Joel's Rant

This past week I helped staff the Republican Party booth at the annual county fair giving out literature, chatting with folks about the GOP’s chances this year and answering questions about candidates and all that.  I’ve been doing this for the past few years and have developed some canned responses to some of the usual questions democrats and liberals like to ask in an effort to sort of “throw me a curve”.  The one question I often get from them is “why are you a republican?”  That’s actually a pretty good question and one that most people, who have not thought about that for a while, probably can’t readily answer without stammering around for a few moments.  But I have an answer to that question and it goes like this,

I’m a republican because I believe in the Constitution of the United States.  I believe in liberty.  I believe in small government.  I believe in personal property and for people taking personal responsibility for their lives.  I believe the government should be working for the people, not the people working for the government.  That’s why I’m a republican.

Sadly our present leaders probably don’t see our country that way, and in fact, often do exactly the opposite.  There are so many examples of that opposite thinking that it’s hard to comprehend the meaning of it all.  Of course there’s the spending and the debt and the Depression-era joblessness.  There’s the redistribution of wealth and playing identity politics and treating groups differently across the spectrum of our society.  There’s the repudiation of state’s rights and the Obama inspired class warfare.  And the coercion implied in health care legislation and the finance bills and EPA mandates that sound friendly but are Trojan Horses assaulting the fabric of our culture and market driven civil social order.

But there are other ways our leaders act in blatantly unconstitutional fashion that does not necessarily capture the public’s interest.

Military voters know what I’m talking about.  Despite our armed forces sacrificing themselves on the battlefields of the Middle East and other places, it seems almost every effort is being made to keep their votes from being counted.  You don’t suppose that has anything to do with the fact that military voters are more likely to be republicans than democrats, do you?  It’s sort of the exact reverse of the border situation with illegal aliens in which Democrat efforts are being made to keep the border open because Hispanics are more likely to be democrats than republicans.  In both cases you can see Congressional and State Democrats doing everything in their power to frame the vote the way they want.

In this specific case the overwhelming evidence in 2008 showed that military voters needed at least 45 days to receive and return their absentee ballots and that more than 20 states failed to provide military voters with sufficient time to vote. This failure alone cost thousands of military members the right to vote and may have resulted in illegitimate pro-Democrat outcomes.  Now, 10 months after the passage of legislation forcing the correction of that problem, nearly one-third of the states have failed to implement one or more of the key provisions of the law. At least 11 states (Hawaii, New York, Delaware, Alaska, Washington, Maryland, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Colorado) and the District of Columbia have not implemented the 45-day deadline for mailing absentee ballots.  Note that 11 of those 12 entities are run by Democrats.  Why am I not surprised?

Then there’s the curious case of “birthright citizenship”, in which American citizenship is presently granted to anyone being born in the United States, regardless of the parent’s citizenship or immigration status.  It’s clear this issue is now starting to appear in the media because of Republican, Conservative and Tea Party opposition to rampant illegal immigration and the government’s absolute and complete refusal to do anything about it, unless of course it means suing Arizona to stop them from protecting their own border from foreign invasion.   Now that, the government is all too willing to do.

The 14^th Amendment to the Constitution says, in part, that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States…….are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”  That sounds straight forward enough so what’s the problem?

First, you need to understand that the 14^th Amendment was ratified in 1868, after the Civil War, and was specifically meant to grant citizenship to the former slaves.  It was not meant, by any stretch of the imagination of the writers of that amendment, to open the doors to citizenship to anyone else on planet Earth.  That was never the intention.  To think otherwise is a purposeful misreading and fundamental misinterpretation of the Constitution for dishonest political purposes.

Second, and more importantly, a careful reading of the words generally left absent from that sentence quoted above proves the folly of the “birthright citizenship” assumption.   The full quote, not often read in its entirety, is as follows:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” 

So what do those pesky words “…and subject to the jurisdiction thereof…” really mean?  They mean that if, at the time this Amendment was ratified, you were living under the laws, or jurisdiction, of the United States, then you were a citizen.  Like the slaves that were born here.  They obviously were born under the laws of this country at the time of the ratification.  A pregnant former slave born in Brazil, and walking across the American border the day after the 14^th Amendment was ratified, would not be a citizen because she was born in Brazil.  But what of her child?

It was clearly the custom of the 19^th century and for that matter the custom of every other country in every other century, that a child lives under the jurisdiction of the country to which its parents are citizens.  There is absolutely nothing written or stated in any record, from that time, that gives any indication that the writers of the 14^th thought anything other than that.  In fact, to do otherwise, as we unfortunately do today, provides every mother on planet Earth the power to provide her child with American jurisdiction in spite of what the citizens of the United States want.  To do otherwise gives HER the power to decide, not the citizens of this country.  To do otherwise takes the decision of who should be an American citizen out of our hands and gives it to every other mother on Earth. 

Is that what the writers of the 14^th Amendment had in mind?  Do you believe the writers’ meant for every other person on Earth to have the power to decide the American citizenship of their child, but not including the Americans themselves, that American citizens have nothing to say about who becomes a citizen of their own country?  Unless you’re blind to an un-American ideology, you know that’s not what the writers of the 14^th intended.   To think otherwise is complete nonsense.  To think otherwise is to believe in a so-called “living and breathing” Constitution which means no Constitution at all.  What bullcrap.

The poor former slave Brazilian mother noted above was living under the jurisdiction of Brazil at the time of her child’s birth in the United States, which makes her child a citizen of Brazil.  Same for the Mexican mothers of today having their child in our country.  Period.

And speaking of bullcrap, what about the Medicare and Social Security Trustees who issued a report 2 weeks ago on the fiscal health of those funds that was so fantastically and stupidly optimistic, one wonders if they made their observations from the vantage point of an alternate universe.  In fact, the trustees, all of whom are Obama regime officials (and include Timothy Geithner, Kathleen Sebelius,  CMS recess appointment  Dr. Donald M. Berwick, and Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis among others), not only claim ObamaCare extends Medicare’s trust  fund by 12 years to 2029, but also noted that the cost projections factored in a 30% cut in fees paid to Medicare physicians, something the Obama regime not only intends to avert but must avert if the health care system in America is to remain intact.

This report is based on the idea that health care costs will rise slower than in the past, despite the fact this has never happened, it includes budget cuts no one intends to make, and requires the perfect implementation of the extraordinarily flawed and imprudent ObamaCare.

In fact, the report submitted was so unbelievable and ridiculous that the Medicare Chief Actuary, Richard Foster, in an unprecedented action, provided his own report calling the former report unreasonable and implausible. 

What Foster’s report says is that the 30% cuts, scheduled to take place over 3 years, for physician’s services will not happen, otherwise ObamaCare will drive doctors away from accepting Medicare completely.  The report indicates that if the cuts were made 15% of all Medicare providing doctors would become unprofitable as a result of ObamaCare’s payment reductions.  He further indicates that the Independent Payment Advisory Board has been given the impossible task of keeping medical costs below medical inflation, which could only happen if the difference is to limit what is covered through rationing.  Where have I heard that before?

Foster’s alternative report also says that the number of medical facilities that would become unprofitable will grow to 25% by 2030 and 40% by 2050 if the health reform law is implemented as written.

Having said that, there is a huge difference between optimism (the Obama regime forecast) and completely stupid bullcrap (the Medicare Chief Actuary’s forecast).   Obama is clearly a liar.  I’m going with the Actuary on this one.

So what’s going on here?  It seems to me you either believe in the Constitution or you don’t.  You can’t cherry pick the stuff you like and disregard the stuff in the Constitution you don’t.  You can’t believe in just 7 of the Amendments to the Bill of Rights.  You either accept them all or you accept none.  That’s it.

I can’t see how anyone can truly love this country if they don’t believe in entirety of the Constitution.  It’s like having bricks for brains.  I’m sure the people who don’t believe in the Constitution love some country, it’s just a country other than the United States.  It may be something that looks like the United States, but it’s different.  It’s not my United States.  It’s not the United States I grew up in.

And that’s what the Obama regime and his Democrat minions are offering.  They’re offering something that from the outside looks like the United States, but different.  It’s a place where the government lies, and tries to get over on you, and says they’ll do one thing but then purposely does another.  Obama’s country is a place where nothing the government does can be trusted and where the people work for the government, and defer all their rights to the government. 

That place is very different from the real United States.  And very unsavory.  And probably very dangerous.

And that’s all there is to it.

It’s now official.  The people and the individual states of the United States, on one side, are now locked in a death roll with the federal government, on the other side.  It’s us versus them.  It’s good versus evil.  It’s the Founders versus the Marxists and their anti-American accomplices.  Don’t believe me?  How do you explain what’s been happening to our country over the past 18 months?

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is forcing Arizona to keep its border with Mexico open to illegal aliens despite the wishes of the American citizens who live there.  This federal government affront to the Constitution is clearly transparent when you consider that the Obama regime would never be taking this “open border” action if it was understood that illegal alien Hispanics, given the opportunity, would almost certainly vote for Republicans instead of Democrats.  You get that, right?  Otherwise, Obama’s rouge government would have the border closed in 20 minutes.  Turning the sovereignty of our country into a mere political calculation is the height of pure evil and is in absolute opposition to his oath of office to “….preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”  Clearly this government respects the “rights” and “needs” of non-citizens, who given the chance will help the current group of Obama’s minions retain power, over the rights and needs of the real American citizens.  Obama’s ends clearly justify his means, no?

How about the Obama regime closing off-shore drilling for some unspecified period of time?  While it seemed the gulf leak would be the most unprecedented eco-disaster of all time, the results so far appears not to be the case at all.  It’s essentially not even in the news anymore.  In fact, even the New York Times is reporting that while sightings of tar balls and emulsified oil can be seen here and there (those are their words), the immense patches of surface oil that covered thousands of square miles of the gulf after the April 20^th oil rig explosion are largely gone.  It seems the amount of oil dispersed, compared against the size and water volume of the gulf, is much like spilling a 12 ounce can of soda into the Superdome filled to the roof with water.  Even the marshes and wetlands are already recovering from the “disaster” and seafood has been declared safe to eat.

Robust off-shore drilling not only continues everywhere else in the world but the bidding for dormant gulf drill rigs is already underway.  It’s estimated that over 100,000 gulf state jobs will be lost, most forever, crippling local economies and spreading financial misery to more millions of Americans.  The Governor of Louisiana is now forced to fight the federal government moratorium in court again, much like what’s happening in Arizona, for the right to continue drilling.  Is it possible the Obama regime, and his rogue government, is actually attempting to starve the energy demands of the country and/or purposely creating victims of former oil industry workers and their families?  Do you still think this ban on continued drilling is a mere “safety issue?”  What do you suppose would have been the clean-up response of the Obama Interior Department had the oil leak been off the shores of blue states like Delaware, New Jersey and Maryland instead of red states like Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama?  What does common sense and your life experiences tell you?  And there’s more.

Why have the governors of 18 states demanded EPA rules favoring climate change legislation be rescinded?  Even more interesting is why the Troubled Asset Relief Program Special Inspector General (IG), Neal M. Barofsky, recently testified that decisions on which car dealerships to close as part of the auto industry bailout, closures the Obama administration forced on General Motors and Chrysler , were based in part on race and gender.  In effect, over 2000 dealerships were strong-armed into closing simply because they were not minority or woman owned.  Because of that, an estimated 100,000 people lost their jobs during a recession.  And the benefit to the car companies for this arbitrary Obama regime action was exactly zero, none.  In fact, the IG report shows the action to have been detrimental to the health of both car companies.  In response to the IG report, Obama’s “auto team czar” Ron Bloom admitted that the dealerships could have been kept open, saving those jobs, “but that doing so would have been inconsistent with the President’s mandate for “shared sacrifice.”  How completely loathsome is that?

Why did the DOJ let the New Black Panthers off the hook for obvious and malicious voter intimidation during the last presidential election with absolutely no apparent reason?

Why has the DOJ proffered rules and policies favoring the “rights” of terrorists while attacking CIA intelligence officers attempting to get information from them that would protect the nation from assault?

Why has the DOJ made it the policy of the federal government to see the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, tried for crimes in New York City, yards from ground zero, thereby allowing him the largest stage in the world from which to spin his tales of the need to destroy America? 

Why did the Obama regime agree to let the Lockerbie bomber go free?  Yes, they provided a copy of the letter they initially sent to Scottish officials making it appear, with a wink and a nod, that they opposed the release of the bomber, but Obama won’t provide copies of the two other missives they shared with Scottish officials before the bomber’s release on the grounds that any additional information about the matter being made public could make future relations with foreign governments more difficult.  How convenient.  So there’s more to the story but the Obama State Department won’t make public additional available information. Hmm……makes you wonder, no?  Whose side is Obama on, anyway?   

He and his rogue government certainly have a soft spot for killers, thugs, dictators and terrorists, and that’s no joke.  He really does. It seems he’d be much more comfortable having dinner with Hugo Chavez and the Castro brothers than with you and our family.

Why was Elena Kagan, of all people, put on the Supreme Court?  Is it possible, or is it more likely, that she’s just a political operative of Barack Obama, whom she called one of her personal heroes?  Here’s a person with no experience as a judge, and virtually no experience as a litigator in court, and no experience outside the cloistered halls of academia, stating quite frankly and clearly that the government of the United States is not limited in any way from doing virtually anything it wants to do to the people of this country, a concept totally anathema to the Constitution and the Framers and Founders of this country.  Yet she can be on the court for another 20, 30 or 40 years or more, plying that kind of anti-American logic and helping transform America into something quite alien, and quite Marxist, from the country required by our founding governing documents.  And she’s just the newest of three others on the court who think like that.  One more and America will be lost forever.  Think about what kind of country your children and grandchildren will live in if Obama’s ever able to replace one of the conservative judges.

And what about news last week that the Congress finally passed, with virtually no Republican support, the unfunded extension of unemployment benefits which will require borrowing from China over $36 billion.  But that’s not all.  Congress also passed this week, also with virtually no Republican support, an unfunded bill to provide another $26 billion so that teachers won’t be laid off.  That’s another $62 billion borrowed dollars to accomplish some friendly sounding priorities, but how friendly are they really?  It’s amazing how in just about 18 months $62 billion went from being considered real money to now it’s just chump change.  That’s a real problem.

How many weeks should someone expect to receive unemployment benefits?  At what point do unemployment benefits become welfare payments?  How about 99 weeks?  How about 126 weeks?  We’re there now.  Let’s be honest for a moment.  How many people look seriously for a job until just before unemployment benefits are scheduled to run out?  Many of us know people that could be working but are instead waiting for the “right” position to become available or are taking a “vacation” as long as the government is willing to pay for it.  Let’s get real.

How about those poor teachers that will be laid off without additional “emergency” funding?  And what will happen to the poor children without those poor teachers?  What about the fact that, according to the Cato Institute, public school employment nationwide has risen 10 times faster since 1970 than student enrollment?  That’s 1000%, for crying out loud!   Is it possible that teacher unions have held taxpayers hostage over the years, and that teacher salaries, which are only for 10 months of work,  are way out of proportion to what the market place should be paying, and that a huge number of administrative personnel should be removed, and that teachers are completely protected from the perils of recession when private sector jobs are not, and on and on?  But the Marxist government is beholden to teachers and other public employee unions in the way described in detail by the socialists of the past, including Karl Marx himself.  It’s part of his manifesto.  Instead of continuing to fund even higher the public education monstrosity of ineptness, there may not be another sector in the American economy more in need of reducing spending than public education.  But is anyone in our rogue government responsible enough to say that?

And then there’s the curious case of Dr. Donald Berwick.  Here’s a Marxist, apparently pretty good as a medical doctor, but who has stated convincingly that he supports a single payer plan for the country, marvels at the British health care model despite its failure, and supports emphatically the rationing of health care in America, yet gets to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) without a congressional hearing.  Barack Obama provided him with a “recess appointment”, an action permitted by the Constitution ostensibly for when, particularly in the old days when travel was difficult and time consuming, Congress is in a long term recess.  In this case Congress was in recess for only 2 weeks and in previous such appointments Congressional hearings had already taken place, like when Ambassador John Bolton was provided a recess appointment by George W. Bush.  The importance of hearings, of course, is so Congress can complete their constitutional responsibility to ask questions and make decisions about the people tasked with running important government business.  In this case no questions were asked of this guy, who is tasked with managing a federal agency with a budget over $600 billion, more than even the Department of Defense, and has responsibility for crafting the regulations required by ObamaCare.  You’d think people would want to know more about this guy, no?

Why then would the Obama regime want to keep Berwick from being grilled by Congress?  The answer, of course, is because he’s a rank political operative of Barack Obama, much like Elena Kagan and Sonya Sotomayor before her, and will do whatever is asked of him by Barack Obama.  Case closed.  The Constitution once again betrayed.

The theme of the Constitution is that the interest of the citizens must be paramount over the interests of the government.  The complete reversal of that theme, coupled by the fact that the Constitution is being willfully misinterpreted by the President, Congress and the Supreme Court, proves that there is no end to the destruction of our country from an enemy within.

And that’s all there is to it.

It was quite a spectacle to see earlier this week, Barack Obama standing among a crowd of auto workers claiming his stimulus and bailouts saved the industry from disaster and even increasing their payroll by 55,000 workers.  Didn’t Joe Biden state not too long ago that the 8 million jobs lost since the beginning of the recession were not coming back?  Didn’t the government recently announce 3 million jobs “saved” or created yet unemployment grew from 8% in February 2009 to today’s 9.5% and that doesn’t include those millions that have literally dropped out of the labor market, otherwise the jobless percentage would be over 17%, also known as “depression era territory?”  And wasn’t it just this week that the Obama regime floated the idea of another jobs stimulus on top of the $862 billion stimulus already passed last year?  And why would unemployment benefits need to be extended beyond 99 weeks if jobs were actually being created?  Is that progress, or is that admitting disaster?

Actually, having bailed out GM to the tune of $55 billion ($7 billion approved during the Bush administration and $48 billion under Obama plus Obama’s additional $25 billion to Chrysler) I’d expect some auto worker jobs would be created, although at $1 million per job I’d judge that action to have been quite the failure.  And the Obama regime’s forcing GM to build and market their new electric car, the Chevy Volt, reeks of dangerous and politically motivated tidings to come.  Getting only 40 miles to a 3-hour charge (and exactly where does that increased electricity use come from if not fossil fuel power plants) and with a sticker price of $41,000 per unit, and on top of that being subsidized by the taxpayers to the tune of an additional $7500 per unit, you can see this also will be a complete and utter failure.  Who, besides a complete fool or rich democrat (or is that the same thing) , would buy a car like that?  Only the government would miss seeing this effort as a failure.  You’d honestly expect decisions like that to be made by the Soviet Politburo, but that’s what happens when government invades and coerces the private sector.  We can only expect more of this in the other industries being taken over or being invaded by the government. 

And these are the same people who plan to control your health care and tell you what you can and can’t get from your doctor.

If that doesn’t scare the shoot out of you try this.

Niall Ferguson, a professor of history at Harvard University, reports that the great nations and empires of the past were destroyed, and with the fantastic speed of only one or two generations, by ruinous debt and unsustainable ficsal policy.  As Ferguson writes, what are the implications for our country today? The most obvious point is that the fall of great nations are associated with fiscal crises, sharp imbalances between revenues and expenditures, and the mounting cost of servicing a mountain of public debt.  Sound familiar? 

Think of Spain in the 17th century; already by 1543 nearly two-thirds of ordinary revenue was going to interest to pay for the loans by which the Habsburg monarchy financed itself.

Or think of France in the 18th century; between 1751 and 1788, the eve of Revolution, interest and amortization payments rose from just over 25% of tax revenue to 62%.  With that, the Bourbon monarchy passed from triumph to terror with astonishing speed.

Finally, consider Britain in the 20th century. Its real problems came after 1945, when a substantial proportion of its now immense debt burden was in foreign hands, amounting to about 33% of the national GDP.  The Suez crisis in 1956 proved that a financially strapped and weakened Britain, beholden to the US for fiscal support, could not act in defiance of the US in the Middle East, setting the seal on the end of their empire.

If you believe the United States is impervious to those disasters consider the fact that the Obama regime has run a deficit of $1.4 trillion two straight years in a row, about 10% of GDP, with more $1 trillion deficits for the next several years in the future.  Since 2001, in the space of just 10 years, the federal debt in public hands has doubled as a share of GDP from 32% to a projected 66% next year. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest projections, the debt could rise above 90 per cent of GDP by 2020 and reach 146 per cent by 2030 and 344 per cent by 2050. 

So how will our leaders deal with this extraordinarily dangerous situation?  By allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, thereby raising taxes on every person and every business in America that still pays taxes.  What that does is take money out of the private sector, where it is otherwise spent building industries, upgrading machines and equipment, providing dollars for research and development and thereby creating high paying jobs that expand markets and increase economic stability.  They’re also going to attack the energy industries and make it even harder to get credit and loans and eventually passing some form of card check to further cripple our ability to complete in the global economy.  And that doesn’t even include the coming VAT tax, wealth tax and potentially taking over your IRA.

Just look at how the stimulus money was wasted.  Look at how all the bailout money was spent.  Look at how Fannie and Freddie have been given, even with all we know about them, a free hand with no monetary limits to continue their destruction of the housing and mortgage industries.  It never ends.  
 
And isn’t it interesting that no matter how high taxes get, and how high the budget deficit gets, it is never enough.  Even with budgets now about $4 trillion each year, for some reason, there’s never enough money for everything.  It’s still not high enough.

How can any significant number of jobs be created when the US corporate tax rate, the second highest in the world, is 35% while the tax on small business is set to rise to 39.6% after January 1, 2011?  Small businesses, like your local pizza restaurant and barber shop, the job creating engine of America, will pay higher taxes than even billion dollar corporations?  How can jobs be created when the people with the money to hire workers will have that money stolen away by the government?

It takes 150,000 new jobs created each month just to keep the unemployment figures stable.  It would take 400,000 jobs each month for 3-years just to get back down to 8% unemployment.  What’s the chance that’s going to happen with this Marxist, anti-business, anti-capitalist, anti-free market, government in control of this country?

The answer is none; there is absolutely no chance that’s going to happen.  In fact, it’s going to get worse, much worse.  Even Ben Bernanke this so.  We’re already Greece.  And when we get worse than Greece there’s going to be civil unrest. 

And that’s all there is to it.