It Ain't Necessarily So ............

Josef Goebbels believed that all that was needed for a lie to be accepted was that it must be oft repeated and with a lot of volume. And that strategy is being tried here and now.

While engaging in astonishing viciousness, vulgarity and violence toward conservatives, liberals accuse cheerful, law-abiding Tea Party activists of being violent racists.

Responding to these vile charges, conservative television pundits think it's a great comeback to say: "There is a fringe on both sides."

Both sides? Really? How about: "That's a complete lie"?

Did that occur to the simpering morons as a possible reply to the slanderous claim that conservatives are fiery racists?

The most notorious accusations of "racism" at anti-Obama rallies so far has consisted of the allegation that one black congressman was spat upon and another called the N-word 15 times at an anti-ObamaCare rally on Capitol Hill last March. The particularly sensitive Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., perhaps walking too closely to a protester chanting "Kill the Bill," was hit with some spittle -- and briefly thought he was a Freedom Rider! When observers contested Cleaver's account -- with massive video evidence -- he took back his claim of being spat upon.

The slanderous claim that a protester called the civil rights hero John Lewis the N-word 15 times was an outrageous lie -- never made by Lewis himself -- but promoted endlessly by teary-eyed reporters, most of whom cannot count to 15. The media never retracted it, even after the N-word allegation was proved false with a still-uncollected $100,000 reward for two seconds of video proof taken from a protest crawling with video cameras and reporters hungry for an act of racism not to mention a stash of cash.

When St. Louis Tea Party co-founder Dana Loesch did make the point on CNN that no one spat on any black congressmen at the anti-ObamaCare rally, a liberal on the panel, Nancy Giles, told her to "shut your mouth," while alleged "comedian" Stephanie Miller repeatedly called Tea Party activists "tea baggers."It's like watching Hitler hysterically denounce Poland for being mean to Nazi Germany while Polish TV commentators defend Poland by saying, "There are mistakes on both sides."

Meanwhile, we do have video proof of the New Black Panthers standing outside a polling station in Philadelphia in 2008 with billy clubs threatening white voters who tried to vote. And there is video footage of Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice as well as a slew of conservative college speakers being assaulted by crazed liberals.

We also have evidence of liberals' proclivity for violence in the form of mountains of arrest records. Liberal protesters at the 2008 Republican National Convention were arrested for smashing police cars, slashing tires, breaking store windows, and for possessing Molotov cocktails, napalm bombs and assorted firearms. (If only they could muster up that kind of fighting spirit on foreign battlefields.)There were no arrests of conservatives at the Democratic National Convention.

Over the past couple of election cycles, Bush and McCain election headquarters around the country have been repeatedly vandalized, ransacked, burglarized and shot at (by staunch gun-control advocates, no doubt); Bush and McCain campaign signs have been torched; and Republican campaign volunteers have been physically attacked.

In the fall of 2008, Obama supporters Mace'd elderly volunteers in a McCain campaign office in Galax, Va. In separate attacks, a half-dozen liberals threw Molotov cocktails at McCain signs on families' front yards in and around Portland, Ore. One Obama supporter broke a McCain sign being held by a small middle-aged woman in midtown Manhattan before hitting her in the face with the stick.

These are just a few acts of violence from the left too numerous to catalog. There were arrests in all these cases. There was, however, absolutely no national coverage of the attacks by Obama supporters. Since Obama became president, the only recorded violence at Tea Parties or Town Halls has been committed by liberals.

Last fall, a conservative had his finger bitten off by a man from a MoveOn.org crowd in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Two Service Employees International Union thugs have been charged with beating up an African-American selling anti-Obama bumper stickers at a St. Louis Tea Party in August 2009.

Respected elder statesmen of the Democratic Party have referred to Obama's "Negro dialect" (Harry Reid), said he would be getting them coffee a few years ago (Bill Clinton), and called him "clean" (Joe Biden). And that's not including the former Ku Klux Klan Democratic senator, the late Bob Byrd.

So I'm thinking that maybe when conservatives are called racists on TV, instead of saying, "There are fringe elements on both sides," conservative commentators might want to think about saying, "That is a complete lie."

Liberals explode in rage when we accuse them of being unpatriotic based on 50 years of treasonous behavior. They have zero examples of conservative racism, but the best our spokesmen can think to say when accused of racism is: "Man is imperfect."

Conservatives who prefer to come across on TV as wonderfully moderate rather than to speak the truth should find another line of work and stop defaming conservatives with their "both sides" pabulum.


Puhlease!

Pride and what follows ..........

The battle lines have been joined and the provisions of Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 are in the maw of the judicial system.

Whatever was going to happen yesterday, this attempt by a state to protect its citizens from an invasion of illegals, kidnappers, drug cartels and violent criminals, was headed for the Supreme Court of the United States. In fact, after Mexico City, Phoenix holds the title of “World Capital for Kidnapping”,

The judicial decision wasn’t a surprise to many but I suspect that the aftermath may be. For a start, the Federal Law is still intact and many jurisdictions in Arizona may well seek to enforce it even more rigorously than before. Remember that the new Arizona law mirrored the Fed stuff that’s been around since the 1940’s except for one aspect. The new state law required that police officers determine a person’s immigration status if it was in doubt but only if they had been stopped for another offence.

Before, on the other hand, the police merely had the discretion to go that one step further but not the mandate. My guess is that the number of cases referred to ICE will increase. Waddya’ think?

The real message here is one of raw politics with more than a tinge of money thrown in.

Employers want cheap labor with no rights and no benefits.

Unions want membership dues.

Obama and the liberals want voters who they believe will prolong their grip on the reins of power.

Sounds good if you’re a liberal but it may not be quite that simple. And, of course, if you are a liberal it has to be made simple.

What is the missing unknown from this hypothesis? Where is the “X”?

The absent element is the American citizen, the voter, the poor Schlub who picks up his lunch pail inside his front door each morning and heads off to another day of uncertain labor.

The absent element is that across this great country an overwhelming majority want to see illegal immigration brought under control. Of course, Obama didn’t win Arizona last time and there is no way in Hades he would do so again. But, of course he knows that, which is why it was OK to sic his DOJ attack dogs on this state.

But what about all the other states that were planning their own version of SB 1070? Well that was another reason for the federal lawsuit against Arizona. It was the warning shot across the bows.

However, it’s just possible that Obama’s hubris will be his undoing. A clear majority, nay a close plurality, want illegal immigration stopped and any conservative candidate this November or in 2012 who doesn’t use this perfectly sharpened spear doesn’t deserve to prevail.

Does Obama know this? Well on an intellectual level he must, even if he’s only half as smart as his acolytes profess.

But then perhaps, his own belief in his own invincibility gets in the way.

And we all know what comes before a fall.

Paint Your Wagon!

There are many people, smart and good people, who are deeply confused about the direction of the current administration. They are baffled as to why Obama and his acolytes cannot see what is happening to our economy. They keep telling everybody that we’ve turned the corner and yet all I seem to see are businesses in strip malls closing and no new ones being opened.

My mind goes to the old story of the IBM salesman who has failed to consummate his marriage and after several months just sits on the edge of the bed telling his new bride how wonderful it’s going to be.

I recently heard from of a gentleman who holds some real estate investments. We had met through Republican politics, but I sensed he was really uncommitted politically and certainly was no staunch Republican. It all started when he asked me how I was doing. I replied that I was doing great compared to many and said so.

He said, “You’re doing great? You are the only one I talk to who is doing great. All my tenants are struggling. These people in the Administration are so smart, why don’t they understand what is going on out here?”

What an opening – how could I pass on that one? So I told him what I thought he understood already. Yes, the folks in the Administration may be smart, but they have no experience. Virtually none of them has ever participated in the free enterprise system creating income and jobs, so how – and why – would you expect them to create policies that would help entrepreneurs and small-business owners move the economy forward. They may be smart, they may be great at writing papers and drawing charts with arrows and symbols, but they are fairly low on wisdom. Wisdom comes from suffering experiences in life – not just living arcane social and economic theories.

A perfect example of this wisdom deficiency is the newest member of the administration, Donald Berwick, the man chosen to administer the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. These two behemoth bureaucracies consume 4% of our gross domestic product, and that’s even before Obamacare vastly increases the amount of money running through their bureaucratic fingers. So one might think Dr. Berwick would have had some experience running a major medical operation or a similar entity.

It turns out that his most significant position was as President of the non-profit Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). If you go to the IHI website, they self-describe the organization as “a small organization with a very big mission.” Not exactly the credentials most of us would consider when looking for someone to run an organization that dispenses hundreds of billions of dollars.

The important thing for Obama it seems is that Dr. Berwick has studied health care organizations and written heady papers and pontificated in speeches about how the health care system should be run. Since that is the background of the occupant of the Oval Office and almost all of his advisors, Dr. Berwick seems to be a natural choice.

Obama believes that should be good enough especially since Dr. Berwick shares his view of the world and how things should be. But it’s not as we shall surely see. And the people who should be pointing all this out are almost entirely silent.

Instead, the media simply circles the wagons!

It's nice to know it's not just me ..............

I do this only rarely for all kinds of reasons but mostly for three. When I was in school the biggest sin was plagiarism. Secondly, I hope you find here stuff that you cannot easily find elsewhere. Plus the fact that I’m addicted to my own deathless prose.

However, when I read the following, I had to pass it along. It was written by Robert Weissburg and published in “American Thinker”. And I am indebted to friends I’ve had in the San Francisco Bay Area for decades. Thanks Guys!

“As the Obama administration enters its second year, I -- and undoubtedly millions of others -- have struggled to develop a shorthand term that captures our emotional unease. Defining this discomfort is tricky. I reject nearly the entire Obama agenda, but the term "being opposed" lacks an emotional punch. Nor do terms like "worried" or "anxious" apply. I was more worried about America's future during the Johnson or Carter years, so it's not that dictionary, either. Nor, for that matter, is this about backroom odious deal-making and pork, which are endemic in American politics.
After auditioning countless political terms, I finally realized that the Obama administration and its congressional collaborators almost resemble a foreign occupying force, a coterie of politically and culturally non-indigenous leaders whose rule contravenes local values rooted in our national tradition. It is as if the United States has been occupied by a foreign power, and this transcends policy objections. It is not about Obama's birthplace. It is not about race, either; millions of white Americans have had black mayors and black governors, and this unease about out-of-synch values never surfaced.

The term I settled on is "alien rule" -- based on outsider values, regardless of policy benefits -- that generates agitation. This is what bloody anti-colonial strife was all about. No doubt, millions of Indians and Africans probably grasped that expelling the British guaranteed economic ruin and even worse governance, but at least the mess would be their mess. Just travel to Afghanistan and witness American military commanders' efforts to enlist tribal elders with promises of roads, clean water, dental clinics, and all else that America can freely provide. Many of these elders probably privately prefer abject poverty to foreign occupation since it would be their poverty, run by their people, according to their sensibilities.

This disquiet was a slow realization. Awareness began with Obama's odd pre-presidency associations, decades of being oblivious to Rev. Wright's anti-American ranting, his enduring friendship with the terrorist guy-in-the-neighborhood Bill Ayers, and the Saul Alinsky-flavored anti-capitalist community activism. Further add a hazy personal background -- an Indonesian childhood, shifting official names, and a paperless-trail climb through elite educational institutions.

None of this disqualified Obama from the presidency; rather, this background just doesn't fit with the conventional political résumé. It is just the "outsider?" quality that alarms. For all the yammering about George W. Bush's privileged background, his made-in-the-USA persona was absolutely indisputable. John McCain might be embarrassed about his Naval Academy class rank and iffy combat performance, but there was never any doubt of his authenticity. Countless conservatives despised Bill Clinton, but nobody ever, ever doubted his good-old-boy American bonafides.

The suspicion that Obama is an outsider, a figure who really doesn't "get" America, grew clearer from his initial appointments. What "native" would appoint Kevin Jennings, a militant gay activist, to oversee school safety? Or permit a Marxist rabble-rouser to be a "green jobs czar"? How about an Attorney General who began by accusing Americans of cowardice when it comes to discussing race? And who can forget Obama's weird defense of his pal Louis Henry Gates from "racist" Cambridge, Massachusetts cops? If the American Revolution had never occurred and the Queen had appointed Obama Royal Governor (after his distinguished service in Kenya), a trusted locally attuned aide would have first whispered in his ear, "Mr. Governor General, here in America, we do not automatically assume that the police were at fault," and the day would have been saved.

And then there's the "we are sorry, we'll never be arrogant again" rhetoric seemingly designed for a future President of the World election campaign. What made Obama's Cairo utterances so distressing was how they grated on American cultural sensibilities. And he just doesn't notice, perhaps akin to never hearing Rev. Wright anti-American diatribes. An American president does not pander to third-world audiences by lying about the Muslim contribution to America. Imagine Ronald Reagan, or any past American president, trying to win friends by apologizing. This appeal contravenes our national character and far exceeds a momentary embarrassment about garbled syntax or poor delivery. Then there's Obama's bizarre, totally unnecessary deep bowing to foreign potentates. Americans look foreign leaders squarely in the eye and firmly shake hands; we don't bow.

But far worse is Obama's tone-deafness about American government. How can any ordinary American, even a traditional liberal, believe that jamming through unpopular, debt-expanding legislation that consumes one-sixth of our GDP, sometimes with sly side-payments and with a thin majority, will eventually be judged legitimate? This is third-world, maximum-leader-style politics. That the legislation was barely understood even by its defenders and vehemently championed by a representative of that typical American city, San Francisco, only exacerbates the strangeness. And now President Obama sides with illegal aliens over the State of Arizona, which seeks to enforce the federal immigration law to protect American citizens from marauding drug gangs and other miscreants streaming in across the Mexican border.

Reciprocal public disengagement from President Obama is strongly suggested by recent poll data on public trust in government. According to a recent Pew report, only 22% of those asked trust the government always or most of the time, among the lowest figures in half a century. And while pro-government support has been slipping for decades, the Obama presidency has sharply exacerbated this drop. To be sure, many factors (in particular the economic downturn) contribute to this decline, but remember that Obama was recently elected by an often wildly enthusiastic popular majority. The collapse of trust undoubtedly transcends policy quibbles or a sluggish economy -- it is far more consistent with a deeper alienation.

Perhaps the clearest evidence for this "foreigner in our midst" mentality is the name given our resistance -- tea parties, an image that instantly invokes the American struggle against George III, a clueless foreign ruler from central casting. This history-laden label was hardly predetermined, but it instantly stuck (as did the election of Sen. Scott Brown as "the shot heard around the world" and tea partiers dressing up in colonial-era costumes). Perhaps subconsciously, Obama does remind Americans of when the U.S. was really occupied by a foreign power. A Declaration of Independence passage may still resonate: "HE [George III] has erected a Multitude of new Offices [Czars], and sent hither Swarms of Officers [recently hired IRS agents] to harass our People, and eat out the Substance." What's next?

What’s next indeed?

Well for a start, November 2nd.

And I can see it from my house.

Things I learned at my Grandmother's knee .....

The Democrats are depressed about their collapsing poll numbers, so it's time to start calling conservatives "racist."

As we now know from the Journolist list-serv, where hundreds of liberal journalists chat with one another, and which was leaked to Daily Caller this week, journalists cry "racism" whenever they need to distract from bad news for Obama. (Ironically, this story did not make headlines.)

When the Rev. Jeremiah Wright scandal broke during the 2008 campaign, the first response of Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent was to demand that they start randomly picking conservatives -- "Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares -- and call them racists."

Ackerman, frequent guest on MSNBC's "Rachel Maddow Show," continued on Journolist: "What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a right-winger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically."

This is what "racism" has come to in America. Democrats are in trouble, so they say "let's call conservatives racists." We always knew it, but the Journolist postings gave us the smoking gun.

This explains why we've heard so much about Tea Partiers being "racists" lately.

But despite a frantic search, the media have been unable to produce any actual evidence of racism at the Tea Parties. Even the trace elements are either frauds or utterly trivial.

For example, there was blind terror last week over a Tea Party billboard in northern Iowa that showed a picture of Adolf Hitler, Obama and Vladimir Lenin under the headings: "National Socialism," "Democratic Socialism" and "Marxist Socialism."

Overheated? Certainly. Racist? No. Unless liberals are about to break the news that Lenin and Hitler were black, what we have here, is not racism.

I'm not even sure why liberals are so testy: As an aficionado of liberal talk radio, because it’s important to know your enemy, I've heard both Ed Schultz and Randi Rhodes repeatedly say socialism is terrific. (Given their ratings, this is understandable.) And let’s not forget about Air America.

To the Al Franken supporters I would say, don’t go there. Right now I don’t have the time and it’s off-topic anyway.

Most sickeningly, the mainstream media continue to spread the despicable lie that someone called civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis the "N-word" 15 times during the anti-ObamaCare rally in Washington. Fifteen times!

That turned out to be another lie.

About a week after the protest, Andrew Breitbart offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who could produce a video of Lewis being called the N-word even once -- forget 15 times.

And whether the recent Breitbart tape and associated hoo-haw was real or not in terms of the words and context, what was undeniably real was the approval of the Black audience to racism aimed at Whites.

With hundreds of news cameras, cell phone cameras and camcorders capturing every nook and cranny of the Capitol Hill protest -- and news media hungry for an ugly, racist act -- it defies possibility that someone called Lewis the N-word once, much less 15 times, without one single camera capturing the incident.

And yet, to this day the reward remains unclaimed.

The truth is that Democrats did their best to provoke an ugly confrontation by marching a (shockingly undiverse) group of black Democrats right through the middle of the anti-ObamaCare protest. But they didn't get one, so the media just lied and asserted Lewis was called the N-word.

Indeed, news anchor after news anchor has indignantly claimed to have footage of the incident, teasing viewers by saying, "We'll get that right up" or claiming personally to have seen the video -– and then you watch the whole program without ever seeing footage of anyone calling Lewis the N-word.

Dateline: April 18, 2010, CNN's Don Lemon: "We have the tape here at CNN. I saw it on CNN's 'State of the Union.'" And yet, Lemon never got around to showing viewers that tape. IF YOU HAVE THE TAPE, DON, CLAIM YOUR $100,000 REWARD!

And now this week, with the NAACP accusing the Tea Partiers of harboring racists, and conservatives demanding proof, the George Soros-backed Center for American Progress ran a 45-second video allegedly showing racism at the Tea Parties.

One of the videos shows what turned out to be a liberal plant announcing, "I'm a proud racist!" Apparently this was their best shot, because they had to work this video into the montage twice, amid utterly innocuous posters, for example, saying, "God bless Glenn Beck." So I guess they didn't have anything better.

Here's the part Soros' people didn't show you: In the fuller video shown on the Glenn Beck show, the Tea Partiers surrounded the (liberal plant) racist, jeering at him, telling him he's not one of them and to go home. In a spectacularly evil fraud, all that was edited out.

Just hours later on MSNBC, Chris Matthews was loudly proclaiming that he would believe the Tea Partiers weren't racist when he sees "just one of those Tea Party people pull down one of those racist signs at the next Tea Party rally. I'm going to just wait. Reach over, grab the sign and tear it out of the guy's hands. Then I will believe you."

Well, here it was. The (liberal plant) racist was driven from the Tea Party by the Tea Partiers. Frankly, I hope they got out of camera shot and beat the crap out of him but, as my Grandmother used to say, “If wishes were horses then beggars would ride”.

The Magnificent Seven

One of the lines we've heard again and again from the Left and even from mediocre Republicans like Bob Bennett and Lindsey Graham is that the Tea Party has no agenda. The idea is supposed to be that the Tea Party is just a bunch of slack-jawed, backwoods hillbillies who are rallying against progress and a black President. Of course, this is not true. The reason the Tea Party exists is because patriotic Americans all across this country are deeply concerned about our nation's future.

Now, I'm not volunteering for the job but there is no "Tea Party leader" nor any one person who can speak for the Tea Party. Still, I've attended Tea Party events and I think I have a pretty good grip on what people at the Tea Parties want but I’ll spell that out in a moment.

But all that being said, Tea Partiers tend to be considerably more informed than the average person about politics; so most of them are well aware of the legislative limitations we'll face if the GOP takes back the House, but doesn't control the Senate or the presidency. Additionally, it's no secret that the American people and the Republican base have very little confidence in the GOP.

So, let's be honest here: if the GOP takes the House back, it will be because of the American people's deep dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party, not their love for the Republican Party.

Ever since its inception the movement has held three concepts close to its heart and these are smaller government, fiscal responsibility and adherence to our Constitution. But perhaps these are a little too general and therefore they have to be “codified” into a humble, limited agenda that helps rebuild the American people's confidence in the GOP's ability to govern. Here are seven doable agenda items that can help make that happen.

1) Kill earmarks: Earmarks don't make up a large percentage of the budget, but they have become a tremendous corrupting influence on Congress. The American people believe, quite correctly, that campaign contributors give money to congressmen and they pay them back for the favor by funneling millions of dollars in earmarks their way. We will not have an honest government in this country as long as this practice continues.

2) Read the bills: During Obama's tenure, we've been treated to massive bills that have been passed without ANYBODY actually reading them from end-to-end. This is simply unacceptable to the American people. Yes, every congressman might not read every bill, but at least their staff should read the bills so that they can inform them about what they're voting on.

Recently Rand Paul said he believed Congress should have to wait one day for every 20 pages of a bill before it’s voted upon.

That seems to me to be a fairly reasonable proposition.

3) Kill the funding for Obamacare: To fully repeal Obamacare, you need to control the House, have 60 votes in the Senate, and control the presidency. That's not going to be the case in 2011. Still, the GOP needn’t be helpless. Simply refusing to fund this monstrosity would do a lot until we can send Obama back to wherever he comes from and that means taking back control of the Hill.

Consider this;

"The IRS might have to hire as many as 16,000 new employees to enforce all the new taxes and penalties the bill calls for! And that doesn’t include all the other government jobs from the 159 new agencies, panels, commissions and departments this bill will create."

What does it take to fund all those government jobs, agencies, panels, & commissions? Tax dollars. Your dollars.

Now, who controls the purse strings? Congress. …

So, can we gut Obamacare by refusing to fund it? YES. WE. CAN. Is this a viable strategy? Yes, it is.

Defunding Obamacare isn't as good as repealing it, but it can stop the bill in its tracks until we do have the votes to repeal it.

4) Security first border proposal: Even the most diehard advocates of amnesty and open borders in Congress claim to be for security when they're called on it. So, if the GOP takes back the House, there will be an opportunity to separate the wheat from the chaff by passing a tough new security law that finishes building the fence, adds more border patrol agents, beefs up interior enforcement, severely penalizes businesses that knowingly hire illegals, ends catch and release programs for people of all nationalities, and do a better job of tracking people who come into America on visas of whatever flavor.

Then, the American people will be able to see once and for all who on Capitol Hill wants to actually end illegal immigration -- and who just gives lip service to the idea while privately doing everything possible to make sure the border remains open.

5) Investigate, investigate, investigate: The Obama Administration has been engaging in more than a few questionably legal maneuvers with no oversight of significance from Congress. If the GOP takes over the House, it will get subpoena power and it can start to get the sort of answers the public has been waiting for in the Sestak/Romanoff bribery case, the dropped Black Panther prosecutions, and the partisan corruption of the census -- among other issues.

Barack Obama has been treated as being above the law by the Democrats in Congress and it's about time that his administration was forced to start playing by the rules.

6) Get the government out of private industry: Congress controls the purse strings and it can make sure that not another dime goes to fund bailouts at private companies or at Freddie and Fannie. Moreover, the GOP needs to do what it can to move the government out of private industry as quickly as possible. We need to work to get the government out of the banks, the car companies, and student loan industry by 2012.

If that means some companies go out of business, that's unfortunate, but any corporation that can only survive with the government's help deserves to go out of business. Although it's probably too much to hope for, that should apply to corporate welfare for farms and inefficient alternative sources of energy as well.

7) Pay for all new spending: Here's a simple rule: Any NEW spending, including "emergency spending," has to be paid for by cutting spending from other places in the budget. This will flatten the growth of government, impose spending discipline as the "new normal" in D.C., and get people used to the idea of cutting government programs -- something that has rarely happened in recent years.

If the GOP can do at least that much, in combination with stopping earmarks and preventing Obamacare from being implemented, it can restore its reputation for responsible governance and fiscal discipline while setting the stage for the sort of gains we need in 2012 to get the country back on track fiscally.

And those are all things that resonate with a huge swath of the American people.

They’re easy to understand, get behind and articulate and can be the platform we need to build in order to rid ourselves of this odious little boy in the Oval Office.

Of course, liberals might want to change the title of this post to, "The Seven Deadly Sins" but that's their problem.

Get rid of all the lawyers starting from the top

Yesterday evening I had an amazing conversation and I report on it now. The person is a liberal although that person pretends I’ve got that all wrong.

Anyway the thrust of the concern was the cost of the upcoming changes to the healthcare system in this country, more commonly known as Obamacare.

Well I couldn’t wait to thrust my boot into that soon-to-be corpse and so I related a conversation with an insurance broker. That person affirms that insurance companies cannot, in future, refuse coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

Whoopee! Fireworks! Champagne and Cake! Liberal victory!

Not so fast. The cost will be between $400 and $900 per month and I’ll leave it to you to do the math.

If you are surprised you should not be.

When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”

Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.

The individual mandate is a tax, denials of the administration to the contrary. And, as it now seems clear, the administration is now going to enthusiastically call it a tax in order to keep it from being thrown out as blatantly unconstitutional. You see, the Commerce Clause argument falls down when you put too much pressure on it.

It was at this point that I had the uneasy feeling that I was approaching waters, the depth of which, I was ill-equipped to handle. So I asked the granddaughter of a friend. The granddaughter has just finished 1st year law school and this is what I got.

"To assess the constitutionality of a claim of power under the Commerce Clause, the primary question becomes, 'what class of activity is Congress seeking to regulate?' Only when this question is answered can the Court assess whether that class of activity substantially affects interstate commerce. Significantly, the mandate imposed by the pending bills does not regulate or prohibit the economic activity of providing or administering health insurance. Nor does it regulate or prohibit the economic activity of providing health care, whether by doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, or other entities engaged in the business of providing a medical good or service. Indeed, the health care mandate does not purport to regulate or prohibit activity of any kind, whether economic or non-economic. To the contrary, it purports to 'regulate' inactivity."

Now this kid will go far but it really didn't help me too much and so I asked for more. And I got this.

"Proponents of the individual mandate are contending that, under its power to 'regulate commerce…among the several states,' Congress may regulate the doing of nothing at all! In other words, the statute purports to convert inactivity into a class of activity. By its own plain terms, the individual mandate provision regulates the absence of action. To uphold this power under its existing doctrine, the Court must conclude that an individual’s failure to enter into a contract for health insurance is an activity that is 'economic' in nature– that is, it is part of a 'class of activity' that 'substantially affects interstate commerce'"'

But I did understand this bit. Never in this nation’s history has the commerce power been used to require a person who does nothing to engage in economic activity.

Now it's all crystal clear. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's almost certainly not a gekko with a cute Cockey accent. It's a tax which means, by the way, that when Obama promised not to raise taxes: …. he lied.

And he thinks that the American people will swallow that lie, because he and his party’s leadership cadre all think that the American people are stupid.

Well I'd be a lousy lawyer but on the other hand, I've read the Constitution ....

So I guess all that hysteria about the Arizona immigration law was much ado about nothing. After months of telling us that the Nazis had seized Arizona, when the Obama administration finally got around to suing, its only objection was that the law was "pre-empted" by federal immigration law.

And it was the latter part of that paragraph which is the subject of confusion by European readers. British people are used to having counties which can be overridden by the central “enforcers” in Westminster. And I use the word after much thought because their system and ours are different and they are because of our Constitution.

These are the United States of America and not the subservient counties of England. Obama’s regime and his lackeys cannot just walk over this, or any other, state’s guaranteed rights. But some of them think they can which is why is we find ourselves where we are.

With the vast majority of Americans supporting Arizona's inoffensive little law, the fact that Obama is suing at all suggests that he consulted exclusively with the craziest people in America before filing this complaint. (Which is to say, Eric Holder's Justice Department.)

But apparently even they could find nothing discriminatory about Arizona's law.

It's reassuring to know that, contrary to earlier indications, government lawyers can at least read English. Instead, the administration argues, federal laws on immigration pre-empt Arizona's law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.

State laws are pre-empted by federal law in two circumstances: When there is a conflict -- such as "sanctuary cities" for illegals or California's medical marijuana law -- or when Congress has so thoroughly regulated a field that there is no room for even congruent state laws.

If Obama thinks there's a conflict, I believe he's made a damning admission.

There's a conflict only if the official policy of the federal government is to ignore its own immigration laws.

But the point is: According to the Supreme Court's most recent pre-emption ruling, Arizona's law is not pre-empted because Congress did not expressly prohibit state regulation of illegal aliens.

In fact, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the pre-emption argument against state laws on immigrants -- including laws somewhat at odds with federal law, which the Arizona law is not.

In the seminal case, De Canas v. Bica (1976), the court held 8-0 that a California law prohibiting employers from hiring illegal immigrants was not pre-empted by federal law.

The court -– per Justice William Brennan -- said that the federal government's supremacy over immigration is strictly limited to: (1) a "determination of who should or should not be admitted into the country," and (2) "the conditions under which a legal entrant may remain."

So a state can't start issuing or revoking visas, but that's about all it can't do.

Manifestly, a state law about illegal immigrants has nothing to do with immigrants who enter legally or the condition of their staying here. Illegal aliens have neither been "admitted into the country" nor are they "legal entrants."

Indeed, as Brennan noted in the De Canas case, there's even "a line of cases that upheld certain discriminatory state treatment of aliens lawfully within the United States." (You might want to jot some of this down, Mr. Holder.)

So there's no "field pre-emption" of state laws dealing with aliens, nor is there an explicit statement from Congress pre-empting state regulation of aliens.

On top of that, the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld state laws on immigrants in the face of pre-emption challenges. Arizona's law is no more pre-empted than the rest of them.

Unless, of course, Obama is right and it's a violation of federal law to enforce federal immigration laws, which is the essence of the Department of Justice's lawsuit.

I think he’s wrong. The ACLU thinks he’s right.

Fifty will get you a hundred. Are you on?

Nobody, but Nobody could fool my Grandmother

On a quiet Friday afternoon this summer, the central justification for Obama’s health-care overhaul died a quiet death.

A Rasmussen poll last week showed that a mere 7% of Americans want to keep it as it is.

And so, for those from Lake Havasu, more than 9 out of 10 want it changed or scrapped. And here’s part of the reason why.

On that day, a bipartisan coalition in Congress reversed the scheduled Medicare cuts to physician payments, ensuring that, over the next decade, the White House’s reforms will cost many billions more than advertised. After over a year of debate and lofty rhetoric, the reality is this: Obama’s goal of “bending” the health-care cost curve has unraveled in just a few months.

Obama and his supporters argued that we need ObamaCare in order to tame the federal budget deficit. When he signed the bill into law, he touted the importance of the legislation in reducing long-term deficits. Democrats cited Congressional Budget Office scoring showing that the health legislation would reduce the deficit over ten years to the tune of roughly $130 billion.

But that was back in March. In May, the CBO released its quantitative analysis showing that discretionary spending not accounted for in the previous scores would cost $115 billion. The CBO director himself expressed significant doubts about potential deficit reduction. Speaking to the Institute of Medicine, he said: “Rising health costs will put tremendous pressure on the federal budget during the next few decades and beyond. In CBO’s judgment, the health legislation enacted earlier this year does not substantially diminish that pressure.”

And that brings us to the quiet Friday afternoon of June 25. By canceling scheduled Medicare cuts, Obama and his Congressional allies have made the fiscal problem even worse: Not only do those fiscal problems remain, but White House reforms meant to address them will push net federal-government health expenditures further into the red. Any notion of fiscal balance has been lost.

Yet canceling these scheduled Medicare cuts is nothing new. Time and again, Republican and Democratic leaderships in Congress have haphazardly voted to undo scheduled cuts.

Congress reversed planned Medicare physician cuts in 1999—and 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2008. In fact, since 1997, when members of both parties agreed to automatic cuts if spending rose faster than population and economic growth, the program has been cut just once, in 2002.

Maybe it’s the pressure of the doctors’ lobby. Maybe it’s the seniors’ lobby. Maybe it’s both.

And this Democratic Congress has been no better. In fact, just months after passing Obama’s health-reform legislation, Democrats vigorously and successfully pushed to postpone the Medicare cut until November (they had previously voted to delay it from April to June 2010).

More worrisome is this: in liberal circles, it’s popular to argue that Congressional efforts to control Medicare costs under the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula have been overly successful. James R. Horney and Paul N. Van de Water make exactly this point in a publication for the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. They write: “Even though Congress did not allow the full cuts required under the SGR formula to take effect, it has still cut the physician reimbursement rate substantially – at its current level, the reimbursement rate in 2010 will be 17 percent below the rate for 2001, adjusted for inflation.”

Picking up on this point, Paul Krugman recently argued that Medicare has been historically very successful at reining in costs. But praising Medicare cost containment in a time of heavy health-care cost inflation is like praising Lehman Brothers for making good investments in Latin America when the market for sub-prime mortgages was imploding.

Let’s put this in perspective: health inflation was 3.4 percent last year, just over double the basic inflation rate. Tellingly, the worst cost increases were experienced by Medicare (costs were up 8.6 percent), and Medicaid (9.9 percent).

Unfortunately, the White House and Congress squandered a great opportunity to bend the cost curve downwards, opting instead for the status quo. The quiet congressional vote in June shows how far the administration has strayed from its reform rhetoric. If we are ever to rein in health care spending, we need leaders who will make tough choices and tough cuts. Their rhetoric must become reality.

But don’t expect it during the life of this Congress nor the remaining 30 months of this administration.

As my grandmother used to say, “From my lips to G-d’s ears”.

Tea and Sympathy

The Tea Party is racist. The NAACP decreed it so and, therefore, it must be true.

Well it was true for a day and then they relented somewhat, one presumes, because there was and is no evidence to back it up.

But let’s run with the original premise for a while because the fact that there was no evidence doesn’t mean that some people in that organization don’t think it.

The attacks are driven by nothing but fear - the Democrats are terrified of the results of the November elections, and are in a visible tizzy.

Voting in this country in a general election typically hovers between 50 and 60 percent and in an off-year even less. And, also typically, within the Black community, it’s less than that again.

2008 was an exception because a Black man was on the ballot but those same voters aren’t nearly as revved up without him, and stirring up racial tensions turns out Black voters, which helps Democrats.

Quick recap of what we’re dealing with on a media level now:

What the NAACP is doing is inciting racial tension, and it is not an accident.

Anyone who is a part of the conservative groundswell can tell you that there is emphatically not a racial element behind the movement. I know. I’ve been to Tea Party events.

However, since the NAACP thrives on racial tensions, this is their comfort zone.

How better to destroy the largest threat to their vision of liberal utopia? What they fail to acknowledge is that they are also diminishing the real threats to racial equality in America by spending their time destroying those that aren’t truly racist.

In fact, the NAACP is stuck in a time warp. Just who in this country refers to “Coloreds”? Not me. And not anybody I know.

They keep that acronym because it’s supposed to evoke regret and memories of the signs in the South and elsewhere at bus stations and diners and water fountains.

Or they’re too cheap to order new stationery.

Taking a quick look at the demographic breakdown of the United State explains a lot of the absence of color - simply put, 75% of the US population is still white, no matter how much the Left likes to pretend that it isn’t.

A politically correct, racially equal group in a spontaneous groundswell of millions of Americans is just not possible… we’re certainly not bussing people in for racial diversity.

The true racism regarding the Tea Party movement comes from the outside. Black conservatives are marginalized, similar to the way the Left marginalizes conservative women - somehow, if you are a Black man or woman that adheres to conservative principles, you are a race traitor. A conservative woman is a gender traitor - less of a woman in the eyes of a liberal, and therefore not included in their protected minority.

Since the glory days of the Civil Rights movement in the 60’s, the Democrats have laid claim to the Black vote. They have made it their mission to, in effect, own the minority vote, and they have done it well. The result has been a massive mount of entitlement spending, which is expanding every time we turn around.

The current administration knows that they are in trouble with the constituencies they’ve purchased - so they’re upping the ante, and this has resulted in things like, oh, I don’t know - massive health care entitlements.

This has got to stop. For racism to be effectively addressed in our country, it needs to be called out when it’s relevant. Making false accusations for political purposes undermines the headway that the Civil Rights Act has made over the past 56 years, and is not furthering the equality of Black Americans.

Now it’s time to iron my white robes for tonight. And, if you believe that, you don’t know me nor where I live.

Czechs and Balances

Friedrich Hayek was right when he wrote. "The Road to Serfdom". And if you haven't read it, I recommend it for insomnia if nothing else but there is some good stuff therein.

Some people have the vocabulary to sum up things in a way you can understand them.

Hayek was one such and I try in my humble way. Sometimes I think I succeed but when I read the following quote which originated in the Czech Republic, I realize how inadequate my attempts are.

"The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency.

It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president.

The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Barack Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince.

The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president."

It would be churlish to add anything and so I won't.

Out of Africa

Even before he was “immaculated”, Obama and his handlers twisted themselves into pretzels over the subject of extreme Muslim terrorists.

We’ve heard every euphemism you can think of both for these animals and their despicable acts and there’s probably more to come. And Obama just can’t find a way to condemn the acts or the perpetrators until now.

So what did it take?

Was it 911? No.

Was it the panty bomber? No.

Was it the bombing attempt in Times Square? No

Was it the London bombings? No.

Was it Bali or Madrid or countless attacks against Israel and elsewhere around the world? No.

Was it outrage about the proposed mosque at Ground Zero? Surely you jest?

But eventually something did goad him into action and he even interrupted a scheduled golf game to voice it.

It was Uganda.

However it was the stated reason that gave me pause. It was racism!

Obama issued the personal warning after suicide bombers killed 76 in an attack claimed by the Somali militant group al-Shabaab, which has links to al-Qaeda. Then he went on to add that terrorist organisations "do not regard African life as valuable in and of itself".

"They see it as a potential place where you can carry out ideological battles that kill innocents without regard to long-term consequences for their short-term tactical gains," he told the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

Mr Obama said that the timing of the attacks in a crowded bar and restaurant during the World Cup final on Sunday, was particularly cruel.

"It was so tragic and ironic to see an explosion like this take place when people in Africa were celebrating and watching the World Cup take place in South Africa," he said.

Later a senior US official suggested Mr Obama was taking a direct swipe at the ideology and motives of al-Qaeda affiliates on the continent, which US intelligence agencies say are the extremist group's most active branches.

"Al-Qaeda is a racist organisation that treats black Africans like cannon fodder and does not value human life," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

So let me get this straight; Am I therefore to infer that the tens of thousands killed by Muslim terrorist groups before, during and since 911 don’t amount to a hill of beans when compared to this latest outrage in Uganda?

I recognize that the place may hold a special place in his heart for reasons that don’t need explanation here but at the very least it’s curious or maybe even downright callous

Hamlet said it first .........

It’s easy to try to blame somebody for your problems when nobody else is around. I used to blame a non-existent sister and the fact that I believed she was real cut no ice with my parents or their neighbors.

But that has not stopped Obama and his regime on the Hill from blaming all their failings on a long-gone President Bush and/or a Republican Congressional delegation. For years now, and I do mean years, the Democrats have held an insurmountable advantage in the Senate and the House and yet, whenever some favored piece of legislation fails, it’s because of the Republicans.

So there was Gibbs et al on the talking head shows last weekend hinting that big Democratic losses in November were possible, nay even likely. What he didn’t say was that Obama wants those losses and so does Pelosi.

The reason why over the recent past the Dems have chosen to blame the Right for stagnant legislation like “Cap and Tax” or the Card Check stuff or immigration reform is because they couldn’t get it done due to some of their own party’s opposition. And these are the ones that may well lose in November but when they do, Pelosi and Obama wins.

After that November election, there will be a period of some 2 ½ months when with a lame-duck house Pelosi will try to ram every piece of unpopular legislation through and there will be nothing a new, but as yet unseated, Republican majority can do about it . But, since Obama is from Chicago or Kenya or somewhere and cares little for democratic processes nor for the will of the people both expressed and implicit, he’ll sign it.

So when the balance of the House and Senate actually changes next January it will be too late. And by then the toxins of the new legislation will be kicking in such as the demise of the Bush tax breaks, the introduction of tax on healthcare benefits and Cap and Trade and on and on. And don’t ignore the possible implementation of a Value Added Tax and anything else they can come up with between November and January. Of course, the Blue Dogs et al will be long gone by then so how will the new Congress deal with it?

Well trying to roll back the situation is not going to work because Obama would simply veto that move. Thus all a Republican dominated legislature could do is to say “No more” to anything else. In the meantime, there would be Obama on TV with a raft of teleprompters wringing his hands and telling his sob story, I can hear it now.

“My fellow Americans, I know that times are hard right now and I know that you are seeing more and more strains on your family’s finances. But, understand this, I am doing whatever I can to persuade Congress to pass legislation to alleviate your pain. However, you also know that the balance of power on the Hill has changed since the last election and so my power to help you is limited.”

And on and on and on..

Then down the road, if Obama can learn the Clintonesque lip-biting routine, he will blame the new guys in Congress for everything that’s wrong always assuming the Bush-bashing routine doesn’t play anymore.

So what’s the endgame here? All of a sudden the Obama agenda appears to come to a screeching halt. But, it may lay the foundation for Obama’s reelection strategy unless the Right can force, and I do mean force, the Republicans to come up with real ideas which translate into real strategies which they can explain to the electorate in effective and convincing terms.

They’d better for the sake of all of us.


But will they? Aye, there's the rub.

The Blind Squirrel and other fables .............

When was the last time that a president of these United States had to go out and profess his administration’s support for the business community. Well, Jimmy Carter excepted, I can’t think of one until yesterday when Obama did just that. But it’s deeds not words that the business world wants to see.

Now we know that the Obama regime hates “Big Oil”, “Big Pharm”, “Big Banks”; in fact, “Big Anything” except for “Big Unions” and/or “Big Government” but as Obama’s pastor put it, “the chickens are coming home to roost”. And indeed they are starting, it seems, at the Aspen Institute.

Now I’d heard of this elite group but I didn’t know too much about it. Needless to say, I’ve never been invited and I’m willing to bet that neither were you and so here’s their quick blurb.

“The Aspen Institute is an international nonprofit organization founded in 1950 as the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies. Today, the organization is dedicated to "fostering enlightened leadership, the appreciation of timeless ideas and values, and open-minded dialogue on contemporary issues." The institute and its international partners seek to promote the pursuit of common ground and deeper understanding in a nonpartisan and nonideological setting through regular seminars, policy programs, conferences, and leadership development initiatives.”

Now that’s their version and now here’s mine.

It’s an elite think tank for people some of whom believe its more important to be elite than it is to think, However, among them and lucky for us, there are one or two who do. And what is more they seem ready to admit their mistakes.

Thank Heavens!

Two such which are worthy of note are Mort Zuckerman who is the owner of the New York Daily News and US News and World Report an Niall Ferguson, a Harvard historian. Both heavily favored and supported Obama during the run-up to the election and since but the times they are a changin’.

Zuckerman said to an audience of liberal Democrats, “The real problem we have are some of the worst economic policies in place today that, in my judgment, go directly against the long-term interests of this country.” Then he continued that he detects in the Obama White House hostility to the very kinds of (business) culture that have made this the great country what it is and was. “I think we have to find some way of dealing with that or else we will do great damage to this country with a public policy that could ruin everything.'"

And Ferguson chimed in with a withering critique of Obama's economic policies, which he claimed were encouraging laziness. He said, "The curse of long-term unemployment is that if you pay people to do nothing, they'll find themselves doing nothing for very long periods of time. Long-term unemployment is at an all-time high in the United States, and it is a direct consequence of a misconceived public policy."

So you have lifelong Democrats saying this to a Democratic audience and being applauded for it even by the likes of Barbra Streisand and her husband, James Brolin. And you have to believe that if people are willing to speak out in public then what they say behind closed doors has to really special.

But there was more as both lambasted Obama's trillion-dollar deficit spending program -- in the name of economic stimulus to cushion the impact of the 2008 financial meltdown -- as fiscally ruinous, potentially turning America into a second-rate power. “We are, without question, in a period of decline, particularly in the business world,” Zuckerman said.

Then Mr. Ferguson went on, “The critical point is if your policy says you're going run a trillion-dollar deficit for the rest of time, you're riding for a fall…Then it really is goodbye.” And then he added: “Can I say that, having grown up in a declining empire [he's from the UK], I do not recommend it. It's just not a lot of fun actually -- decline.”

Ferguson called for what he called 'radical' measures. “I can't emphasize strongly enough the need for radical fiscal reform to restore the incentives for work and remove the incentives for idleness.” He praised 'really radical reform of the sort that, for example, Paul Ryan [the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee] has outlined in his wonderful "Roadmap" for radical, root-and-branch reform not only of the tax system but of the entitlement system' and 'unleash entrepreneurial innovation.”

At long last, they’re getting it but as I have observed in the past, even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every once in a while.

Color Him Gone ..........

Writing a political Blog is a bit like surfing the Web. You start out with one subject in mind and, before you know it, you’re off on a tangent.

Thus it was in the last post when I mentioned that the Federal Department of Justice had filed suit against the State of Arizona over its pending immigration legislation. But I left it at that knowing full well that there was too much there to ignore it for long.

Arizona’s law, the now famous or notorious depending on your point of view, SB1070 came into being via the normal legislative process. It was debated and passed by both state bodies and signed into law by the governor. And it has drawn ire the likes of which I’ve never seen and now a lawsuit from the Feds.

How can it be therefore, that the State of Rhode Island has had a very similar law in place for a considerable period which came into being via an Executive Order of their governor. But it has drawn no boycott attempts and no federal lawsuits and no speeches by Obama or foreign leaders like Senor Calderon of Mexico.

Could it be that it’s all about politics? Arizona’s political structure is largely conservative and Republican while that of Rhode Island is almost entirely liberal and Democrat. For a start, all four congressional representatives are Democrats including Patrick Kennedy of dubious reputation.

And, while we’re on the subject of Arizona’s lawsuit, I would be remiss were I not to add that the suit makes no mention of civil rights, racial profiling or any other indignity that Obama and Calderon and countless others railed against. Instead it focuses on federal preemption and so one is again bound to ask why there is no action against Rhode Island.

Could it be that the Department of Justice is playing politics and while we’re on that subject could some of its decisions be based on race?

Consider two cases in Philadelphia. In one, a polling station had members of the Black Panthers outside the door in paramilitary outfits wielding Billy clubs while chanting clearly racial slurs about “white supremacy”. This is surely voter intimidation and that was the view of the Feds. But when the offenders failed to show up for a hearing in court the DOJ decided to drop the charges.

Then there is the case of King Samir Shabazz of the “New Black Panthers” who is on tape, again ironically in the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia with the following message.

“I hate white people. All of them. Every last iota of a cracker I hate him, because we're still in this condition."

"There's too much serious business going on in the Black community to be out here… with white, dirty, cracker whore [expletive]s on our arm."

"We keep begging white people for freedom. No wonder we're not free. Your enemy cannot make you free, fool. You want freedom? You're gonna have to kill some crackers. You're gonna have to kill some of they babies. Let us get our act together. It's time to wake up, clean up, and stand up."

"I can't wait for the day that they're all dead. I won't be completely happy until I see our people free and Whitey dead."

"When you have 10 brothers in uniform, suited and booted and ready for war, white folks know these niggas ain't their niggas. We kick white folks asses. We take it right to the cracker."

"We're going to keep putting our foot up the white man's ass until they understand completely. We want freedom, justice and mutha[expletive]' equality. Period. If you ain't gonna give it to us, mutha[expletive], we're gonna take it, in the name of freedom."

And again the decision of the Federal Department of Justice is to take no action.

Could race be playing a part in that decision as well? I’d hate to think so but one is bound to wonder.

How about you?

Or put it another way; do you think the reaction from government would be different if the speaker were Caucasian and the objects of the diatribe were African-Americans and their babies?

O Say Can You See ............

Well it’s time to play catch up after the long July 4th weekend and I’ll write about stuff that’s on my mind and then we’ll see if there’s a common thread to be found. If there is, so much the better but if the effort is too much for me, please understand.

On the evening of the Fourth, after a good dinner at a local resort, we sat outside to watch the firework display which was accompanied by recorded music as diverse as Lee Greenwood’s “G-d Bless the USA” and various Sousa marches and I began to think.

Clearly immigration is on the minds of all right-thinking Americans and none more than the beleaguered state of Arizona which found out yesterday that the Federal Justice Department is filing suit in order to head off the implementation of our new anti-illegal law.

Note that I said “anti-illegal” as Arizona is no more anti-legal immigration than anywhere else in the country. On the contrary, we celebrate legal immigration as the backbone of this country’s strength and we welcome the skills those immigrants bring. And I know because many decades ago I was one of them.

Now I don’t think of myself as a “huddled mass” but you get my drift. I am so grateful for the opportunities that this land has offered me and it is therefore possible that I am more patriotic than many native-born citizens.

So as I listened to and watched “the rockets’ red glare and the bombs bursting in air”, I offered this to my dining companion. It may well be that legal immigrants look at this country as personified by Independence Day in a different light than do those who were born here. Not better or worse but different.

She, my dining companion, is native born and seemed to think that there may be something to the hypothesis because so much is taken for granted by those who’ve always known what it means to be an American and that assumption is perfectly natural. But immigrants, for the most part, remember their previous lives and every July 4th recalls so vividly why we came here and what we sought and what we found.

Of course, there are some immigrants who can’t seem to stop looking back while they point out that which they see as shortcomings within their adopted land. To them I say go back to whatever you miss so much and I also feel sorry for them because they don’t feel that swell of pride of being an integral part of the greatest social and political experiment in history.

Then yesterday, in a seemingly unrelated circumstance I was involved in a short but heated discussion about the current political scene and I was able to add a corollary to the hypothesis cited above.

I was faced with three staunch liberals who tried to tell me that the budget deficit Obama has foisted on us was really all George Bushs’ fault.

Let’s say your first wife is a spendthrift and shops the two of you into near bankruptcy and you file for divorce. But that doesn’t make the debt go away and then, in a second marriage, you come to the curious conclusion that the cure for your financial woes is to triple your previous debt.

Huh?

Because that’s what Obama has done and he’s still got a wallet full of new credit cards.

And my adversaries didn’t stop there but want to see even more “stimulus” money on top of the trillion or so we’ve already spent in spite of the fact that it has produced very few jobs in total and out of those most are in the public sector. Why is it that so many liberals cannot or will not recognize that public sector jobs consume wealth which has to be paid for by private sector jobs which create it?

Liberals don’t like facts and much prefer “feelings” and the few items that follow from the June report of The Institute for Supply Management, ISM, underscore why that is.

125,000 Americans lost their jobs. That means more than 3 million Americans have lost their jobs since President Obama signed the stimulus bill

The U.S. workforce shrank by 652,000, meaning that nearly 8 people left the labor force for each private sector job created. 124,000 of those workers were simply discouraged and have given up trying to find a job. Over the past 12 months, more than 400,000 Americans gave up looking for work.

The 83,000 private-sector jobs added in June is 209,000 jobs below the "replacement level" of 292,000 new jobs a month required to get unemployment back to 5%. In fact, for every one million Americans out of work in June, only 5,600 private sector jobs were filled.

The average time needed to find a job rose to 35.2 weeks. This average time figure is unprecedented in the post-war era.

ISM's employment index fell to 49.7% in June (below 50% means the jobs sector is declining)

When I pointed out that we didn’t have the money for such a lavish spending plan one person, who in the past has referred to Obama as a “Genius”, had the answer. “Print It”, she announced triumphantly. It was at this point that I decided that further discussion was pointless.

Then on the way home it seemed to me that it is liberals, whether native-born or not, who see this country’s “faults” first while conservatives see its strengths.

Clearly this is not absolute and I’m sure you could come up with exceptions as could I but I would suggest it’s not a bad working hypothesis to be going on with.

Well I see a common thread but I'll leave you to find your own if you so desire.

Happy Birthday America!

Truth or Consequences?

This occupant of the Oval Office never ceases to amaze me. Not, you understand, for his much vaunted “brilliance” but rather for his naiveté.

And yesterday we saw another example, as if we needed one, as Obama made his “massive” immigration speech. Does this man really think that his “straw man” examples are going to sway the thinking American voter?

Does he really think that citing the contributions of legal immigrants such as Albert Einstein or Nicola Tesla or Andrew Carnegie can be used to prove that little Jesus hiding in an arroyo near Nogales will found another U.S. Steel? Or, put another way, do the coyotes and/or the drug smugglers “seek a path to U.S. citizenship”?

And does he really think that the Statue of Liberty is a global invitation? Well, if he does, he’s wrong.

The Statue of Liberty was given to us by France on the centenary of the Declaration of Independence. It’s purpose was to reinforce this nation’s destiny to spread Freedom throughout the World rather than to be a terrestrial Motel 6.

Earlier this week there was a gun battle near to Nogales which, for the geographically challenged, straddles the border between Arizona and Mexico. When authorities reached the site there were 21 dead bodies and it was deemed to be the aftermath of a gun battle between drug cartels and migrant smugglers.

Then this fool of a little boy who occupies the Oval Office tries to pretend that the border situation has never been better.

Really?

Then perhaps he would like to explain the gun shots which originated in Mexico and hit the City Hall in El Paso, Texas.

Or, how about this one? Somewhere in the Sonoran desert south of Phoenix yesterday a police stop resulted in two men running off and a search of the car revealed two backpacks stuffed with marijuana. So perhaps Governor Jan Brewer’s claim that illegals are bringing in narcotics isn’t too far away from the truth.

There is another twist as well to the outcome of Arizona’s SB1070. Recent evidence from American law enforcement agencies tell the story. The Mexican drug cartels are switching away from Arizona and are regrouping in Oklahoma City.


Being forgotten in all this is the fact that Obama’s hints at amnesty simply increases the flood of people waiting for nightfall in an arroyo near the Rio Grande. We know that to be the case as it was after the last time under Reagan’s watch. Some of them will succeed in crossing the border and most of those don’t want to be a citizen but they will work under the table, pay no taxes and wire money back to Mexico.

You would think that Obama would know this and you would also think that he or one of his handlers could read a poll in a newspaper. One today said unequivocally that almost 2/3 of likely voters want the border secured first. Now Obama, claimed yesterday that the border was “too vast. Well try bringing home underused troops from Europe or Asia for a start.

Perhaps Obama's narcissism tells him that anything he does is OK and perhaps he plans to grant amnesty as an Executive Order. Is he stupid enough to do that when the voice of the voter is loud and clear? And when more than 20 states plan their own SB1070?

He may just be.