7 Year Rash

Today is the 7th Anniversary of this blog. For a long time this year I considered making this one my last because, quite simply, The Stupid Have Inherited the Earth. Intelligence and Common Sense (let alone <gasp> Logic) are Politically Incorrect. Hell, some Leftists have decreed that just saying “politically incorrect” is Politically Incorrect. 😦

So instead I thought I’d revisit one of my favorites from the last 7 years.

This also goes out the #NeverTrump -ers who are so mindlessly obsessed with hating Donald Trump that they are willing Hillary into the White House.

Hate never felt so Right. 🙂

And a special shout out to the Sabotage Republicans (The Establishment ones and their followers) WHO ALSO want Hillary.

The Generations (and possibly permanent) of damage you want to inflict on what’s LEFT of this country is so short-sighted you deserve her.

It will be YOUR fault.

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings! -George Orwell

So with that in mind, cast your mindless adherence to January 21, 2012  and this Blog and see yourselves currently in it also.

THE ZOMBIE HOARD

They are just a zombie hoard.

Remorseless. Merciless. Incapable of shame, morals or ethics.

They want want what they want when they want it and because they want it and will do anything to get it. Relentlessly.

And what they want is YOU. You to be either converted or cow-towed to their every whim. To do whatever they want when they want it.

Evidence John King, the CNN Liberal Moderator of the South Carolina Debate. He opens the debate with a salicious question to Gingrich about his “open marriage” and Gingrich blows him to bits for it and the crowd goes wild.

He did this to prove his “courage” to stand up to the evil “right wingers” and puff out his chest that he was “journalist” and was going to bravely confront the issue. Meanwhile, anything remotely damaging to President Obama is ignored with great speed and spin.🙂

2016: Just Like they do with Hillary. The Debate will be set up to show that Trump is grumpy, unstable and mean. The fact that Hillary is a congenital, sociopathica Liar has no bearing on the debates whatsover.

Their will be more Candy Crowley moments than ever.

And the Zombie hoard will eat it up like candy. “Brains…”

“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act”.- George Orwell.

And their has never been more deceit now than ever in American History and more mindless Zombie Hoards out to make sure “What difference does it make, anyways?”

Rush Limbaugh (who I rarely get a chance to listen to because of my work schedule): Now, let me tell you one thing here, folks: You cannot shame the mainstream media. If any of you are thinking that the media learned a lesson — if any of you believe that the media finally had it handed to ’em, if you believe that the media had their eyes opened and they are fully awake now and they understand what they’re dealing with — forget it. John King is proud of what happened last night. John King is a hero in the Main Street media because he didn’t back down, because he continued to illustrate how it is that the media does really control the agenda. That was a demonstration of the power they hold over every public figure’s head, that they choose to hold like a guillotine. John King… There may even be some jealousy and envy within the journalist ranks (well, not journalists; within the Democrat Party ranks) because John King is a guy that got in Newt’s face, stared him down — and the fact that Newt told him off? It’s a badge of honor. If you are thinking that John King was embarrassed and ran away with his tail tucked between his legs and learned his lesson and it’ll never happen again? Ah, ah, ah, ah. You cannot shame the mainstream media. They are proud of this. They delight in their power to destroy candidates that they don’t like.

And they don’t like anyone who doesn’t cow-tow to them.

2016: They made THEIR Choice. Now it’s you’re Zombie duty to vote for it or else.

“At the end of the day the message to every conservative who hasn’t run for office is: “You want a piece of this? You want some of this? You want Brian Ross hounding you and your ex-wife and then you want me asking you about it on national TV the next night? Come on in. We’re ready.” That’s the message from John King and CNN last night, and do not doubt me on this.”

2016: look at the evidence, every time new “evidence” comes out about Hillary they bury it. Every time Trump even raises his voice or say one less than perfect political phrase they are on it like flies on shit and they stick to it like super glue and blow it up.

So the alternative is to cow-tow. To live in fear of the Liberal wrath.

2016: To acquiesce. Given in, the Ministry of Truth has the system rigged.

Hell, the Democrats got caught rigging the Primary, blatantly.

No one really cared.

The Zombie Hoard just went, “oh” and moved on. The Media covered it up.

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was sacrificed.

End of Story.

#2: Hillary is caught re-handed on the Email Scandal. The FBI even says so. But since Comey has connections to Clinton and doesn’t want to have a mysterious “accident” she is not prosecuted.

Future Hillary Supreme Court Nominee Loretta Lynch, Attorney General and Clinton Cronie refuses to prosecute her.

Other people not connected to Clinton aren’t so lucky.

And the reaction from the Zombie Hoard, “Yawn”.

Hillary is still leading in the Polls!

“Brains…”

The Food Police. The TSA. The EPA. The Justice Department. Homeland Security. The FCC.

Because if they can’t make you a zombie, they can at least make you a peasant in fear of your Masters who will not challenge them or not have the power to challenge them.

“[…]you don’t have to be Sun freakin Tzu to know that real fighting isn’t about killing or even hurting the other guy, it’s about scaring him enough to call it a day.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War

They’ll just turn your children into zombies instead. 12 years of Grade School and 4 years of College is a lot of Zombie Voodoo time after all. And “getting them while they are young” is entirely within the Zombie Liberal playbook. Make them a zombie before they even know what one is and then make them as immune as possible to any anti-virus and get them addicted to their own Kool-Aid. Feed it to them constantly through the Media and the Internet.

2016: They’ll DEMAND Segregation, “Safe Spaces”, “Diversity” and “Inclusion” mindlessly and will trample Free Speech because they don’t want to be “offended”.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

WAR (Class, Gender, Race, Religion) IS PEACE

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Hell, even white people getting a tan will set the little zombie off…

What it does is illustrate that they can be dealt with. But you can’t beat ’em. They’re not gonna be shamed. They’re not going to be shamed into stopping the coverage of conservatives as they do it. It’s going to continue. No matter what kind of shame you think they suffer in a contest like that — no matter how much money they lose, no matter how many of them get fired, no matter how many magazines or TV stations or newspapers get shut down — they are not gonna change. They are hard-core, leftists”

And as I have said over and over again, they are have no morals or ethics because they are governed not by logic and reason but by emotions, mostly the most basic of primitive emotions, Fear, Lust (for power), anger, jealousy, ENVY, etc. –Raw emotions.

2016: THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS!

Which is why when you engage them they sound and act like an immature 5 year old. And as we all know from childhood development the child has to develop a sense of shame by have having boundaries and limitations and consequences. And if they don’t, they will grow up with little to no sense of shame.

2016: “Microaggressions” anyone?

They are usually called sociopaths. I can call them Liberal Zombies.

2016: And the #Never Trumpers and Establishment RINOs.

Liberals have no shame. They want what they want when they want it because they want it.

2016: And the #Never Trumpers and Establishment RINOs.

“…one of the upsides that isn’t gonna happen is the media saying, “Gosh, we’ve been so mean to these people and so unfair. You know, maybe we ought to start being fair.” That’s not going to happen.

Liberals talk about being “fair” which means you’re being unfair to them and should do what they want.

Liberals talk about “compassion” but it’s to make you feel guilty, not them, and to do what they want.

Liberals will talk about “bi-partisanship” but that just means you have to compromise your principles so they can do what they want.

“Diversity” means you’re evil and need to do what they say to repent for your sins.

2016: “Inclusion” Means you include everything THEY say and do it without hesitation.

They are a remorseless hoard. They want what they want when they want it and on their terms only.

Give them everything they want or they’ll cry, scream, bitch, moan, pout and lash out at you.

2016: “White Privilege” anyone?

That is their primitive zombie hoard mentality. And they want YOU.

“Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they’re used.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War

“Most people don’t believe something can happen until it already has. That’s not stupidity or weakness, that’s just human nature.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War

“Often, a school is your best bet-perhaps not for education but certainly for protection from an undead attack.”
― Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide

“Remember; no matter how desperate the situation seems, time spent
thinking clearly is never time wasted.”
― Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide

“I think that most people would rather face the light of a real enemy than the darkness of their imagined fears.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War

“They feel no fear, why should you?”– Max Brooks

“The zombie may be gone, but the threat lives on.”
― Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide

Get rid of one zombie, and 10 more will take it’s place. So you have to be ready to do battle constantly.

Look at 2010. The Democrats suffered the worst defeat in 80 years. Does it look like they learned ANYTHING?

No.

As a matter of fact the zombie hoard is even tighter, even more determined than ever. They want it EVEN MORE.

So if we defeat then in 2012 will they go away?

HELL NO!

2016: They weren’t defeated. Even more hoards joined them. So if they are beat in 2016 will they finally be defeated and go away.

HELL NO!

They will just keep coming back like a remorseless zombie hoard until you are overwhelmed.

Which is why you will have to fight them all of your days, your kids days and their kids days until the infection is wiped out.

But like any good zombie plaque it only takes 1 to re-ignite it and spread it all over again.

And these zombies have Media and Internet outlets! (and Europe!)

“Looking back, I still can’t believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of ‘experts’ all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more ‘shocking’ and ‘in-depth’ than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War

“The only rule that ever made sense to me I learned from a history, not an economics, professor at Wharton. “Fear,” he used to say, “fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe.” That blew me away. “Turn on the TV,” he’d say. “What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products.” Fuckin’ A, was he right. Fear of aging, fear of loneliness, fear of poverty, fear of failure. Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War

The Democrat Party in a nutshell.

FEAR IS HOPE!

My own personal Fourth Orwellian Precept (which includes WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH).

“If you believe you can accomplish everything by “cramming” at the eleventh hour, by all means, don’t lift a finger now. But you may think twice about beginning to build your ark once it has already started raining”
― Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide

“When I believe in my ability to do something, there is no such word as no.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War

“. . . show the other side, the one that gets people out of bed the next morning, makes them scratch and scrape and fight for their lives because someone is telling them that they’re going to be okay.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War

“This is the only time for high ideals because those ideals are all that we have. We aren’t just fighting for our physical survival, but for the survival of our civilization. We don’t have the luxury of old-world pillars. We don’t have a common heritage, we don’t have a millennia of history. All we have are the dreams and promises that bind us together. All we have…is what we want to be.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War

“…We were a shaken, broken species, driven to the edge of extinction and grateful only for tomorrow with perhaps a little less suffering than today. Was this the legacy we would leave our children, a level of anxiety and self-doubt not seen since our simian ancestors cowered in the tallest trees? What kind of world would they rebuild? Would they rebuild at all? Could they continue to progress, knowing that they would be powerless to reclaim their future? And what if that future saw another rise of the living dead? Would our descendants rise to meet them in battle, or simply crumple in meek surrender and accept what they believe to be their inevitable extinction? For this alone, we had to reclaim our planet. We had to prove to ourselves that we could do it, and leave that proof as this war’s greatest monument. The long, hard road back to humanity, or the regressive ennui of Earth’s once-proud primates. That was the choice, and it had to be made now.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War

The Future is yours. So is living through “The Walking Dead” and “1984” for real.

Dr. Phil

Image via Screenshot

Psychologist and TV personality Dr. Phil McGraw appeared on The Kelly File Thursday night to discuss the need to “stop rewarding bad behavior in America” for fear of continuing to promote a culture of entitlement and narcissism prevalent in recent generations.

“We do have a generation that, I think, we have raised with a great degree of entitlement where it’s like, the world owes me a living,” said Dr. Phil.

He brought up as an example a man aspiring to be a rock star at the age of 40, using all of his family’s money – even their savings and retirement funds – to buy fame as opposed to actually going out and working for it.

“He’s got the poses. He’s got the haircut, everything. But so entitled, won’t take a job because it’s not a rock star job,” Dr. Phil explained.

“People sometimes ask me what’s wrong with America,” he said. “This is the greatest country in the world with the greatest people in the world. But sometimes, we forget commonsense – the simple things we need to remember. Like, basically, you just don’t reward bad behavior.”

“We’ve got to stop rewarding bad behavior in America,” Dr. Phil went on. “When people don’t work and produce, then they need to be kicked to the curb, get a damn job, carry your own weight. It’s just that simple.”

Making Society Better

Allen West: I found a definition of Yin and Yang to be, “In Chinese philosophy, yin and yang (also, yin-yang or yin yang) describes how opposite or contrary forces are actually complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another.” It appears that our 2016 presidential election cycle is early on being defined by that philosophy. The question is, can this media-driven divide be good for the future of our Constitutional Republic?

In 2008 it was all about the “anti-Bush” sentiment in America – heavily fueled by a complicit media. The rallying slogan was “Hope and Change.” Some of us will never forget the statement, “we are the change that we have been waiting for.” Huh?

Pronoun Trouble… 🙂

None of this was challenged, but embraced as a historical moment that truly was the Yang to the existing Yin. Amazingly, there were little to no questions about policy; just the simplistic retort that “I will not be like the current president.” Furthermore, any challenge to the issue of a lack of policy proposals and experience in 2008 was met with the Alinsky tactic of personal demonization by way of being castigated as racist. And so in 2008 America replaced the Yin with the Yang and we had a new Yin – progressive socialism.

In 2012, the new slogan became “Forward,” and that was even as we recognized that so many quantitative assessments evidenced we were not going forward. We were certainly not progressing, and that situation continues to today. There were deceptions of jobs report numbers and we know that the economy was suffering under one of the most anemic recoveries in American history. But what was most telling was that we actually believed that we were safer; that Islamic terrorism was quelled. That was because Osama bin Laden had been double-tapped by U.S. Navy SEALS. However, the reality was far from being such. And so another deception took place when on 9-11-12 four Americans were abandoned to die in Benghazi – a place which had been destabilized by a horrific intervention by the current administration. Yet the new Yin, aided by a dedicated media campaign told us it was just a video.

So in 2012 we kept the current Yin.

Today, the situation is completely reversed. There is a new Yang that has risen due to the failures of the current Yin. The new slogan is “Make America Great Again.” This Yang has tapped into the evident weakness of the current Yin and has garnered a solid support base. Funny, this new Yang is not being embraced by the liberal progressive media, but its incessant assaults have enhanced the popularity of this new Yang in many aspects. And why is this happening? Simple: because the media clearly established and continues to establish itself as the protector of the progressive socialist ideal in 2008 and 2012. They have lost their credibility.

However, I would caution America to carefully assess whether this new Yang presents any viable policy solutions – similar to 2008.

My concern is that we Americans are once again being driven by media news cycles and not focusing on the prevailing issues or the future of America. Instead of basing our decisions about the future leadership of America on individual personalities, we must seek out a vision. Sadly, the social culture in America forces us to pay more attention to personas rather that principles. Now, I will be the first to admit that consideration of policy solutions may seem boring, but a base understanding is essential.

 

We have become more drawn to the person than the ideal. And what is lacking is a representation of the embodiment of that American ideal. Some would say that it does not exist, and God knows there are many who are trying to eradicate it – “we are five days away from fundamentally transforming America.”

What is necessary at this time in the current election cycle is for the American electorate to listen, and not be emotional. How do we restore the free enterprise opportunity society in order to get Americans back to work and productive in their own lanes? How do we develop a strategy to defeat militant Islamic terrorism? What needs to be done to reasonably stem the flow of illegal immigrants into America, secure our sovereign borders, yet also streamline our legal immigration system? How do we repair a healthcare system where individual premiums are rising, the individual mandate tax is increasing, and the level of care is decreasing? How do we advance the idea of parents being in charge of educating their children and being responsible for determining their outcomes – not the government?

The current Yin has done an exceptional job at focusing America on emotional “feeling” oriented issues. The reality is that the American public feels less safe. They know their beloved America, the land of individual economic empowerment, is becoming a breeding ground of collective economic enslavement, wealth transfer to grow the dependency society, a playground for social egalitarianism, and abject weakness.

And so we have the rise of the new Yang, a new slogan, but a lack of defined policy vision. The interconnection of the Yin and Yang of politics in America is that demagoguery has no favorite side. It can appear anywhere and finds a way to feed off the other.

As we close out 2015, enjoy a blessed Hanukkah, have a Merry Christmas, and celebrate a joyous and Happy New Year. May your favorite college football team win its bowl game – unless they are playing mine. But was we enter into a pivotal presidential election season, seek out an American leader, not an American celebrity.

Bend Over, Here Comes ObamaClaus

KING Barack Hussein Obama…

And he’s going to make it with your taxes. So the tax that’s a penalty that actually a tax is now going to raise your taxes to pay for the penalty that is a tax. Got it.

Obamacare is killing the heath insurance industry, but help for health insurers is on the way – and it will be coming out the pockets of American taxpayers via higher insurance rates and a federal bailout.

When the government says, “Explore other sources of funding” and “working with Congress on the necessary funding,” it’s time to hide your wallet and get ready to study a few more pages of tax code.

As MRCTV reported Thursday, United Healthcare lost $425 million on its policies sold via the Obamacare exchanges, and they might back out of the exchanges all together after 2016. And United Healthcare isn’t alone. U.S. insurers had to absorb nearly $2.9 billion in unexpected medical expenses from their customers in Obamacare’s exchanges in 2014, according to new data from Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The Milwaukee Sentinel Journal reports that some of the deficit will be made up with higher premiums, much higher premiums.

And Obama and Company will blame it on “corporate greed” not a fatally flawed partial socialized medicine designed to fail.

Many insurers have requested premium increases of 20% to 40% for next year. In August, Blue Cross Blue Shield secured approval in Tennessee for a 36.3% price hike, while Oregon OK’d a 25.6% increase for Moda Health Plan.

Even these premium increases are mild compared with what’s coming when the risk corridor provision and other stopgaps expire.

A recent University of Minnesota study found that after 2016, the cheapest plans would experience some of the most dramatic premium increases. Families who purchased “bronze” plans on the exchanges could see 45% increases. Some unlucky individuals could see their premiums shoot up 96%.

“Our data still indicate that — for at least the next decade — premiums will increase faster than they did in the years before the Affordable Care Act’s implementation,” cautioned one of the study’s authors. “Federal subsidies for ACA plans won’t be able to keep up.”

But, the federal government is going to try make the subsidies keep up. Pres. Obama’s Department of Health and Humans Services (HHS) is promising insurance companies that taxpayers will help them out.

After the United Healthcare announcement on Thursday, HHS issued a letter to insurance companies recognizing the 2014 shortfalls and declaring that the U.S. Government needs to make good:

 In the event of a shortfall for the 2016 program year, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will explore other sources of funding for risk corridors payments, subject to the availability of appropriations. This includes working with Congress on the necessary funding for outstanding risk corridors payments. 

Risk corridors were created by the Obamacare bill.  The corridors are meant to redistribute money (sound familiar?) from insurance companies who make a bigger profit from exchange plans than expected and give to companies who lost money on the exchange plans.

Yeah, it’s called redistribution. Socialism…

The problem with the risk corridor in 2014 was that too many companies lost money – so, there wasn’t enough money to cover everyone’s losses.  HHS is promising a bailout, or in HHS language, it will work with Congress to get more money for the risk corridors in order to cut insurance companies losses. 

Robert Laszewski, president of consultancy Health Policy and Strategy Associates in Virginia, told CNBC:

“‘The Obamacare business model doesn’t work,’ ‘Obamacare has got to be retooled.’ Laszewski cited the fact that insurers overall still are losing money selling exchange plans in the second year of Obamacare, and that as a result many of them are raising prices, which could in turn lead to current and prospective customers taking a pass on further coverage.” 

According to Nathan Nascimento, Senior Policy Advisor for Freedom Partners:

“We already knew that this Administration has no problem with putting special interests ahead of Americans’ health care – but yet another bailout for insurance companies on the backs of taxpayers only throws more good money after bad. Washington’s flawed one-size-fits-all approach to health care has failed, leading to plan cancelations, skyrocketing premium and out-of-pocket costs, and instability for American families and business. The solution is to get government out of the way – not dig the hole even deeper.”

Supporters of Obamacare are in denial. Much higher heath insurance premiums, insurance company losses needing a federal bailout, and news that almost half of the state-run Obamacare exchanges  have bitten the dust, add up to one inconvenient fact: Obamacare is a failure.  

Was never meant to be anything else.

But the supporters have no choice but to be in denial. They have wanted Socialized Medicine for 100 years and it’s failing so they have hide that from everyone, including themselves.

Sadly, it won’t be the politicians who forced the program down the American people’s throats who will be reaching into their pockets to pay for that failure.  It will be the rest of us, average American families, our children, and our grandchildren paying for this unmitigated disaster. 

Get ready to dig deep for failure. Also, get ready for the spin that will not make it the Liberals fault.

After all, they are always right and always have the best of intentions.

Welcome to the Road to Hell. 🙂

 

 

DIY

A recent New York Times headline read, “Raising Taxes on the Wealthiest Would Pay for Bold Plans.” The story says that by soaking the rich “the government could raise large amounts of revenue … while still allowing them to take home a majority of their income.”

Nowhere in the story, nor in the endless promises of Democratic presidential candidates, is there a single word about whether more government spending will produce the promised outcomes. We are to take this on faith, despite past performance being a good indicator of future results. Also absent is any expectation that individuals have more power than government to direct and improve their lives.

The Government in 2015 has taken in more tax money than any time in American History…but they still run a massive deficit…things have gotten worse not better.

That’s because to the left, government is much like a deity to be worshipped rather than a servant of the people. If you don’t worship at the leftist shrine, you’re labeled unsympathetic toward the poor. Republicans should respond: “We care about the poor, but unlike you, who have spent over a trillion dollars fighting poverty with little to show for it, we want the poor to become independent of government.”

What keeps most of the poor locked in poverty is propaganda from the left, which tells them they cannot succeed without government assistance, which, in turn, leads them to a series of bad choices and a state of perpetual victimhood. Look at America’s big cities, dominated by Democrats, to see how that’s working. Once we talked about people who overcame difficult circumstances; now we just sing about overcoming … someday.

 

Charles Koch and his brother David are reviled by the left because they contribute large amounts of money to Republicans. Never mind that George Soros does the same for Democrats. The normally reclusive Charles is doing interviews to promote his new book “Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World’s Most Successful Companies.”

Speaking with Megyn Kelly on the Fox News Channel, Charles read a letter his father sent him about his inheritance: “If you choose to let this money destroy your initiative and independence, then it will be a curse to you and my action in giving it to you will have been a mistake. I shall regret very much to have you miss the glorious feeling of accomplishment. Remember that often adversity is a blessing in disguise and is certainly the greatest character-builder.”

Where are you hearing anything like that in contemporary political discourse, especially among Democrats? It’s all about free college tuition, free health care, free everything. The United States will become a giant ATM and those evil, miserly, insensitive “millionaires and billionaires” will pay for it all because it isn’t fair that they have more money than you have.

They (the anti-Democrat) are racists,bigots, homophobes, haters,misogynists, who hate children, poor people, want to destroy the environment and above all are “greedy” and “selfish” (the last two are in quotes because they are so laughable I can’t type it straight).

Even if government confiscated all of their wealth there wouldn’t be enough to pay off the $18 trillion national debt. What happens when the money runs out; when all of the wealth of the successful is exhausted and the incentive to make money disappears with it?

The Democrats will demand more.

Where will the left turn then? Who is asking these questions? Not debate moderators, who seem more interested in getting the candidates to attack each other, as though the debates were just the latest reality shows. This is the future of the United States at stake. Could we please hear some adults conversing like adults?

The Liberal Media only wants to attack the right and throw Nerf balls at the Left.

The Agenda is The Agenda and they are the superior form of life, at least according to them.

Need a plan for success, or at least independent living?

The Democrat completely endorse not having one. That’s what government is there for, for you to be coddled and manipulated like zombies.

It isn’t new. Stop turning to government as a first resource. Get married before you have children, stay married and if things get tough seek counseling. Stay in school. Don’t take drugs. Develop good character and a sound work ethic. If a good job with a future isn’t available where you live, move to a city that offers more opportunity, or start a small business.

Why be an adult when Democrats want to be your Mommy. 🙂

In the bidding war for votes, the left is preaching a message of envy, greed and entitlement. Human history proves that message doesn’t improve a life.

But as long as itn wins elections they don’t care.

The old values worked. If you’re a millennial, ask your grandparents about them, why they worked and how we lost sight of them along the way. Since these values succeeded for previous generations, why don’t we reclaim them?

Because then you’re a “greedy”, “selfish” “uncaring” bastard!

Yeah, Bastards! 🙂

 

The Lose-Lose Scenario

The City of Baltimore is in a Lose Lose Scenario thanks to their incompetent “it’s only property” ‘give them room to destroy’ Liberal Mayor and 40+ years of liberalism that has made people “victims” who chant “No Justice No Peace” but really they mean “No Vengeance No Peace”.

A Far, far, cry from the ideals of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The lose-lose scenario goes like this:
If the report exonerates or doesn’t convict the cops the Narrative driven thugs will riot and there will be much gnashing of political teeth.

If the report convicts the cops the Narrative driven thugs will riot and there will be much gnashing of political teeth.

Either way, more looting, more violence and absolute no “healing” or resolution. But that doesn’t matter.

The evidence won’t matter. The Narrative matters.

It will be more like a volcano that has had it’s magma chamber filled to bursting so it erupts to release the pressure but the volcano is still active an will re-erupt at another time. The next Freddie Gray, Travyon Martin, etc.

This is world Liberalism has created. A rocky, volcanic landscape that will erupt at any moment  with the right human sacrifice to trigger the Wrath of The Liberal Gods. And you’re supposed to supplicate your yourself to them in appeasement.

The fact that they are the one’s creating the magma, stoking the magma, and then complaining when the volcano erupts that it’s YOUR Fault! is something you’re not supposed to talk about you racist pig-dog!

That is the post MLK world where you ARE judged on the color of your skin and content of your character only matters if you’re not a Liberal. Then, they are to exploited and you are guilty of racism, homophobia,islamophobia & greed for “oppressing them” until proven Liberal enough to repent for your sins. If you’re a Christian, well, you’ve all ready gone to Liberal Hell and can’t be redeemed.

This Week on the New Black Panther Party’s “Black Power Radio,” national chairman Hashim Nzinga said since America has “declared war on us,” evidenced by “military police in the black neighborhood” protecting the rich, the New Black Panthers should be looked upon as Founding Fathers who declare war and are “willing to die or kill to save our babies and to save a black nation that is dying before our eyes.”

Nzinga said, “America is about protecting the rich and the powerful.”

He added, “We pay taxes. They have declared war on us and it’s nothing but state racism.”

“So if we say we are at war, we should be applauded like George Washington,” Nzinga continued. “We should be applauded like Thomas Jefferson. We should be applauded like the Founding Fathers of the country.”

“This is not the hate hour, this is the love hour,”he added. “We have to love ourselves enough to be willing to die or kill to save our babies and to save a black nation that is dying before our eyes.” (Breitbart)

The only winners are the Narrative set up to be advantageous to Liberal Politicians and “activists” and disadvantageous to everyone else.

Anything else would be racist, after all. 🙂

Homeland Insecurity

WASHINGTON — For the second consecutive day, Senate Democrats blocked their Republican colleagues from bringing a bill to the floor to fund the Department of Homeland Security, which has become a proxy for a broader policy disagreement over President Obama’s executive actions on immigration.

The department is set to run out of money on Feb. 27, but Democrats object to amendments in the funding bill, sent from the House, that would undo the president’s actions that provide legal protections to as many as five million immigrants, including children, who are in the country illegally.

Despite a ticking clock that could lead to a shutdown of the agency, the cycle of futile votes is unlikely to end anytime soon.

The President’s unconstitutional “Me, Myself, and I” Three Branches of Government Executive Amnesty is important to the Democrat Agenda so the bullies of the Left will hold you hostage with a gun to your held and blame the Republicans for it! 🙂

“It would be irresponsible for the Democrats to block funding for the Department of Homeland Security,” said Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. “They are attempting to hold our national security hostage in order to protect the president’s illegal and unconstitutional executive amnesty.”

Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, using the example of the Islamic State militant group, had an equally harsh and decidedly opposite analysis.

(you mean she can utter Islamic and militant in the same sentence without her brain frying from a thoughtcrime?)

“In a time when the world is united in trying to send a strong signal about confronting ISIS and defeating ISIS, I think putting veto bait in the funding for homeland security is a very bad idea,” she said. “It is an awkward time for them to try to mire this down in presidential immigration politics.”

I guess not. 🙂

The irony in politics is delicious.

At the White House on Wednesday, the president hosted a half-dozen young immigrants who were brought to the country illegally and benefited from his 2012 executive order. In a statement afterward, Mr. Obama warned Republicans in Congress not to pass legislation that would reverse the steps he has taken to help protect immigrants from deportation. (NYT)

My Agenda is My Agenda, I am King, am I not! I must protect my new Welfare Democrats from those evil, vile, racist Republicans, after all! 🙂

The Sowell of Equality

Some time ago, burglars in England scrawled a message on the wall of a home they had looted: “RICH BASTARDS.”

Those two words captured the spirit of the politicized vision of equality — that it was a grievance when someone was better off than themselves.

That, of course, is not the only meaning of equality, but it is the predominant political meaning in practice, where economic “disparities” and “gaps” are automatically treated as “inequities.” If one racial or ethnic group has a lower income than another, that is automatically called “discrimination” by many people in politics, the media and academia.

It doesn’t matter how much evidence there is that some groups work harder in school, perform better and spend more postgraduate years studying to acquire valuable skills in medicine, science or engineering. If the economic end results are unequal, that is treated as a grievance against those with better outcomes, and a sign of an “unfair” society.

The rhetoric of clever people often confuses the undeniable fact that life is unfair with the claim that a given institution or society is unfair.

Children born into families that raise them with love and with care to see that they acquire knowledge, values and discipline that will make them valuable members of society have far more chances of economic and other success in adulthood than children raised in families that lack these qualities.

Studies show that children whose parents have professional careers speak nearly twice as many words per hour to them as children with working class parents — and several times as many words per hour as children in families on welfare. There is no way that children from these different backgrounds are going to have equal chances of economic or other success in adulthood.

The fatal fallacy, however, is in collecting statistics on employees at a particular business or other institution, and treating differences in the hiring, pay or promotion of people from different groups as showing that their employer has been discriminating.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics! 🙂

Too many gullible people buy the implicit assumption that the unfairness originated where the statistics were collected, which would be an incredible coincidence if it were true.

Worse yet, some people buy the idea that politicians can correct the unfairness of life by cracking down on employers. But, by the time children raised in very different ways reach an employer, the damage has already been done.

What is a problem for children raised in families and communities that do not prepare them for productive lives can be a bonanza for politicians, lawyers and assorted social messiahs who are ready to lead fierce crusades, if the price is right.

Many in the media and among the intelligentsia are all too ready to go along, in the name of seeking equality. But equality of what?

Equality before the law is a fundamental value in a decent society. But equality of treatment in no way guarantees equality of outcomes.

On the contrary, equality of treatment makes equality of outcomes unlikely, since virtually nobody is equal to somebody else in the whole range of skills and capabilities required in real life. When it comes to performance, the same man may not even be equal to himself on different days, much less at different periods of his life.

What may be a spontaneous confusion among the public at large about the very different meanings of the word “equality” can be a carefully cultivated confusion by politicians, lawyers and others skilled in rhetoric, who can exploit that confusion for their own benefit.

Regardless of the actual causes of different capabilities and rewards in different individuals and groups, political crusades require a villain to attack — a villain far removed from the voter or the voter’s family or community. Lawyers must likewise have a villain to sue. The media and the intelligentsia are also attracted to crusades against the forces of evil.

But whether as a crusade or a racket, a confused conception of equality is a formula for never-ending strife that can tear a whole society apart — and has already done so in many countries. (Thomas Sowell)

Thank you, Al Sharpton, Eric Holder, and King Obama. 🙂

Brazil Nuts

Dependency: A Brazilian economist has shown a near-exact correlation between last Sunday’s presidential election voting choices and each state’s welfare ratios. Sure enough, handouts are the lifeblood of the left.

Much of the attention in Brazil’s presidential election has been on the surprise rise of Aecio Neves, the center-right candidate who bolted to second place in the space of a week in the first round of Brazil’s election last Sunday, putting him in a face-off against leftist incumbent Dilma Rousseff at the end of the month.

Neves won 34% of the vote, Rousseff took 42% and green party candidate Marina Silva took about 20% — and on Thursday, Silva endorsed Neves, making it a contest of free-market ideas vs. big-government statism.

But what’s even more telling is an old story — shown in an infographic by popular Brazilian economist Ricardo Amorim.

In a Twitter post, Amorim showed a near-exact correlation among Brazil’s states’ welfare dependency and their votes for leftist Workers Party incumbent Rousseff.

Virtually every state that went for Rousseff has at least 25% of the population dependent on Brazil’s Bolsa Familia welfare program of cash for single mothers, given for keeping children vaccinated and in school.

States with less than 25% of the population on Bolsa Familia overwhelmingly went for Neves and his policies of growth.

The World Bank and others praise Bolsa Familia’s “poverty alleviation.” Problem is, “some experts warn that a wide majority cannot get out of this dependence relationship with the government,” as the U.K. Guardian put it.

And whether it’s best for a country that aspires to become a global economic powerhouse to have a quarter of the population — 50 million people — dependent on welfare and producing nothing is questionable.

The cash payouts amount to a half percentage of GDP and 2.5% of government spending. Money spent on welfare is money that can’t be put to use in creating jobs.

Amorim points out that Brazil’s 2% average GDP between 2011 and 2013 is the second lowest in all Latin America, topping only El Salvador, another country with a sizable welfare population — and millions of illegal immigrants in the U.S.

Fact is, the left cannot survive without a vast class of dependents. And once in, dependents have difficulty getting out.

So Brazil’s election may come down to a question of whether it wants to be a an economic powerhouse — or a handout republic.

https://indyfromaz.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/in-dependence-2014/

 

The Dole: New data on federal public assistance programs show we’ve reached an ignominious milestone: More than 100 million Americans are getting some form of “means-tested” welfare assistance.

The Census Bureau found 51 million on food stamps at the end of 2012 and 83 million on Medicaid, with tens of millions of households getting both. Another 4 million were on unemployment insurance.

The percentage of American households on welfare has reached 35%. If we include other forms of government assistance such as Medicare and Social Security, almost half of all households are getting a check or other form of government assistance. The tipping point is getting closer and closer. (IBD)

And it’s not for a lack of trying on the Democrats part.

Dependence is good for the country, after all. Remember, Unemployment is Job Stimulus! 🙂

We are from the Government and we are here to help you…. 🙂

 

Tipping Point

 

 

The Dole: New data on federal public assistance programs show we’ve reached an ignominious milestone: More than 100 million Americans are getting some form of “means-tested” welfare assistance.

The Census Bureau found 51 million on food stamps at the end of 2012 and 83 million on Medicaid, with tens of millions of households getting both. Another 4 million were on unemployment insurance.

The percentage of American households on welfare has reached 35%. If we include other forms of government assistance such as Medicare and Social Security, almost half of all households are getting a check or other form of government assistance. The tipping point is getting closer and closer.

So much is shocking and dismaying about these numbers. How is it that the number of recipients and the price tag for many of these programs kept skyrocketing though the recession officially ended in 2009? Normally, you’d expect welfare caseloads to fall in a recovery as the unemployment rate dips, but this time welfare participation keeps expanding.

Perhaps this is because this administration and many Democrats in Congress, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi, have told Americans that welfare benefits are a stimulus to the economy (sic). Apparently, the left believes that if every family were on food stamps, the economy would return to its glory days.

The feds have also created outreach programs — including radio and TV ads in multiple languages — to encourage people to sign up for the dole because, as one ad put it, this “helps the local community.”

The new statistics also highlight how limited work requirements are for welfare benefits. In 1996 when a Republican Congress and President Bill Clinton enacted landmark welfare reform laws, the old-fashioned cash welfare assistance (AFDC) was replaced with a time-limited assistance program (TANF) that required work for benefits.

This was a huge policy success as millions of former welfare recipients — more than half that were enrolled in the program — moved on to the economic ladder by getting jobs. But that program today is only 5% of the welfare safety net. Most of the other dozens of programs do not require work, so welfare reform has been effectively eviscerated.

Another shocking feature of these statistics is that they don’t even include income-transfer programs such as unemployment insurance and disability. These two add another $250 billion to the cost of welfare and are two of the most abused and scandal-ridden dispensers of federal cash.

On top of that, the 2012 numbers exclude most of the 3 million Obama has added to the ranks of Medicaid due to ObamaCare. The dependency problem is getting worse, not better. And by the way, in most states these programs don’t require work. In fact, the benefits end once an individual moves into a job.

Putting all these programs together, a family can get a package of benefits equivalent to a $35,000 a year job in 11 states, and in Hawaii the benefits can exceed what a $60,000 a year job would offer, according to a Cato Institute analysis.

Is it any wonder we’re having trouble moving people out of welfare into work? Half of all low-income households today have no one working at all.

Staying on this course is a recipe for social chaos and economic decline. “The days of the dole are numbered,” Lyndon Johnson optimistically declared when he launched the War on Poverty. That was 50 years ago, and the welfare state continues to grow in size, cost and lives lost to the trap of government dependency.

Rep. Paul Ryan had the right idea when he called for turning many of the welfare programs such as Medicaid and food stamps back to the states so they can find ways to expeditiously move people back into work.

In the 1990s, innovative governors, including Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, John Engler of Michigan and William Weld of Massachusetts, helped turn around lives through smart and effective welfare reforms.

With 100 million Americans on welfare, we have a genuine crisis on our hands. It’s time again to let the states find solutions where the federal government has indisputably failed or hasn’t even tried. (IBD)

Job Creation Myth

Remember when ObamaCare was going to CREATE jobs? When unemployment was good for economic growth (“Unemployment Benefits ‘One of the Most Important Stimuli for the Economy”) well now we have the latest in the Democrat Ideological Job Creation Myths.

Illegal Aliens!! (aka Future Welfare Voting Democrats).

When asked whether legalizing illegal immigrants would help unemployed Americans, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D.-Md.) responded by pointing to testimony from the director of the Congressional Budget Office that Van Hollen said indicated enactment of the Senate immigration bill (which gave illegal aliens a “path to citizenship’) would “reduce the deficit and increase long-term economic growth.”

Van Hollen responded: “I think what we need to do is pass comprehensive immigration reform, and I just came from a hearing with the non-partisan director of the Congressional Budget Office, who testified that if you passed the Senate bipartisan bill, you will reduce the deficit and increase long-term economic growth in the United States,” Van Hollen replied.

This would be the latest in the “CBO says…” line of  Democrat ‘arguments’ for their ideological needs.

Mind you ever since the CBO gave the Dems the green light on ObamaCare (with fake the false numbers provided by the Dems) the CBO has been whithering bad to the Democrats.

But THE AGENDA IS THE AGENDA.

So the CBO is good when they agree with The Agenda, and are ignored when they don’t.

Just like most Democrat Agenda items. The ‘evidence’ is always in their favor and any evidence to the contrary is a lie, “racist” or some other form of contempt is heaped upon it.

It’s all too predictable really.

After all, Foster parents have the ability to collect more than $7,400 per month, considering that they can house six immigrants at any given time.

So Illegal Aliens are a stimulus. Just like Unemployment. So what we need is even more of them!

Don’t worry, be happy. We are from the Government and we are here to help you! 🙂

 

Why I left The Left

Weekend Must-Read: Ten Reasons Why I Am No Longer a Leftist

By Danusha V. Goska

How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace Corps volunteer and I have a degree from UC Berkeley. So far left that my Teamster mother used to tell anyone who would listen that she voted for Gus Hall, Communist Party chairman, for president. I wore a button saying “Eat the Rich.” To me it wasn’t a metaphor.

I voted Republican in the last presidential election.

Below are the top ten reasons I am no longer a leftist. This is not a rigorous comparison of theories. This list is idiosyncratic, impressionistic, and intuitive. It’s an accounting of the milestones on my herky-jerky journey.

10) Huffiness.

In the late 1990s I was reading Anatomy of the Spirit, a then recent bestseller by Caroline Myss.

Myss described having lunch with a woman named Mary. A man approached Mary and asked her if she were free to do a favor for him on June 8th. No, Mary replied, I absolutely cannot do anything on June 8th because June 8th is my incest survivors’ meeting and we never let each other down! They have suffered so much already! I would never betray incest survivors!

Myss was flabbergasted. Mary could have simply said “Yes” or “No.”

Reading this anecdote, I felt that I was confronting the signature essence of my social life among leftists. We rushed to cast everyone in one of three roles: victim, victimizer, or champion of the oppressed. We lived our lives in a constant state of outraged indignation. I did not want to live that way anymore. I wanted to cultivate a disposition of gratitude. I wanted to see others, not as victims or victimizers, but as potential friends, as loved creations of God. I wanted to understand the point of view of people with whom I disagreed without immediately demonizing them as enemy oppressors.

I recently attended a training session for professors on a college campus. The presenter was a new hire in a tenure-track position. He opened his talk by telling us that he had received an invitation to share a festive meal with the president of the university. I found this to be an enviable occurrence and I did not understand why he appeared dramatically aggrieved. The invitation had been addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. X.” Professor X was a bachelor. He felt slighted. Perhaps the person who had addressed his envelope had disrespected him because he is a member of a minority group.

Rolling his eyes, Prof. X went on to say that he was wary of accepting a position on this lowly commuter campus, with its working-class student body. The disconnect between leftists’ announced value of championing the poor and the leftist practice of expressing snobbery for them stung me. Already vulnerable students would be taught by a professor who regarded association with them as a burden, a failure, and a stigma.

Barack Obama is president. Kim and Kanye and Brad and Angelina are members of multiracial households. One might think that professors finally have cause to teach their students to be proud of America for overcoming racism. Not so fast, Professor X warned.  His talk was on microaggression, defined as slights that prove that America is still racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist, that is, discriminatory against handicapped people.

Professor X projected a series of photographs onto a large screen. In one, commuters in business suits, carrying briefcases, mounted a flight of stairs. This photo was an act of microaggression. After all, Professor X reminded us, handicapped people can’t climb stairs.

I appreciate Professor X’s desire to champion the downtrodden, but identifying a photograph of commuters on stairs as an act of microaggression and evidence that America is still an oppressive hegemon struck me as someone going out of his way to live his life in a state of high dudgeon. On the other hand, Prof. X could have chosen to speak of his own working-class students with more respect.

Yes, there is a time and a place when it is absolutely necessary for a person to cultivate awareness of his own pain, or of others’ pain. Doctors instruct patients to do this — “Locate the pain exactly; calculate where the pain falls on a scale of one to ten; assess whether the pain is sharp, dull, fleeting, or constant.” But doctors do this for a reason. They want the patient to heal, and to move beyond the pain. In the left, I found a desire to be in pain constantly, so as always to have something to protest, from one’s history of incest to the inability of handicapped people to mount flights of stairs.

9) Selective Outrage

I was a graduate student. Female genital mutilation came up in class. I stated, without ornamentation, that it is wrong.

A fellow graduate student, one who was fully funded and is now a comfortably tenured professor, sneered at me. “You are so intolerant. Clitoredectomy is just another culture’s rite of passage. You Catholics have confirmation.”

When Mitt Romney was the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, he mentioned that, as Massachusetts governor, he proactively sought out female candidates for top jobs. He had, he said, “binders full of women.” He meant, of course, that he stored resumes of promising female job candidates in three-ring binders.

Op-ed pieces, Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show,” Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon posts erupted in a feeding frenzy, savaging Romney and the Republican Party for their “war on women.”

I was an active leftist for decades. I never witnessed significant leftist outrage over clitoredectomy, child marriage, honor killing, sharia-inspired rape laws, stoning, or acid attacks. Nothing. Zip. Crickets. I’m not saying that that outrage does not exist. I’m saying I never saw it.

The left’s selective outrage convinced me that much canonical, left-wing feminism is not so much support for women, as it is a protest against Western, heterosexual men. It’s an “I hate” phenomenon, rather than an “I love” phenomenon.

8.) It’s the thought that counts

My favorite bumper sticker in ultra-liberal Berkeley, California: “Think Globally; Screw up Locally.” In other words, “Love Humanity but Hate People.”

It was past midnight, back in the 1980s, in Kathmandu, Nepal. A group of Peace Corps volunteers were drinking moonshine at the Momo Cave. A pretty girl with long blond hair took out her guitar and sang these lyrics, which I remember by heart from that night:

“If you want your dream to be,

Build it slow and surely.

Small beginnings greater ends.

Heartfelt work grows purely.”

I just googled these lyrics, thirty years later, and discovered that they are Donovan’s San Damiano song, inspired by the life of St. Francis.

Listening to this song that night in the Momo Cave, I thought, that’s what we leftists do wrong. That’s what we’ve got to get right.

We focused so hard on our good intentions. Before our deployment overseas, Peace Corps vetted us for our idealism and “tolerance,” not for our competence or accomplishments. We all wanted to save the world. What depressingly little we did accomplish was often erased with the next drought, landslide, or insurrection.

Peace Corps did not focus on the “small beginnings” necessary to accomplish its grandiose goals. Schools rarely ran, girls and low caste children did not attend, and widespread corruption guaranteed that all students received passing grades. Those students who did learn had no jobs where they could apply their skills, and if they rose above their station, the hereditary big men would sabotage them. Thanks to cultural relativism, we were forbidden to object to rampant sexism or the caste system. “Only intolerant oppressors judge others’ cultures.”

I volunteered with the Sisters of Charity. For them, I pumped cold water from a well and washed lice out of homeless people’s clothing. The sisters did not want to save the world. Someone already had. The sisters focused on the small things, as their founder, Mother Teresa, advised, “Don’t look for big things, just do small things with great love.” Delousing homeless people’s clothing was one of my few concrete accomplishments.

Back in 1975, after Hillary Rodham had followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, she helped create the state’s first rape crisis hotline. She had her eye on the big picture. What was Hillary like in her one-on-one encounters?

Hillary served as the attorney to a 41-year-old, one of two men accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. The girl, a virgin before the assault, was in a coma for five days afterward. She was injured so badly she was told she’d never have children. In 2014, she is 52 years old, and she has never had children, nor has she married. She reports that she was afraid of men after the rape.

A taped interview with Clinton has recently emerged; on it Clinton makes clear that she thought her client was guilty, and she chuckles when reporting that she was able to set him free.  In a recent interview, the victim said that Hillary Clinton “took me through Hell” and “lied like a dog.” “I think she wants to be a role model… but I don’t think she’s a role model at all,” the woman said. “If she had have been, she would have helped me at the time, being a 12-year-old girl who was raped by two guys.”

Hillary had her eye on the all-caps resume bullet point: FOUNDS RAPE HOTLINE.

Hillary’s chuckles when reminiscing about her legal victory suggest that, in her assessment, her contribution to the ruination of the life of a rape victim is of relatively negligible import.

7) Leftists hate my people.

I’m a working-class Bohunk. A hundred years ago, leftists loved us. We worked lousy jobs, company thugs shot us when we went on strike, and leftists saw our discontent as fuel for their fire.

Karl Marx promised the workers’ paradise through an inevitable revolution of the proletariat. The proletariat is an industrial working class — think blue-collar people working in mines, mills, and factories: exactly what immigrants like my parents were doing.

Polish-Americans participated significantly in a great victory, Flint, Michigan’s 1937 sit-down strike. Italian-Americans produced Sacco and Vanzetti. Gus Hall was a son of Finnish immigrants.

In the end, though, we didn’t show up for the Marxist happily ever after. We believed in God and we were often devout Catholics. Leftists wanted us to slough off our ethnic identities and join in the international proletarian brotherhood — “Workers of the world, unite!” But we clung to ethnic distinctiveness. Future generations lost their ancestral ties, but they didn’t adopt the IWW flag; they flew the stars and stripes. “Property is theft” is a communist motto, but no one is more house-proud than a first generation Pole who has escaped landless peasantry and secured his suburban nest.

Leftists felt that we jilted them at the altar. Leftists turned on us. This isn’t just ancient history. In 2004, What’s the Matter with Kansas? spent eighteen weeks on the bestseller lists. The premise of the book: working people are too stupid to know what’s good for them, and so they vote conservative when they should be voting left. In England, the book was titled, What’s the Matter with America?

We became the left’s boogeyman: Joe Six-pack, Joe Hardhat. Though we’d been in the U.S. for a few short decades when the demonization began, leftists, in the academy, in media, and in casual speech, blamed working-class ethnics for American crimes, including racism and the “imperialist” war in Vietnam. See films like The Deer Hunter. Watch Archie Bunker on “All in the Family.” Listen to a few of the Polack jokes that elitists pelted me with whenever I introduced myself at UC Berkeley.

Leftists freely label poor whites as “redneck,” “white trash,” “trailer trash,” and “hillbilly.” At the same time that leftists toss around these racist and classist slurs, they are so sanctimonious they forbid anyone to pronounce the N word when reading Mark Twain aloud. President Bill Clinton’s advisor James Carville succinctly summed up leftist contempt for poor whites in his memorable quote, “Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.”

The left’s visceral hatred of poor whites overflowed like a broken sewer when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate in 2008. It would be impossible, and disturbing, to attempt to identify the single most offensive comment that leftists lobbed at Palin. One can report that attacks on Palin were so egregious that leftists themselves publicly begged that they cease; after all, they gave the left a bad name. The Reclusive Leftist blogged in 2009 that it was a “major shock” to discover “the extent to which so many self-described liberals actually despise working people.” The Reclusive Leftist focuses on Vanity Fair journalist Henry Rollins. Rollins recommends that leftists “hate-fuck conservative women” and denounces Palin as a “small town hickoid” who can be bought off with a coupon to a meal at a chain restaurant.

Smearing us is not enough. Liberal policies sabotage us. Affirmative action benefits recipients by color, not by income. Even this limited focus fails. In his 2004 Yale University Press study, Thomas Sowell insists that affirmative action helps only wealthier African Americans. Poor blacks do not benefit. In 2009, Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford demonstrated that poor, white Christians are underrepresented on elite college campuses. Leftists add insult to injury. A blue-collar white kid, who feels lost and friendless on the alien terrain of a university campus, a campus he has to leave immediately after class so he can get to his fulltime job at MacDonald’s, must accept that he is a recipient of “white privilege” – if he wants to get good grades in mandatory classes on racism.

The left is still looking for its proletariat. It supports mass immigration for this reason. Harvard’s George Borjas, himself a Cuban immigrant, has been called “America’s leading immigration economist.” Borjas points out that mass immigration from Latin America has sabotaged America’s working poor.

It’s more than a little bit weird that leftists, who describe themselves as the voice of the worker, select workers as their hated other of choice, and targets of their failed social engineering.

6) I believe in God.

Read Marx and discover a mythology that is irreconcilable with any other narrative, including the Bible. Hang out in leftist internet environments, and you will discover a toxic bath of irrational hatred for the Judeo-Christian tradition. You will discover an alternate vocabulary in which Jesus is a “dead Jew on a stick” or a “zombie” and any belief is an arbitrary sham, the equivalent of a recently invented “flying spaghetti monster.” You will discover historical revisionism that posits Nazism as a Christian denomination. You will discover a rejection of the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western Civilization and American concepts of individual rights and law. You will discover a nihilist void, the kind of vacuum of meaning that nature abhors and that, all too often, history fills with the worst totalitarian nightmares, the rough beast that slouches toward Bethlehem.

5 & 4) Straw men and “In order to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs.”

It astounds me now to reflect on it, but never, in all my years of leftist activism, did I ever hear anyone articulate accurately the position of anyone to our right. In fact, I did not even know those positions when I was a leftist.

“Truth is that which serves the party.” The capital-R revolution was such a good, it could eliminate all that was bad, that manipulating facts was not even a venial sin; it was a good. If you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. One of those eggs was objective truth.

Ron Kuby is a left-wing radio talk show host on New York’s WABC. He plays the straw man card hourly. If someone phones in to question affirmative action – shouldn’t such programs benefit recipients by income, rather than by skin color? – Kuby opens the fire hydrant. He is shrill. He is bombastic. He accuses the caller of being a member of the KKK. He paints graphic word pictures of the horrors of lynching and the death of Emmett Till and asks, “And you support that?”

Well of course THE CALLER did not support that, but it is easier to orchestrate a mob in a familiar rendition of righteous rage against a sensationalized straw man than it is to produce a reasoned argument against a reasonable opponent.

On June 16, 2014, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank published a column alleging that a peaceful Muslim was nearly verbally lynched by violent Islamophobes at a Heritage Foundation-hosted panel. What Milbank described was despicable. Unfortunately for Milbank and the Washington Post‘s credibility, someone filmed the event and posted the film on YouTube. Panel discussants, including Frank Gaffney and Brigitte Gabriel, made important points in a courteous manner. Saba Ahmed, the peaceful Muslim, is a “family friend” of a bombing plotter who expressed a specific desire to murder children. It soon became clear that Milbank was, as one blogger put it, “making stuff up.”

Milbank slanders anyone who might attempt analysis of jihad, a force that is currently cited in the murder of innocents — including Muslims — from Nigeria to the Philippines. The leftist strategy of slandering those who speak uncomfortable facts suppresses discourse and has a devastating impact on confrontations with truth in journalism and on college campuses.

2 & 3) It doesn’t work.  Other approaches work better.

I went to hear David Horowitz speak in 2004. My intention was to heckle him. Horowitz said something that interrupted my flow of thought. He pointed out that Camden, Paterson, and Newark had decades of Democratic leadership.

Ouch.

I grew up among “Greatest Generation” Americans who had helped build these cities. One older woman told me, “As soon as I got my weekly paycheck, I rushed to Main Ave in Paterson, and my entire paycheck ended up on my back, in a new outfit.” In the 1950s and 60s, my parents and my friends’ parents fled deadly violence in Newark and Paterson.

Within a few short decades, Paterson, Camden, and Newark devolved into unlivable slums, with shooting deaths, drug deals, and garbage-strewn streets. The pain that New Jerseyans express about these failed cities is our state’s open wound.

I live in Paterson. I teach its young. My students are hogtied by ignorance. I find myself speaking to young people born in the U.S. in a truncated pidgin I would use with a train station chai wallah in Calcutta.

Many of my students lack awareness of a lot more than vocabulary. They don’t know about believing in themselves, or stick-to-itiveness. They don’t realize that the people who exercise power over them have faced and overcome obstacles. I know they don’t know these things because they tell me. One student confessed that when she realized that one of her teachers had overcome setbacks it changed her own life.

My students do know — because they have been taught this — that America is run by all-powerful racists who will never let them win. My students know — because they have been drilled in this — that the only way they can get ahead is to locate and cultivate those few white liberals who will pity them and scatter crumbs on their supplicant, bowed heads and into their outstretched palms. My students have learned to focus on the worst thing that ever happened to them, assume that it happened because America is unjust, and to recite that story, dirge-like, to whomever is in charge, from the welfare board to college professors, and to await receipt of largesse.

As Shelby Steele so brilliantly points out in his book White Guilt, the star of the sob story my students tell in exchange for favors is very much not the black aid recipient. The star of this story, still, just as before the Civil Rights Movement that was meant to change who got to take the lead in American productions, was the white man. The generous white liberal still gets top billing.

In Dominque La Pierre’s 1985 novel City of Joy, a young American doctor, Max Loeb, confesses that serving the poor in a slum has changed his mind forever about what might actually improve their lot. “In a slum an exploiter is better than a Santa Claus… An exploiter forces you to react, whereas a Santa Claus demobilizes you.”

That one stray comment from David Horowitz, a man I regarded as the enemy, sparked the slow but steady realization that my ideals, the ideals I had lived by all my life, were poisoning my students and Paterson, my city.

After I realized that our approaches don’t work, I started reading about other approaches. I had another Aha! moment while listening to a two minute twenty-three second YouTube video of Milton Friedman responding to Phil Donahue’s castigation of greed. The only rational response to Friedman is “My God, he’s right.”

1) Hate.

If hate were the only reason, I’d stop being a leftist for this reason alone.

Almost twenty years ago, when I could not conceive of ever being anything but a leftist, I joined a left-wing online discussion forum.

Before that I’d had twenty years of face-to-face participation in leftist politics: marching, organizing, socializing.

In this online forum, suddenly my only contact with others was the words those others typed onto a screen. That limited and focused means of contact revealed something.

If you took all the words typed into the forum every day and arranged them according to what part of speech they were, you’d quickly notice that nouns expressing the emotions of anger, aggression, and disgust, and verbs speaking of destruction, punishing, and wreaking vengeance, outnumbered any other class of words.

One topic thread was entitled “What do you view as disgusting about modern America?” The thread was begun in 2002. Almost eight thousand posts later, the thread was still going strong in June, 2014.

Those posting messages in this left-wing forumpublicly announced that they did what they did every day, from voting to attending a rally to planning a life, because they wanted to destroy something, and because they hated someone, rather than because they wanted to build something, or because they loved someone. You went to an anti-war rally because you hated Bush, not because you loved peace. Thus, when Obama bombed, you didn’t hold any anti-war rally, because you didn’t hate Obama.

I experienced powerful cognitive dissonance when I recognized the hate. The rightest of my right-wing acquaintances — I had no right-wing friends — expressed nothing like this. My right-wing acquaintances talked about loving: God, their family, their community. I’m not saying that the right-wingers I knew were better people; I don’t know that they were. I’m speaking here, merely, about language.

In 1995 I developed a crippling illness. I couldn’t work, lost my life savings, and traveled through three states, from surgery to surgery.

A left-wing friend, Pete, sent me emails raging against Republicans like George Bush, whom he referred to as “Bushitler.” The Republicans were to blame because they opposed socialized medicine. In fact it’s not at all certain that socialized medicine would have helped; the condition I had is not common and there was no guaranteed treatment.

I visited online discussion forums for others with the same affliction. One of my fellow sufferers, who identified himself as a successful corporate executive in New Jersey, publicly announced that the symptoms were so hideous, and his helpless slide into poverty was so much not what his wife had bargained for when she married him, that he planned to take his own life. He stopped posting after that announcement, though I responded to his post and requested a reply. It is possible that he committed suicide, exactly as he said he would — car exhaust in the garage. I suddenly realized that my “eat the rich” lapel button was a sin premised on a lie.

In any case, at the time I was diagnosed, Bush wasn’t president; Clinton was. And, as I pointed out to Pete, his unceasing and vehement expressions of hatred against Republicans did nothing for me.

I had a friend, a nun, Mary Montgomery, one of the Sisters of Providence, who took me out to lunch every six months or so, and gave me twenty-dollar Target gift cards on Christmas. Her gestures to support someone, rather than expressions of hate against someone — even though these gestures were miniscule and did nothing to restore me to health — meant a great deal to me.

Recently, I was trying to explain this aspect of why I stopped being a leftist to a left-wing friend, Julie. She replied, “No, I’m not an unpleasant person. I try to be nice to everybody.”

“Julie,” I said, “You are an active member of the Occupy Movement. You could spend your days teaching children to read, or visiting the elderly in nursing homes, or organizing cleanup crews in a garbage-strewn slum. You don’t. You spend your time protestingand trying to destroy something — capitalism.”

“Yes, but I’m very nice about it,” she insisted. “I always protest with a smile.”

Pete is now a Facebook friend and his feed overflows with the anger that I’m sure he assesses as righteous. He protests against homophobic Christians, American imperialists, and Monsanto. I don’t know if Pete ever donates to an organization he believes in, or a person suffering from a disease, or if he ever says comforting things to afflicted intimates. I know he hates.

I do have right-wing friends now and they do get angry and they do express that anger. But when I encounter unhinged, stratospheric vituperation, when I encounter detailed revenge fantasies in scatological and sadistic language, I know I’ve stumbled upon a left-wing website.

Given that the left prides itself on being the liberator of women, homosexuals, and on being “sex positive,” one of the weirder and most obvious aspects of left-wing hate is how often, and how virulently, it is expressed in terms that are misogynist, homophobic, and in the distinctive anti-sex voice of a sexually frustrated high-school misfit. Haters are aware enough of how uncool it would be to use a slur like “fag,” so they sprinkle their discourse with terms indicating anal rape like “butt hurt.” Leftists taunt right-wingers as “tea baggers.” The implication is that the target of their slur is either a woman or a gay man being orally penetrated by a man, and is, therefore, inferior, and despicable.

Misogynist speech has a long tradition on the left. In 1964, Stokely Carmichael said that the only position for women in the Civil Rights Movement was “prone.” Carmichael’s misogyny is all the more outrageous given the very real role of women like Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, and Fannie Lou Hamer.

In 2012 atheist bloggers Jennifer McCreight and Natalie Reed exposed the degree to which misogyny dominates the New Atheist movement. McCreight quoted a prominent atheist’s reply to a woman critic. “I will make you a rape victim if you don’t fuck off… I think we should give the guy who raped you a medal. I hope you fucking drown in rape semen, you ugly, mean-spirited cow… Is that kind of like the way that rapists dick went in your pussy? Or did he use your asshole… I’m going to rape you with my fist.”

A high-profile example of leftist invective was delivered by MSNBC’s Martin Bashir in late 2013. Bashir said, on air and in a rehearsed performance, not as part of a moment’s loss of control, something so vile about Sarah Palin that I won’t repeat it here. Extreme as it is, Bashir’s comment is fairly representative of a good percentage of what I read on left-wing websites.

I could say as much about a truly frightening phenomenon, left-wing anti-Semitism, but I’ll leave the topic to others better qualified. I can say that when I first encountered it, at a PLO fundraising party in Marin County, I felt as if I had time-traveled to pre-war Berlin.

I needed to leave the left, I realized, when I decided that I wanted to spend time with people building, cultivating, and establishing, something that they loved.

 

Jumped The Shark

 

Growing up, I was – as I assume you were – inundated with lists of “the benefits of citizenship.” The list was long and capped, naturally, by the fact the United States was the best, strongest, freest nation on the planet.

Being an American was a source of pride. But is it still? Do the benefits of citizenship still outweigh the alternative?

As progressives cheer the dissolution of our southern border and, by extension, our sovereignty, it’s worth looking at the benefits of non-citizenship illegal aliens now enjoy and comparing them to the responsibilities of citizenship.

Most people don’t like paying taxes. But it’s the price of citizenship, and if we don’t we face losing our property and jail time. We also do it because the government has legitimate functions that only it can do and that need to be paid for. It also does way more than it needs to or should, but that’s an argument for another time.

But the people flooding our border haven’t paid taxes and, to be honest, have no real prospects for paying taxes in the future, if they stay.

Most do not speak English, have no education and no real skills to contribute to the economy. No doubt some have potential in the future. But we don’t live in the future, and the total number who will fulfill that potential are almost as rare as unicorns.

Until those unicorns can draft a business plan, they all will be a drain on the economy, an economy that even after five “Recovery Summers” can’t employ enough Americans in full-time positions to return us to where we were before the last recession.

The jobs they take while they await their immigration hearings – and they will take jobs even though they aren’t legally allowed to – will be under-the-table jobs. No taxes will be paid. More importantly, those jobs won’t go to Americans who would have paid taxes on their wages. Medicare taxes will not be paid. Social Security taxes will not be paid. And the employers who hire them, illegally, for cash will save money too, not having to pay their share of taxes or for benefits.

In addition to the jobs they will fill, they will get sick. Everyone, citizen or not, can show up at an emergency room and get health care. The difference is a citizen will get a bill, but an illegal alien will not. A citizen is required to buy insurance; an illegal alien is not. A citizen who doesn’t buy insurance eventually will be forced to pay a fine for not following the law and may have to declare bankruptcy to pay for services received. Illegal aliens can…well, you get the idea.

Citizens who fall on hard times, such as the Obama economy, can avail themselves of the social safety net until they get back on their feet. But illegals can too. Sure, it’s against the law for illegal aliens to receive welfare, but the few documents that are required can be purchased easily on the black market. Identity theft is rampant in the illegal alien community, as it were.

And if you really want some money, house Illegal alien children for $1,054 per child,m paid for by YOU the Taxpayers! Such a Deal! 🙂

Moreover, many states offer driver’s licenses and in-state tuition to illegals. You, as a citizen, can’t attend a college in another state without paying full-freight, but someone in the country illegally can. Illegal aliens are even boarding domestic flights without photo IDs, but you can’t. Advantage illegals.

After all, you’re just a racist if you object!

As an American citizen you can be arrested for allowing your children to play in front of your house, as happened in 2012, or for allowing them to play in a park without you hovering over them, as happened this month. As an illegal alien, you can pay a human trafficker up to $10,000 to smuggle your child thousands of miles through several countries, have them enter the country illegally, and they’ll get free health care, food, housing and a plane ticket to be reunited with you.

Imagine placing an ad on Craig’s List seeking a stranger to drive your minor child from Los Angeles to St. Louis for cash. Forget not having anyone in St. Louis waiting for them; you’re just sending them to the city. How long do you suspect it would be before a SWAT team and child protective services kicked in your door? A half-hour at most?

But the open borders government agencies will pay you per child.

https://indyfromaz.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/leftist-sanctimony/

That’s what these illegal aliens who’ve sent for their kids to join them here – and many, if not most, of the unaccompanied minors are sent for by their parents, not sent by them – are doing. Their children aren’t being taking into protective custody by social services, the parents aren’t being arrested or even investigated; they’re being reunited with their illegal alien children. And it’s all being done on our dime.

We aren’t there yet, but we’re fast approaching a time when it’s more advantageous to be in the United States illegally than it is to be a law-abiding citizen. If we don’t gain control of our borders and reclaim our sovereignty, we will jump that shark in the next 10 years. The president’s much ballyhooed “comprehensive immigration reform” won’t make a dent in the real problem of punishing citizens but will incentivize law breaking.

But it will make millions of new loyal Welfare Democrats who will expect you to pay for their every whim.

http://video.foxnews.com/v/2421645386001/inside-the-booming-food-stamp-program-in-florida/#sp=show-clips

fter all you don’t want to be a mean old RACIST now do you? 🙂

We are no longer talking about a situation that can be assuaged by a “Little Dutch Boy” approach. The dike has collapsed, and we’re all wet. (Derek Hunter)

Can you say “dike” without the Left calling you a homophobe? 🙂

After all…

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) slammed Republicans at a news conference Thursday, saying, “It’s stunning to me how the Republicans have tried to politicize this issue. We must act in the best interest … of the children … and that means we need the resources to get that job done.”

Be at peace that The Left’s Sanctimony is intact as you jump that shark!

Winning!

President Obama is so obsessed with income inequality that he’ll make yet another speech on it Thursday. But he’ll do nothing about it. After all, the poor are still with us, only there are more of them than ever.

My question would be, was the goal to make every one poor rich or just make every rich person poor thus all “equal” in their poorness?? 🙂

Neither one has worked, yet.

Or was it to just make the poor more numerous and more dependent on Big Brother. That’s working. 🙂

Fifty years after President Johnson started a $20 trillion taxpayer-funded war on poverty, the overall percentage of impoverished people in the U.S. has declined only slightly and the poor have lost ground under President Obama. 

So why do we need unemployment benefits extended even further? Our workforce participation rate has decreased meaning if we had the same amount of individuals in the workforce as in 2009, the US unemployment rate would be closer to 11-12 percent.

The truth is, in spite of the administration’s anti-poverty efforts, poverty has by some measures worsened under President Obama compared to President George W. Bush. The U.S. Census Bureau reported that 31.6 percent of Americans were in poverty for at least two months from 2009 to 2011, a 4.5 percentage point increase over the pre-recession period of 2005 to 2007. Of the 37.6 million people who were poor at the beginning of 2009, 26.4 percent remained in poverty throughout the next 34 months.

One of the most disturbing results of this 50 year war was articulated by Robert Rector, a specialist on welfare and poverty at the conservative Heritage Foundation, “When the war on poverty started, about 6 percent of children were born outside of marriage,” he said. “Today that’s 42 percent — catastrophe.”

It was President Johnson’s policy of rewarding women who had children out of wedlock, and kept a father out of the home, with government largesse — it has caused an epidemic of single parent homes in the black community at nearly 72 percent.

After all these years and trillions of dollars, poverty has decreased only two percent, while increased spending on welfare programs has grown into the stratosphere — some return on the “government investment, hm?(WT)

Wednesday marked 50 years since President Lyndon Johnson asked Congress to wage “all-out war on human poverty and unemployment” — a war that’s seen no end, let alone victory, to celebrate.

A record 46.5 million Americans are still counted as poor, and the share of those living in poverty — 15% and rising today vs. 19% and falling in 1964 — is close to what it was when Johnson sounded the trumpet.

More than 47 million Americans are now on food stamps — also a record high and representing roughly a 50% increase since the day Barack Obama was inaugurated after a campaign based on “hope.”

Meanwhile, an all-time high of Americans — nearly 9 million, 20% more than when Obama walked into the White House — are on disability. And not because they’re disabled, but rather because they can’t find jobs in Obama’s economy and have exited the workforce.

It’s not out of the realm to argue that the war on poverty has had an adverse effect.

The poverty rate was in sharp decline when Johnson made his speech. It fell from almost 23% in the late 1950s to 17.3% in 1965, a year after the program was announced and before it could have made any significant impact. Since then, the rate has remained virtually flat — never better than 11%, never worse than 15%.

Many on the political left say poverty is still with us because insufficient funds have been applied. Indeed, that was the reason given by Sargent Shriver, who ran the war as head of Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity. Asked why the program was not progressing as expected, Shriver, who believed 1976 should be “the target date for ending poverty in this land,” said the government hadn’t spent enough.

We cringe at what the Democrats would consider enough. Robert Rector who has studied poverty for nearly three decades at the Heritage Foundation, reckons government has already spent $20.7 trillion in taxpayers’ money on 80 means-tested welfare programs in the past 50 years.

Despite the spending — or because of it — the 2013 Index of Government Dependence as measured by Heritage scored America in 2011 at an all-time high of 332, almost 17% higher than when Obama took office two years prior.

During his second term, President Reagan reminded the country that “in the ’60s we waged a war on poverty” but “poverty won.” Almost three decades later, it’s still winning.

And always will. Especially, with Liberals around to make even more poor people!

 

Diminished Future

Mark Steyn: One consequence of the botched launch of Obamacare is that it has, judging from his plummeting numbers with “Millennials,” diminished Barack Obama’s cool. It’s not merely that the website isn’t state-of-the-art but that the art it’s flailing to be state of is that of the mid-20th-century social program. The emperor has hipster garb, but underneath he’s just another Commissar Squaresville. So, health care being an irredeemable downer for the foreseeable future, this week the president pivoted (as they say) to “economic inequality,” which will be, he assures us, his principal focus for the rest of his term. And what’s his big idea for this new priority? Stand well back: He wants to increase the minimum wage!

Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos of Amazon (a non-government website) is musing about delivering his products to customers across the country (and the planet) within hours by using drones.

Drones! If there’s one thing Obama can do, it’s drones. He’s renowned across Yemen and Waziristan as the Domino’s of drones. If he’d thought to have your health-insurance-cancellation notices dropped by drone, Obamacare might have been a viable business model. Yet, even in Obama’s sole area of expertise and dominant market share, the private sector is already outpacing him.

Who has a greater grasp of the economic contours of the day after tomorrow — Bezos or Obama? My colleague Jonah Goldberg notes that the day before the president’s speech on “inequality,” Applebee’s announced that it was introducing computer “menu tablets” to its restaurants. Automated supermarket checkout, 3D printing, driverless vehicles . . . what has the “minimum wage” to do with any of that? To get your minimum wage increased, you first have to have a minimum-wage job.

In my book (which I shall forbear to plug, but is available at Amazon, and with which Jeff Bezos will be happy to drone your aunt this holiday season), I write:

Once upon a time, millions of Americans worked on farms. Then, as agriculture declined, they moved into the factories. When manufacturing was outsourced, they settled into low-paying service jobs or better-paying cubicle jobs — so-called “professional services” often deriving from the ever swelling accounting and legal administration that now attends almost any activity in America. What comes next?

Or, more to the point, what if there is no “next”?

What do millions of people do in a world in which, in Marxian terms, “capital” no longer needs “labor”? America’s liberal elite seem to enjoy having a domestic-servant class on hand, but, unlike the Downton Abbey crowd, are vaguely uncomfortable with having them drawn from the sturdy yokel stock of the village, and thus favor, to a degree only the Saudis can match, importing their maids and pool-boys from a permanent subordinate class of cheap foreign labor. Hence the fetishization of the “undocumented,” soon to be reflected in the multi-million bipartisan amnesty for those willing to do “the jobs Americans won’t do.”

So what jobs will Americans get to do? We dignify the new age as “the knowledge economy,” although, to the casual observer, it doesn’t seem to require a lot of knowledge. One of the advantages of Obamacare, according to Nancy Pelosi, is that it will liberate the citizenry: “Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.” It’s certainly true that employer-based health coverage distorts the job market, but what’s more likely in a world without work? A new golden age of American sculpture and opera? Or millions more people who live vicariously through celebrity gossip and electronic diversions? One of the differences between government health care in America compared to, say, Sweden is the costs of obesity, heart disease, childhood diabetes, etc. In an ever more sedentary society where fewer and fewer have to get up to go to work in the morning, is it likely that those trends will diminish or increase?

Consider Vermont. Unlike my own state of New Hampshire, it has a bucolic image: Holsteins, dirt roads, the Vermont Teddy Bear Company, Ben & Jerry’s, Howard Dean . . . And yet the Green Mountain State has appalling levels of heroin and meth addiction, and the social chaos that follows. Geoffrey Norman began a recent essay in The Weekly Standard with a vignette from a town I know very well — St. Johnsbury, population 7,600, motto “Very Vermont,” the capital of the remote North-East Kingdom hard by the Quebec border and as far from urban pathologies as you can get. Or so you’d think. But on a recent Saturday morning, Norman reports, there were more cars parked at the needle-exchange clinic than at the farmers’ market. In Vermont, there’s no inner-city underclass, because there are no cities, inner or outer; there’s no disadvantaged minorities, because there’s only three blacks and seven Hispanics in the entire state; there’s no nothing. Which is the real problem.

Large numbers of Vermonters have adopted the dysfunctions of the urban underclass for no reason more compelling than that there’s not much else to do. Once upon a time, St. Johnsbury made Fairbanks scales, but now a still handsome town is, as Norman puts it, “hollowed out by the loss of work and purpose.” Their grandparents got up at four in the morning to work the farm and their great-great-great-whatever-parents slogged up the Connecticut River, cleared the land, and built homes and towns and a civilization in the wilderness. And now? A couple of months back, I sat in the café in St. Johnsbury, and overheard a state official and a Chamber of Commerce official discuss enthusiastically how the town could access some federal funds to convert an abandoned building into welfare housing.

“Work” and “purpose” are intimately connected: Researchers at the University of Michigan, for example, found that welfare payments make one unhappier than a modest income honestly earned and used to provide for one’s family. “It drains too much of the life from life,” said Charles Murray in a speech in 2009. “And that statement applies as much to the lives of janitors — even more to the lives of janitors — as it does to the lives of CEOs.” Self-reliance — “work” — is intimately connected to human dignity — “purpose.”

So what does every initiative of the Obama era have in common? Obamacare, Obamaphones, Social Security disability expansion, 50 million people on food stamps . . . The assumption is that mass, multi-generational dependency is now a permanent feature of life. A coastal elite will devise ever smarter and slicker trinkets, and pretty much everyone else will be a member of either the dependency class or the vast bureaucracy that ministers to them. And, if you’re wondering why every Big Government program assumes you’re a feeble child, that’s because a citizenry without “work and purpose” is ultimately incompatible with liberty. The elites think a smart society will be wealthy enough to relieve the masses from the need to work. In reality, it would be neo-feudal, but with fatter, sicker peasants. It wouldn’t just be “economic inequality,” but a far more profound kind, and seething with resentments.

One wouldn’t expect the governing class to be as far-sighted as visionaries like Bezos. But it’s hard to be visionary if you’re pointing in the wrong direction. Which is why the signature achievement of Obama’s “hope and change” combines 1940s British public-health theories with 1970s Soviet supermarket delivery systems. But don’t worry: Maybe one day soon, your needle-exchange clinic will be able to deliver by drone. Look out below.

Achievement is a Four Letter Word

Thomas Sowell: A friend recently sent me a link to an inspiring video about an upbeat young black man who was born without arms. It showed him going to work — unlike the record number of people living on government payments for “disabilities” that are far less serious, if not fictitious.

How is this young man getting to work? He gets into his car and drives there — using controls set up so that he can operate the car with his feet.

What kind of work does he do, and how does he do it? He is involved in the design of racing cars. He sits at his computer, looking at the screen, with the keyboard on the floor, where he uses his toes as others use their fingers.

His story recalls the story of Helen Keller, who went to an elite college and on to a career, despite being both deaf and blind. Her story was celebrated in books, in television documentaries and in an inspiring movie, “The Miracle Worker.”

But our culture has changed so much over the years that the young man with no arms is unlikely to get comparable publicity. Helen Keller’s achievement was seen as an inspiration for others, but this young man’s achievement is more like a threat to the prevailing ideology of our times.

The vision on which the all-encompassing and all-controlling welfare state was built is a vision of widespread helplessness, requiring ever more expanding big government. Our “compassionate” statists would probably have wanted to take this young man without arms, early on, and put him in some government institution.

But to celebrate him in the mainstream media today would undermine a whole ideological vision of the world — and of the vast government bureaucracies built on that vision. It might even cause people to think twice about giving money to able-bodied men who are standing on street corners, begging.

The last thing the political left needs, or can even afford, are self-reliant individuals. If such people became the norm, that would destroy not only the agenda and the careers of those on the left, but even their flattering image of themselves as saviors of the less fortunate.

Victimhood is where it’s at. If there are not enough real victims, then fictitious victims must be created — as with the claim that there is “a war on women.” Why anyone would have an incentive or a motivation to create a war on women in the first place is just one of the questions that should be asked of those who promote this political slogan, obviously designed for the gullible.

The real war — which is being waged in our schools, in the media and among the intelligentsia — is the war on achievement. When President Obama told business owners, “You didn’t build that!” this was just one passing skirmish in the war on achievement.

The very word “achievement” has been replaced by the word “privilege” in many writings of our times. Individuals or groups that have achieved more than others are called “privileged” individuals or groups, who are to be resented rather than emulated.

The length to which this kind of thinking — or lack of thinking — can be carried was shown in a report on various ethnic groups in Toronto. It said that people of Japanese ancestry in that city were the most “privileged” group there, because they had the highest average income.

What made this claim of “privilege” grotesque was a history of anti-Japanese discrimination in Canada, climaxed by people of Japanese ancestry being interned during World War II longer than Japanese Americans.

If the concept of achievement threatens the prevailing ideology, the reality of achievement despite having obstacles to overcome is a deadly threat. That is why the achievements of Asians in general — and of people like the young black man with no arms — make those on the left uneasy. And why the achievements of people who created their own businesses have to be undermined by the President of the United States.

What would happen if Americans in general, or blacks in particular, started celebrating people like this armless young man, instead of trying to make heroes out of hoodlums? Many of us would find that promising and inspiring.

But it would be a political disaster for the left — which is why it is not likely to happen.

The Government is We

Americans who were recipients of means-tested government benefits in 2011 outnumbered year-round full-time workers, according to data released this month by the Census Bureau.

They also out-numbered the total population of the Philippines.

There were 108,592,000 people in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2011 who were recipients of one or more means-tested government benefit programs, the Census Bureau said in data released this week. Meanwhile, according to the Census Bureau, there were 101,716,000 people who worked full-time year round in 2011. That included both private-sector and government workers.

That means there were about 1.07 people getting some form of means-tested government benefit for every 1 person working full-time year round.

The Census Bureau counted as recipients of means-tested government programs “anyone residing in a household in which one or more people received benefits from the program.” Many of these people lived in households receiving more than one form of means-tested benefit at the same time.

Among the 108,592,000 people who fit the Census Bureau’s description of a means-tested benefit recipient in the fourth quarter of 2011 were 82,457,000 people in households receiving Medicaid, 49,073,000 beneficiaries of food stamps, 20,223,000 on Supplemental Security Income, 23,228,000 in the Women, Infants and Children program, 13,433,000 in public or subsidized rental housing, and 5,854,000 in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Also among the 108,592,000 means-tested benefit recipients counted by the Census Bureau were people getting free or reduced-price lunch or breakfast, state-administered supplemental security income and means-tested veterans pensions.

The 108,592,000 people who were recipients of means-tested government programs in the fourth quarter of 2011 does not include people who received benefits from non-means-tested government programs but not from means-tested ones. That would include, for example, people who received Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, or non-means-tested veterans compensation, but did not receive benefits from a means-tested program such as food stamps or public housing.

In the fourth quarter of 2011, according to the Census Bureau, there were 49,901,000 people who received Social Security benefits, 46,440,000 who received Medicare benefits, 5,098,000 on unemployment, and 3,178,000 who received non-means-tested veterans compensation.

When the people who received non-means-tested government benefits from programs such as Social Security, Medicare, unemployment and non-means-tested veterans compensation are added to those who received means-tested government programs such as food stamps, Supplemental Security Income and public housing, the total number of people receiving government benefits from one or more programs in the United States in 2011 climbs to 151,014,000, according to the Census Bureau.

The 108,592,000 people who were beneficiaries of means-tested government programs in the United States in 2011 not only outnumbered full-time year-round workers, they also outnumbered the total population of the Philippines, which is 105,720,644, according to the CIA World Factbook. They are also approaching the number of people living in Mexico, which is 116,220,947, according to the CIA.

But try and cut that number and you’re a heartless, mean, nasty “greedy” capitalist who wants grandma to be out on the street eating dog food and babies to starve.

Just saying’

Welcome to the US, the Land of Free Welfare and Home of the Government Dependent.

Oh, and Congress deserves to be subsidized (and or exempt):

Rep. Charlie Rangel said that he considers the subsidies part of Congress’ “overall compensation” even though ordinary Americans who earn $174,000 per year would have to have at least nine dependent children to qualify for the same subsidy if they bought insurance in the Obamacare exchanges.

CNSNews.com: “Earlier today, Congressman Barton on C-SPAN – who like most members of Congress makes $174,000 a year – said that he gets a $10,800 taxpayer subsidy for his health insurance, which most people who make his money would not ordinarily get in the private sector. Do you think members of Congress should be able to get that subsidy?”

Rangel: “We should not be able to get any subsidy that anybody with a life profession, who’d be getting from any other employer, and it’s my understanding that the government’s contribution is on square with the type of job we have in the private sector.”

CNSNews.com: “So no taxpayer money for health insurance to go on the exchanges at all?”

Rangel: “I didn’t say that. The federal government is our employer.”

CNSNews.com: “But do you think you should get that money to go in the exchanges?”

Rangel: “No question about it. We should not lose a part of our overall compensation. Of course not.”

It’s good to be the King!

 

The Madness

By: Thomas Sowell

Political crusades for raising the minimum wage are back again. Advocates of minimum wage laws often give themselves credit for being more “compassionate” towards “the poor.” But they seldom bother to check what are the actual consequences of such laws.

Because they don’t care. They are self-righteous, ego maniacal and have enough narcissism to rival the Gods themselves and anyone who would dare to challenge them must be a very evil Devil.

And since they have the all the “compassion” and it “feels so good” that anything else must be bad.

Like the Truth.

One of the simplest and most fundamental economic principles is that people tend to buy more when the price is lower and less when the price is higher. Yet advocates of minimum wage laws seem to think that the government can raise the price of labor without reducing the amount of labor that will be hired.

Or race the price of labor and not expect the price of the goods to go up because after all that just “Corporate Greed” and “profiteering”. 🙂

When you turn from economic principles to hard facts, the case against minimum wage laws is even stronger. Countries with minimum wage laws almost invariably have higher rates of unemployment than countries without minimum wage laws.

Norway has a 3% unemployment and no minimum wage, by the way.

Most nations today have minimum wage laws, but they have not always had them. Unemployment rates have been very much lower in places and times when there were no minimum wage laws.

Switzerland is one of the few modern nations without a minimum wage law. In 2003, “The Economist” magazine reported: “Switzerland’s unemployment neared a five-year high of 3.9 percent in February.” In February of this year, Switzerland’s unemployment rate was 3.1 percent. A recent issue of “The Economist” showed Switzerland’s unemployment rate as 2.1 percent.

Most Americans today have never seen unemployment rates that low. However, there was a time when there was no federal minimum wage law in the United States.

For a good portion of it there was no welfare either.

The last time was during the Coolidge administration, when the annual unemployment rate got as low as 1.8 percent. When Hong Kong was a British colony, it had no minimum wage law. In 1991 its unemployment rate was under 2 percent.

As for being “compassionate” toward “the poor,” this assumes that there is some enduring class of Americans who are poor in some meaningful sense, and that there is something compassionate about reducing their chances of getting a job.

Well, Liberal doe need dependents and the fearfully ignorant to vote for them. “Vote for Me, the other guys Rich” doesn’t quite work otherwise.

Most Americans living below the government-set poverty line have a washer and/or a dryer, as well as a computer. More than 80 percent have air conditioning. More than 80 percent also have both a landline and a cell phone. Nearly all have television and a refrigerator. Most Americans living below the official poverty line also own a motor vehicle and have more living space than the average European — not Europeans in poverty, the average European.

In a worldwide sense Americans are 1%ers. How evil are we. 🙂

Why then are they called “poor”? Because government bureaucrats create the official definition of poverty, and they do so in ways that provide a political rationale for the welfare state — and, not incidentally, for the bureaucrats’ own jobs.

Most people in the lower income brackets are not an enduring class. Most working people in the bottom 20 percent in income at a given time do not stay there over time. More of them end up in the top 20 percent than remain behind in the bottom 20 percent.

There is nothing mysterious about the fact that most people start off in entry level jobs that pay much less than they will earn after they get some work experience. But, when minimum wage levels are set without regard to their initial productivity, young people are disproportionately unemployed — priced out of jobs.

$15/hr flipping burgers at McDonalds will only make less jobs. And would make that “Value Meal” $5 instead of 1 or 2. 🙂

In European welfare states where minimum wages, and mandated job benefits to be paid for by employers, are more generous than in the United States, unemployment rates for younger workers are often 20 percent or higher, even when there is no recession.

Unemployed young people lose not only the pay they could have earned but, at least equally important, the work experience that would enable them to earn higher rates of pay later on.

Minorities, like young people, can also be priced out of jobs. In the United States, the last year in which the black unemployment rate was lower than the white unemployment rate — 1930 — was also the last year when there was no federal minimum wage law. Inflation in the 1940s raised the pay of even unskilled workers above the minimum wage set in 1938. Economically, it was the same as if there were no minimum wage law by the late 1940s.

Relative to inflation the minimum wage in 1963 is the same as it is now.

In 1948 the unemployment rate of black 16-year-old and 17-year-old males was 9.4 percent. This was a fraction of what it would become in even the most prosperous years from 1958 on, as the minimum wage was raised repeatedly to keep up with inflation.

Some “compassion” for “the poor”!

A survey of American economists found that 90 percent of them regarded minimum wage laws as increasing the rate of unemployment among low-skilled workers. Inexperience is often the problem. Only about 2 percent of Americans over the age of 24 earned the minimum wage.

Advocates of minimum wage laws usually base their support of such laws on their estimate of how much a worker “needs” in order to have “a living wage” — or on some other criterion that pays little or no attention to the worker’s skill level, experience or general productivity. So it is hardly surprising that minimum wage laws set wages that price many a young worker out of a job.

Because it’s all about “feelings” and not reality. Emotion, not logic. And a base of sticking it to “corporate greed” and the liberal genetic necessity, Class Warfare.

What is surprising is that, despite an accumulation of evidence over the years of the devastating effects of minimum wage laws on black teenage unemployment rates, members of the Congressional Black Caucus continue to vote for such laws.

Because it’s about THEM, not the people they are “advocating for” and they stay where they are by “advocating”.

Once, years ago, during a confidential discussion with a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, I asked how they could possibly vote for minimum wage laws.

The answer I got was that members of the Black Caucus were part of a political coalition and, as such, they were expected to vote for things that other members of that coalition wanted, such as minimum wage laws, in order that other members of the coalition would vote for things that the Black Caucus wanted.

Quid Pro Quo! 🙂

You grease my skids I’ll grease yours!

When I asked what could the black members of Congress possibly get in return for supporting minimum wage laws that would be worth sacrificing whole generations of young blacks to huge rates of unemployment, the discussion quickly ended. I may have been vehement when I asked that question.

They got POWER.

The same question could be asked of black public officials in general, including Barack Obama, who have taken the side of the teachers’ unions, who oppose vouchers or charter schools that allow black parents (among others) to take their children out of failing public schools.

Minimum wage laws can even affect the level of racial discrimination. In an earlier era, when racial discrimination was both legally and socially accepted, minimum wage laws were often used openly to price minorities out of the job market.

In 1925, a minimum wage law was passed in the Canadian province of British Columbia, with the intent and effect of pricing Japanese immigrants out of jobs in the lumbering industry.

A well regarded Harvard professor of that era referred approvingly to Australia’s minimum wage law as a means to “protect the white Australian’s standard of living from the invidious competition of the colored races, particularly of the Chinese” who were willing to work for less.

In South Africa during the era of apartheid, white labor unions urged that a minimum wage law be applied to all races, to keep black workers from taking jobs away from white unionized workers by working for less than the union pay scale.

Some supporters of the first federal minimum wage law in the United States — the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 — used exactly the same rationale, citing the fact that Southern construction companies, using non-union black workers, were able to come north and under-bid construction companies using unionized white labor.

These supporters of minimum wage laws understood long ago something that today’s supporters of such laws seem not to have bothered to think through. People whose wages are raised by law do not necessarily benefit, because they are often less likely to be hired at the imposed minimum wage rate.

Labor unions have been supporters of minimum wage laws in countries around the world, since these laws price non-union workers out of jobs, leaving more jobs for union members.

People who are content to advocate policies that sound good, whether for political reasons or just to feel good about themselves, often do not bother to think through the consequences beforehand or to check the results afterwards.

Why would they, it either feels good and gives them a sense of moral superiority or it gives them power. Why bother with worrying about consequences. That’s someone’s fault.

If they thought things through, how could they have imagined that having large numbers of idle teenage boys hanging out on the streets together would be good for any community — especially in places where most of these youngsters were raised by single mothers, another unintended consequence, in this case, of well-meaning welfare policies?

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Because of Narcissism.

Your Government Family

Looking for a good paying job? Well, look no further.

No, really, stop looking. In 35 states, welfare benefits pay more than a minimum wage job, according to a new study by the libertarian Cato Institute, and in 13 states welfare pays more than $15 per hour.

http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/work-versus-welfare-trade

There are states in that study where if you play it right you can make more money than my college-educated, state licensed professional 10 hour a day 4 days a week job makes!

But if you cut welfare you want grandma thrown over a cliff and children to starve!

You evil heartless bastards!

“One of the single best ways to climb out of poverty is taking a job, but as long as welfare provides a better standard of living than an entry-level job, recipients will continue to choose it over work,” said Michael Tanner, senior policy analyst and co-author of the study.

The study is an updated version of one Tanner put out in 1995 that estimated the full value of welfare benefits packages across the states. The 1995 study found that such tax-free welfare benefits greatly exceeded the poverty level and “their dollar value was greater than the amount of take-home income a worker would receive from an entry-level job.”

Despite efforts to curb welfare spending, many welfare programs and benefits have continued to outpace the income that many workers can receive for working an entry-level job, which disincentivizes work, according to the study.

“The current welfare system provides such a high level of benefits that it acts as a disincentive for work,” reads the study. “Welfare currently pays more than a minimum-wage job in 35 states, even after accounting for the Earned Income Tax Credit, and in 13 states it pays more than $15 per hour.”

According to the study, the federal government funds 126 separate programs designed to support low-income earners. Seventy-two of these programs provide cash or in-kind benefits to recipients. This is on top of additional welfare programs operated by state and local governments.

Welfare recipients in Hawaii get the most benefits, according to Tanner, at $29.13 per hour — or $60,590 pre-tax income annually. However, the state’s minimum wage is only $7.25 per hour, according to the Labor Department. Hawaiians on welfare also earn 167 percent of the median salary in the state, which is only $36,275.

The District of Columbia, Massachusetts and Connecticut have the next more generous welfare benefits.

D.C. welfare recipients can earn $24.43 per hour. In Massachusetts they can get $24.30 per hour. In Connecticut welfare recipients can receive $21.33 per hour.

“If Congress and state legislatures are serious about reducing welfare dependence and rewarding work, they should consider strengthening welfare work requirements, removing exemptions, and narrowing the definition of work,” says the study.

And Just like “family” they take care of you:

Fourth-grade students in Illinois are learning that “government is like a nation’s family” because it sets rules and takes care of needs such as health care and education.

So says a worksheet for social studies homework that was distributed to students at East Prairie School in Skokie, Ill, complete with a drawing of Uncle Same cradling a baby that represents the citizens.

Students are then prompted to answer 10 questions comparing government and families, including how their family provides for their health care needs and how the government does the same, and what rules families set and what rules government sets.

The worksheet it titled, “What is Government?” and then goes on to answer that question.

“Government is all of the agencies, departments, organizations, groups, individuals in a nation who make, carry out, enforce, and manage conflicts about rules and laws,” the worksheet says.

“Government is like a nation’s family. Families take care of children and make sure they are safe, healthy and educated, and free to enjoy life. Families encourage children to be independent hardworking and responsible,” it continues. “Families make and enforce rules and give appropriate punishments when rules are broken. Government does these things for its citizens, too.”

A concerned parent forwarded the homework assignment to TheBlaze. The worksheet asks the following questions:

1. How does your family keep you safe?

2. How does the government keep its citizens safe?

3. How does your family keep you healthy?

4. How does the government keep its citizens healthy?

5. How does your family help you learn and become educated?

6. How does the government help its citizens learn and become educated?

7. What kind of rules does your family have for you?

8. What kind of rules does government have for its citizens?

9. How does your family punish you when you break the rules?

10. How does government punish citizens who break the law?

Teri Madl, the superintendent for East Prairie School District 73 in Illinois, told TheBlaze the assignment was not pushing a political message.

“In response to your questions and said worksheet, it is meant to offer a simple analogy that helps children understand that part of a government’s role is to set rules, enforce those rules, and provide safety, security and freedom for its citizens,” Madl said in a statement. “It is not an attempt to include and/or promote a political message. If a parent does have a concern I would encourage him or her to contact the child’s teacher.” (the Blaze)

You’d expect such a blase’ answer from a liberal. Nothing to see, move along…Oh, we have an Obama Praise sing-a-long later, Ummm-Mmmm-mmmm…:)

Relative Morality

This week bored teens shot and killed a jogger for the thrill of it. A teen purposely shot a 13-month old baby in the face during a robbery.

In 2000, teens kidnapped, tortured and murdered an 85 year old woman. They rode her dead body around in the trunk, showing it off to at least 10 friends. Not one friend reported the murder.

In 1997 a teen gave birth in the restroom at her senior prom; cut the umbilical chord, choked her baby to death, put him in a plastic bag which she threw away and returned to dancing the night away.

I could go on and on with countless examples of youths displaying a callous disregard for human life and the moral decay eating away at the soul of America.

In an on going discussion with colleagues, we ponder. What marked the genesis of it going so horribly wrong in America?

My wife Mary believes it began with liberals being allowed to infiltrate our public schools. Their philosophy is, in a nutshell, God out and government in. Liberals introduced the concept of moral relativity. In other words, nothing is absolutely right or wrong.

Personal accountability is for the most part unheard of in our liberal government and liberal media-dominated America. Consequently, disability, food stamp, and welfare fraud are through the roof.

A colleague suggested that the root of our decline is parents dropping the ball and surrendering responsibility for their kids to the schools – free breakfast and lunch, not vetting the curriculum, and so forth.

Rush Limbaugh believes our youth’s callous disregard for life stems from abortions on demand (4,000 per day) and Dr. Jack Kevorkian promoting assisted suicide. In essence, the devaluation of life.

I was devastated after watching the Fox News special report, The Great Food Stamp Binge. The program exposed how the Obama Administration is actively attempting to change the mindset of Americans, telling them self-reliance is bad and government dependency is moral and just.

Another thing that I find depressing is that the Obama administration believes enforcing our laws should not be applied equally. They claim defending our borders and enforcing immigration law is racist because the offenders are mostly people of color. And who can forget when Attorney General Eric Holder refused to prosecute New Black Panthers members for intimidating voters at the polls?

Beyond the obvious negative political and economic consequences of our cultural and moral decline, what breaks my heart is the loss of what it means to be an American.

I have written about my dad on numerous occasions, but for those of you who are unfamiliar, my dad epitomizes what it used to mean to be an American.

Born out-of-wedlock, dad was raised in the ghetto of east Baltimore by his aunt, and has been an entrepreneur since age 10. He shined shoes on the weekends at the Greyhound bus station. On a good weekend dad earned $1.25. Dad bragged to his buddies that he was a man because he purchased his own clothes — a t-shirt — and paid room and board — 25 cents to Aunt Nee. Now in his 80′s, I still feel dad’s pride when he talks about his first job.

Dad served in the Merchant Marines. He still bears deep emotional scars from an incident when whites in the South tried to hang dad for simply getting off the ship. White shipmates saved dad’s life.

Dad married and had five kids, while breaking the color barrier in the Baltimore City Fire Department in the mid 1950s. Dad could not use the same eating utensils or drink from the same coffee pot as the white firefighters. Despite deplorable, humiliating and unfair conditions, dad won Firefighter of the Year twice. Not once did dad expect or request special concessions or lower his standards due to his skin color.

As a young minister, dad strove to be excellent; a good representative for Christ and Negroes.

After two years, a new white firefighter arrived at Engine 6. Dad said the new guy came upstairs and invited dad to have coffee with the crew.

Dad’s oxygen mask malfunctioned causing him to pass out in a burning building. The chief ordered his crew out of the inferno. Upon realizing that dad had not exited the building, John, who was the most racist of the crew, went back into the smoke filled burning building. He found dad and saved his life. The two became lifelong friends.

Dad became Baltimore’s first black paramedic. He was also a chaplain in the Baltimore Fire Dept for 50 years. He earned a doctorate in theology and has authored books.

I feel incredibly blessed that I still get occasional phone calls from my 85 year old dad who calls to tell me his latest corny joke, or one he forgot he told me. I laugh regardless. His wife, my mother, passed away almost 20 years ago.

Dad is all about trying to do the right thing and striving for excellence, not expecting anyone to give you anything. Pastor of four churches, dad still stays busy visiting the sick and the shut-ins.

So, when I see Obama and the mainstream media constantly lowering the bar, expecting less and less of Americans in every area of our lives, morally, educationally, economically and etc, I mourn the loss of what it use to mean to be an American.

If Obama and the mainstream media’s vision for America is realized, there will be far fewer great American success stories like my dad’s. Most Americans will be on food stamps, abortions and murder rates will continue to skyrocket, and mediocrity will be distributed equally. (DC)
But at least it will be “fair” and “equal” for everyone. You can’t get more than that from a Liberal.

All hell all the time.

Oh, and it’s the Republicans/Conservatives Fault! 🙂

“I actually think that a lot of people have lost their ability to laugh. Look at the country as a whole. There’s a lot more to be mad at than a rodeo clown at a rodeo trying to make somebody laugh.”– Tuffy Gessling, the Missouri rodeo clown who wore a President Obama mask at the state fair,now gets death threats from the “kind” “compassionate” and “sensitive” Liberals.

Though shalt not make fun of their God, Government, nor his emissary, B.O.

After all, Government always makes everything “fair” 🙂