The Smoke Break

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The Democrats’ Dilemma

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“If you voted for Obama in ’08 to prove you were not a bigot,
vote for anyone else in ’12 to prove your not an idiot.”
(Comment at FOX News website)

This weekend’s FOX News poll asks the question:  Could Obama Face Rival for Democratic Nomination?  But the real question is SHOULD he?

In his Saturday address, a few hard-core Kool-Aid drinkers and the media hacks paid to listen heard the obvious:  “You’ve got a right to be frustrated. I am. Because you deserve better. I don’t think it’s too much for you to expect that the people you send to this town start delivering.”

What President Lame Duck conveniently forgets to mention is that HE is one of the “people” sent to Washington and voters expected HIM to deliver.  And to deliver better; more than just petulant, divisive snarking and pointing fingers and admonitions to eat our peas while he and Marie…errr…Michelle spend our tax money on Waygu beef and vacation after vacation.  The people who voted for him expected that his ability to orate off a teleprompter was a result of having real-world leadership abilities; they didn’t expect things like a budget so far out in left field even the most progressive liberal entitlement-mentality derangement syndrome Democrats couldn’t find a way to hold their noses to vote for it.

So now, after growing the deficit faster in two years than G.W. did in eight and unemployment refusing to budge no matter how much phantom “shovel-ready” is thrown at it, we are being told that very same 9+% unemployment is really the equivalent of jobs; apparently because in the Ivy League bubble-land of unicorns and fairy dust money earned by one person and given to another to spend on necessities is still money earned and spent; even though there is no multiplier in the equation and so this merely maintains a consumption status quo simply by saying it is so it magically creates “growth”.

The American people aren’t stupid.  That kind of “new math” only proves the growing suspicion that public education ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.

Any Democrat who can still harbor a tiny shred of self-respect should see the writing on the wall.  It’s not the Tea Party pointing out the serious economic and Constitutional problems in this country and insisting on grown-up, real-world solutions that is the problem here, it’s that their Chosen One who has failed them.  Rather spectacularly, I might add.

If they were smart they’d give Obama a cardigan and a primary challenger.

Trickle-Down Hypocrisy

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Last November Americans voted to flip the House over on its progressive liberal head and put grownups in charge of the nation’s purse strings.  They also put a serious conservative tilt on the Senate.

To anyone with a modicum of common sense the message was clear:  hope and change means the American dream, not working your ass off so someone else doesn’t have to.

But finally, with someone at the helm who has made a living off the taxpayer teat his whole life and spent the first two years of his presidency throwing the Constitution under the bus, America has now finally gotten up the courage to stare straight into the eyes of the monster birthed by progressives some 76 years ago:  we’ve run out of other people’s money.  So the topic of the day has been the debt ceiling and the games have begun.

But like most of what we pay Washington politicians to do, it’s pointless.  There is no need to default on our debt, nor on things like Social Security and Medicare payments.  What we wouldn’t be able to pay for are all the unnecessary services that have accumulated like rats in a dumpster over the last 76-odd years, the vast majority of which are unconstitutional anyway.

Here is a chart put out by the administration’s bailout buddy, AIG, that demonstrates this in black and white:

To us regular folks (who can’t possibly understand or be bothered with something as Big And Important as the national debt) the chart points out the obvious:  decisions have to be made on how to spend the money left over after we pay the mortgage and utilities.  Do we opt out of that daily cuppa joe at Starbucks (grants for “cowboy poetry”) or do we skip a trip to Kohl’s for clothing we don’t really need anyway (Marie Antoinette…errrr…Michelle Obama’s staff)?  The choices are endless and some decisions save us more money than others but like Dave Ramsey is fond of saying, it’s “beans and rice and rice and beans” until you get your debt paid off so the non-essentials have to go.

President Walking Eagle repeatedly scolded we should eat peas we can’t afford on our rice-and-beans budget and threatened to withhold Social Security checks but as the chart shows it’s just an empty threat and the kind he makes solely try to and gain political points.  I don’t think the American people are buying it, though, because the more he tries to blame those who’ve taken the time to put a budget down in black-and-white the more his approval rating continues to plummet and it now sits happily below his disapproval rating, earning him the new monicker of President Lame Duck.  And the American people aren’t missing the fact he’s illegally using federal property to film campaign ads, either.  Nor does it go unnoticed that we’re paying his bloated staff to help run his 2012 re-election campaign.

Another sign of what is either cluelessness or simply willful ignorance from those “best and brightest” in Washington of the people’s intentions in the November election is Tax-Cheat Timmy’s statement that he “never thought they would take it [raising the debt ceiling] this close to the edge”.  Is it because when a Democrat-majority Congress fails to pass a budget for well over 800 days you get used to seeing the limit raised on the credit card without any questions?

I don’t expect Tax-Cheat Timmy expected the nation’s credit rating would be downgraded when the debt ceiling was raised without addressing the underlying issue of continued overspending, either.  So remind me again:  exactly why is this clueless man in charge of the Treasury?

Oh yeah, for the same reason President Lame Duck threw off his Jimmy Carter cardigan and danced at a reelection campaign fundraiser he called his 50th birthday party.  Said party paid for in part, of course, by our hard-earned tax dollars.

Demonstrating yet again that the only thing first class about progressive liberals is their hypocrisy.

Lining Up RINOs

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They haven’t passed a budget for 798 days, but today the Senate voted to give President Walking Eagle (and any other wanker that follows him) more czar power via the S. 679, the “Presidential Appointment Efficiency and Streamlining Act of 2011“.  Not only is this an abdication of their oversight responsibilities, but they have effectively allowed this and any president the ability to add to the taxpayer burden in the form of salaries and benefits for these cling-ons.

Though it doesn’t stand a chance of passing the House, the bill passed with help from the following RINOs:

 Lamar Alexander, TN
 John Barrasso, WY
 Roy Blunt, MO
 Scott Brown, MA
 Thad Cochran, MS
 Susan Collins, ME
 Bob Corker, TN
 John Cornyn, TX
 Michael Enzi, WY
 Lindsey Graham, SC
 John Hoeven, ND
 Kay Hutchison, TX
 Mike Johanns, NE
 Mark Kirk, IL
 Jon Kyl, AZ
 Richard Lugar, IN
 John McCain, AZ
 Mitch McConnell, KY
 Lisa Murkowski, AK
 Robert Portman, OH
 Pat Roberts, KS
 Jefferson Sessions, AL
 Richard Shelby, AL
 Olympia Snowe, ME
 John Thune, SD
 Patrick Toomey, PA
 Roger Wicker, MS

Lots of familiar faces; faces that need to be sent back to obscurity during their next election cycle.

Happy Birthday, America

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Beloved Republic and mankind’s greatest experiement in allowing ordinary people to demonstrate the true length and breadth of their personal potential, in short order you proved the Founders correct in their optimism. 

Yet at the same time, as fighting breaks out over the Constitutionality of the debt ceiling, federal bailout after federal bailout and the individual mandate of Obamacare, with career politicians fattened on the tax payments of those ordinary people leading the charge to discard that precious document as being somehow “naive” or “out of touch”, our Pantywaist In Chief prefers to indulge in his predilection for golf and the race card and proves the Founders correct in their greatest fears.

 In his first inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson wisely admonished that America must “…pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter–with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens–a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.”

How far we’ve come since Jefferson felt the need to lay out such clear warning.  There is no need to lay out the ever-lengthening laundry list of crimes against those once self-evident truths that have been perpetuated on a daily basis over the last 3/4 of a century by tragic, frightened little souls who harbor no goal but that of replacing King George.  The question we now face on this, the 235th birthday of the most powerful nation in the history of this world, is do enough of us remember the great gift we were given and are we strong enough wrest it back again?

If I have one wish for America today, it is that the answer is yes.

God bless America.

Shameless

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When you are trying to get yourself out of credit debt, the first thing every advisor tells you is to sit down and write out a list of your expenses and your income, and from that create a budget that allows you to pay off your debt and live within your means.  For many of us, it’s a bit of a shock to see we exactly how much more we spend than we make but being unable to raise our personal debt ceilings we then gird our proverbial loins and scrimp along on beans and rice for however long it takes us to get out of debt.

And once the credit habit has been broken, most people don’t pick it up again.

The fact that the United States has not had a budget in place since April 29, 20o9 tells us one thing:  Congress critters are not normal people.  They don’t live in the real world but instead think Washington, D.C. is the place where some kind of magic fairy dust turns the sweat of the laboring worker paying their taxes into “federal money” and that federal money can be pulled from thin air.

Even though it is one of Congress’ primary responsibilities to budget America’s money, Senate Majority Leader Harry (the Grinch) Reid told the Los Angeles Times recently, “It would be foolish for us to do a budget at this stage.”  And Kent Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, told reporters that he planned to “defer” work on a 2012 budget indefinitely.

‘Scuse me?  You are going on the record saying you flat-out REFUSE to do your job?

Oh, no.  That’s not what they meant.  So what we got were games and more games.  A forced up-or-down Senate vote on the House-passed budget (why debate to a legitimate compromise when you can later use the vote to – wrongly – claim the GOP wants to kill Grandma).  A retaliatory forced up-or-down vote on President Walking Eagle’s budget vision to encourage entitlement mentality (one so badly conceived that even the left-wing progressives voted against it and it went down in flames, 97-0).

They are acting like college students who won’t give Mommy and Daddy back their credit card or pay the bill they’ve run up on it.  Not only is this childish, it is dangerous.  If you and I must live within our means while providing our country with the money required to fulfill its Constitutional responsibilities, then those in Congress must live within the means we are able to provide them and apply them first and foremost to those things that fulfill those Constitutional responsibilities.  Like to our military and protecting our borders.  Not using the sweat of our brows to allow more and more of the progressive left’s little pet “victims” to do nothing and allow those directing the flow of money to become rich doing so. 

You cannot deserve what you have not earned.  Congress, and this administration in particular, deserves nothing except a good knock upside its collective head.

The Statesman Vs. The Turncoat

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It has been such an exciting week.  With our Turncoat President off reassuring Great Britain that he has no clue (or class), our House was graced with the presence of a true statesman, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  Unfortunately, Bibi was forced to explain to those of us who don’t have the luxury of galvanting around the world at the taxpayers’ expense that for there to ever be peace between Israel and the Palestinians, the Palestinians must actually want peace, not the annihilation of Israel (a small fact that strangely seems to elude our self-proclaimed smartest. president. evah.)

It is safe to say that some of the difference between Bibi and BO stems from the way they grew up and, in particular, how they spent those crucial first years crossing over into adulthood:

The values set in place then are quite evident today and are rather like the difference between having oatmeal for breakfast versus Fruit-Loops.  One is solid nourishment, the other sugary fluff with no real substance.  Bibi’s speech, delivered with proper eye contact and with only a few notes for reference instead being read off a teleprompter, was interrupted countless times by heartfelt, spontaneous applause as he stated simple, real-world truths that a majority of Americans already understand.  It was grand and it was glorious and it was a shame that President Walking Eagle would be conveniently absent to hear it.

And though it was somehow fitting our president would instead be mucking up a toast to the Queen of England, the truth is that it was actually rather embarrassing that a foreign head of state should be the one to provide such clear leadership to the American people.

Assassination Redefined

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If the previous administration had done this, the lamestream media and entire left wing would have been frothing rabidly at their collective mouths in claims of violation of human rights, but President Pantywaist continues down his predecessor’s path, following each step of its plan to the point our brave military is able to take out Osama bin Laden and what we get is the spin that death by assassination, much like death by abortion, is suddenly a Really Good Thing.

Now, this isn’t to say that bin Laden didn’t deserve his ignoble end.  Whether he had a gun in his hand as the bullets rang out or whether he cowardly tried to use a wife as a human shield from the inevitable cessation of his raison d’être matters little when such inner evil is so penultimate it must be stopped by any means. 

That our ignorant Golfboy In Chief has had no choice but to acquiese to those with real knowledge and experience in the ways of the real world but the great unwashed liberal masses believe him to have done something different and somehow something more heroic than President Bush and his advisors would be mind-boggling except for the fact that hypocrisy is the very foundation of progressive liberalism.

Why A “Third Palestinian Intifada” Is Immoral & Just Plain Wrong

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Time for a little history lesson as the Middle East continues to burn unchecked and Arab Palestinians swarm social media sites like Facebook to rally other anti-Semites to attack Israel again; prompted by a liberal’s recent cruel blathering that “EVERYTHING that is wrong w/U.S. Mideast Policy falls at the feet of our blind support for Israel; a nation created by stealing from others and founded upon lessons not learned in the Holocaust.”

 There were no such issues nor anyone called a “Palestinian” prior to the end of WWI when the Turks, by their association with Germany, lost the war.  The southern portion of their Ottoman Empire was “mandated” to France and Britain under the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916 which assigned (“mandated”) Lebanon and Syria to France and assigned “Palestine” (today’s Jordan, Israel and “West Bank”) to Great Britain, who liked the idea of having Palestine be the national Jewish homeland.   (Note that to be “Palestinian” meant one could be either Arab or Jew and both were living across this entire area without problems.)

 In 1923 came GB’s administrative mandate that Jews would be permitted only west of the Jordan river.  In effect, GB “chopped off” 75% of the originally proposed Jewish Palestinian homeland to form an Arab Palestinian nation called Trans-Jordan (renamed “Jordan” in 1946).  Bottom line:  the Palestinian Arabs now had their very own “Arab Palestinian” homeland while the remaining 25% of west of the Jordan River would be the Jewish Palestinian homeland.

 But this wasn’t enough for the Arabs and those who were living in the Jewish Palestine went on the offensive.  Witness the Hebron massacres of 1929 and later the 1936-39 “Arab Revolt.” GB gave up on the whole thing and turned the matter over to the U.N. in 1947 and they decided to settle things by proposing Resolution 181, which essentially gave more of the original 25% of Jewish Palestine to the Arabs based on population concentrations.  The Jews agreed but the Arabs rejected it, wanting the entire original 25%.

 Israel was then officially “born” on May 14, 1948 and on May 15, 1948, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Yemen together invaded Israel. Most of the Arabs living within the boundaries of the newly born country were encouraged to leave by the invading Arab armies to facilitate the slaughter of the Jews and were promised all Jewish property after the Arab armies won the war.  They left because it made (sick) sense:  let someone else do the dirty work and come back later to claim the spoils.

 But 19 months later, their calculated risk to leave turned out to be a bad idea.  It cost Israel a full 1% of its entire population but they won the war.  The Arabs who did not leave are today’s Israeli-Arab citizens; those who chose to leave in hopes of later gains were the first wave of “Palestinian Arab refugees.”  At the end of it all, what remained of that almost-created second Arab Palestinian State ended up with Egypt occupying the Gaza Strip and Trans-Jordan occupying Judea-Samaria (a.k.a. the “West Bank” of the Jordan River) and Jerusalem. In the next year (1950) Trans-Jordan formally merged this West Bank territory into itself and granted all those “Palestinian” Arabs living there Jordanian citizenship.  Since Trans-Jordan was then no longer confined to one side of the Jordan River, it renamed itself simply “Jordan.”  The bottom line here is that the Arabs of Palestine ended up with nearly 85% of the original territory of Palestine; now called Jordan but in reality a little more than their original share, the ARAB Palestine.

 Now consider this:  From 1949-67, when all of Judea-Samaria (the West Bank and Jerusalem} and Gaza were 100% under Arab (Jordanian & Egyptian) control, no effort was EVER made to create a second Palestinian State for the Arabs living there.  It is laughable to say Israel should now provide these same Arabs with their own country when their fellow Arabs failed to do so.

 This is apparently because the Arabs had other plans for in 1967 the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian armies mobilized along Israel’s narrow and seemingly indefensible borders in preparation for a massive invasion to eliminate her. The battle cry heard throughout the Arab world was then, as it continues to be, “Slaughter the Jews” and “Throw the Jews into the Sea!”  How embarrassing that once again, but only six days later, Israel won this war, too, and in doing so gained the entire Sinai Peninsula.  Through their own actions, the Arab losers became simply more “Palestinian Arab refugees”.

 It makes no sense to to me, but in 1982 Israel gave the rich Sinai Desert back to Egypt.

 And so the nonsense from the Arab side continues.  The best way I have heard this put is that the so-called “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is essentially, “In many ways an Islamic religious jihad against the Jews.”

 So spare me any sop about Israeli “persecution” and Jewish “understanding”.  If anything, the Jews have been far too soft in the face of this Arab insanity.  Insanity now spreading around the internet like wildfire with calls for a Third Palestinian Intifada on May 15, 2011.

Unnecessary Services?

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If a government shutdown includes only “unnecessary services” (military pay not included), why does it take 800,000 people to perform them and why don’t we just cut them permanently?

That’s the question that kept running through my mind as our unrepresenting representatives in Congress through cat turds at each other in the Washington sandbox this week.  The left-wingnuts got their panties in a wad over the thought of properly defunding Planned Parenthood; Representative Louise Slaughter went so far as to accuse the GOP of being out to kill women.  President Walking Eagle slipped and showed enormous transparency when he called a bill intended to fund only the military through the rest of the year and thereby get that concern off the table a “distraction” – are you listening, beloved servicemen and women?  Your Commander In Chief values entitlements to his voting block more than he does your willingness to lay your lives on the line in defense of his freedom to make an idiot out of himself.  Again.  He is so concerned about what the wacks in the U.N. who hate the United States think he’s willing to illegally send you into Libya but doesn’t see caring for you as worthy of his attention.  Only his veto.

Shameful doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Hypocritical Union Protest Planned In Michigan

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The poster child for all that’s wrong with liberalism who became obese by biting the capitalist hand that paid for his too many Big Macs, Michael Moore, is now setting his ego…errr…his sites on the state of Michigan.  In an open letter to labor unions on his website he calls for union members to fake calling in sick to work and students to cut class:

Please show up at noon on Wednesday for our first mega-rally against this insanity. Hundreds of groups are already organizing car pools and buses. You can right now just declare yourself an organizer and get your friends and neighbors committed to being in Lansing. If ever there were a day to call in sick, Wednesday is it (because this IS sick). Students, if ever there were a day to cut class and become a participant in your democracy, Wednesday is it. This event needs to be HUGE — and I believe it will be if you will simply be there and take a stand.

Much attention has been paid to Wisconsin in recent weeks. Well, they got nothing on what’s going on here in Michigan. Rick Snyder is Scott Walker on steroids. There’s never been what even the AARP calls “an all-out attack” like this on us. Trust me, you will rue the day you sat home and did nothing while thieves posing as politicians stole your Great Lakes State from you.

All because Governor Rick Snyder wants to balance Michigan’s budget by taxing monies not previously taxed and putting Michigan in a welcoming position for business (and therefore jobs) by lowering the state business tax.  Yeah, ok, that Emergency City Management idea needs more work and it isn’t fun to realize that you are going to become like almost everyone else in the country by paying taxes on your pension (Michigan is one of only 4 states that doesn’t tax pensions) but let me assure you that once he won the primary, Governor Snyder had the support of Michigan Tea Party members who know full well drastic measures must be taken to balance the budget.  And success doesn’t come by losing money in the form of film credits that do nothing more than bring more La-La Land entitlement types to rub shoulders with the mafia-run labor unions.

Besides, if the AARP doesn’t like it and it is giving unions heartburn, it must be good.