Rise Above By Sinking Below

     CNBC, whose parent company GE received billions of taxpayer dollars at the dawn of President Obama's first term, has created a campaign called, "Rise Above." This White House inspired campaign is designed to convince House Republicans to abandon their principles and sink to the level of fiscal depravity currently occupied by the President and Congressional Democrats.
     The incestuous relationship between CNBC and President Obama began early in his first term. It was best illustrated by Jim Kramer, the host of the network's show, "Mad Money", when he  laid down at the administration's request. Only months into the President's term, Jim Kramer said he had never seen an administration that had engaged in such a massive destruction of wealth in the private sector. Only days later, presumably after a visit from the Chicago mob in the form of Rohm Emanuel and David Axelrod, Mr. Kramer was praising the administration's handling of the economy. It was shortly thereafter that Jim Kramer received a promotion to one of the morning anchor positions. Had he stuck to the truth, I imagine his career would have suffered an opposite but equal effect.
     The "Rise Above" campaign is insidious in its use of  the Liberal tactic to manipulate through feigning balance. Ostensibly the campaign is suppose to send a message to politicians from both sides to "rise" above partisanship and come to an agreement to save the country from leaping off the fiscal cliff. On a daily basis, however, CNBC engages in characterizing  Republicans as focusing exclusively on keeping tax rates low on the wealthy, as if they are actually suggesting a rise of middle-class tax rates. One of their methods of deception is to demonize Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform, and by extension the Republicans who signed Grover's pledge not to raise tax rates. Over the years, CNBC has engaged in a campaign to characterize Mr. Norquist as a radical right-winger, simply because he advocates for the American people keeping more of what they earn and the Federal government living within a budget. Pretty radical stuff.
     The "Rise Above" campaign, replete with its own graphic and buttons that all the CNBC employees are forced to wear, looks and feels like an extension of the 2012 Obama Presidential campaign. Any time now I expect CNBC to claim that Republicans want to tax Big Bird and use the money to buy binders for businesses that want to ship jobs overseas in some grand scheme that will prevent women from being able to afford contraception and abortions while at the same time pushing your grandmother over a cliff in her wheel chair.

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

A Rice Pretzel

     It's an upside down time in which we live where a highly decorated general like David Petraeus, who has spent the better part of 40 years serving his country, must retire in shame as the result of an affair, but Susan Rice, who purposely deceived the country about the deaths of four Americans, is being considered for a promotion. After all, didn't the left try to make the case that an affair was a private matter when they defended Bill Clinton during his many dalliances? 
     Republican senators Phil Graham, John McCain and Kelly Ayotte met with UN ambassador Susan Rice yesterday to discuss her role in the Benghazi cover-up. The result of the meeting was best summed up by Senator Graham, who said he was more disturbed after the meeting than he had been before. As well he should have been. Ms. Rice twisted herself into a pretzel trying to explain why she lied when she appeared on 5 Sunday shows after the terrorist attack on September 11 in Benghazi that killed the ambassador and three other Americans.
     Ambassador Rice claims that her statements in the days following the attacks were guided by the official talking points disseminated by the intelligence community. But according to the testimony of former CIA Director, David Petraeus, the intelligence community knew almost immediately that the attacks were a result of planned terrorism and not, as Ms. Rice said on the Sunday shows, a spontaneous demonstration as a result of an anti-Muslim YouTube video. Mr. Petraeus also testified that the official talking points that were distributed by the CIA reflected the terrorism angle and nothing was said about the video.
     And therein lies the rub. The White House claims that someone changed the talking points and removed the reference to terrorism and inserted the claim about the video being responsible for the attack. It just isn't believable that the talking points from the CIA would have been changed without the knowledge of the President and his senior staff, including Ms Rice. It is also not feasible that when Mr. Petraeus saw the changed talking points, he would not have tried to correct the inaccurate information. This would have taken place before Ms. Rice appeared on the Sunday shows and purposely disseminated the lies about the video.
     There are many unanswered questions about the biggest foreign policy disaster in recent memory. One thing is clear, the administration, including Ms. Rice, engaged in a cover-up to hide the truth from the American people that Al Queda is resurgent and is not on the run as the President has said. There is no more obvious lie in American politics than the Benghazi cover-up, and oddly enough there is no greater lack of interest in the truth than there is by the main stream media and the left. In response to the absurd twisted defense of Ms. Rice's lies in recent days from the media, all I can say is, "These pretzels are making me thirsty."

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

Between Barack And A Hard Place

     House Republicans have no one to blame but themselves for the difficult position in which they currently reside visa-via the fiscal cliff. By allowing the Democrats to back them into a political corner the last two years that they have controlled the House of Representatives, John Boehner and the rest of the Republicans have given President Obama and the Democrats not only legislative victories, but may well have cost their party the Presidential election.
     It all began shortly after the Republicans took control of the House after the 2010 mid-term elections. The Bush era tax rates were set to expire on December 31, 2010, unless they were extended by Congress and the President. President Obama, at that time, wanted to extend all the rates, saying that raising any tax rates in the context of a faltering economy would throw us back into recession. But the President also wanted increased spending and the ill-advised tax holiday created by a reduction in the Social Security withholding rate. Instead of John Boehner and the Republicans saying "no" to the increased spending and tax holiday and pushing for the current income tax rates to be made permanent, they gave the President everything he wanted. And in so doing, they placed a temporary tourniquet on a bleeding economy and allowed the President to procrastinate the results of his failed policies until after he was safely re-elected.
     Less than a year after the President and Senate Democrats played John Bohner and the House Republicans like a cheap Stradivarius, they executed an encore performance. In August of 2011 the Federal government's debt ceiling was reaching its limit and needed Congressional action to allow the drunken sailors in Congress and the White House to extend their spending spree. Once again, instead of having a showdown and imposing adult behavior on the Federal government, the House Republicans agreed to raise  the debt ceiling. But they didn't just stop at raising the debt limit, they also agreed to the automatic cuts in defense and domestic programs called the sequester. These automatic cuts would be triggered by nothing being done otherwise, which is the one talent Congress exercises best. Conveniently for the President, the cuts wouldn't happen until he was safely re-elected. Once again, for fear or reprisal from the voters, the Republicans aided President Obama in kicking the can down the road past his re-election.
     Had John Boehner and the House Republicans stood on their principles and the knowledge of what was best for the country, the colossal failure of President Obama's policies would have been brought to fruition before he was re-elected and may have prevented that tragedy from ever occurring. This would have allowed for a real recovery to happen over the next four years with leadership interested in the health of the country, both economically and constitutionally. I find it ironic that the very thing which lead the Republicans to cave into the President, i.e. electoral defeat, is the one result they guaranteed with their fall from principle.

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

Why Do Union and Government Workers Escape Redistribution

     The left in the United States and around the world is fond of redistributing wealth from those who have it to those who don't. But this concept always raised at least two questions in my mind, who is wealthy and who is not? To the person making minimum wage, a bloke earning $25 an hour is wealthy. Just as to a person who is making 200 thousand dollars a year, someone making a million dollars is wealthy. In survey after survey, almost independent of what someone earns, they don't consider themselves rich.
     A third, and I think more important, question comes to mind in the redistributive model, i.e. what entity is the arbiter of determining who is the provider and who is the benefactor? Of course, in most cases it is big government that is given the power to confiscate wealth and redistribute it. This necessarily leads to corruption because as the saying goes, "When you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can always count on the support of Paul." It has become painfully obvious recently that the United States has reached a tipping point which finds us with more Pauls than Peters.
     Politicians who implement redistributive policies are not concerned with the financial status of those they call poor, but rather with the disposition of those persons votes. If they truly believed in redistribution as a path to fairness, then why do government and union workers escape the redistributionist's confiscatory policy. Government and union workers enjoy up to twice the salaries as their counterparts in the private sector, and contribute very little to benefits that far outstrip any received by their brethren in the real world. The redistribution model seems to work in reverse when it benefits union workers. Wealth is taken from taxpayers, who make less than the union workers, to pay for their higher salaries and gold-plated benefits.
     The reason that government and union workers escape the ire of community agitators and other redistributionists is simple, money. Taxpayer money is given to union workers in the form of higher contracts, which is then collected in the form of dues. Those dues are then "donated" to Democrats, who are the very same people who negotiate union contracts within the framework of collective bargaining agreements. As an added bonus, the Democrat party receives two-thirds of the union votes. It's a money-laundering scheme that would make Tony Soprano wet his pants with excitement.

Click here to watch my latest political song parody. Posted November 25, 2012.
           
    

The Self Esteem of Global Warming

     I have been fascinated in recent years by the global denial of fact and common sense as it relates to the climate change religion. The fact that none of the predictions from the climate change "experts" over the last 20 years have materialized, doesn't stop these anti-Capitalists from trying to destroy perfectly good economies. Even the exposure as frauds of the "scientists" at England's Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research, doesn't slow down the desire of world leftists to redistribute wealth using oppressive global government. I thought for sure it was the end of this fraudulent "science" known as climate change, when emails were released from Hadley showing the "scientists" deliberately ignored data that refuted the man-made global warming argument. But the world media, along with all the institutions of the left, ignored the scandal. Just as they did when the code for the computer program which created the models upon which the entire man-made climate change argument is based, showed that the desired results were hard coded so as not to allow any other results.
     I was perplexed by the willingness of otherwise intelligent people to buy into such a thoroughly discredited fraud. Until I realized that support for man-made climate change is linked to another leftist sacrament, the self-esteem movement. What better way is there to make irrelevant people feel good about their lives than to convince them they are saving the planet? Think of the delusion of grandeur inculcated in a generation of people that instructs them that they are more powerful than God. Never mind the fact that even if the planet is warming in some unnatural way, the climate change pushers solutions would have little affect on reversing the trend, according their own research.
     If one looks at the history of our planet, it becomes obvious that climate change is a natural part of its cycles. Greenland used to be farmed by the Vikings, and is now covered by ice. A million years ago there weren't any polar ice caps, and now "climatologists" point to their supposed melting as a sign of some man-made Armageddon. The planet has existed through many cooling and warming spells greater than anything the climate change pushers claim is happening today. And these other climate change events in our planet's past have all occurred before industrialization or the invention of SUVs. These facts are known by the world leftists, whose aim it is to use these natural earth cycles to convince the people of an impending Armageddon, and thereby sacrifice their liberty at the alter of big government. Much like the Egyptian Pharaohs used eclipses to convince the simpletons of their day that they had godly influence over the earth.
     It is hard to counter manufactured self-esteem, especially when it is derived from an individuals perception that they can control the climate, much like a god. And the superiority they feel over their fellow citizens, who they have been taught are analogous to flat-earthers, is more intoxicating than any opiate known to man. It is the self-esteem of Global Warming, and in the absence of real science, it has created the mechanism of our real destruction as a result of ignorance.

Click here to watch my political song parodies.
    

The Biggest Con In History

     As a child, my mother taught me that one diminishes the morality of a good deed by bragging about it. Throughout my life I have learned that this truism applies to most virtuous behavior. So, for instance, the person who talks about how honest they are, is usually the one with the least honesty. The bread and butter of the confidence man is convincing their mark through words, not actions, of their honesty. And it's not just con men who employ this tactic for the purpose of separating gullible people from their money. I'm sure we've all known people who exaggerate how good they are at one activity or another, when reality falls far short of their words.
     The need for someone to constantly talk about their virtuous character has its roots in a basic insecurity within the individual. They realize, even if it's at a subconscious level, that they are lacking in virtue. By shaping others perception of them as a virtuous person, they can mitigate the insecurity within themselves. Sometimes this shaping of perception is done for some material gain, as with the con men, and sometimes it is done to fill an emotional need within the person.
     There are those individuals who brag about their non-existent virtue as a means of controlling other people. If one can establish that they are virtuous, then it follows that everything they do and say is beyond reproach. Their decisions cannot be questioned because they originate from the well of purity that they themselves have told you they posses. This is the case with the statist mentality of many who practice the religion of Leftism.
     Many have surmised that statists want larger and larger government so that they can gain access to bigger chunks of taxpayer money and more control over their daily lives . Both of these are true. But at the very core of every statist, is insecurity about the supply of virtue within themselves, and they assume a similar lack of supply in others. As a means of saving people from themselves, the statist convinces people to allow them, with all their virtue, to make basic decisions for them. They convince people to abdicate their responsibilities, thereby not only giving the statist material control over their lives, but moral control. Because without responsibility, one has very little virtue and therefore will fall victim to those who they perceive to have more. It really is the confidence game, but executed on millions of people at a time. It has been a decades long process by the Left to remove virtue from society through government policy, and then bestow upon themselves the title of, "The Virtuous." This allows them to run the biggest con in history.

Click here to watch my political song parodies.

America's Cool Hand Luke Moment

     In the Paul Newman movie from the 1960s, "Cool Hand Luke", the rather authoritarian warden of the work camp would proclaim to a prisoner, "Git yer mind right" just before he put them in "the box." The "box" was the 60s prison movie genre version of a sensory deprivation tank. A prisoner would be given a stay in the "box" commensurate with the seriousness of the rule he broke. Paul Newman's character, Luke, spent alot of time in the "box". As a child, I thought sitting in a box by myself was preferable to swinging a pick ax out on a hot road for 12 hours a day. But then I was a strange child. I digress.
     After a prisoner's stay in the "box", he would emerge half-dead but with "his mind right." I thought about this movie after the recent election, and how we as Americans have to spend time in the "box" to get our minds right. The "box" I'm talking about is the one created by President Obama and the Democrats. It is constructed of chronically high unemployment, credit worthiness crushing debt, a drowning pool of Federal regulations and the ruination of the best health care system in the world. Not to mention the emotionally draining rhetoric of class warfare and the community organizing strategy of divide and conquer. The President and his thugs are waiting for us to emerge from the "box" with our spirits broken and ready to accept their authoritarian work camp environment.
     But the other way to look at the "box" and its subsequent "mind righting", is that we need to spend time in isolation from prosperity and liberty in order to learn our lesson. We can emerge from the "box" with a determination to change our situation and escape from the work camp of Liberal policy. This is the approach that Luke took in the movie. Throughout his many ordeals in and out of the "box", he never lost the will to escape in an effort to separate himself from the clutches of the warden and his henchmen. Even if Luke had to act as if he was broken, he played the part so as to gain the trust of his captors and, when they least expected it, he would escape again.
     We can learn much from the fictional character of Luke. He valued his freedom more than anything, even as it turned out in the end, more than his life. Luke's original crime was stupidity, getting drunk and cutting the tops off of parking meters. But like us, even if it meant spending time in the "box", he wasn't going to abandon all hope of being free. He struggled to rehabilitate himself, not from the stupidity of his crime, but from the frivolous treatment of his freedom. We too have treated our freedom frivolously, and we have brought ourselves to the cusp of losing it forever. But like Luke, we must get our minds right. Not in the acquiescent resignation of acceptance, but in the renewed spirit to fight with our final breath, if necessary, to fully restore our liberty.

Click here to watch my political song parodies.