Joel's Rant

With all the coverage of the budget deficit and the debt ceiling it was easy to miss the report that came this week from the Commerce Department that indicated the nation’s growth in the last quarter was 1.3%. To put that into some perspective, it takes quarterly growth of at least 3% just to keep up with the population of new workers coming of age and seeking employment. Essentially, 3% growth means being just even, treading water, just keeping up. It’s, for all practical purposes, no actual growth at all. It’s what an economy does when it’s standing in place, not moving forward or back. You get the idea.

If only our nation had 3% growth, what a lovely thing that would be. Instead we had 1.3% growth in the last quarter. But that’s not the worst news that was reported, news that no one really saw or cared about given the debt ceiling crisis and all that. No, the worst news was that the reported 1.9% growth of the previous quarter was actually incorrect. It turns out the actual real growth figure was 0.4% growth.

Now here’s the deal. The nation’s economy is dead in the water. We’re actually listing to the left. All this Obama and liberal and Democrat talk about an economic recovery, a recovery that’s underway but just not fast enough, and any other talk from Geithner or Schumer or Reid and the others about recovery is utter bullcrap. Not only is it a complete lie to say we’re in a recovery, but the ease with which these people lie reveals something very dark and sinister and troubling. It’s serial, it’s psychopathic. It just is.

If you believe those guys, or their media sycophants, you’re living on another planet. There’s no recovery at all. In fact, there may actually be a real live depression going on. Job growth is dead. Home buying is dead. Consumer spending is dead. With fully 25 million people either unemployed, or under-employed, what we have here is your classic stagnation, with stagflation not far behind.

This brings us to the debt ceiling and the farce that’s playing out for the entire world to see. It would be funny to watch if it weren’t so serious and the stakes so high. We have the Republicans on one side, furiously trying to put plan after plan, proposal after proposal on the record, hoping to get the Democrats to allow a vote up or down and then use that debate to formulate a policy every side can live with. My own opinion is that the Republicans should stop negotiating and let the August 2nd deadline come and see what happens, but that’s beside the point.

Since April, the House Republicans have actually passed, and made official and transparent, the Ryan budget, the Cut, Cap & Balance proposal, and the Boehner plan. The Democrats have not even offered a budget, let alone passed one, as required by law, in almost 3 years!

On the other side we have the freaks of the left. You can’t describe them in any other way because to do so would lend them a sense of seriousness of which they do not deserve. They are not serious people, they are destroyers. For the past 7 months they have offered exactly nothing. They have not offered a plan or a policy. There is nothing specific on paper, there’s nothing written down for others to examine, they have provided no documentation. They just talk……and talk and talk.

Obama’s the best talker, a talker in the mold of Castro or Chavez, droning on and on, blaming everyone else, using his now almost daily national audience to stoke, the way a third-world dictator would, hate and loathing of the Republicans. Or if not Republicans one day, it’s hating the rich, the oil companies, insurance companies, or jet owners the next day. It’s about hating the “millionaires & billionaires” (who are actually more likely to be a teacher and fireman married to each other and earning about $250,000 a year). It’s about hating the people on Wall Street. It’s about hating business or corporations. It’s about hating CEO’s or drug companies. But it’s always about hate.

Obama and his minions are very hateful people.

And so they offer nothing. Even after all the discussions and negotiations about spending cuts Jack Lew, Obama’s director of the budget, admitted that the Democrats had actually agreed to only $2 billion in discretionary spending cuts. That’s $2 billion; or 1/20th of 1% of the expected budget deficit for 1 year.
But even that wasn’t written down anywhere.

And the Senate Democrats then refused to even debate the bills the House sent over for a vote. Not only did they not vote, 51 of them agreed not to even hear the specifics of the bill, to not even listen to what was proposed. The Democrats essentially put their hands over their mouths, eyes and ears and would not even admit that there was something physical sitting directly in front of them. They’re the ones proclaiming a calamity in the American economy if something isn’t done to raise the debt ceiling and they refuse to vote on or even discuss the Republican’s offer of a resolution. And literally no sooner do they refuse the Republican’s outright, but have the unmitigated chutzpah to appear before a national audience just moments later to say the Republicans are negotiating in bad faith. You can’t make this stuff up.

So what does all this mean? I don’t believe the Republicans are necessarily noble people. They clearly are politicians and have their own stuff. But they’re not anti-American. They don’t hate America. They don’t hate the people they are supposed to represent.

The Democrats, on the other hand, want to create an additional $10 trillion in budget deficits over the next 10 years to add to the $14 trillion in public debt already on the books. They have no problem raising taxes on those still lucky enough to be employed and will increase those taxes by 5% or 50%, they really don’t care. They don’t care that the nation’s accrued debt, by 2020, will be over $25 trillion. They don’t care that debt levels of that magnitude cannot be sustained. They don’t care that the civil society might collapse, that civil unrest could break out the way it has in Greece. They really don’t care.
They don’t care that the economy is dead. They lie about it to convince you otherwise, but the facts tell the truth. And ObamaCare has not even hit the streets yet.

The Democrats are the party of Fast & Furious. Like the reprehensible scandal that bemoans that name, people like Obama and Pelosi and Wasserman-Schultz and others don’t think things through; they have no interest in the consequences; they’re not concerned about how they impact on people’s lives. They refuse to take any blame, they refuse to be reflective of their actions, they refuse to be transparent, they refuse to take any responsibility.

When you take a moment and look at our country and the political class that is navigating our ship of state you realize something really scary. This present debate isn’t at all about America’s economy, or our debt or debt ceiling or any of that. This is about America and the kind of country we are and the kind of country we will become. This is about the future of America for us and our children.

This is an existential battle between two different and opposite ideologies. One ideology is good, even brilliant, if otherwise managed clumsily and often weakly. The other is evil and will bring down our once great society and culture, bringing menace and misery to everyone but the political class that adores it.
I hate to say it, but the Democrats hate America and they hate Americans. They hate all of us. Their actions prove it.

And that’s all there is to it.

A friend of mine is very well traveled and has visited almost every continent as part of his job.  He likes to tell the story about a village he visited in Namibia in which the elders decided they needed to do something to put the huge number of local unemployed men to work. 

It seems the village fresh water supply was at a well, about 5 miles from the village center, and each day the women-folk had to walk back and forth at least once with huge and obviously heavy buckets for their family’s daily water supply.  The elders decided they needed to drill a new well in the village center to make life so much easier for everyone, and so they contracted with a drilling company which arrived with a hydraulic drill to make the well happen.  But instead of using the hydraulic drill, the elders decided to have the company mount a huge wheel placed on its side, with each spoke of the wheel being about 100 feet in length, at the top of the drill hole.  The elders then had all the unemployed men in the village take positions along the spokes to turn the wheel manually, thereby turning the drill bit in the hole, sort of the way oxen might have been used in ancient times.  That was the elder’s way of creating jobs and lowering the village unemployment rate.

 It seems Barack Obama has a lot in common with the village elders, tossing aside efficient and labor-saving technology in favor of a manual process that seems, at first glance, to employ more workers.  Unfortunately, Barack Obama is not an elder of a primitive African village but is rather the leader of the world’s foremost 21^st Century engineering and technologically driven society.  His comment that ATMs are taking jobs from bank tellers, thereby causing unemployment to be high, reveals not only his archaic and disturbing way of thinking about job creation, but his complete lack of understanding of how technology creates more jobs than it eliminates though the process of “creative destruction”. 

Yes, Mr. President, ATMs reduce the number of bank tellers required, but think of the enormous number of new workers it takes to build the ATMs, and maintain the ATMs, and service the ATMs, and develop new tasks a person can do at an ATM, and all the new companies and businesses that have been developed because of ATM technology.  ATMs now populate essentially every country on Earth and allow a person in one country to make a transaction in another country, a continent away, and automatically converts the money of one into that of the other and on and on.  Yes, the number of bank tellers is reduced, but imagine the number of new and higher paying jobs and wealth that have been created by the invention of ATMs, in precisely the same way humans benefitted from the automobile industry took over from the horse utilization industry, for crying out loud.

That’s just one example of creative destruction and the fact that the president of the United States, arguably the keeper of our economy, is so totally clueless about this process is shocking, absolutely stupefying, and jaw-dropping in its ignorance and frightening when you think of the impact that apparent dementia has on the rest of us.  It also underscores the danger our country faces with respect to the crushing official unemployment rate of over 9%, with the under-employment rate closer to 20% when the guy steering our ship of state is stupid.

If only that were the only example of incredible Obama and Democrat stupidity.   Unfortunately, it’s not. 

Just this past week Senate Democrats, led by Charles Schumer of New York, said additional stimulus spending should be included in the discussions to raise the debt ceiling even as a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report shows the public debt of the United States will double, from its present obscene level of $14 trillion, to $28 trillion by 2035 if spending policies are not changed.  Amazingly enough, on the same day the CBO released a report detailing Obama’s stimulus spending had added almost $5 trillion in public debt in just 2 ½ years, Democrats were calling for more spending.  Are they freaking kidding?  You can’t make this stuff up.

Anyone recall the $830 billion stimulus ($1.2 trillion with interest included) of February 2009 and how that failed?  Anyone recall that the Federal Reserve has now far overtaken China as the largest buyer of American debt, meaning the Federal Reserve is literally and simply printing money and devaluing your dollars after 2 rounds of quantitative easing?

None of this spending is working and the economic numbers prove it, yet the Democrats are calling for even more spending.  How completely stupid is that?  Is it actually possible these people believe their own self-serving rhetoric, that we can spend ourselves to prosperity?  Or is there something more sinister and even evil afoot?   Think about that.

And how completely stupid is it for Barack Obama and the Democrats to continue to call for more and higher taxes as a way to resolve this budget disaster.  This is all about entitlement spending and nothing about taxes or revenue. 

If you don’t believe me, take a look at this.  The expected budget deficit for this year will be $1.65 TRILLION.  Putting the higher “Clinton tax rates” into effect, just like Obama breathlessly wants to do so the so-called rich will be paying their so-called fair share, would raise only $80 billion a year.  Immediately terminating the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq would raise another $100 billion.  Immediately stripping, cutting and shredding defense spending by 20% (remembering that Obama’s own Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said just a 10% cut in defense spending would be “catastrophic”), thereby delegitimizing our defense posture to dangerous levels, would raise another $120 billion.  Eliminating all the oil industry deductions and subsidies would raise $20 billion (even though that money would be recouped by passing those costs onto the consumers at the gas pump).  Squeezing the itemized tax deductions of rich people, whoever they are, would raise another $20 billion.  All of those higher taxes and cuts to defense spending amounts to only $340 billion; but the deficit is $1.65 trillion. THE DEFICIT WOULD STILL BE OVER $1.3 TRILLION!  Do you see the problem here?

And the Obama deficits of the previous 2 years were $1.3 trillion and $1.4 trillion respectively.

No, the problem here is not raising taxes.  Taxes cannot be raised high enough on anyone or any group to significantly close the $1.65 trillion budget deficit gap.  The only way to do that is by cutting entitlement spending. 

But here’s the problem.  The Democrat Party can not cut spending; they can not cut programs.  They will not cut anything, they can never cut anything. The reason is because to cut spending or programs is to cut government.  And the Democrat Party IS the government.  The government and the Democrat Party are one in the same.  http://www.joelsrant.com/2011/04/09/the-%e2%80%9cdemocrat-party%e2%80%9d-and-%e2%80%9cthe-government%e2%80%9d-are-one-in-the-same/ 

To cut spending is to make the government smaller, and to make the government smaller is for the Democrat Party to cede influence, and that’s never going to happen as long as Democrats control the White House and the Senate.  The Democrats unwillingness to do what’s good for the country is not only stupid, it’s dangerous.  And that’s a fact.

What we have here is a Marxist/liberal ideology that’s completely out of control.  It’s an ideology that resembles a mental illness or a cult religion.  Its purveyors only care about themselves and their power.  It’s tyranny.  And it’s logarithmically and galactically stupid.

It needs to be stopped.

And that’s all there is to it.

Did you know that over 14,000 oil wells were drilled in the Gulf of Mexico before the Deep Water Horizon well exploded 13 months ago?  That was one spill in over 14,000, spanning a 40 year blemish-free period.  Yet the government – defined as Barack Hussein Obama and his administration (BHOAHA) – decided to shut down virtually the entire oil drilling industry.  In the gulf, this shut down was done over the objections of a federal court order. 

At about the same time, BHOAHA effectively shut down the oil drilling industry off both of America’s coasts.  It even shut down drilling in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Alaska, claiming the need to review the potential for environmental impact.  In the case of Alaska, over $4 billion had been recently invested and another $2.2 billion paid to the government in oil drilling leases.  Even so, the EPA shot down the drilling effort claiming “air quality issues” to the people living in that most northern of regions. 

North Dakota has one of the largest oil reserves in the world.  Nevertheless, BHOAHA’s EPA recently shut down the building of a pipeline from the North Dakota shale oil fields to Texas.  The new pipeline was to connect with an existing pipeline complex that efficiently and quickly moves oil to different areas of the country at low cost. 

BHOAHA also has actively aided and encouraged the oil drilling and exploration industries in Brazil and Columbia, and has told those countries that America will be their best customers.  This is rather than drilling and developing our own resources and having Brazil and Columbia become customers of America.  It’s all ass-backwards, no?

Is there any wonder why gasoline prices have soared in the past year, actually more than doubling in just the time Barack Obama has been president?  You still believe it’s “the speculators” that are forcing the price of gasoline to rise?

Only last month the price of gasoline first broke the dreaded $4.00 per gallon barrier in most parts of the country with nary a peep from the main-stream media and “progressive” consumer organizations.  This is the opposite of the summer of 2007, when the price last reached that level and the media outrage at the time made it seem the world was coming to an end.  Now it’s moving with speed toward $5.00 and threatens everywhere to reach $6.00 by the end of the summer driving season.  All the while, the media seems to be protecting BHOAHA. 

Clearly BHOAHA wants to proactively manipulate and interfere with the laws of supply and demand.  But why?  What’s going on? 

If you think this purposeful manipulation and inference is just crazy talk you need to listen to Obama’s Energy Secretary, Steven Chu.  As early as December 2008, before Obama was sworn in, Chu told the Wall Street Journal “somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”  That would, by the way, be in the $7.00 to $9.00 range.  He then went on to describe ways that the government could encourage people to buy more fuel efficient cars and even coax them into living closer to their work.

And what about Obama’s own words from January 2008 when he told the San Francisco Chronicle that under his administration the price of electricity “would necessarily skyrocket” and he “will bankrupt the coal industry”. 

The policies of his government, and the Democrats in general, would seem to be bringing his words and those of his lieutenants to fruition.  He meant it when he said it.  It wasn’t just rhetoric for campaign purposes.  Where exactly in the Constitution does it say the government should be considering issues like this?  How about planning policies that aim to change not only consumer behavior but social and personal behavior as well?  Where does it say in the Constitution that government should be acting to drive costs and choosing which industries are winners (“green energy”) and losers (“fossil fuels”)? 

Of course BHOAHA, like every other “class-warfare, envy-pushing, hate-the-so-called-rich Marxist”, is now trying to blame the oil companies for price gouging and making too much profit.  Like that’s the government’s business anyway? 

So let’s first put some perspective on this.  Did you know that even with the price of oil presently at over $111 per barrel, the large American oil companies make only 2 cents per gallon of gasoline in profit while local, state, and federal excise taxes amount to about 50 cents per gallon?  In other words, the government takes about 25 times per gallon what the oil companies themselves get to keep.  That’s just what the mob would do. 

Did you know that the American oil industry pays more in federal incomes taxes than the bottom 75% of all American taxpayers; in fact, the American oil industry is the second highest payer of all income taxes in America after personal incomes taxes?  Did you know that the average profit of American oil companies is less than 6%, less than drugs, computers, electronics, clothes, beverages, virtually everything manufactured and most other industries?  (Incidentally, did you know the health insurance industry runs just a 3% profit, among the lowest of all industries in America?  This is despite being labeled by BHOAHA as wealthy blood-suckers and Medicare rejecting about 7% of all claims, while private insurance rejects less than 2% of all claims.  But that’s an argument for another time.)

Did you know that no American oil company controls more than ½ of 1% of the world’s oil production volume?  It’s the state-owned companies in the Middle East and OPEC and others that set the price of a barrel of oil, not Exxon-Mobil, for crying out loud.

Did you know that the so-called $4 billion in “oil industry subsidies” BHOAHA is looking to terminate are the same exact subsidies provided to all other industries that also get to depreciate equipment and take other business related losses according to the tax code?  Not only do oil companies get nothing special, but that $4 billion will be appear at the gas pump for consumers to pay.  (Incidentally, did you know that General Motors, BHOAHA’s car company, was relieved of paying over $48 billion in future income taxes and that General Electric – BHOAHA’s favorite CEO friend – paid zero income taxes last year?  But that’s also an argument for another time).

Now I’m not crying for the oil companies, but the fossil fuels they provide, until recently at low cost, are what allows the American economy and standard of living to be the best in the world.  This applies even to our poorest people.  Even poor people in America can drive across the country and eat cheap food brought to market by cheap fuel.  But that can change and that’s just a fact. 

So why the purposeful sabotage of America’s energy industry by BHOAHA?  Why would the President of the United States purposely want to starve the country of low cost energy, thereby making virtually every product and service in America more expensive, increasing the price of food and forcing companies’ overseas and taking millions of jobs with them? 

Everything Barack Obama is doing with relation to energy is completely wrong and completely counter to free market and capitalist principles.  And he’s doing it on purpose.  But why?

The answer is because Barack Obama is a Marxist.  What Marxists do is destroy the economy so that the “Middle Class”, the one Barack Obama professes he’s trying to save, is actually destroyed.  I’m sorry to say this, but what we have is an American version of Castro or Hugo Chavez running the American government, and thereby ruining the American economy, and purposely running it into the ground.  He may have been born in Hawaii, but he ain’t no American.

By purposely increasing the price of energy, he destroys jobs.  By purposely increasing the cost of energy he increases the price of food and all other staples of life in America.  By calling for the elimination of fossil fuels in exchange for unproven and unreliable “green energy” he purposely creates chaos and rationing of energy, resulting in brown outs, black outs and the ultimate destruction of the civil society in this country.  By forcing you to live closer to where you work he destroys your freedom and mobility, and makes you easier to control.

By doing these things BHOAHA is deliberately diminishing America’s presence, standing and leadership in the world.  He is fundamentally changing our country into an alien nation. 

By doing all these things he makes everyone into a victim needing to be saved by the government.  And that makes the government, the same government BHOAHA wants to take over the health care industry, really, really, really powerful. 

And that’s all there is to it.

Why do Democrat controlled legislatures throughout the nation consistently do the wrong thing virtually every time when it’s so easy to just do the right thing instead? 

Why do Democrats virtually always vote to raise spending when common sense and good fiscal stewardship say cutting spending is the right policy?  Why do they raise taxes when taxes should be cut?  Why do they always promote policies which take money away from producers instead of keeping money in the private economy, which has time after time proven to be the best policy for everyone?  I could go on and on, but you get the point.

So why do Democrats almost always choose the wrong path instead of always choosing the right path? 

There’s something at play here that actually explains why we can count on Democrats to do the wrong thing, something that’s sort of the missing piece to the puzzle.  And here it is; the government is the Democrat Party and the Democrat Party is the government.  They are, in fact, one in the same.  That’s not an exaggeration or hyperbole; that’s for real. 

Take a moment to think about it instead of rejecting that notion out of hand.

That explains why Democrats always want to make the government bigger, more powerful, more intrusive, and more encompassing; it’s in their best interest to do that because they are the government.  Like an entrepreneur wants to grow his/her business because that’s in their best interest, Democrats want to grow government because it’s in their best interest. 

Entrepreneurs grow their businesses because they own them; Democrats grow government because they own it.  The Democrats ARE the government.

In effect, there are Republicans; and then there is the government.  For the convenience of voters, the government calls itself the Democrat Party; but when you vote for a Democrat, you’re voting for the government.

That’s the case whether people are voting for Democrats in a local election, a state election or in a national election.  It makes no difference. The word “Democrat” now means “government.”  They’re synonymous.

Now it all makes sense, right?

Once you have that perspective, you can understand why Democrats would force a potential government shutdown over what amounts to literally mere pennies, or why there will be a death struggle by Democrats to raise the debt ceiling to over $15 trillion or more, or why there will be a savage fight, with Democrats hurling disgusting incriminations before they are forced to accept any of Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget proposal that cuts into the very fabric, the entitlements, of big government. 

Democrats can’t give in to even the most minor of these cuts because to do so, in some fashion, reduces the government, which really reduces the Democrat Party.  The Democrats will never stand for such an onslaught on big government because an attack on big government is an attack on the Democrat Party.

Just look at the logic of Democrats in the showdown just ended Friday night in which even the most ridiculous federal funding could not, would not, be cut.  Where in the Constitution does it say that I must fund Planned Parenthood or the National Endowment for the Arts, or National Public Radio?  Where does it say that?  But to listen to Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer you’d think there was an enumerated power in the Constitution forcing me to do exactly that (http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/schumer-cuts-planned-parenthood-never-ne ). 

Harry Reid says that funding Planned Parenthood is more important than funding the military.  Can you believe that?  Comparing Planned Parenthood to military warriors taking gunfire?  How contemptible is that?  To Democrats, the military and national defense are relatively inconsequential matters of little importance.  They’re little more than welfare recipients.  In fact, Democrats would sooner fund abortion doctors than our military warriors in the field and in harm’s way.  If there had been a shutdown, the Democrats plan was to make sure people on welfare got their checks, but not the warriors keeping our country safe. (http://biggovernment.com/mikeflynn/2011/04/07/obama-ill-shut-down-the-government-and-suspend-military-pay/ ).  Screwing the families who have sacrificed the most, by sending warriors to defend our liberty, freedom and national interest, is less important than sending money to NPR, the partisan propaganda arm of the government, aka Democrat Party.  It’s just contemptible.

Look at the horrific language Democrats are using at this exact moment to characterize Republicans who are looking to make mostly modest and symbolic cuts.  Reminds you of Wisconsin, no?  Immediately, Democrats pull out “human shields” to try to keep Republicans from landing any punches or doing any damage, in pretty much the same fashion as the barbarians in the Middle East might use human shields when they are put under attack.

The “human shields” the Democrats favor are statements like Nancy Pelosi stating Republican budget cuts will force seniors literally into starvation (http://nation.foxnews.com/nancy-pelosi/2011/04/05/pelosi-republican-budget-will-force-seniors-starvation ).

Or Harry Reid saying Republicans don’t want women to get breast cancer screenings (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/08/usa-budget-health-idUSWEN079220110408.

Or Congresswoman Louise Slaughter saying Republicans want to kill women (http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/house-freshmen-came-washington-intent-ki ).  

Or Congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton saying Republican budget cuts are the equivalent of bombing civilians (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20051805-503544.html ), and on and on. 

The Democrat strategy is to claim Republicans hate children, want old people to just die, don’t want anyone to get an education, favor polluting the air and water, hate poor people, hate blacks, hate Hispanics, hate gays, and on and on, pulling out human shield in front of human shield in an effort to obfuscate, disguise, confuse, conceal, and divert any criticism so as not to land a blow against the need to spend more money by the government.

This Democrat strategy is so evil it’s actually pathological.  Here’s the Democrat president, Barack Obama, just about 4 weeks ago proposing his 2012 budget.  In spite of our nation’s near fiscal collapse, yearly trillion dollar deficits every year of this entire new decade, the potential to actually triple our national debt from its present $14 trillion, the unsustainably of the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security entitlements, he adds another $1.5 trillion of new spending and a host of new taxes that will only limit the ability of the private sector to grow the economy.  His 2012 budget plan is a total budgetary disaster. 

Now, he’s supposed to be a smart guy.  So why does he want to do this?

He does it, and the Democrats approve of it, because forcing the debt to run even higher will force, absolutely force, taxes to be raised.  And if taxes are raised to a high enough level, businesses will almost certainly have to fail or move out of the country.  That leaves the American citizens without jobs and no means of support.  And that puts them on the government dole; thereby growing the government to its ultimate size, the size where it takes control of everything, your health, your wealth, simply everything. 

And that’s really the purpose of the modern Democrat Party; that’s the purpose of big government; to control everyone and everything.

It’s all laid out in detail in “Rules for Radicals” by Saul Alinski, Barack Obama’s mentor.

The Democrat Party and the government are one in the same.  We’ve seen this pathology before, albeit on different continents.

Am I wrong?

And that’s all there is to it.

Under the radar screen of most of us, the battle between the forces of good vs. evil continues unabated, and those with truly dark intentions seem always to be winning.  We are in a war for our country, and yet things are seemingly so quiet.

Take the news from Wisconsin.  Here’s the quintessential model of what tyranny looks like. 

A new Republican governor is elected with 52% of the popular vote in November 2010, taking control from the Democrats who had held that position for the 8 previous years.  In addition, both the Wisconsin House and Senate also flipped control to the Republicans.  Clearly, a majority of the electorate decided a change in state government was needed and put in place those who had promised to make those exact changes, which included a well debated and discussed effort to restrict the power of public employee unions.  Republicans won in a blue state; Democrats could not believe they had actually lost.  Hell hath no fury like a Democrat scorned!

Losing an honest election does not deter Democrats (e.g., see Al Franken election in Minnesota in 2008, Christine Gregoire in Washington in 2004, Robert Torricelli in New Jersey in 2002 to name just a few), and this is where the tyranny plot thickens.  As soon as the “budget repair bill” was introduced in the Wisconsin legislature, the Democrats left the state in order to prevent Republicans from having the quorum they needed to pass the bill.  Only Democrats could think of something as underhanded and un-American as that.

Public employee unions called upon their members to protest in Madison, to literally take control of the capitol building, and while doing so making sure they could do the most physical damage as possible.  Hateful banners, of the kind that just weeks before were castigated as encouraging assault in Tucson by these very people, appeared including shouts and chants tinged with violence.  And don’t forget the death threats aimed at Republican legislators.  All of this was done by public employees in an effort to intimidate and coerce Republican legislators from their mission.

Thousands of additional protestors, aka SEIU thugs, were bused in from other states, all with funding and support provided by the Democratic National Committee and Barack Obama’s own campaign organization, “Organizing for America”. 

Think about the enormity of that for just one moment.  The President of the United States, the presumptive leader of ALL the American people, has a bonafide organization that he can call upon to support one side, and against the other side, in a state political procedure.  That is completely anathema to the history and tradition of the office of the president.  But in Barack Obama’s mind, history and tradition begins with him.  Nothing, to him, ever happened before he became president.  He honestly believes that.

But we’re not done.  On two separate occasions, Republican legislators met with Democrats, hiding in Illinois, to negotiate a compromise to this stalemate.  Both times Democrats agreed to come back to Wisconsin, and both times reneged at the last moment, and both times the media accounts purposely make it seem the Republicans were the one’s not negotiating in good faith. 

By this time the collusion of public employee unions, Democrat political leaders including the President of the United States, and the state-run liberal media is having a detrimental influence.  Governor Scott Walker’s poll numbers begin to fall. 

In an effort to break the stalemate, the Legislative Council (LC) and the Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB), both legal agencies and employees of Wisconsin, determined that aspects of the budget repair bill could be separated out, allowing the Republicans to pass their bill without any Democrat involvement.  It’s important to understand that these agencies, the LC and the LRB, are the same people who just weeks before advised and counseled the Democrats when they were in charge.  These are not political appointees, nor are they affiliated with a political party.  They are, essentially, nonpartisan.

Armed with that information, the Governor and Republicans voted to pass the bill stripping the public employee unions of their collective bargaining rights (but not including bargaining for wages).  And there you have it; the duly elected authority of a sovereign state taking action to pass a law that affects only their own state.  It’s just what the Founders had in mind.  Case closed!

Actually, no, the case is not closed. 

Once the Democrats realized the bill had been passed they filed a lawsuit claiming the Republicans had not afforded them time to respond to the call for a vote.  The fact that the state parliamentarian, literally the state’s official expert on procedural expediencies like this and an employee of the state rather than a political party, indicated that the correct process had been followed had in no way tempered the wrath of the Democrats.  As usual, history, experience, tradition and facts mean nothing to Democrats.  Only power, and who’s wielding that power, means something to the Democrat mind. That’s a very dangerous way of thinking, but it is what it is.

In fact the Democrats, through their allies in the state run liberal media, went on a binge, accusing Republicans of “violating state law”, “making a mockery of democracy” and “operating like a banana republic” and in performing a “coup d’état”.  The irony of Democrats hiding out in another state, in a deceitful and shameful effort to prevent a newly inaugurated senate from holding a vote on vital state business, seems to have no impact or effect on this group of devious, deceitful and hostile Americans.

Instead, Democrats went the route of all good Marxists and found safety and comfort through the court, in the personage of Judge Maryann Sumi of Dane County, who issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) preventing the new law from going into effect.

This is where malicious collusion and contemptible behavior crosses over the line into soft tyranny.

Enter Maryann Sumi, the same judge who astoundingly refused to order the striking teachers back to work in February (http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/education/local_schools/article_1a2a34ce-3baf-11e0-983c-001cc4c03286.html ). 

This is the same Maryann Sumi whose son is a political operative, who also happens to be a former lead field manager with the AFL-CIO and data manager for the SEIU State Council.  In fact, Jacob Sinderbrand, Sumi’s son, runs a company called Left Field Strategies. 

It seems that both Judge Maryann Sumi and her son are hack political activists and her obvious conflict should cause her to recues herself.  Ah, but no, that’s not how Democrats work, not when tyranny is afoot.  Don’t forget, Democrats believe the ends justify the means, which means in this case, twist or spin or break any law or process necessary to get this budget repair law overturned. 

In fact, it seems Judge Maryann Sumi cavalierly chose to ignore the budget repair bill law and, since she knew there were no merits to the case, instead decided to argue procedure.  In effect, she completely disregarded the guidelines regarding TRO’s, overruling each of the four elements a plaintiff, in this case the Democrats, must prove:  (1) likelihood of success on the merits; (2) irreparable harm, absent the order; (3) that less harm will result to the defendant if the TRO issues than to the plaintiffs if the TRO does not issue; and (4) that the public interest, if any, weighs in favor of plaintiff. If the balance of hardships tips in favor of plaintiff, then the plaintiff must only raise “questions going to the merits so serious, substantial, difficult and doubtful, as to make them fair ground for litigation and thus for more deliberative investigation.”

All four of these elements must be proven, not just one or two.  All four.  And yet, none of them rises to level the law requires.  This means that Judge Maryann Sumi is a liar and a political hack.  She’s using her position to provide cover for the Democrats and their union overseers.  Maryann Sumi is like having the Manchurian Candidate on the bench; and the Democrats are worse.

So now the process moves forward to a court hearing which will now waste time and block the effectuation of a law properly passed by those Republicans empowered by the people of the state. http://www.620wtmj.com/shows/charliesykes/118298099.html?blog=y

Does this represent tyranny?  Here’s a case in which the court takes a political position to act on behalf of a Democrat group looking for a political favor.  It doesn’t get more tyrannical than that.  Would you want to be in front of this court battling, say, for your life or liberty?  What are the chances you would get a fair shake from Judge Maryann Sumi?  What are the chances this judge will look only to the merits of the case and not to some other agenda?  You can draw your own conclusions.

And now it seems, while this TRO is winding its way to some end, the miscreants and thugs who make up the public employee unions in Wisconsin have taken their war to the streets.  In fact, they are literally shaking down private businesses in Madison by “asking” owners to place signs in their windows saying they support the unions……or face a boycott.  http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/118963234.html

Can you believe this?  Can you believe these unions?  Can you believe these Democrats?

What happens in Wisconsin will affect every American because tyranny has no borders.

And that’s all there is to it.