Joel's Rant
A Conservative Blog

Joel's Rant

4 Unlucky Marines

January 16th, 2012 . by joel

I’ve never been in a combat zone and I’ve never been in the military.  I avoided that in the 60’s when I was lucky enough, like many other men my age, to be safely ensconced in school.  Now, in my later years, I’m sorry I didn’t serve but I understand those words ring hollow today when I’m here in the present and some of my college classmates are remembered when I visit their names engraved in a wall. 

But that doesn’t mean I don’t understand war.  I certainly do, as do most thoughtful, thinking people, who similarly never served.  According to that crackpot, Ron Paul, I’d be unqualified to be the president because I didn’t serve.  Some of our greatest wartime presidents, FDR and Lincoln come to mind, didn’t serve either.  Neither did James Madison and James K. Polk, presidents during 2 of our 5 “declared” wars.  And neither did, of course, the greatest president in my lifetime, Ronald Reagan.  But Ron Paul’s an ass, so who of consequence really cares what he thinks? 

This brings me to my point.  By now you know that 4 US Marines were videotaped urinating on some dead Taliban bodies. U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta called it “deplorable” and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she felt “total dismay” after hearing the story.  There are several investigations underway by the Navy and the Marine Corps and others to see how such a terrible thing could happen.  I suppose there’s no way such a “travesty” could take place in our armed forces, during a period of war mind you, and our political class merely looking the other way, or letting it slide.  No, that could not be possible.

Here’s my take on this story. I’m glad those 4 Marines did what they did.  I’m just sorry they didn’t set those dead barbarian freak bodies on fire or desecrate them in some other way.  I’m just sorry they didn’t cut off their freak barbarian heads and kick them around like soccer balls and then fling them into a river.  They deserved to be desecrated and defiled.  Our soldiers are warriors, sent to a foreign battlefield to kill, conquer and vanquish the enemy. And they should be allowed to do so with speed and dispatch, the same way we fought our war in WWII. War is freaking war and people die and that’s what’s supposed to happen, for crying out loud. 

And how are our warriors supposed to psychologically handle that situation, the war situation, the same one Ron Paul claims I’m not supposed to understand because I’ve never been sent to fight.  How are they supposed to react after being in battle, with their very lives in constant danger?  Our vaunted leaders like Panetta and Clinton think our warriors should go out and kill the people who are trying to kill them first, and then when they’re finished killing the bad people, to apparently just shrug that off, like they would at the Pentagon or the State Department, and go back to nation building and maybe get some coffee.  Are they serious?  How can our warriors be expected to do merely that.  It’s not what reasonable people would do.  How did our warriors of WWII handle that and how did they regard those they had to kill?  With anger?  With depravity?  With worse?  Maybe. Probably.

And that’s as it should be, no?  When you put people, like our warriors, in harm’s way, we need to not be offended when they vent their rage and anger. That venting is exactly what freaking keeps them human beings, for crying out loud.

Civil War general, William Tecumseh Sherman, is well known for his quote that “War is hell.”  But that’s not his best quote.  His best quote would be “War is cruelty.  There is no use trying to reform it.  The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”  Now ain’t that the truth?

Our problem is that we are, through our sanctimonious leaders and the fifth-column mainstream media, trying indeed to reform it into something not quite so bad.  We now demand no collateral damage, no innocent’s being killed, no severity, only proportionality, defenseless rules of engagement that expose our own troops to danger and on and on.  And now we’re at a point where we have to fight a weak and insignificant-in-numbers enemy for a decade or more and still we’re not done. 

I say no.  We need to fight this war, and any war, with ferocity and focus until we have slaughtered our enemies and vanquished them from the field of battle, even if that battlefield is in a village or even a hospital.  Because that’s how wars are fought.  Because the crueler it is the sooner it will be over.  And yes, there will be dead people, and maybe lots of them.

And if we’re not going to fight like that, then let’s not send our precious warriors to fight at all.

And that’s all there is to it.


Newt’s Baggage

January 2nd, 2012 . by joel

Negative campaigns work.
People claim they want to hear a positive message, they want to hear
optimism, they want to hear genuine solutions, but isn’t that really a bunch of
bullcrap?  Once the negative ads hit the
airwaves, all they want to acknowledge is the bad stuff, or what’s being
purported to be bad stuff.

Too many people can’t reconcile “good stuff” versus “bad
stuff”, and so they just go with the bad stuff.
It’s easier to believe bad stuff.
It’s the same kind of thinking that makes it far easier to be a liberal
than a conservative.  Conservatives are thoughtful;
liberals are emotional.  In a contest
between thoughtful and emotional, emotional wins almost all the time.  Same with good stuff and bad stuff; bad stuff
goes down easier and doesn’t take much sorting and thinking.  It’s easier to trick people with bad
stuff.  That’s why going negative is more
successful than going positive.  Barack
Obama’s counting on that human nature for his reelection strategy.

Too many Iowans’ seem to be buying into the easier to
swallow bad stuff.  They should be
embarrassed because now we can officially dismiss Iowa as a place where genuine
thought takes place.  Apparently it
doesn’t.

Newt’s obviously been the focus of a negative campaign;
promulgated by people who have either no record of their own, or a lesser
record than Newt’s, to run on.  But a
smart and outspoken guy, like Newt, who’s been in political office or in the
public arena for over 30 years, makes an easy target.  A guy who’s voted on about 8,000
congressional bills, testified numerous times before Congress, written hundreds
of position papers, written 24 books and given thousands of speeches has got a
huge paper trail to glean “bad stuff” from.
No other candidate in the race comes even close to the record of
involvement and public life that Newt commands.
And so those, with no record of accomplishment of their own, are trying
to take Newt out by attacking his record.

So what are the “bad stuff” people are clearly responding to
and what’s the truth.

Newt’s First Wife

First of all, Newt’s first wife is still alive and
well.  According to the urban legend, she
should have been dead since 1980 when Newt supposedly demanded a divorce while
she was literally on her death bed.  The
truth is that it was she who had sought the divorce and that action was already
underway when she had a benign tumor removed.
Go figure!

Freddie Mac

Newt was paid $1.6 million by Freddie Mac for, what his
opponents claim, was nefarious lobbying efforts.  But let’s put this into some
perspective.  That $1.6 million was paid
not to Newt, but rather to The Gingrich Group, a Washington consulting firm,
one of hundreds of others doing legitimate business in the nation’s
capital.  That seemingly huge fee was
paid out not in one lump sum, as his opponents would have you believe, but
rather in monthly “retainer” installments from 1999 through 2007, or about
$20,000 per month, which interestingly enough is about the “going rate” for
those kinds of services in Washington.
The Gingrich Group also is comprised of 3 separate offices, in
Washington, Atlanta and St. Louis and has a staff, and pays rent and utilities,
buys equipment and business products and services, pays for travel and does all
the other things normal to a business of that size and nature.  What this means is that the $1.6 million paid
by Freddie did not end up exclusively in Newt’s wallet.  It was business income, along with other
income, from other consulting work performed, and went in the coffers of The
Gingrich Group.

It should also be remembered that Newt was a private citizen
during this time, unlike Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and others driving Freddie
Mac.  He was allowed to make a living.  Did he lobby Congress?  I’m not sure myself, but Newt claims he
didn’t, his contract with Freddie said he wouldn’t, and I’m certain if he did,
those congress people who were lobbied would have come forward already if he
did, no?

House Ethics

The story goes that Newt was fined $300,000 by the House
ethics committee because he used a book deal to circumvent campaign-finance laws while he was
Speaker.  Compared to Charlie Rangel,
Maxine Waters, Diane Feinstein, and others, a book deal sounds almost quaint,
but even that is bullcrap.  There was
certainly a political effort among Democrats on the committee, as well as
Republicans not fond of Newt’s leadership style, who wanted him out.  Under pressure, Newt acquiesced and paid for
the cost of the “investigation”, not a $300,000 fine.  As it turns out, the ethics committee
initially investigated 83 so-called violations of which they dismissed all
except for one.  A year later, the IRS
dismissed even that one and claimed no conflict ever existed.

On a
Bench With Nancy Pelosi

The 31 second commercial Newt participated in with Nancy
Pelosi, in April 2008, rates as the worst time spent in his life.  But all Newt says in that commercial is that
he’s concerned about the future and that solutions need to be found.  All the details are left to the
imagination.  Newt claims what he was trying
to do was make sure that whatever action Congress decided, and at the time
you’ll recall the super majority Democrat House and Senate was hell-bent on cap
& trade action, that conservatives had a voice crafting that action.

If that sounds stupid and self-serving, compare that 31
second fluff piece with the over 1 hour of direct and detailed testimony Newt
gave, by himself, before the Waxman-Markey Environment Committee, in April 2009,
and how combative that was and where precisely Newt was coming from, and where
Waxman and Markey were coming from.  Even
if you hate Newt’s guts, after viewing that testimony you know he was talking
about small, measured steps, all done without government intrusion or taxpayer
funding.  You’ll note the extreme respect
Newt has for private industry and the free market and how leaving this issue to
the capitalists will solve this climate problem, if there even is a climate
problem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzDutBRMsXw

Characterizing Newt as some sort of climate complicit cap
& trader is dishonest in the extreme.
By the way, what are Mitt Romney’s thoughts on this exact issue?  What are Ron Paul’s?

Mandatory Health Care

Newt has been a deep thinker about health care in America
for over 20 years.  He formed the Center
for Health Transformation and has written books about the present and future of
health care and the insurance industry.
His involvement in this issue is not just sound bite slogan driven
baloney, like those of the other candidates.
Newt has spoken at the Heritage Foundation and given speeches about this
stuff long before he was even considering being a candidate in 2008, let alone
2012.  This is a guy who thought about
and struggled with the need of health care, and the ability to pay for it, for
a very long time.

He claims he flirted with the issue of mandating health care
as a way to sidetrack HillaryCare in the early 1990’s and more recently by
thinking it might be better to have people post “health care bonds”.  The important point to take from here is that
lots of ideas were being bandied about; lots of possibilities were being
considered.  Don’t forget, Newt’s been
involved with health care issues for a very long time, not just since he
announced in 2011, like the others, or like in Mitt Romney’s case, actually
signing into law the forerunner and template for ObamaCare, the single greatest
destroyer of American government in history, and the plan which has already put
Massachusetts in $4 billion in debt and cost over 28,000 jobs.

And listen more carefully to what Newt was saying about Paul
Ryan’s Medicare proposal. His point was that the government, or more
specifically the Republican Party, should not impose a change in Medicare
without first explaining the details to the public and getting their acceptance
before ramming it through.  Newt’s
thinking is that a really big change requires first a really big
discussion.  And that actually makes
sense, no?

This is only a sampling of the most audacious “bad stuff”
being used in an effort to knock Newt out of contention.  But you get the idea.  Most of it is bullcrap.  Some of it is purposely misconstrued stuff
taken from a huge body of work stretching 20 years or more ago when the
thinking on a particular issue was in its infancy but might be different now
after the passage of time.  This is the
price one pays when they’re in the forefront of public life for over 30 years
and during times of great change and danger.

And that’s all there is to it.


Fast & Furious……and right over the edge

July 30th, 2011 . by joel

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.


Stupidity Masquerading as Intelligence

June 26th, 2011 . by joel

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 21st 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.


Crack pot politics

June 12th, 2011 . by joel

Some weeks ago Barack Obama visited the border in Texas and gave a speech about how his administration has done everything possible, everything the Republicans demanded, to close the border and reduce the number of illegal’s streaming into our country.  In fact, he said the border is safer now than ever before.  Of course, everything Obama said was a factual and documented lie.  But a long time friend of mine of almost 50 years, a liberal from NYC, told me the reports of Barack Obama lying were just “crack pot politics”.

I mean, everything BHO said was a lie.  He said the wall was virtually completed; instead there are over 1900 miles of border and only 350 miles of fence has been built, and only about half of that was built to the correct standards.  Not even close.  BHO claimed 31% more drugs and 64% more guns were seized then before, yet the number of people crossing the border is down 40%.  Hmmm, very interesting; seizures of drugs and guns go up, yet seizures of people go down. Up or down, it matters not. Whatever the numbers, Obama vindicates himself.

He tells us that the country is creating more jobs, when it’s not. He tells us he has either “saved or created” 2 million jobs since he’s been president, but will not provide the data or formula by which those numbers were derived.  He tells us that the country is bouncing back economically or that ObamaCare is good for the citizens, when it’s not.  Everything he says is an actual lie.  But to the liberal, drawing attention to those lies is just crack pot politics.

Obama and his record should be the basis for what the 2012 presidential election is about, and the Democrats will do everything they can to not talk about the present, to not talk about the Obama record.  The truth is that the GOP nominee, no matter who that is, should have a field day beating the person who is essentially the dumbest and least capable of all the candidates running in 2012, Barack Hussein Obama.

So before we forget about the present, let’s review where we presently stand after just 2 ½ years of Barack Obama’s presidency.

  • The number of people on Food Stamps has increased by 40% to the highest number of beneficiaries in the nation’s history. 
  • The price of gasoline has increased by 75% to the highest in the nation’s history.
  • The 33% of average home equity loss in the last 2 years is higher than that of the 31% suffered during the Great Depression.  Home prices are now at 2002 levels, wiping out 10 years of increased equity and personal wealth.  In fact, home foreclosures, recently at record levels, continue at very high and unacceptable rates.
  • Two nationally recognized credit agencies are about to downgrade America’s bond rating to below triple-A  because of a $14 trillion debt that the Obama administration has done everything it can to avoid dealing with in an honest and responsible fashion and has taken absolutely no action to address other than to require higher taxes on the so-called rich.  By the way, even if taxes on “millionaires and billionaires” (who are really people grossing just $250,000 and are not millionaires or billionaires at all) are eventually taxed at the “Clinton tax levels” the additional revenue generated would amount to only $80 billion.  With a budget deficit this coming year alone of an expected $1.65 trillion, you can see the issue of taxing the “rich” to get out of our budget disaster is a complete red-herring, a canard, a lie, bullcrap.  You get the idea.
  • Manufacturing in America has slacked off to its lowest level since September 2009, no matter what Obama recently said about the 2 government auto companies, which could only be showing progress due to GM and Chrysler both being relieved of their tax burdens to the tune of $47 billion and $7 billion respectively.  Only a government and union owned company could possibly get a deal like that.
  • By a 3 to 2 vote (the 3 being Obama appointed union lawyers and hacks) the National Labor Relations Board is attempting to stop the Boeing Corporation from opening a manufacturing plant in South Carolina because that state is a “right to work” state.  Boeing’s only other alternative would be to take those 1,000 jobs overseas.
  • The official unemployment rate is presently 9.1% and the GAO now reports that, using present government economic policies, it is likely to remain at that “European level” until at least the year 2020.  And that doesn’t even factor in the “under-employment” rate, including folks either working only part-time but want to work more or who have simply dropped out of the labor market altogether, which is closer to 20%, a number last seen during the Great Depression.
  • Over 51% of the working age population pays no federal personal income tax, depending rather on the largesse provided by the remaining 49%, of which the top 1% pays 40% of the taxes and the top 10% pay over 70% of all federal personal income taxes.
  • Because of the instability in the American economy, China no longer wants to buy our debt.  They figure holding $1 trillion is clearly as high as they want to go.  In fact, they’re trying to off-load some of the debt they hold.  Instead, the biggest buyer of American debt, which is required to fuel the operation of our government to the tune of 40 cents for every dollar spent, is the Federal Reserve.  Through their “quantitative easing” policies they have bought over 70% of all US debt, which effectively means they are simply printing fiat money, backed by nothing, to flood the economy.  The approximate $1 trillion recently printed through QE1 and QE2 is apparently not even enough since talk of a QE3, to print additional hundreds of billions, is already underway in the halls of the Treasury and Federal Reserve.  What are the repercussions of a government printing paper money to borrow from itself?  Remember Weimar Germany?  How about present day Zimbabwe?
  • The Obama EPA has imposed such strong anti-coal policy that 5 coal-fired power plants in the Midwest have decided to shut down rather than make needless modifications that would cost literally billions to effectuate.  Interesting that the lifeblood of a technological society is cheap and abundant energy, which America has much of, yet the Obama administration is doing everything it can to halt production, force prices higher and make stockpiles scarce, even to the point of lending money we borrowed from China to Brazil and Columbia for them to develop their own energy resources instead of us developing ours.  Using exactly what kind of demented calculus do you use to believe that policy is good for America?

And there’s so much more.  And that doesn’t even include the destruction of liberty and subversion of the Constitution that we know of as ObamaCare.  And that doesn’t even include a foreign policy from Mars.

But isn’t there any good news?  BHO must have done something good, no?

Well, the limousine industry in America is doing well since the number of such government vehicles has effectively increased 100% since Obama has been president.  Now that says a lot, doesn’t it?

Oh, and if you’re a politically well connected crony-capitalist company or someone with friends high in the Democrat Party (for example, Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid) or a public employee union, you could get a waiver from ObamaCare that will shield you from the costs and risks that the rest of the population may have to endure.  Of the over 1300 ObamaCare waivers already granted, over half the effected workers belong to public employee or other favored union even though less than 12% of the population are union members.  If that doesn’t show the corruption that will ensue if this law is either not repealed or defeated in the courts, nothing will.

This is what happens when you take the best society and culture in the world and attempt to replace it with something else, as Obama said, to “fundamentally change America.”  You know, “fundamentally change America” into something different, foreign and alien.  But why would you want to “fundamentally” change something that you love, anyway?  The answer is you don’t. 

You only “fundamentally” change something you hate.  That’s why you “fundamentally” want to change it.  That says a lot about Barack Obama, no?  And isn’t attempting to fundamentally change America into something else really the definition of “crack pot politics”?

And that’s all there is to it.


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