal, NSA spying - or any of the other
myriad betrayals of the public trust that this administration has committed,
Obama would likely have lost his 2012 reelection campaign. (A fact that even The Washington Post has tacitly
acknowledged. Well done, fellas! Happy now?)
Instead, they turned a blind eye, even when they knew he was lying,
abusing power, disregarding the limits of the Constitution. It was only
when he began to spy on them, and when the lies were so blatant that the lowest
of low-information voters could figure it out that they realized they had to
report on it. (Even in the face of blatant, deliberate and repeated lies, The
New York Times has the audacity to tell us that the President "misspoke.") They have betrayed us,
abandoned us, and deceived us.
5. Ted Cruz was right. So was Sarah Palin. The computer program
is a disaster. The insurance exchanges are a disaster. What's left? The
healthcare system itself. And this, of necessity, will be a disaster, too.
Millions of people have lost their individual insurance plans. In
2015, millions more will lose their employer-provided coverage (a fact which
the Obama administration also knew, and admitted elsewhere).
The exorbitant additional costs that Obamacare has foisted on
unsuspecting Americans are all part of a plan of wealth confiscation and
redistribution. That is bad enough. But it will not end there.
When the numbers of people into the system and the corresponding demand
for care vastly exceed the cost projections (and they will, make no mistake),
then the rationing will start. Not only choice at that point, but quality and
care itself will go down the tubes. And then will come the decisions made by
the Independent Payment Advisory Board about what care will be covered (read
"paid for") and what will not.
That's just a death panel, put politely. In fact, progressives are
already greasing the wheels for acceptance of that miserable reality as well.
They're spreading the lie that it will be about the ability of the dying to
refuse unwanted or unhelpful care. Don't fall for that one, either. It
will be about the deaths that inevitably result from decisions made by people
other than the patients, their families, and their physicians. (Perhaps
it's helpful to think of their assurances this way: " If you like
your end-of-life care, you can keep your end-of-life-care.")
6. We are not SUBJECTS. (or, Nice Try, the Tea Party Isn't Going Away). We
have tolerated these incursions into our lives and livelihoods too long
already. There is no end to the insatiable demand "progressives" have
to remake us in their image. Today it is our insurance, our businesses,
our doctors, our health care. Tomorrow some new crusade will be announced
that enables them to take over other aspects of our formerly free lives.
I will say it again: WE ARE NOT SUBJECTS. Not only is the Tea Party
right on the fiscal issues, but it appears that they are more relevant than ever.
We fought a war once to prove we did not want to be the subjects of a king, and
the Boston Tea Party was just a taste of the larger conflict to come. If
some people missed that lesson in history class, we can give them a refresher.
The 2014 elections are a good place to start. Call your
representative, your senator, your candidate and tell them: "We are not
subjects. You work for us. And if the word "REPEAL" isn't front and
center in your campaign, we won't vote for you. Period."
Laura Hollis is an attorney and
teaches entrepreneurship and business law at the University of Notre Dame.
And this comes from Notre Dame. What a powerful and true letter!
For those of you who have yet to acquire a clear understanding of how and what radical liberals think and what tactics they use, I recommend two recently published books which I will shortly add to those already appearing on the right side of Doggone Blog. 1) RADICALS - Portraits Of A Destructive Passion by David Horowitz and 2) THINGS THAT MATTER: Three Decades Of Passions, Pastimes And Politics by Charles Krauthammer
Thursday, December 19, 2013
Federal Government Waste You Should NOT Tolerate
I just received a “heads up” email from Newt
Gingrich. I present it here and second his recommendation
that you read Wastebook
2013 by Senator
Tom Coburn. You needn’t buy a thing. All you need to do is click on this link
to read it on line or download it as I did for later or repeated reading.
Here’s
what Newt had to say:
Do you remember spending almost a
million dollars in the last few years on a website devoted to romance novels?
How about that $17.5 million you spent on brothels in Nevada? Or the $200,000
treating record industry executives to a world tour?
No? Well, technically you didn’t spend all that money.
Your government did. But it was your money
the government spent.
Romance novels
and record tours are just a few among dozens of outrageous expenditures Senator
Tom Coburn has cataloged in his 2013 “Wastebook,” the latest of his annual reports to remind
us just how out-of-control the federal government has become.
The entire report
is worth reading, if only for the experience of discovering example after
example of scandalous use of taxpayer dollars, each more absurd than the last,
none of which you’ve ever heard of.
For instance,
the State Department recently spent $5 million on custom crystal wine glasses
for its embassies. USAID spent $300,000 on 600 gallons of diesel in
Afghanistan--$500 per gallon, or a hundred times the going rate.
Amtrak lost
$60 million last year alone providing food service on its long distance routes
(some of which include complimentary wine and cheese, and offer gourmet meals
subsidized by taxpayers).
And the USDA
gave a $100,000 grant to a North Carolina distillery to “explore the
feasibility” of the company making vodka out of yams--in a virtually dry
county. The Department also gave nearly $17 million to dozens of businesses to
fund the creation of products such as salsa and Bloody Mary mix.
Senator
Coburn’s Wastebook is more than just a list of wasteful programs, however. It
is a perfect documentation of the advanced breakdown in government we see
throughout the federal bureaucracy.
In my new
book, Breakout, I
describe three kinds of breakdown in government: the breakdown in simple
competence, the breakdown in common sense and defined purpose, and the
breakdown in the rule of law. We see all of them in this report.
Large parts of
the government are simply incompetent at performing the tasks they have taken
on. The Wastebook includes $11 billion worth of improper payments the IRS made
on the Earned Income Tax Credit last year alone. This is as much as 28 percent
of all its Earned Income Tax Credit payments, an unbelievably high error rate
which, as the report points out, causes the IRS to “erroneously dish out more
money in improper payments than the entire budgets of the Environmental
Protection Agency, Department of the Interior, and the Department of Labor.”
Senator Coburn
identifies more than a billion dollars a year in Pell Grant fraud: scammers
posing as students who take the money from the government and run. Evidently
the Department of Education is incapable of stopping it.
The series of
wastebooks may be the clearest description ever published of the breakdown in
common sense and defined purpose of the federal government. This year’s edition
finds that Department of Justice employees spent more than $626,000 last year
to book travel by speaking to a live travel agent rather than booking their
trip online. That’s because the DOJ’s travel agency charges $6.49 to book a
trip over the internet, and a whopping $31 to book one over the phone. In
defiance of common sense, the employees used the phone 40 percent of the time.
A more
expensive example of this collapse in common sense is the National Technical
Information Service. This agency charges other organs of the federal government
to provide reports which are largely available for free online. For instance,
the wastebook notes, the NTIS sells the “Public Health Service Food Code” to
other agencies for $69 a pop. Yet this document is available at no cost over
the internet. In fact, it’s the first result when you search “Public Health
Service Food Code” on Google. Senator Coburn refers to the NTIS as the “Let Me Google That For You” of the federal government.
The agency costs taxpayers $50 million.
Finally, the
report illustrates the breakdown in the rule of law. In one example, it points
to $30 million intended to restore the Mississippi coast which was instead used
for unrelated pet projects. One official allegedly directed millions of grants
to entities associated with his family and friends.
Similar
corruption exists on a grand scale. As of 2011, Senator Coburn notes, there
were 312,000 federal employees or retirees who had failed to pay their income
taxes--$3.5 billion worth of them. More than a third of these people (107,000)
are current civilian employees (bureaucrats) who have not paid their taxes and
yet continue to be paid by the taxpayers. Evidently these “public servants” do
not feel they have to live under the law they administer.
This is the
breakdown we must overcome. Read Senator Coburn’s Wastebook to understand it. Then
demand that your elected officials commit to breaking out.
Your Friend,
Newt
Newt
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Open Letter To Bill O'Reilly At FOX NEWS
The following email was sent today to Bill O'Reilly at FOX NEWS
"We support the government paying tribute to those who served bravely in our country's armed forces," said Daniel Mach, director of the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief. "But we should honor all of our heroes under one flag, not just one particular religious symbol."
Judge orders removal of Mt. Soledad
cross in La Jolla
U.S. District
Judge Larry Burns in San Diego issued an order from the bench Thursday
declaring that the government's display of a 43-foot cross atop Mount Soledad
in La Jolla violates the Establishment
Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
He ordered the cross to be
removed within 90 days, but stayed the order until all possible appeals have
been exhausted.
On December 12, 2013 Burns
gained notoriety over his ruling that the Mount Soledad war memorial cross near
San Diego must come down. It was erected in 1954. Burns said he had no choice
but to order its removal as the cross on the memorial amounted to an
endorsement of Christianity. He stayed his order for 90 days to allow for an
appeal of his ruling to the entire United
States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit or the Supreme Court of the
United States
The federal display was
challenged in a 2006 lawsuit by the Jewish
War Veterans of the United States of America and several local residents,
all of whom were represented by the American
Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU
of San Diego and Imperial counties.
"We support the government paying tribute to those who served bravely in our country's armed forces," said Daniel Mach, director of the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief. "But we should honor all of our heroes under one flag, not just one particular religious symbol."
What a “crock”!
Cross On Mt. Soledad
Arlington National Cemetery - Canadian Cross of Sacrifice
Please Bill, do not let them get away with
it! This needs the widest possible
exposure.
Regards,
Wayne Clark, Fullerton, CA
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)










