The New Dark Ages Of The Left

     There is ample evidence available to support the notion that leftism destroys everything it touches. One only needs to look at Europe to see the results of one of the sacraments of the Left, multi-culturalism. This holy of all holies to the Left has turned nations with vibrant cultures into simply geographical locales. Combined with another of the Lefts sacraments, equality, Europe has been transformed into an economic and social basket case.
     And now a new dark ages has been ushered in by the destructive policies which are advanced by an agenda driven by Leftism. Even the "Last best hope of man on earth", America, has fallen victim to a world religion like no other that has come before it. It is a religion whose greatest sins are hard work, self-reliance, independence and success and whose virtues consist of  sloth, victim hood, dependence and class envy. Leftism despoils a previously virtuous idea like equality by aiming to impose it without regard for fairness, morality or common sense. What could be more immoral than redistributing the fruits of one man's labor to another man who didn't earn it, all in the name of equality? The Lefts idea of equality insures that everyone is equally poor, equally miserable and equally without hope.
     The new dark ages of the Left is further defined by a complete lack of any value placed on life, whether it is in the womb or wandering the desperate streets of the crime-ridden inner cities of this nation. The Left worships barbaric ancient cultures like the Mayans because they share the same proclivity towards infanticide. Calling it a medical procedure that solves the problem of an unwanted pregnancy, makes it no less barbaric than the ritualistic infanticide practiced by the Mayans and other ancient cultures. And the constant decay and moral breakdown of the inner city as a result of Leftist policies aimed at getting Democrat politicians re-elected, is reminiscent of the social disorder that defined the original Dark Ages.
     The Lefts energy policy is also designed to limit economic growth and prosperity, thus contributing to the new dark ages. The advocacy by a big statist government of automobiles that have a limited range, combined with higher and higher fuel costs, is the way in which the Left limits the movement of free people. A prosperous and thriving economy needs fuel, which the Left limits through policies ostensibly for the sake of the environment that they have put themselves in charge of protecting. This is why the Left seeks to destroy energy production by using the environment to stop the miracle of Hydraulic Fracturing, which is used to secure more natural gas at a cheaper price and with less damage to the environment. The Left use to be in favor of natural gas when they were waging war against nuclear energy. Now that they have seriously crippled that industry through massive regulation and permitting processes that last as long as spent fuel rods, they have turned their sights on the natural gas industry.
     The new dark ages of the Left is borne of policies that seek to destroy the morality of Capitalism and replace it with the immorality of Socialism. The Lefts idea of a Utopian society is one in which there is less wealth, less freedom, less innovation, less health care and, in a word, less civilization. And this, my friends, is the coming dark ages brought to you by the practitioners of Leftism and the soulless ideology of Utopianism.

Click here to watch my political song parodies.

Gun-Free Zones Are Common Sense Free Zones

     In the wake of recent mass shootings, there has been much talk about gun control and mental health issues. Some of the potential solutions have been constructive and some have been driven by ideological hysteria. It is a terrible thing when innocent life is taken senselessly, but we must remember that in most areas of our society violent crime, and especially gun violence, has been reduced in recent years. Except of course in gun-free zones.
     Gun-free zones were established by law in 1995, and since then there has been a spike in violent incidences in these areas. Those on the left are enamoured with gun-free zones because they are the quintessential leftist solution to a problem. A deviant behavior in individuals is somehow solved by passing a law or regulation which aims to criminalize the vehicle of the deviancy. From the moment the gun-free zone law was passed, I thought it was a feel good measure which only served to replace common sense with political rhetoric. The whole idea that government can simply eliminate the potential for violent acts to be committed by evil men by simply telling them they aren't allowed in certain places, is ridiculous. If the gun-free zone idea was effective at keeping bad guys from harming innocent people, then we ought to declare the entire country a gun-free zone and dismantle our military and law enforcement agencies. We would no longer need them because we would be protected by the magic of the gun-free zone.
     The reason that the Left chooses an irrational solution like gun-free zones to real solutions that involve stricter criminal penalties and more involuntary commitment of the mentally ill, is because of ideology. And ideology is the same reason they oppose protecting innocent life from bad guys with guns by placing good guys with guns between the innocent and the evil. Their real goal is not to protect innocent life, but to shred the second amendment by using their intellectual superiority to create what they think is a better society. At the core of that better society is less choice for individuals and more for an ever-expanding centralized government.
     The Lefts support for gun-free zones is completely consistent with their support for abortion. In both cases the lives of the innocent are not as valuable as their political agenda. It is an agenda which makes us all less safe by transferring responsibility from the guilty to the innocent for the greater good of leftism.

Click here to watch my political song parodies.

Who Has Compromised And Who Has Not?

     Yesterday on the floor of the Senate Mitch McConnell, the Republican Minority Leader of that body, made the case that it has been Republicans who have compromised in an effort to craft a deal with the President to avoid the fiscal cliff. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, of course tried in vain to make the opposite case.
     The problem with Senator Reid's position is that it has no standing in fact and reality. The Democrat-controlled Senate has refused to pass a budget in almost four years. The Republican-controlled House has passed a budget every year since being made the majority by the voters in the 2010 mid-term elections. But the Republican budget, which would have imposed some fiscal sanity on the Federal government and gone a long way to reducing the deficit and debt, was not even brought to the floor for a vote in the Senate. The Republican house has passed 31 jobs bills, which Harry Reid killed as soon as they were sent to the Senate. In fact, Majority Leader Reid bragged about House Republican bills being, "Dead On Arrival" in the Senate that he controls. Finally, the Republican House has sent legislation to the Senate that would solve the current fiscal cliff crisis, but once again Harry Reid has not even allowed debate on this legislation, let alone a vote.
     So what have the President and the Democrat majority in the Senate been doing while the Republicans have been advancing legislation to repair the nation's problems? Nothing. The President nor the Democrat-controlled Senate have yet to put forth an official plan for solving the fiscal cliff problem. Senate Majority Leader Reid talked about a Senate bill that House Republicans have yet to pass, but the bill is vapor. As of yesterday, December 27, 2012, no bill has been sent to the House from the Senate regarding the fiscal cliff. The existence of a Senate bill on the fiscal cliff is a moot point anyway since Constitutionally all spending and revenue bills must originate in the House. They are then sent to the Senate for debate, amending, voting on and then sent back to the House to be approved by that body.
     In the final analysis, the Republicans have moved their position from being dead set against tax increases on anyone, to agreeing to a raise on those making over a million dollars a year. This is a huge compromise that has gotten them in hot water with many Conservatives. But it is to no avail since the President has refused to give in on any meaningful spending cuts, which comprise over 90% of the nation's fiscal problems. In fact, the President has suggested increased spending that would actually add another 9 trillion dollars to the debt in the next 10 years. The Republicans must stand firm on meaningful spending cuts and entitlement reforms, otherwise there is no point in avoiding the fiscal cliff only to fall into the bottomless fiscal abyss that will surely come as a result of out-of-control spending.

Click here to watch my political song parodies.

The Oppression Of A Thousand Cuts

     Amidst all the debates on gun control, the fiscal cliff and why Hillary Clinton's concussion seemingly only effects her ability to answer questions about Benghazi, was the release of a data point that went virtually unnoticed. It was reported that the Federal government now has its long and expansive fingers into 9 out of every 10 mortgages in this country. This means that with Federal authorities now controlling education through student loans, the banking industry through the massively burdensome Dodd/Frank law and health care, we are officially a Socialist country.
     It's not just that government control of housing is a bit authoritarian, but aren't we still suffering the effects of a financial crisis caused in large part to government interference in the housing market? And for those who believe that the Federal government's manipulation of the housing market through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was not responsible for creating the sub-prime mortgage debacle which lead to the collapse, look at our neighbors to the north in Canada. The Canadian housing market has remained strong and thriving these last 4 years exactly because they did not have government-created sub-prime mortgages for the expressed purpose of allowing lower income people to buy houses they couldn't afford. Canadian housing did not suffer a setback, nor did their economy as a result of an artificial market driven by Liberal government policy.
     Illustrative of the unnecessary level of government involvement in the housing market is the Federal regulation which requires a filing with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, even in home sales which require no mortgage. This means that a buyer who is paying cash for their new home, must still allow the Federal government to poke their big old Pinocchio nose into their private business. With this much government involvement, it will be a miracle if we ever have anything resembling a normal housing market again, let alone a thriving one like our Canadian neighbors have. The next logical progression for this government intrusion into the private sector is edicts which aim to control where and how people live. The Federal government's control of health care, its control of food through food stamps and school breakfast, lunch and dinner programs and now its control of the housing industry is Orwellian in nature.
     Not only does government control rear its ugly head in the mortgage end of the housing market, but now the Environmental Protection Agency has exerted even more government control through an ever increasing repertoire of regulations aimed at reducing lead levels. Lead is the latest boogie man created by the left for the expressed purpose of growing government. A homeowner can spend thousands of dollars to rid their home of unacceptable levels of lead to pass the government requirements, only to fail again in 6 months or a year. This is because that lead is in the soil and on the sidewalks in levels that are unacceptable, especially in areas where there is or has been industry. That lead gets carried or blown into the home and can cause the home to fail a lead test days after it has passed. At present the lead Nazis are only terrorizing rental and other commercial properties, but it won't be long before they will inspect every home on a regular basis.
     I have always wondered how people of a nation could readily accept oppression. But my mistake was in thinking that it came all at once, it doesn't. This is the oppression of a thousand cuts which rips at our Constitution, bleeds dry our wealth and ultimately takes the soul of a once great nation.

Click here to watch my political song parodies.
    

Ridiculous Is As Ridiculous Does

     With Christmas over and the New Year fast approaching, so is the fiscal cliff that will see automatic spending cuts and an across the board tax increase. This nation waits with baited breath to see if Speaker Boehner and President Obama craft a grand deal that is going to save us all from the pain of falling off the cliff. The reality is that the terms of a deal really don't matter, or even if there is a deal at all. This nation's fiscal problems that have resulted from the Obama policies, have only just begun. And any hope of a solution was lost with the election in November.
     Tax revenue to the Federal government is to the level it was before the recession. Rick Santelli from CNBC said recently that all the focus of the fiscal cliff debate is on taxes which are 7% of the problem, too much spending is the other 93% of the problem, and it is not being addressed. Federal spending since the end of World War Two has averaged 18-20% of Gross Domestic Product, Barack Obama's policies have increased Federal spending to over 24% of GDP. If you combine the increased spending with the fact that 40% of that money is being borrowed, and 70% of the borrowed money is being lent to the Federal government by the Federal Reserve whose printing machines haven't stopped spitting out ever-decreasing-in-value dollars since Obama took office, you have a cliff that looms much larger than any we are facing now.    
     In the midst of this financial malaise caused by over-spending, President Obama and the Democrats want to institute a discriminatory tax increase on the very people who can create jobs and economic prosperity. As ridiculous as this sounds, it is even more ridiculous for the President to suggest that raising taxes on the so-called wealthy is not going to deliver a gut shot to an economy that is already stumbling.
     This is why my suggestion for the Republican leadership in the House is to illustrate the ridiculous by being ridiculous. They should propose a 100% tax rate on anyone making over 250 thousand dollars a year and let the Democrats defend the Conservative position of why raising taxes on job creators during a failing economy is a bad idea. Because even if the Federal government took every dollar from this group of taxpayers, they would only be able to run the government for a couple of weeks. The real problem is that politicians in Washington will continue to spend more money than is paid in taxes, and those in the private sector who burden the cost will have less and less with which to create future wealth and shore up the economic health of this country. The real solution is to limit the amount the Federal government can spend by requiring it to balance its budget and limiting it to 18% of GDP. But accomplishing this solution is a little like the proverbial fox limiting his visits to the hen house.

Click here to watch my political song parodies.

A Christmas Message

     As I sit in the darkness before the sun's illumination blankets the day, on this Christmas morning, I can't help but to think of a similar morning half a world away and separated from the present by two thousand years. And in the solitude of my thoughts with the gentle sounds of the morning awakening, I am led to feel joy, hope and a sense of the blessing that comes from knowing something more than this ephemeral world. If you are Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or Atheist, the peace, joy and love of this season is for you. It does not discriminate based on belief, but it is available to all who will claim it.
     When I was a child, Christmas meant time off school and the receiving of gifts. The anticipation of weeks and months was washed away in one felled swoop on Christmas morning. And even though I knew the impetus for this yearly holiday, my appreciation for it was undeveloped and immature. I was, after all, just a child. As I grew into adulthood and fathered my own child, I was blessed to experience Christmas from a different perspective. I felt the joy of my child on Christmas morning, which was at the same time similar to my own as a child, and yet it was somehow more meaningful to this grown man. The anticipation I felt was the anticipation of giving, and the joy of the unwrapping was borne of bringing joy to my child. In recent years with the appearance of grand-children, Christmas has taken on an even deeper meaning than anticipation and gifts, there is still the joy that comes from those things, but there is something more. There is the realization that the larger meaning of Christmas somehow transcends childhood and even adulthood to a place where the attributes of Christmas like peace, love and joy are fully realized and exist outside the bounds of human frailty.
     So on this Christmas morning, and always, may the blessings of the child born long ago and whom ultimately sacrificed his earthly life for all mankind, be with you in your heart. And for those who may not believe in that child, I wish the joy, peace and love which has created this very special day. These are the things which that child beckons us to believe and burn into our hearts as a guide as we make our way through this world and into the greater one that follows.

              Merry Christmas Everyone !

The Shaded Position Of Liberal Gun Views

     Many thousands of words have been written and spoken about guns and gun control in the ten days since mass murderer, Adam Lanza, slaughtered 20 children and 6 adults in an elementary school in Connecticut. Liberals have not only made this a debate on guns and the second amendment, but oddly enough have injected race into it as well. It really is spell-bounding to watch supposedly intelligent people make complete fools of themselves, but that is what those on the Left do on a daily basis in this country and around the world.
     Wayne Lapierre, president of the National Rifle Association, was ridiculed by Liberals for suggesting that we place armed security in our schools to protect the children of this country, just as we do banks and their customers. The clarity of Mr. Lapierre's statement, when he said the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, is the kind of clarity that the left abhors. Liberals look at everything in shades of grey, with no right and wrong or good and evil. Every issue is expressed by Liberals in nuanced tones that belie a certain intellectual superiority that convinces people they must agree or suffer the humiliation of being thought of as a rube. So even though restricting the access and use of fire arms by law abiding citizens will only embolden the criminals among us, the Left's goal of tearing down the Constitution and consolidating their power is furthered by more gun-control.
     Liberals look at the acts committed by individuals who suffer from isolated mental or emotional issues, not as problems to be solved on an individual basis, but as opportunities to expand government and increase bureaucratic budgets. This can not be accomplished if they accept as truth clarified statements like the one Wayne Lapierre made. That's why it is more supportive of the Lefts agenda to assign an almost drug-like quality to guns. In the minds of Liberals, when people possess a gun, they fall under its spell and do things they would not normally do. This allows the Left to shift blame from the individuals acts, which hold no ability for them to restrict others freedoms, and to lay the blame on the gun. Liberals can thusly make all of society responsible for the acts committed by an individual, and thus the society must bear the brunt of the punishment.
     Yes, many thousands of words have been spoken and written recently in the aftermath of mass murder committed by one evil man. But the most important 14 words ever written on the subject were done so over two hundred years ago and they are, "...the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Click here to watch my political song parodies.



    

The Statism Of The New Environmentalism

     The modern-day environmental movement has replaced individual behavior with collective policies which are aimed at redistributing wealth and consolidating power. Prior to Richard Nixon establishing the Environmental Protection Agency on December 2, 1970, environmentalism was the responsibility of each individual citizen. And after forty years of growing more powerful and drifting further from its original charter, the EPA has infiltrated aspects of American life that would make the most ardent statist proud. Its budget has swelled to over 8 billion dollars a year, and growing, all for the purpose of controlling the use of private lands and creating an environment that is hostile to business and Capitalism.
     The Environmental Protection Agency is not only anathema to the founding principles of limited government, but it is the very essence of the arrogance of big government. The idea that government should spend 8 billion taxpayer dollars a year to make thousands of regulations that restrict personal freedom, is an idea, the thought of which would make the Founders lose their minds. From the very first "success" of the EPA, the banning of DDT, it was clear that their agenda was to stifle Capitalism and not to protect the environment. As is the case with every other left-wing initiative, the environment was the ruse used to lull the American people, while the statists' real goal was political power funded by taxpayer money without accountability.
     A Federal judge took months to pour over the study done on DDT by multiple scientists and made the determination that it was completely safe for humans. William D. Ruckelshaus, the first director of the EPA, without studying any data or reading a word of any scientific reports, decided to ban DDT. The world community quickly followed suit, and because of it malaria, which was all but eliminated by DDT, now kills thousands of people every year. Other mosquito-borne diseases that were made almost non-existent by DDT, are also on the rise. The recent resurgence of bed bugs is also directly attributable to the banning of DDT. All this human suffering caused by statists at the EPA who are so arrogant as to think that they are the chosen few who have been endowed with the ability to "protect" everyone and everything from the evils of Capitalism.
     And what about that individual responsibility for the environment? In my opinion, people are less individually responsible because they choose big government solutions to individual efforts. I recently saw a young mother tell her screaming child that the juice box he had dropped on the ground was too dirty to handle. She then got into her car with a "Save The Planet-Live Green" bumper sticker on it and drove away. This is the attitude that the left has inculcated in so many people in this country, that their ultimate responsibility is to empower government to solve problems ostensibly created by the evils of Capitalism. Oh yeah, and you also have to festoon your automobile with  politically correct bumper stickers, and then you'll be a caring, compassionate citizen of the world.

Click here to watch my political song parodies.

I Just Had A Crazy Idea-Or Is It?

     John Boehner has been Speaker of the House since January 2011, after the Republicans won the majority in the 2010 mid-terms elections. Mr. Boehner seems like a good and decent man, but good and decent men aren't always up to every task put before them. The current Speaker has shown an inability to negotiate with Barack Obama and achieve outcomes which are anything other than complete humiliations for Republicans and disastrous for the American people. I've said before that Barack Obama is a street fighter and the Republicans approach him as if he is a chess player. They continue to make the mistake that this President has the best intentions for the country as founded and refuse to admit, even after four years of incontrovertible evidence, that he wants to remake the country into something 180 degrees out of phase with the Founders' intentions.
      That is why I think the Republicans should immediately call to remove John Boehner as Speaker and elect instead Newt Gingrich. Crazy you say? Well, technically it can be done. The Constitution says that the House of Representatives shall elect a Speaker, but it does not say that that person has to be from their ranks. The Speaker has always been a member of the House because it is natural for the members to vote for one of their own. But there is nothing Constitutionally from preventing the majority in the House from voting for someone like Newt, who holds no elected office.Of course this brilliant, if I do say so myself, stroke of strategy would require courage, thinking outside the box and a unified Republican caucus.
     Once elected as Speaker of the House, Mr. Gingrich could make the President aware in no uncertain terms that there is a new sheriff in town. Gingrich is smart, tenacious and not easily intimidated, all qualities in short supply in the current Speaker. Newt Gingrich also has the added benefit of being a little unpredictable, which is a good quality to possess when negotiating with a street fighter like Barack Obama. John Boehner's steady, predictable nature is an advantage in some situations, but in the hard-knuckle contest of political negotiations, one needs to unbalance his opponent with unpredictability. Newt's track record of accomplishments in this arena is staggering. He was able to move a big government liberal like Bill Clinton to accept a balanced budget, welfare reform and many other policies which President Clinton now brags about, but which he fought tooth and nail at the time.
     But alas, my fantasy will never materialize because of a Republican party that is too mired in its recent failed past to reach back further to a past when they exhibited political success and in the process did what was right for the country. I sure would like to see the look on Barack Obama's face when he had to sit across the table from someone who he couldn't intimidate or back down with his smuggish thuggish brand of politics. Now that would be a street fight I'd pay to see.

Click here to watch my political song parodies.

Time Couldn't Find A More Deserving Person Of The Year ?

     I don't know the criteria used by Time for choosing their "Person Of The Year", but obviously it isn't the subject's positive contribution to mankind. It also doesn't seem to have anything to do with selfless acts which raise up others. And elevating the human spirit in its quest for freedom and justice doesn't seem to be a requirement for Time in selecting the person who appears on their annual cover to receive this great honor. I say all this because this year's "Person Of The Year" is none other than Barack Hussein Obama. I am aware that Time awards the honor to the person or entity that has had the most influence on the world over the previous year, for good or bad. Previous recipients have included Adolf Hitler and Osama Bin Laden, but it has also included Ronald Reagan and Gandhi. I'll allow the reader to determine which group of previous recipients the current "Person Of The Year" is aligned.
     If the distinction of "The Person Of The Year" title was bestowed upon an individual for negative achievements, then our newly re-elected President would more than qualify. After all, it has been his policies which have lead to a record number of people living in poverty, a record number of people receiving food stamp assistance, a record amount of national debt, a record number of unemployed and under-employed, a historic downgrade of the U.S. credit rating, the longest sustained period of slow economic growth in 70 years and a country which is more divided than it ever has been. Quite a list of accomplishments and I haven't even gotten to the historic amount of corruption in the Obama administration and scandals like Solendra, Fast and Furious and Benghazi. If one were to take everything that Barack Obama has done and some how rotate them 180 degrees, he would be one of the greatest President in this nation's history, but instead he will be seen by history as one of the worst.
     A more deserving recipient would have been Benjamin Netanyahu, who has struggled to keep his island of democracy in a sea of tyranny secure, and not only functioning but thriving. Israel has one the best economies in the world while having to endure daily attacks from enemies who wish to destroy it and a world body, The United Nations, that seems to support the cause of her enemies more than that of Israel. They could have also awarded the honor of "Person Of The Year" to Steve Jobs, who died in 2011 but whose company, Apple Computer, became the largest company in the world by market cap in 2012. Very few companies have had the impact that Apple has had on how people interact with each other and live their dialy lives using technology. Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin sparked a firestorm of controversy when he passed legislation in his state to reign in the power of the unions that were bankrupting Wisconsin. He survived a recall election and began an awakening in this country among ordinary people to the economically destructive force of out of control union contracts. Governor Walker would have also been a better and more deserving choice than Barack Obama.
     In the big picture of the daily lives of real people, the Time "Person Of The Year" really doesn't matter a hill of beans. But I guess to the media types who live and die by their own self-congratulatory, over-inflated ego stroking, the "Person Of The Year" is the highlight of their otherwise ever-increasingly irrelevant existence.

Click here to watch my political song parodies.
   
    

The Trouble With Life

     During my lifetime I have learned some valuable lessons, the most important of which is that the source of most problems is myself. I know this isn't a popular sentiment in today's world, where it is fashionable to blame anything or anyone but oneself for the self-inflicted wounds of bad choices and the dire consequences of immoral behavior. The dominant religious philosophy in the world today, Leftism, has spent the better part of the last 50 years inculcating in people that they are not responsible for themselves, the current gun-control debate is a perfect example. But I have found that the more responsibility I take for my own life, the more I not only improve my own outlook but that of those around me as well.
     It is an over simplification to say that problems occur in one's life because of bad choices. Of course this is true, but there is something deeper at work in the creation of trouble and strife in a person's life. I believe that at the very core of bad choices is a lack of gratitude. Gratitude is the linchpin of happiness, without it, the joyous self is cannibalized by anger, hatred and pettiness. Under the influence of these darker emotions it is more difficult, if not impossible, to make moral and wise decisions. It is as if these dark emotions cover the moral brain with a thick haze that won't allow reason and probity to penetrate. And it all begins with gratitude for the blessings of life, and not the constant coveting of what others possess. This applies not only to material things but talent, looks and intellectual ability. Gratefulness not only includes acknowledging the blessings in one's own life, but being genuinely happy for the blessings in others lives, without coveting them for the self. The truly grateful, and by extension happy, person will use the achievements of others to inspire themselves and not to wallow in defeatism and victim hood.
      The grateful person values life more and therefore is more concerned with making choices which honor it and make it even stronger. People who are grateful don't usually commit horrible acts against fellow human beings. They actually make the world a better place, whether on a large scale or in just their own corner of it. I have found that once gratitude has chased away the darker thoughts of envy, self-defeatism and despair, my ability to think clearly and make better choices for my life increases greatly. Everyone has blessings on which to build an edifice of gratitude, even if it is as basic as having woken up alive. The trouble with life is not enough gratitude, once you begin to develop this valuable resource within yourself you will be amazed at the heights to which you can climb.

Click here to watch my political song parodies.

Look Out For The Cave-In

     If you happen to be walking by the nation's capital and hear a rumbling sound, it isn't gastrointestinal noises emanating from bloviating politicians, it's the Speaker of the House John Boehner caving into the President on a fiscal cliff deal. While the President has been playing golf with Bill Clinton, running around the country campaigning (apparently the President doesn't know the election is over) and using the recent massacre in a Connecticut elementary school to undermine the second amendment, John Boehner has been once again negotiating with himself. And himself is getting the better of the Speaker by backing him into a corner where he has all but given up the farm to an absent competitor.
     John Boehner began this negotiating process by saying in no uncertain terms that he would not agree to raising tax rates on anyone. His plan was to increase revenue into the Treasury by closing some deductions and loopholes and entitlement reform as a way to decrease the Federal budget, a plan for which the President himself was advocating just a little over a year ago. The Speaker knows that raising tax rates on anyone in the debts of an anemic economy will drive us off another cliff, the recession cliff. Especially if those increased tax rates affected higher income earners, many of which are small businesses that employ two thirds of the nation's workers. These small businesses have already stopped hiring and may begin to layoff in an effort to minimize the effects of Obamacare, which becomes fully implemented in just over a year from now.
     Speaker Boehner has compromised his position on increasing tax rates on upper income earners, while at the same time the President has not given an inch on any cuts to an overly bloated Federal government. The Speaker thinks that Conservatives will be placated by the fact that he has gotten the President to raise the threshold of tax rate increases from 250 thousand to 400 thousand, but this is unacceptable, especially without any real spending cuts. The President has shown no signs of any willingness to make any serious cuts to a Federal budget that grows by leaps and bounds every year.
    So now we have come to a point where Conservative principles, which can save this country from the dire consequences of a President on a spending spree, have no champion in the Congress. Speaker Boehner is a nice guy, but you know what they say about nice guys and finishing last? And throughout his tenure as Speaker of the House, John Boehner has finished last in every encounter he has had with this President. I expect nothing more from the current fiscal cliff negotiations than for the Speaker to cave once again and for the President to get his tax increases without any real spending cuts. And the only thing left for the citizens of this great nation to do is to avoid getting trapped in the massive cave-in of Speaker Boehner.

Click here to watch my political song parodies.

The Incremental Dismantling Of The Constitution

     The murderous rampage last Friday by Adam Lanza was an ineffable act of which we may never know all the reasons for its occurrence. But in the wake of that act, as is the case with all similar acts, there is a misplaced outrage by some directed to the instrument of Adam's evil, i .e. Constitutionally protected fire arms. Part of the reason for this misdirected outrage is the Lefts inability to come to grips with the reality that there is real evil in the world, so they have to blame an inanimate object. Those on the left calling for an assault weapons ban or any other stricter gun control laws would have us believe that the weapons Adam Lanza used to commit his horrible act were the impetus for it.
     I am always amazed at the Lefts ability to ignore the many times more deaths committed without guns than are committed with guns. After all, over 3000 people were killed on September 11, 2001 by evil men using nothing more than box cutters and hijacked airliners. I didn't hear anyone on the left suggesting that a ban be placed on either of those items. On April 19, 1994 Timothy McViegh used a U-Haul truck and a homemade bomb to kill 168 people, 19 of which were children under the age of 6, when he destroyed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City and damaged over 30 other buildings in the vicinity. I don't recall anyone on the left calling for a ban on U-Haul trucks or the fertilizer which comprised the main ingredient for Mr. McVeigh's bomb. But President Clinton did blame Rush Limbaugh, just a guy on the radio, and there was serious talk on the left of restricting Mr. Limbaugh's right of free speech. According to recent statistics, arsonists claim over 500 innocent lives a year, most of which are young children who have less of a chance of extricating themselves from a fire than adults. And yet no one on the left is calling for a ban on matches and accelerants, which are the common tools used by arsonists to commit their murders.
     The danger in allowing the Left to succeed in passing more restrictive gun laws as a means of "solving" murderous rampages like the one committed last Friday by Adam Lanza, is that it lulls people into a false sense of security. After the right of the people to keep and bear arms has been infringed, those same people will not be any safer, and in fact will be less safe because their ability to defend themselves will have been mitigated. At the same time, criminals and those intent on perpetrating evil will find a much more target rich environment. The pure folly of thinking that more gun laws will keep law-abiding citizens safer is irrational at best and deliberately tyrannical at worst. But my guess is that the Lefts goal is not the safety of the innocent, but the incremental dismantling of the very Constitution which has been the foundation for this exceptional nation.

Click here to watch my political song parodies.

What Makes Liberals Happy

     Liberals are happiest when they can use the power of big government to punish those whom they perceive to be more successful than they are. The current fiscal cliff negotiations are a glaring example of this statement. Sure, the Liberal goal is for them to appear to be equalizing an unfair system, where disparate groups of victims have been taken advantage of by those on the top rung of society. But at the very core of their beings, Liberals feel they can only be relevant and matter by mitigating the success of others. So they not only want to redistribute wealth, but achievement as well.
     To understand what makes Liberals happy, one must first understand what makes them unhappy. The greatest enemy to the liberal ideology is self-reliance, so all institutions and habits which foster independence must be mitigated, if not outright eliminated. This is the driving force behind the Lefts obsession to destroy the foundations of liberty, such as strong families, churches and communities. The Founding Fathers understood that liberty is best served by strong involvement at the local level, and there is nothing more local than the family. I think it was Jeane Kirkpatrick, the first U.S. female ambassador, who said the family is the original departments of education, health and human services and welfare.
     One would be hard-pressed to find a Liberal initiative which doesn't weaken, if not completely obliterate the family. The late Democrat Congressman, Daniel Patrick Moynahan, argued against Lyndon Johnson's great society by saying that once the government replaced the husband and father in poor families, the destruction of those families would be imminent. Never was an assessment by someone in Congress more accurate, for today we see the harvest reaped by those Liberal policies of 50 years ago. An inner-city out of wedlock birth rate that was less than 20% prior to the Great Society, is now over 75%. And high school drop-out rates and unemployment rates have suffered dramatic and similarly negative effects from the welfare state. But Liberal policy makers have as their goal, not to make the poor more independent, which would go a long way to repairing the problem, but to increase dependence on the Federal government. Their unstated reason for this is twofold, one is to make sure those people keep voting for them in every election in perpetuity, and secondly is to use them as an excuse to confiscate wealth from the more successful.
     The very idea of limited government is anathema to the happiness of Liberals. At their core, they don't feel as capable of making decisions as the more successful they see around them, therefore they desire to use the power of government to make those decisions for everyone. This is why they want to tell everyone what kind of light bulbs to use, what kind of car to drive, how big a soda you can drink, where and when you can smoke, what you can do with your own land and a thousand other areas of life that free people should decide for themselves. What makes Liberals happy is making other people unhappy. But they fail to understand that once they have eliminated the successful class that they envy so much, there will be nothing left for them to rule over except an empty shell of a once great nation.

Click here to watch my political song parodies.
    

Sandy Hook And The Indecency Of The Left

     This past Friday's murder spree by Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut illuminated the debts of depravity, not only in the soul of the killer, but in the almost gleeful opportunistic way that Liberals used it to push their anti-gun agenda. The tears of the families who lost loved ones to the barbaric act of an evil man hardly had a chance to clear their tear ducts and run down their cheeks before some on the left, including the President of the United States, were calling for more restrictions on second amendment rights. When the coward killer took his own life, a task he should have completed prior to entering Sandy Hook on Friday morning, he took with him the lives of 20 children and the innocence of many more who had to live through the terror.
     Adam Lanza's rounds were barely out of their chamber before leftist celebrities, leftist media clowns and even President Obama were blaming, not the evil in one man, but the tool he employed to carry out his evil act. It's ironic that on Friday in China, a man used a knife to slash over 20 children in a school there. In fact, murders are committed every day by people using items other than fire arms, some with just their bare hands. Those on the left pushing their anti-second amendment agenda don't like to talk about that, or the fact that there are many more crimes averted with the use of fire arms than there are committed every day in this country. And the fact that the murder rate per capita is at one of it's lowest points in the last 50 years while gun ownership is at its highest, doesn't support the Lefts assertion that murders are worse than ever because of our Constitutional right to bear arms. Additionally, more people die every year in traffic accidents as a result of the government's CAFE mileage standards than die by gunshot wounds, but you will never hear those on the left calling for more government control.
     People commit evil acts because their souls are bereft of morality, not because of the availability of guns. The weapons used by Adam Lanza implemented hundred year old semi-automatic technology, but the weapons used by the left to take advantage of his evil, i. e. deception, fear-mongering and indecency, have been around since the dawn of man. And these weapons are much more dangerous than any fire arm because they are used to steal liberty, and I for one would rather die a free man than live forever in tyranny.

Click here to watch my political song parodies.

The Real Purpose Of Taxes

     Not once during the current fiscal cliff debate has the President talked about tax collection as a way of funding the essential functions of government, as is the only Constitutional basis for the government to levy taxes. No, the President looks at taxes in a completely different way than the founders did. He sees them as a way for the Federal government to impose some twisted sense of fairness that he and his intellectual elite decide based on taking from those who they deem to have too much, and ostensibly giving it to those they deem to have too little. It's ironic that after half a century of income redistribution that began in earnest with President Johnson's "Great Society", the poor are still poor and are additionally worst off because their families have been destroyed by Liberal policies.
     The founders gave Congress the Constitutional authority to impose and collect taxes to pay for the essential functions of government, like national defense. But these early taxes were in the form of tariffs and duties, which is why in 1913 Woodrow Wilson and his progressives had to push for a Constitutional amendment to allow for the income tax. The founders were turning over in their graves with the passage of the income tax because they would have thought it the height of tyranny to tax a man's labor. Once the Federal government was allowed to lay claim to a man's labor, then he became either a slave or a beneficiary to the power of a central government. The 70,000 page tax code is a testament to corruption, it is a tome of special deals handed out to certain groups of people by politicians. These politicians attained their power by granting themselves the authority to determine what percentage of a man's labor he is able keep for himself. Politicians decry "loopholes" as if they fell out of the sky and embedded themselves into the tax code, when in reality every "loophole" was created by politicians to exact political favors from those who benefited from them.
     I think a much more moral and just tax system would consist of a consumption tax, i.e. tax people when they spend their money, not when they earn it. Of course, any national consumption tax would have to require 2/3 vote in both chambers of Congress and a majority of the states' support to be raised at any time in the future. This would save the tax payers the estimated billion hours they spend each year filling out tax forms. It would also eliminate the billions of dollars spent on tax preparation. But the most important outcome of a consumption tax would be to mitigate the power of the Federal government over the citizen. And less government control always leads to an expansion of liberty, which benefits everyone in society, not just power-hungry politicians.

Click here to watch my political song parodies.
    

Benzo The Fed Clown And QE4

     Whenever I see Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke trying to defend his disastrous interference in the economy, I can't help but imagine him wearing a red rubber nose, big floppy shoes and baggy pants that he regularly douses with squirts from a seltzer bottle. Benzo was once again out in front of the cameras this week at his press conference announcing QE4. QE stands for quantitative easing and consists of the Federal Reserve printing hundreds of billions of dollars and buying U.S. government bonds, over 70% of which have been purchased by the Fed in the last 18 months. This action has a twofold effect, it keeps the borrowing costs low for the Federal government, which can't even get China to buy it's debt anymore, and it drives investors out of bonds and into stocks.
     Liberals like to point to the rising stock market as a sign that the economy is recovering. It's a hypocritical position for them to take, considering that during the Bush years when the market was hitting new highs every other month, these same Liberals said Wall St. has no relation to Main St. The difference between the Bush years and the Obama years is that the Bush stock market was driven by a thriving economy, today it is driven by artificial stimulus from the Fed's quantitative easing program. Investor money is going to gravitate to the asset class with the best return, and with the ten year government bond paying around 1.5%, that money has been going into the riskier investment of the stock market. So the equities market is not so much a reflection of improving economic conditions as it is of the Federal Reserves willingness to print as many dollars as it takes to prop up stocks.
     Benzo knows that the easing of monetary policy necessarily must lead to a tightening of that policy in the near future, they go hand-in-hand. The feckless Fed Chairman is playing chicken with the economy, hoping that GDP will rise significantly and unemployment will drop precipitously before all that money he has been printing has to be pulled out of the economy. If he loses, interest rates will sky-rocket along with inflation and the country will be plunged into an economic Armageddon.This is the result of someone tinkering with the economy who has no experience in it. Benzo has worked in academia and government his whole life, so all his economic theories hold no water in the real economy.
     The very basis of a free market economy is the cost of money. When a source other than the free market determines that cost, as is the case with the current Fed Chairman, banks don't lend and businesses don't expand and hire more workers. The Fed's plan is bound to fail, as it has in the last couple of years, but the coming failure will be more spectacular as a result of the meddling of a clown with seltzer in his pants and useless economic theories in his head.

Click here to watch my political song parodies.

Diamond Barry Obama-The Gambler

     The Obama administration has officially recognized the Syrian rebel forces as the legitimate representatives of the people. This recognition is one more in a long line of actions by the Obama regime which is illustrative of its feckless incompetence. Not that lending moral support to the Syrian rebels against the brutal regime of Bashar Al Assad is the right course of action, it is. But there is a world of difference between lending moral support to people who are in rebellion against their oppressive and brutal government, and officially recognizing those people as the de facto government of their country. Not to mention that the Obama regime was praising Bashar Al Assad as a reformer just a short time ago. Talk about sending mixed signals.
     The President seems intent on throwing his support behind different groups of Middle-East rebels until he can claim competence. President Obama is analogous to a gambling addict who thinks his next bet at the black jack table or the next spin of the roulette wheel is going to make him a big winner. But this President has a history of being on the wrong side of history, just like most Liberals of the last 40 years. He chose not to lend his support to the Iranian Green Party in 2009 after that country's sham of an election lead to mass rioting and demonstrations. A word of moral support from the President of United States may have made the difference in the effort to topple the Iranian regime. But he was silent and the rebellion was squashed.
     The President's next foray into rolling the die of freedom and trying to avoid the snake eyes of oppression, was the Arab Spring. It is uncanny how Diamond Barry Obama backed the wrong groups in almost every uprising in the Middle-East. From his support of the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, to his arming of rebels in Libya who later turned out to be Al Queda terrorists who killed our ambassador and three other Americans, President Obama has shown very poor judgement. This lack of competent judgement on the part of the President has not only made the Middle-East less stable and more dangerous, but it has caused a weakening of the national security of this country.     
     Prior to 1979, radical Islamists had no state support for their terrorists activities. Then President Jimmy Carter handed the Islamist terrorists Iran on a silver platter, which lead to the formation of every terrorist group in the last 33 years. Now, it seems, that President Obama has handed radical Islamists most of the rest of the Middle-East. I wonder what the next 30 years will bring the United States and the world, surely it will be more loss of innocent lives and a stronger world-wide terrorist community. And this will be the legacy of a President who is in over his head and has no right, by experience or understanding, to gamble away the future of this country and global peace for all the people of the world.

Click here to watch my political song parodies.

Right To Work Is The Real Pro-Choice

     Yesterday, the Michigan house past legislation that joined their state with over 20 others which have right to work laws. Simply stated, right to work laws eliminate the state mandate that workers must join a union and pay dues as a requirement of being employed. It seems like a no-brainer for people who fought a revolution to extricate themselves from a government that limited their right to make choices they deemed to be best for themselves. But the neanderthal unions protested the passage of the new law, in some instances with their trademark violence, in an effort to take Michiganders back to the days of King George III.
     My first problem with the union reaction to the law is based on free-market ideals, i.e. if the unions provide a valuable service to their customers, why do they need to use the force of law to require membership. Are they afraid that workers have figured out the unions' money laundering scheme that has union dues, and in the case of public sector unions taxpayer dollars, being funneled into Democrat political campaigns? These campaigns elect politicians whose policies are at odds with many union member's values. Have the unions and Democrats forgotten that the Constitution that they seem intent on using as toilet paper, guarantees the right of free association? Maybe they don't understand that this means free people can not be compelled by the force of government to join organizations they don't freely choose to join.
       My second problem with the union reaction to the new Michigan law is the dishonest way in which they frame their opposition. Even President Obama stated in a recent speech that right to work is the right to work for less. However, a recent survey completed by the Pew Research Center shows that the average pay for workers in right to work states is higher than it is for workers in states that compel union membership. Additionally, union membership drops significantly after a state passes right to work laws similar to the one in Michigan. This is the real reason that the unions fear workers' choice, they know that many will choose to free themselves from the grip of unions that no longer represent what is best for the worker or the country.
     The right to work debate is illustrative of the shear hypocrisy of the left who claim to be pro-choice when it comes to killing babies, but not much else. Mandatory union membership by workers is just one in a long list of impositions that the left has tried to thrust upon an unwilling populace that is capable and desirous of making their own choices. And this is what scares the unions and the left most, that given the opportunity, free people will choose not to labor under their oppressive policies.

Click here to watch my political song parodies.

Tale Of Two Revolutions

     Late in the eighteenth century there were two revolutions of note, the French and of course the American. It is a testament to the factors which bind us together through the centuries, that the values that motivated each revolution are still what motivates people today, for better or for worse. Even in the United States, the embers of both revolutions still glow brightly and ignite the passions of people on both sides of the political spectrum.
    The french Revolution was a populace movement built on a hatred for the wealthy and it blamed them for everything bad in 18th century French society. It resulted in many of the aristocracy being permanently separated from their heads. By contrast, the American Revolution was fomented mostly by the wealthy, and they pledged that wealth, along with their very lives and sacred honor, to the cause of freedom and economic liberty. Most of the Founding Fathers lost their wealth to the revolution, many also lost their lives, but none lost their sacred honor.
     If one were to attach one of the two eighteenth century revolutions to the two movements in this country today, Liberals would be more closely associated with the French Revolution and Conservatives with the American. At the very core of the French Revolution was a demand for more government, the opposite was true of the American revolution. And where the French Revolution chose to eliminate their wealthy citizens, the American Revolution was centered around the kind of economic freedom which created more wealthy citizens. Today's Liberals are not suggesting that we engage in public guillotining of the rich, not yet anyway, but the policies they advocate will behead the very capitalist ideals that create wealth. Their campaign to demonize the rich has created a new  and growing class of people that demand a bigger and bigger government to redress their perceived grievances.
     The entitlists, as I like to call them, are descendants of the French Revolution and keep the embers of class warfare and hatred burning. They want to benefit from the work someone else has done in their own self-interest. The descendants of the American Revolution want only to reap the fruits of the work they have done. Both are working in self-interest, but the difference is that the entitlist wakes every morning scheming ways in which to reap fruit from his neighbor's tree. The sons and daughters of the American Revolution wake every morning trying to devise ways to expand their orchard. The human characteristic of working in one's self-interest is present in every system of government, the morality of Capitalism is that individual self-interest is able to expand to benefit others. Berkshire Hathoway and Microsoft were founded not to create thousands of millionaires but to benefit Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, respectively. The effect was to create wealth for millions of other Americans, thereby expanding the scope of opportunity without any government involvement. Another example of this is the package delivery service. Federal Express and United Parcel Service have not only provided a more efficient method of shipping, but have created wealth for their shareholders, many of whom are every day Americans who own the companies stocks in their retirement accounts. The United States Postal Service, on the other hand, hasn't created wealth for anyone and has in fact run deficits which cost the American taxpayers billions of dollars.
     In the final analysis, the French Revolution, as is the case with the modern Liberal, looked through a myopic lens to grab someone else's wealth in the short term, thereby destroying the very engine of that wealth for the future. The American Revolution, and by extension the modern Conservative movement, looked to create an environment of economic freedom which would propel the country into a future of prosperity based on individual liberty.

Click here to watch my political song parodies.

Success Supression

     Lost in the back and forth of the fiscal cliff debate is a core question we must answer as a country. Do we want more or fewer wealthy Americans? Depending on the answer to this question, government policy must reflect the answer and encourage the desired result. If we wish to create more millionaires, then more wealth must necessarily stay in the hands of individuals and out of the coffers of government. If we wish to have a country of fewer wealthy citizens, then the government must take more money out of the private economy to prevent economic growth and prosperity. The latter seems to be what the current administration has as its core objective.
     Raising tax rates on the rich, in addition to the constant characterizations of the rich as selfish and greedy, inculcates in others the desire to avoid becoming wealthy. After all, no one wants to be a constant target of  demonization by their fellow citizens. People often wonder, and so did I for a long time, why billionaires like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates would advocate for raising taxes on people like themselves. They, as successful businessmen, understand better than most that fewer dollars at work in the private economy means less economic growth. Then I realized that by publicly taking a populist stand against themselves, they have attained immunity from the criticism of class warfare rhetoric. They can appear to be saying, "Look I'm with you, but those damned Republicans won't raise my taxes." This makes them the "good rich" as opposed to the "bad rich" who want to keep more of the money they earned through their own endeavors.
     Another way in which the wealthy are characterized as the scourge of humanity is by reducing or eliminating their accomplishments, saying they became rich "off the backs of the poor." No one has yet to explain to me how it is that poverty creates wealth, but the masses don't think that hard. The left foments envy and coveting within the minds and hearts of those who are not rich against those who are. This coveting has escalated in recent years to a place where the non-rich feel entitled to charge government with taking wealth from those who have earned it, and give it to those who have not. In my opinion, there is no greater greed than feeling you are entitled to the private property that someone else has earned. And there is no greater travesty than employing the power of government to confiscate that wealth for you.
     Abraham Lincoln once stated that a man can not build his own house by tearing down his neighbor's house. He also understood that owning the fruits of one's own labor is what is called liberty and the opposite is called tyranny. And the worst kind of tyranny is that which is self-imposed as a result of suppressing the desire to succeed to avoid public criticism and derision. 

Click here to watch my latest political song parody. Posted December 2, 2012.

The Superficial Diversity Of The Left

     I have written previously about the obsession the left possess to swaddle education in diversity at the expense of excellence, but this obsession has become a malignant tumor on many parts of our culture. Those on the left that push the diversity agenda, say they do not believe in discriminating based on skin color, sexual orientation or ethnicity, except of course when it advances their diversity goals. The entire basis of their idea of diversity is based on superficial characteristics, such as skin color. Visit any college campus and you will witness students of all races and sexual persuasions, but you won't find that same diversity in the arena of ideas or thought. Students that express an opinion that is at odds with the strict leftist ideology of the university, are routinely discriminated against by their professors and peers, with the full-throated support of leftists everywhere.
     This superficial diversity has become standard operating procedure in business, private organizations and even in churches and synagogues. It is becoming more important, for instance, that a company have the "proper" mix of minorities, than it is that they hire the best people to advance their company's financial goals. The judging of a person based on skin color, ethnicity or sexual orientation to advance them to a position they wouldn't have on their own merits, is just as discriminatory as keeping some benefit from someone who has earned it based on the same criteria. And the idea that penance can be served for some perceived discriminatory sin of the past by simply showing preference to someone who wasn't even the target of that discrimination, is twisted logic at best and deliberate minority pandering at worst.
     Superficial diversity is practiced by those on the left for two reasons. First, equality is a religious sacrament to the committed leftist. Reason, fairness and rational thought all take a back seat to making everyone equal, with equal outcomes, even if it means that those who achieve on their own are unfairly debited. The second reason that leftists practice superficial diversity has more to do with feeding their own egos than it does with some cosmic justice that can never be achieved. They can perceive themselves, and hopefully influence the perception that others have of them, as morally superior beings because they are champions of social justice. But the concept of social justice, whatever that means, disintegrates when your methods are based on superficial characteristics, such as skin color, ethnicity or sexual orientation. Worst than that, you actually engage in the very same discriminatory behavior that you say you abhor. But this is nothing new for the left, whose ideology is based on hypocrisy and convenient changes of principles to accommodate whichever political currents will help them impose their agenda on the rest of the country.

Click here to watch my latest political song parody. Posted December 2, 2012.
    

Jim DeMint's Departure-A Sign Of A Rocky Road Ahead

     This week, South Carolina Republican Senator, Jim DeMint, announced that he was leaving the Senate next January, to the chagrin of Conservatives everywhere. Senator DeMint was one of the few stalwart Conservatives in the body in which he serves. He was elected to the Senate in the 2004 mid-term elections, and was two years into his second term, when he made this surprising announcement. Mr. DeMint said he was leaving the Senate to assume control of  The Heritage Foundation, the Conservative think tank which advised Ronald Reagan. He said he could affect more change running Heritage than he could executing his duties in the Senate. As good of an organization as The Heritage Foundation is, being one of only a hundred members of an exclusive body like the Senate of the United States, I think, is much more influential.
     As a member of the Senate, Jim DeMint has the ability to vote on legislation which affects the entire nation. He can also affect the votes of other Senators by persuading them to vote in a manner which upholds the principles set forth in the founding documents of this great country. Leading Heritage, he will be lobbying his former colleagues from the outside, and will not have access to what bills may be proposed as early in the process as he does presently. As fine of an organization as Heritage is, it is just one of many Conservative think tanks and advocacy groups. Senator DeMint, in his current position, has the ability to vote on Supreme Court justices as well as other Federal judgeships. As a Senator he is one of only a hundred people who vote on treaties which can affect the way in which Americans live in the future. On balance, I can't understand how someone can affect more change heading a think tank than being a member of the United States Senate. But then I'm just a guy with a blog.
     If the Republicans would have won the White House in the recent election and picked up a majority in the Senate, my guess is Mr. DeMint would not be making this move. Which tells me it's not about affecting change, but leaving an organization that is becoming more rigidly leftist and joining one filled with like-minded people. Whomever Governor Nikki Haley appoints to fill Jim DeMint's seat until the special election in 2014, the Senate is going to become decidedly less Conservative by one. And at a time when we have an out of control President and more members of both houses of Congress afraid to stop him, losing a Conservative voice like Senator DeMint is truly a sign of the rocky road that lies ahead.

Click here to watch my latest political song parody. Posted December 2, 2012.

The Fiscal Cliff And The Alinsky President

     The Fiscal Cliff negotiations are illustrative of the President's inability to lead and to govern. With this dire deadline of economy-killing tax increases and automatic spending cuts looming over the American people, he chooses to campaign at toy factories, golf with Bill Clinton and publicly try to intimidate the Republicans into a deal that he wants. President Obama hasn't even met with Speaker Boehner in person for weeks, choosing instead to only talk to him over the phone.
     But then we really can't expect any other behavior from a committed Alinskyite like the President. When one strictly adheres to the principles of Saul Alinsky, you don't negotiate, you intimidate. You don't take a stand, but make the other guy take a stand and then you demonize it. You create so much static with class warfare rhetoric that it drowns out reason and fact. A good case in point is the President's insistence that the wealthy do not pay their fair share. He has been saying this for so long, it is almost an accepted fact by some. The real truth is that the top one percent of wage earners have gone from paying 20% of the total tax burden in the 1980s to 40% today. The percentage of the total income they earn is around 25%. If one extrapolates out the tax burden to include the top 10% of wage earners, the total share of the tax burden paid by that group is 70%. Their total percentage of the income earned is around 38%. These facts come straight from current IRS data.
     No fair-minded person could conclude from the empirical evidence laid out in the previous paragraph, that the wealthy in this country are not paying their fair share. And yet, the President spews out this categorically false narrative and a certain percentage of the population laps it up like kittens lapping milk from a bowl. This is also what followers of Saul Alinsky practice, repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth in the minds of the masses. This concept is best illustrated by the incident in Bob Wooward's recent book about the debt limit negotiations in August of 2011. President Obama placed his hand on John Boehner's arm and said, "John, I have complete confidence in my ability to sway the American people." This statement shows not only the President's complete contempt for the truth, but for the American people who he looks at as sheep to be lead, not free people to be governed.
     The President looks at problems not so much to be solved, but as opportunities to score political points and advance an agenda that recent polling has shown, even a majority of his voters don't want. President Reagan had a sign on his desk that read, "It is amazing what a man can accomplish when he doesn't care who gets the credit." President Obama should have a sign on his desk saying, "It's amazing what I can accomplish by blaming others for the problem."

Click here to watch my latest political song parody. Posted December 2, 2012.
    

The Fantasy Dwellers

     It has been a month since the 2012 Presidential election, which saw the American people reward failure and incompetence with another four year term for President Obama. Over the last month I have heard many hours of analysis from the right, the left and those disinterested parties in the middle. One thing is clear, many in the Republican party are what I call, "The Fantasy Dwellers." They refuse to leave their comfort zone of denial as they blame the election loss on a supposed lack of Hispanic outreach or too strict of an adherence to the social issues like abortion. All of their reasons lead to the same conclusion, less Conservative influence in the party.
      I believe that the recent election loss is a result of Republicans not understanding the contest in which we were involved. We sent a chess player to a boxing match, and expected him to deliver a first round knock-out punch. This is not a criticism of Mitt Romney, he is a decent and accomplished man for whom I have nothing but respect and admiration. But it is obvious now that the world of politics has an ever decreasing tolerance for men who posses decency and honor. And therein lies our problem. The electorate say they abhor negative campaigning, yet they just re-elected a man to the Presidency based solely on his character assassination of his opponent. The more that Republicans deny this fact, the more national elections they will lose.
     But still the "Fantasy Dwellers" persist in their absurd notion that somehow we can keep sending out tit-mice to battle rattle snakes. I'm re-evaluating, based on the election results, my opinion that Newt Gingrich may have been a better choice for our party than Mitt Romney. Recent polling has shown that a majority of those who voted for President Obama don't like his policies and think they are wrong for the country. So why did they vote against their own self-interests? They did so because they were influenced by the barrage of negative ads by the Obama campaign against Mitt Romney. It didn't matter that they weren't true, they made people dislike Mitt Romney more than they disliked the President's policies. The Republican establishment's insistence that President Obama is a nice guy but just misguided on policy, helped President Obama maintain his likability edge.
     Hindsight is always 20-20, but after the 2008 election many on our side were saying we needed to attack Obama on his radical ideology and roots. But the moderate faction of the party, "The Fantasy Dwellers", were afraid of alienating the independent voters as well as being called racists. Well Mitt Romney won the independent vote and was called a racist anyway, and still lost the election. Maybe if we had sent a street fighter like Newt Gingrich into the ring with Obama, the result may have been different. He may have been able to give people a reason not only to vote Republican, but a reason not to vote Democrat. "The Fantasy Dwellers" in the Republican party, unfortunately, seem to be in control. And as long as they are, we can expect to lose elections with candidates who arm themselves with pee-shooters against nuclear-armed opponents. 

Click here to watch my latest political song parody. Posted December 2, 2012.

Obama's "Warning" To Assad

     The Obama administration has sent a stern warning to the embattled leader of Syria, Bashar Al Assad, letting him know in no uncertain terms that he will face dire consequences if he uses chemical weapons on the rebels that are trying to oust him. I seem to remember similar messages being sent to Assad after his forces had slaughtered a thousand of their own countrymen, and each time after that that the death toll increased on its march to the fifty thousand plus it is today. So now with the equivalent of a football stadium packed to capacity, dead in Syria and another 1.2 million people displaced, the Obama administration is going to get tough on Bashar Al Assad.
     Remember the good old days of the Syrian revolution when there were only a few thousand Syrians that had been slaughtered by their own government and Secretary of State Clinton called Bashar Al Assad a "reformer." In fact, no matter where you looked,  you could not find a disparaging word about Dr. Assad anywhere on the left. Even now, there is not the outrage coming from the left over the slaughter of 50,000 freedom fighters as there is over the possibility that tax rates may not be increased on the wealthy.
     Remember the visits made to President Assad by the feckless former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan? If the situation weren't so tragic for the Syrian people, it would have been comical. Good old Kofi would meet with Bashar and leave Syria with the tyrant's assurances that there would be no more bloodshed. The death toll escalated more after each visit from Annan.  I remember the smile on the former Secretary General's face, like Chamberlain after his meeting with Hitler, waving an agreement signed by the evil dictator, and stating emphatically that peace had been secured. This silly and dangerous notion on the left that they can negotiate with evil men, seems to span distance and time. I guess it is their inability to admit that there is evil in the world, because to do so would shatter their idea of  a global Utopia being attainable. Tyrants and other evil men know this fact and use it to give the leftists of the world slivers of hope that they will change their ways, while they use the time to become even stronger and expand their influence.
     The other interesting thing about the Obama administration's warning to Bashar Al Assad about using his chemical weapons, is that it is a circuitous admission that George W. Bush was right about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction. Since there is no evidence that Bashar Al Assad had chemical weapons prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, and Saddam Hussein did, it can be assumed that the missing weapons in Iraq were shipped to Syria for safe-keeping. When Saddam did not triumph over the U.S. led invasion of his country, Bashar Al Assad was an unintended beneficiary. But no one, especially on the left, seems interested in finding out how Assad acquired his chemical weapons, they only want to send empty warnings and hope that the situation will fade from the attention of the world community. It is typical problem avoidance by the left when the problem involves real evil, which they are unable or unwilling to comprehend or confront.

Click here to watch my latest political song parody. Posted December 2, 2012.

Hippieocrisy

     During the late 1990s and early 2000s, when I was in the midst of some sort of mid-life crisis, I attended some weekend music festivals. These festivals were populated with old hippies whose current lives had become so meaningless that they wanted to escape into their past, when they remember being more relevant. The other attendees to these festivals were the young, modern day hippies who were so void of their own creativity that they wanted to hitch their creative wagons to a star that had long ago burned out. I attended because I enjoyed the music, camping out for the weekend, playing my guitar around a campfire and eating junk food. But I never fully bought into the hippie mentality, and there were several reasons why.
     There was a decidedly anti-Capitalism present in the air and on the ground at the hippie festivals. I saw hippies, young and old, wearing tee-shirts emblazoned with slogans like, "Corporations Kill", "Corporate America is Responsible for Global Death" and the ever popular, "Ban Profit." What bothered me is the pure ignorance of a mindset that would presume there could be jobs, and therefore tax revenue to pay for the social programs for which hippies advocated, without profit from corporations and small businesses. What was more troubling was the hypocrisy exhibited by these anti-capitalist who themselves sold glass marijuana pipes, grilled cheese sandwiches, cigarette lighters and bottled water, all for a profit. What further compounded their hypocrisy is that they sold their wears without purchasing a vendors license from the event sponsor, thereby engaging in the same kind of cheating of which they accused the  corporations.
     The hippie hypocrisy didn't end with engaging in capitalist behavior while at the same time demonizing it, but extended to their environmental views. Once again, the tee-shirt slogans of the hippies did not match their behavior. The catchy little slogans were all about "saving the planet" and "being green", but the hippies actual goal seemed to be to turn the festival grounds into a garbage dump by the end of the weekend. Trash bins were strategically placed throughout the festival grounds, but the hippies preferred to drop their trash where ever it was they happened to be standing when it was time time to dispose of their refuse. When confronted with his slovenly behavior, I heard one hippie say, "Relax man, they have volunteers that pick up the trash." The improper disposal of litter was only one of the ways in which hippies emulated their own characterizations of corporate polluters, but I will save you from the details of their scatological behavior.
     In addition to the hypocrisy I have outlined above, the peace and love of communal hippie living was less in evidence at these weekend music festivals than was child-like self-centeredness. It was a microcosm of why the Liberal creed of "Do what feels good" is a recipe for disaster, whether in the life of an individual or of a culture.

Click here to watch my latest political song parody. Posted December 2, 2012.
    
 

The Age Of Selfishness

     There is a shift in our culture towards more dependence as it relates to the relationship between the government and the citizen, but the same kind of shift has occurred on a more micro level in our society. This shift has occurred in the family and has taken place within the realm of parenting. Until recently, the goal of parents has remained relatively unchanged and has spanned most cultures of the world. The successful outcome of good parenting is a child who has been transformed into an independent and contributing member of society. This is accomplished through the teaching of moral values, a strong work ethic and a strong sense of independence.
     Unfortunately, the skills of good parenting are lost on some in today's generation of parents. We've all seen the unruly child in public whose parent ignores the uncivilized behavior or even worse, rewards it with whatever it is the child wants. There is an even worse trend of which I have been made aware, i.e. mothers taking inappropriately aged boys into the ladies room. Some have reached the age of 7 or 8, long past the age when a trip to the ladies room with mother is appropriate. It is not only damaging to the sense of independence in the young boy, but is very uncomfortable for other women who may be using the facility. This inappropriate behavior is possibly driven by a fear of what might happen to the young man if he were allowed to enter the men's room by himself. But this is an irrational fear since it can easily be overcome by the mother waiting right outside the door and by previously having properly trained and instructed the boy in how to handle any unusual situation, should it arise.
     Creating independence in a child begins at a very young age. A friend of mine told me a story about a trip he had taken to Amish country. While there, he helped a small Amish girl to her feet after she had fallen. The girl was no more than 3 or 4 years old, and my friend received a stern look from her father. When my friend inquired if he had done something wrong, the Amish father said that the girl must learn to pick herself up when she falls. This is the antithesis of the parenting mentality which causes a mother to take her 6 or 7 year old son into the ladies room. The Amish father knows that a child who is taught to always expect help from others, will grow into an adult who can't do for themselves, and this isn't good for any culture or society.
     Of course there is a fine line a parent must walk between allowing the child in their care to learn the valuable lessons of independence, and keeping them safe and healthy. This line, which was instinctive in our culture for so long, seems to have been obliterated in favor of raising children that remain juvenile their entire lives. It begins with retarding a child's very basic personal responsibilities, like using the restroom by themselves. But it leads to adults who can't fulfill any of the responsibilities of living in a civilized society, like supporting themselves, helping their community and leaving more to the world than they have received. We have entered the age of selfishness which is caused by dependence and leads to a soulless society.

Click here to watch my latest political song parody. Posted December 2, 2012.

The Damaging Effect Of Diveristy On Education

     Equality is the left's version of the golden calf. They have elevated it to the status of a god worthy of their worship, and have melted down every other value of our culture to create it. They have even bastardized this great nation's founding documents in order to have some authority with which to empower government to achieve it. The Declaration of Independence and Constitution do not guarantee equality of results, only that all men are equal in the eyes of God and under the law. The form with which equality takes as it relates to our education system, as it does with so many other areas of our culture, is diversity.
     Diversity, on its face, seems like a good and moral goal. Who would be against the idea of inclusivity in any area of our national life, especially education? But as it is with so many seemingly moral ideas, the left sees them only as opportunities to expand the scope and power of centralized government to the benefit of the ruling class. The bigger question, as it relates to education, is have we sacrificed excellence in order to achieve some bureaucratic idea of diversity? I think the evidence is clear that we have.
      Some may think that diversity relates only to ethnicity and race in the classroom, but it is so much more than that. Government administered diversity has resulted in an education system that teaches to the lowest common denominator. This causes the emphasis to be placed on failure rather than success. Lower achieving students are not raised up, but rather the higher achievers are, in a sense, lowered down. Diversity is responsible for many schools abandoning honor rolls and even meaningful grading systems, so as not to make the less-gifted or less ambitious students feel bad. Excellence in higher achieving students is not used as a motivational goal for the students at the lower end of the academic achievement scale, but is discouraged all together.
     As a result of the Liberal insistence on using the full force of government to make the classroom more diverse, they have actually made it less so. The students are asked to sacrifice a quality education in the name of diversity, which has the effect of an equally lower result for all students with very little room for excellence. Real diversity comes from teaching to a higher standard and expecting all students to meet it. It doesn't come from tethering more gifted students to lower achievers for the purpose of artificially inflating the self-esteems of those at the lower end of the academic achievement scale. It is only through an emphasis on a higher academic standard, for all students, that we can achieve excellence and diversity in our education system.

Click here to watch my latest political song parody. Posted November 26, 2012.   

Did The Government Really Build That?

     Big government Liberals, like President Obama, like to think that nothing would exist without a centralized government authority. This concept was the point of President Obama's, "You didn't build that" comment during this past Summer in the heat of the Presidential campaign. But his statement, and more importantly his ideology, misses the point that government would not exist without everything else. Giving the government credit, for instance, for the existence of the modern-day Internet is like giving credit for the development of the automobile to the caveman who invented the wheel.
     The recent Liberal argument that business couldn't exist without roads and other infrastructure built by government, labors under the assumption that businesses exist in a vacuum. After all, businesses and their employees pay taxes that fund infrastructure projects. In fact, since every taxpayer works for some kind of business, I would go so far as to say that government infrastructure projects could not exist without business. Business, on the other hand, would find a way to build infrastructure if government didn't. The Lincoln and Dixie highways were built by the private sector and many government projects are actually contracted out to private firms. So in many cases the government just acts as a middle-man in the construction of public works.
     The President likes to point out that the government created the Internet, and by so doing is responsible for all the Internet businesses that exist today. The Internet was developed by the military, the redheaded step-child of Liberal government. Two things are important to remember about the creation of the Internet. One, the government fought commercialization of the Internet for years and two, does anyone really think that the government was the only entity capable of creating the Internet? My contention is that had the government not fought commercialization for so many years, the Internet may have actually advanced much more rapidly.
     There are indeed some things that only the government can build. They include, but are not limited to, a 70,000 page tax code, over-regulation of the banking and energy industries, destruction of the black family, massive debt that will take generations to pay off if ever and of course the ever popular, if not thoroughly destructive, welfare state. 

Click here to watch my latest political song parody. Posted November 26, 2012.

The Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy President

     Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy is a mental disorder which affects woman in 85% of the cases diagnosed. The disorder manifests itself with the caregiver of a child deliberately keeping the child ill, sometimes to the point of death, in order to fulfill an overwhelming desire on the part of the caregiver for attention and sympathy. As long as family and friends are focused on the sick child, that focus is also extended to the caregiver of that child.
     I only bring up this rare disease as a sequoia into discussing the motivation of President Obama for the obviously destructive policies he advocates. In a way, the President has a version of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, only it is an entire nation that he seeks to keep sick. One thing is clear about Barack Obama, he is a narcissist, and as such he needs constant stimulation of his ego. A healthy and thriving economy places the government and the President in a much less prominent role in the lives of the citizenry. Inversely, when things are in turmoil and people are unemployed, there is much more attention paid to the President, thereby giving him a sense of importance. Of course, the environment of constant crisis does allow, as Rohm Emanuel framed it shortly after President Obama's victory in 2008, for the government to do things that it ordinarily wouldn't be able to do. But forcing socialist policies on the country is only one outcome of crisis for President Obama, the other is to feed his ego.
     To understand why the President is a practitioner of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, one only needs to look at his childhood. He was abandoned by his father and his mother sent him to live with his grandparents to separate him from his step-father, Kolo, because she felt his free market ideas were poison to her young impressionable son. By a very young age, Barack Obama developed not only a hatred for capitalism, but a desire to be a better father than his biological father had been to him. These early lessons, along with the constant ego-stroking he received throughout his life, created a potent combination of a desire to be in control like a father and a distrust for anything that might claim that responsibility from him, such as free market capitalism.
     Barack Obama's need to keep the nation in a constant state of crisis and malaise is rooted then in his desire to father and to have constant attention focused on his every word. This is why he prefers speech-making to governing and confrontation to cooperation. The first step in the therapy process for treating Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy is the separation of the victim from the person with the disorder. Unfortunately, Barack Obama has been given another four years to continue the economic sickness of the nation and thereby feed his need for attention. We, as his victims can only become sicker and hope we don't die before help arrives in four more years.

Click here to watch my latest political song parody. Posted November 26, 2012.