Syrian anti-American protesters looking to get their gripes translated into English found a real deal when they used an American consultant employed by an insurance company in Syria. Unfortunately, there are no reports disclosing how much the Syrian protest organizers paid the retired U.S. Army Sergeant for his translation assistance.
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The United States government’s investment is scientific research has a long and beneficial history. Government subsidized scientific research has brought phenomenal levels of prosperity to this nation’s people. Government funded scientific research ended America’s war with the Japanese, it has brought about cures and vaccines for numerous diseases, prolonged the lifespan of American citizens, put out nation on the surface of the moon, increased the speed of our communications and affected virtually every aspect of our daily lives. Few would disagree that when federal tax dollars are used to subsidize scientific research the American people should share in the benefits produced. However, when junk science becomes the political cause du jour and is used adversely by the U.S. government to regulate private business and restrict the activities of American citizens then we all have a serious problem that needs to be resolved.
In Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address he used the word “energy” fifteen times and the word “climate” three times. He stated “I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change. But even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future — because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy.”
To date all of the theories about global warming and the affect, if any, it has on the climate of this planet remain unproven and the idea that global warming represents a significant threat to the environment or to mankind is, at this point in time, utterly absurd. The alleged “scientific evidence” has been repeatedly shown to be seriously flawed and in many cases fraudulent data has been used to intentionally reach unwarranted conclusions.
Coral reefs off the coast of Florida are dying off because the water is too cold for them. The Antarctic is getting colder and the glaciers of Iceland are getting increasingly thick. Sea levels are rising, but they are doing so at an extremely low rate, and while the temperature of Earth has increased by a minuscule amount, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are also showing minor temperature rises. The glacial melting that has been the topic of many overblown and sensationalized news reports is far from a recent development inasmuch as it began with the onslaught of the current interglacial period – 10 to 20 thousand years ago.
Scientists first developed the process for taking the Earth’s temperature in the 1880s so our selection of data is somewhat limited. The margin of error for this process is generally assumed to be 14 °C ± 0.7 °C. Between 1880 and it has been demonstrated that the change in the Earth’s overall temperature is +0.6 °C ± 0.2 °C. That is significantly less than the margin of error for taking the temperature of the planet. That is far from looking like any sort of a dire threat to humanity and yet many Americans have gullibility allowed themselves to be conned into taking this garbage seriously and are even clamoring for the government to take the necessary steps to reverse it, as if they knew how to do that. The fact is that most politicians and a good portion of the scientists who came up with it in the first place, don’t really know what they are looking at or what it all means.
For the last 2.5 million years or so the bipedal humanoids on the planet Earth have tolerated and survived through the best and the worst of whatever weather conditions were thrown their way. Mild weather conditions were greatly enjoyed by all while the extremes of nature’s harsher weather tempered the species as it forced them into a heartless struggle for survival. From the darkest recesses of forgotten time, when mankind’s most distant ancestor first stood upright and surveyed the vastness of his domain, until this date in time, little has changed in this regard. With time and research we have come to understand that the climate of the planet we live on is affected by a large number of variables such as variations in the brightness of the sun, cosmic ray flux, solar energy output, volcanic events, the distance between the sun and Earth, the axial wobble and orbital eccentricities of the Earth, the amount of cloud coverage, variations in the circulation of the oceans, the amount of particulate matter in the atmosphere and tectonic movement. Despite the vastness of our accumulated knowledge and the high degree of intelligence we believe we have attained, we can control exactly none of these variables. We can determine the global mean temperature of the planet, but since our scale of comparative values is so limited, that information is virtually useless to us. Furthermore, the planet Earth did not come with a manual that we know of so who is to say what the correct temperature of the planet is suppose to be. When you get right down to it we don’t have the foggiest idea if the planet is too hot, too cold or right where it is suppose to be.
The entire idea of global warming is derived from the output of computer modeling software. The groups and individuals who run these software programs load them up with an untold number of assumptions and correction factors, countless workarounds to keep the data churning and as many adjustments to the numerous parameters as are required to get the software to function. The sum total of all data input to the program does not necessarily reflect reality as far as our atmosphere is concerned and the final results are no more an accurate prediction of the future than what we could find by deciphering hidden messages derived from tarot cards, a bag full of rune stones or the entrails of a dead goat.
Despite the hysterically absurd claims of global warming proponents armed with their fraudulent data and junk science, politicians around the world have shown no reluctance to jump onto the global warming train. Rahm Emanuel revealed a core tenant of modern day politics when, speaking of the nation’s economic situation, he advised Barack Obama, “never let a crisis go to waste.” There is no better motivator than fear, and imaginary threats often stoke the public’s fear more effectively than real threats. In fact, with careful planning and the right amount of spin, imaginary threats can provoke so much fear in the general populace that the real threats are overlooked. Bad weather is something we never run out of, it is always unexpected, we have never been able to predict or control it, and few people remember what the weather conditions were like from one year to the next. Like the classic “he said / she said” argument or the existence of God, global warming can neither be proved nor disproved. Horrific scenarios can be easily constructed and thrown out to the public as if they were highly probable, and because our collective knowledge regarding climate and weather is so limited, the threats can never be proven or disproven. An emotionally distraught population on the verge of panic, in response to an intentionally provoked fear of an imaginary threat, is a population ripe for manipulation.
In the effort to avoid certain extinction as a result of disastrous climate change for which there is no credible supporting evidence, the American people have willingly accepted some of the most harebrained legislation imaginable. The development of our own natural resources has been prohibited and we have become dependent on the more expensive resources of countries that hold us in low regard. Simple, cheap and entirely safe incandescent light bulbs have been banned by the United States Congress in favor of much more expensive compact fluorescent bulbs containing hazardous mercury. Gasoline, the substance that fuels the American economy, allows millions of American citizens to commute to work and facilitates the delivery of products from manufacturers to wholesalers and on to retailers is, by legislative mandate, required to contain 10% ethanol. We have been told that in order to meet this requirement, the tax money of American citizens must be used to subsidize huge agricultural corporations, fuel blenders and ethanol refineries. It has driven the price of gasoline through the roof, reduced the amount of acreage in the U.S. dedicated to the production of food, does absolutely nothing to reduce the so-called “greenhouse gases,” and increases the risk of air pollution deaths relative to gasoline by 9%. The addition of ethanol to gasoline actually increases the level of ozone in our atmosphere, decreases wildlife habitat, and increases the amount of photochemical smog we must breath, aggravates medical conditions such as asthma and distorts the free market economy by artificially increasing the price of the feedstock used now for ethanol production. Furthermore, by mandating that all gasoline in the U.S. contain a 10% mix of ethanol, the federal government has increased the emission of carcinogenic aldehydes, such as formaldehyde and acetaldehyde, by as much a 40%, and all of this has been done purportedly to save us from the threat of global warming, a threat that is, to date, unsubstantiated by empirical scientific evidence. Despite the numerous problems caused by the legislation requiring ethanol in gasoline, the American people are stuck with it because it enhances the economic welfare and prosperity of the large corporations and agricultural conglomerates involved and while we are forced to foot the bill for this nonsense, the politicians reap the rewards through campaign donations and lucrative deals cut behind the scenes with agricultural lobbyists.
While the list of insane legislation is far from comprehensive, I would be entirely remiss if I failed to include the recent legislative effort to establish cap and trade regulations, the single largest enhancement to the federal government’s revenue since the implementation of the income tax. The American economy is seriously tanking, millions of people are unemployed and facing bankruptcy, foreclosure, homelessness and hunger. Businesses are going belly up in record numbers, the ones that have survived to this point have done so by cutting back and laying off and all across the country strip malls and shopping areas are pockmarked with the paint covered windows of business that have already gone under. Instead of alleviating the unwarranted financial burden our government levies against the source of our nation’s prosperity, the United States Congress, in their benevolent wisdom, has seen fit to implement cap and trade legislation and accelerate the demise of companies now barely hanging on. Carbon taxes and cap and trade regulations are financial penalties levied against companies that emit carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases,” which may, or may not be causing global warming. No clear indication exists to warrant a belief that increased carbon taxes or cap and trade regulations will have even the slightest effect on the environment, however, they will make it much more difficult for struggling businesses to remain solvent, and even more importantly (to the government) they will significantly increase government revenue in a manner that “appears” to be more of a fee than a tax. They reap the benefits, we shoulder the burden. The unbelievably wealthy corporations that have always been identified as the major source of pollutants will easily be able to meet the high auction price of carbon credits and purchase their legitimacy and the smaller companies, the ones that most middle-class Americans work for, will either succumb to the bureaucratic nightmare of this convoluted system, or be forced to reduce their scale of operations to meet the new compliance requirements. Carbon credits will become the nation’s hottest commodity and insanely huge profits will be made by those who figure out how to manipulate the system to their financial advantage, but the effect of this added burden will be catastrophic for many smaller businesses and the consequence of the ill-advised legislation will be an increase in prices and a higher unemployment rate.
As if matters couldn’t get any worse, on Wednesday, February 5, 2010, while speaking to a number of state governors, Barack Obama announced a the implementation of new initiatives intended to increase the use of ethanol by moving to a 15% blend of ethanol in all gasoline sold in the United States. The success of his plan may result in a reduction of foreign oil over a long period of time but it will likely cause an increase in fuel costs for consumers as refineries are retooled to meet the changes required. In addition to the higher costs and the increased output of carcinogenic aldehydes into the atmosphere, it is estimated that more than 3 million American families will be left without transportation because the mixture will destroy the engines of many pre-1998 automobiles as well as those of many luxury cars. Along with the decrease in fuel efficiency, the increase of carcinogenic pollutants and the accelerated fouling of carburetors and fuel injectors, ethanol attacks the elastomers that bind together plastic automobile parts together. Ethanol causes rubber hoses, seals and gaskets dry out and crack, it seeps through fuel lines increasing the likelihood of engine fires and it can destroy some fiberglass fuel tanks. The primary impact of the increased ethanol content will be felt by the lower middle-class individuals at or below the poverty line who are driving, and in some cases, living in the older, pre-1998 automobiles that they can afford to purchase. Inasmuch as the upper middle-class and wealthier Americans will be able to afford the cost of new cars and the requisite engine modifications to their existing automobiles, the impact on the lower middle-class and poorer families will disproportionately affect many Hispanic and African American families.
The United States government should consider science in the establishment and implementation of new policy, however, that consideration should be limited to well-developed, repeatable scientific findings developed through empirical scientific experimentation. The unsupported hysterical allegations of environmental alarmists armed with questionable computer modeling software should be discounted until such time that the results of their modeling can be supported empirically. Anything less is political manipulation and should be considered detrimental to the welfare of the American people and the economy of the United States.
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Truth be told, a chimpanzee of no particular political persuasion could have scored more votes than either Brown or Coakley in Tuesday’s election.
For all the wild speculation going on in the world of American politics regarding Scott Brown’s surprise victory over Martha Coakley in Tuesday’s Massachusetts special senate election it appears that both the Republicans and the Democrats are struggling in their effort to spin what they clearly do not understand, meanwhile, Scott Brown, the newly elected Republican senator from Massachusetts is looking to inflate the victory to its fullest capacity and avoid the very plain and simple fact that his victory had nothing to do with the fact that he is just another elitist political hack of a different brand.
Many Republicans are claiming that Brown’s victory is a referendum on President Barack Obama. They seem to be operating under the delusional belief that what happened yesterday in Massachusetts was a demonstration of the American people’s anger at the Obama administration and their belief that the Republicans have something better to offer. The Democrats are still in a state of shock, and their preliminary attempts to force a perspective on the situation are still all over the road. Some of them are obviously fearful of having pushed the American voters too far and too fast, some of the more dense liberal legislators have offered the opinion that the people of Massachusetts were demonstrating their impatience with the inability of congress to get the health care bill passed and a few have already decided to turn tail and run in the hope that they can retain enough salvageable image to get re-elected later this year. We have to give them a bit more time than the Republicans; eventually they will get their stories in line, corral the would-be deserters and come out in a more cohesive manner. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were busy early Wednesday morning trying to solidify the liberal’s position on the loss, and before 9:00am they had both made statements to the effect that the Democratic Party has gotten the message from the Massachusetts” voters and that message was not to drop the health care legislation but to hurry up and get it done, a good indication that both of them are a clueless and out of touch as ever.
As far as the health care legislation is concerned, some analysts are now saying they don’t believe it will pass now that Brown has been elected. Many of the potential major beneficiaries of the proposed legislation have seen their stocks take a nosedive this morning as Wall Street reacted to the news. UnitedHealth’s shares dropped 1%, Aetna went down by 0.7%, Humana slipped 2.3%, Tenant Healthcare Corporation dropped 3.3%, Health Management stock fell 2.7%, and the amid the pharmaceutical companies, Novartis AG fell by 0.5%, Merck & Co. dropped by 0.8% and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. lost 0.7%, however, Wall Street is fairly confident that the losses are temporary and has been urging investors to not get too excited. Some of the major investment firms have upgraded the three pharmaceutical companies to a “buy” status while they are down because they are historically strong performers and will recover quickly because of the enormous profit margins they pull in and because they are well connected politically to the current administration and because they have most of the Democrats and Republicans in congress safely tucked away in their back pocket.
Despite the glee of one side and the fear of the other, both have missed the message sent to them by the voters of Massachusetts and that fact is made apparent by the speculative news reports that are falling out of the sky like a heavy winter rain.
Sure, the voters in Massachusetts were pissed off about the health care legislation, but it had nothing to do with the inability to get the job done. The people of Massachusetts already have universal health care coverage so the message was clearly not a referendum on health care.
Comparatively speaking, other than their political affiliation, there is little difference between Martha Coakley and Scott Brown. Coakley would have provided the constituents with the same pathetically disconnected level of representation that Kennedy gave them. In what may be one of the nation’s most politically lackadaisical states, a state whose population pretended not to notice the cloying stench of corruption emanating from Hyannis Port while they put Ted Kennedy in the US Senate nine consecutive times in a row, the people certainly couldn’t hold Martha Coakley in that much disfavor. Actually, until a week or so ago, Coakley was the front runner in the race and Scott Brown was still an underfunded nobody Republican state senator in a historically liberal part of the country. What changed and what, if anything, does it mean?
I honestly can’t speak with any authority for the voters of Massachusetts and I am not going to play the spin game and try to convince you that my opinion holds any particular merit over anybody else’s opinion, but I will say that it could be the result of a few things that seem to be pissing folks off more than usual. The list is long so I’ll just scrape the scabs off of six of them and leave the rest for another day.
1. It could be that because Martha Coakley is your standard shrew-faced evil witch who feels that divine intervention tagged her specifically as the one person on the planet qualified to tell others what they should and shouldn’t do and it is very possible that the voters in Massachusetts feel that they are doing the nation a favor by keeping her home.
2. The lack of support by Coakley’s potential constituents could be related to the role she played as the grand inquisitor in the Amirault witch-hunt. If you can’t abuse your authority by locking up entire families of innocent people what fun is there in holding a high public office?
3. Many of the voters in Massachusetts cast their ballots for Obama in 2008 because they wanted to see the changes he promised. Instead of change they got 12 months of Bush bashing, finger pointing and a heaping dose of more-of-the-same. This could be their way of telling the omnipotent one that he needs to either wake up and smell the coffee or start working on his resume.
4. Having endured Coakley’s embarrassing campaign strategy of lies, character assassination and personal attacks, the voters might have felt that if she needed Obama to come to the state and pull her ugly buns out of a fire she started and then threw herself into, then she wasn’t worth saving.
5. It might be that the people of Massachusetts have began the long painful process of realizing that, like the rest of the American people, they’ve been conned by both political parties and for the time being the best we can do is keep them busy fighting with each other while we figure out how to get rid of them all.
6. There is a distinct possibility that while many people in Massachusetts were willing to buy into some of the liberal’s quirkier characteristics, they did so under the commonly held belief that what the American liberals wanted was in the best interests of the nation as a whole and benefitted the American people. The current leaders of the Democratic National Party and the presidential administration of Barack Obama appear to be going above and beyond what would be considered necessary to prove beyond the shadow of doubt that they want to marginalize the influence of the U.S. by agreeing with the biggest and most out-spoken critics of America’s foreign policy, furthermore, their policy decisions and legislative proposals are exceedingly destructive towards the welfare of the American people. In simple terms, the people of Massachusetts might have been willing to support the DNC’s liberal agenda insofar as it strengthened the nation and benefited the American people, but the current trend is to shove a noticeably Marxist agenda down the throats of everyone and it is very difficult to make that appear beneficial.
While the precise reasoning for Tuesday’s surprising political switch in Massachusetts might be open for debate the relevant facts associated with the outcome of that election are clear and irrefutable. The facts alone speak far louder and with greater accuracy than any of the speculative news articles offering an explanation for Brown’s victory. Clearly, the facts indicate a significant change in the voter’s perception regarding the Democratic Party.
If there is one clear and significant message for the Democrats from Tuesday’s upset that message would be,
“Warning! Extreme danger ahead, Proceed at your own risk.”
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Barack Obama has pledged to send $100 million American tax dollars to Haiti for earthquake aid. That $100 million is in addition to the $800 million we sent to Haiti between 2004 and 2008, and it doesn’t count against the $282 million the U.S. Senate proposed for them in the next annual foreign assistance budget, nor will it be a part of the $165 million proposed by the U.S. House of Representatives. Obviously, the people in Haiti need help desperately. The country has been devastated by the recent earthquake, thousands of people are dead and many of the structures have collapsed. The people need help but sending money to a historically corrupt government that has already stolen everything that we have sent them in the last five or six years doesn’t seem like a bright thing to be doing. They need rescue workers to help dig out the trapped and dead, they need demolition crews to clear the rubble of the nation’s collapsed buildings, they need construction crews to start building new shelters for the displaced people, new schools for the children and hospitals for the sick and injured. They need road crews to go in and rebuild their demolished streets and highways. They need portable shelters until house can be build and throughout the entire process they need food, water, clothing and medical care. Sending them $100 million dollars is not the way to ensure that the people of Haiti get these things they need. The $800 million we have already sent to Haiti plus the $7 million that was sent to them by other nations and charities has not been used to build roads, schools or hospitals. It was not used to provide the people with food, medical assistance or to improve their education. Nobody really knows where that money went or what it was spent on but the people of Haiti know that none of came their way. Most of the homes in Haiti, before the earthquake, were without safe drinking water, sewage or electricity. Nearly 50% of the population is illiterate and the majority of the population lives on less than $2 dollars a day. One out of every eight children dies before their fifth birthday because of the squalid living conditions in a country where people still die from diseases like malaria, typhoid and dengue fever and other diseases that most of the civilized world long ago ceased to be concerned about. Sending money to the Haitian government is not going to help the people of Haiti. It is like throwing a drowning man an anchor.
The United States of American has unemployed engineers, light and heavy construction workers, electricians, plumbers, heavy equipment operators, welders, carpenters, laborers and countless other occupations and craftsmen all sitting around with nothing to do except watch the illegal aliens work at the jobs we used to have. Instead of sending money to the Haitian government, send shiploads of knowledgeable workers, supplies, building materials, food and medicine and use all of the money to fund the relief effort. The $15 million that the government of Haiti received from the U.S. taxpayers and from other countries in the last five years has not been used to help the people and there is no reason to believe that another $100 million will go to help the people of Haiti either. They need help, not money. Other than a cigarette factory, a bunch of Barbancourt rum distilleries and a couple of textile factories that assemble the pre-cut parts to clothing items that first have to imported, there is nothing in Haiti. They’ve got tons of mangrove trees but no lumber mills capable of producing the quantities of lumber needed to replace all of destroyed buildings. There is no cement plant, no steel mill nor any reliable power generation in the entire country. What good is a $100 million dollars going to do them? They can’t eat it, they can’t build a house out of it, and there certainly isn’t anywhere in the country to buy what they need so what’s the point? The answer to that should be pretty obvious. Even though our government officials know very well that the money will be siphoned off and spirited into secret bank accounts in Sweden or somewhere else they will send it because the American people don’t know any better and think that it is the right thing to do. Obama can pat himself on the back. He can use the opportunity to boost his dwindling popularity ratings among black Americans, and slam George Bush, and the entire Republican Party, in the head for the federal government’s response to Katrina. It is not an indication of any large degree of compassion for Obama; it is merely a politically savvy thing for a typically sociopathic politician to do. Its Obama way of saying to the American people, “See, unlike my predecessor who didn’t care about anybody, I care about everyone, I sent them money, your money. Sure, we are broke and can’t afford to do it, but what the hell, its only money and we can print more while you, and the next ten generations, work your asses off to pay the bill.” According to www.usdebtclock.org, which I checked at 3:30 pm Pacific Stand Time today, the US National Debt was at $12.3 trillion dollars (it was at $5.7 trillion when Bush took office and $7.8 trillion when he left office 8 years later). For the mathematically challenged that works out to about $113,000 for each U.S. Taxpayer. Can we really afford to give away money we don’t have?
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Given the fact that the congressional socialists have managed to cram their ridiculous health care legislation down the throats of the American people to the point of immanent implementation in less than one year, it might just turn out that they can do the same thing with their immigration reform/amnesty agenda before the mid-term elections come around and the American people have a chance to rid themselves of these scumbags.
While the current congressional views on immigration reform, like their views on health care reform, will be devastating to this nation if implemented, our congressional representatives appear to be less than concerned about the impact on the American people and adding benefit to our lives by actually improving this nation seems to be the last thing they want to accomplish.
The high costs that led to health care reform and the deplorable state of America’s educational system are two separate problems, but the underlying cause is common to both. The cost of health care was driven into the stratosphere by the more than 40 million illegal aliens taking advantage of federal law that required hospitals and emergency rooms to provide them with free health care despite their inability to pay. The cost of that “free” health care was passed along to the tax payers and consumers through higher medical care costs which inevitably drove up the cost of health insurance. The health care reform legislation does not address the root cause of the problem and we can expect the costs to escalate despite the reforms and we will have fewer dollars to pay those increased costs because our tax burden will increase to pay for the insurance of 40 million people who shouldn’t be in this country anyway. Simple common sense tells us that to solve a problem you must first identify the cause and then figure out how to eliminate it. You can’t rid your home of ants by poisoning the family dog but that is exactly the way our congressional representatives approached health care reform. Now that they have solved that problem they are ready to deal with immigration.
It is a futile hope to believe that the United States Congress will exercise any more intelligence when handling immigration than they demonstrated when they solved the health care problem. Despite the fact that millions of American citizens are unemployed and facing foreclosure, the representatives of both major political parties still cling to the belief that the United States need to build a larger workforce by increasing immigration and giving those who have already come here illegally amnesty for their criminal violation of American immigration laws. The simple fact is the politicians in Washington D.C. flatly refuse to see illegal aliens as a part of the immigration problem. It would be politically incorrect to identify the root cause of the problem and anyone who dared to do so would be branded a total racist.
In every election that takes place in this nation responsible American citizens face a number of alternative approaches. For any number of reasons many American voters are not inclined to actually consider the choices they make at the voting booth. They may have had a limited education. There is the possibility that they have never read the U.S. Constitution and everything they know about the formation of the American government came from elementary school text books. Quite a few will vote for the candidates of the political party that promises them the most personal gain and they will continue to vote for that party’s candidates year after year despite their failure to deliver on those promises. American voters routinely vote for the candidates they are told to vote for. If the PTA or the workplace union endorses a group of candidates, many of their members will vote for them. The political parties, every newspaper in the country, some religious groups, virtually every labor organization and ten million special interest groups annually spend millions of dollars printing up informational circulars and pamphlets advising us about who to vote for and who to vote against. Despite their reputation individualism and independence, the American people are mostly followers of the herd. They don’t want to think anymore than they have to and prefer being told what to do and what to think. Very few American voters actually research the candidates during an election by looking at their background, their voting record, the legislative endorsements they’ve made or any real relevant information about them. It is far too time consuming. We would rather vote for someone who is sure to win based on who the newspapers tell us is the most popular than vote for a certain loser we know to be more qualified and distinctly more honest. As a result of our own laziness, the United States Congress is filled with charlatans, thieves, dumbbells, tax evaders, sexual deviants and drug addicts, and most ironic of all, they are people who, like us, don’t want to think too hard about what decisions they make. Rather than doing a lot of exhausting research on the issues before them, they prefer someone tell them how to vote. It isn’t their constituents they turn to, it’s the party bosses, and we are left holding the bag and the bill to pay when the dust settles.
The United States Congress is one of the only places I can think of where an individual with a college degree in English Literature, Philosophy, Communications, Political Science, Art History, Physical Education, Women’s Studies, Poetry, General Studies, Liberal Arts, or Sociology can find extremely lucrative employment providing they also have a well-honed talent for expressing their convoluted cogitations to the general public in an articulate manner that appears to be logical and intelligent despite its lack of substance or actual meaning. If it were not for the United States Congress, parents and grandparents with tons of surplus money to finance them, and/or their families and friends connections to generous campaign contributors willing to gamble huge sums of money for the chance to own a big slice of their own Washington politician, these otherwise feculent pedestrian dregs of our nation’s appallingly expensive institutions of higher learning would be leveraging their artfully designed and very impressive looking college diplomas to compete for employment as burger flippers, trash truck drivers, dish washers and janitors. After all, anyone with access to tons of money, the IQ of an avocado, and nothing better to do for the next four years, can drink their way through the most prestigious universities this nation has to offer and come out the other end with an impressive looking diploma and the legitimate right to add a few meaningless abbreviations to the end of their illegibly scrawled signature. Those beautifully engraved (suitable for framing) diplomas do not indicate any depth of character, positive human attributes, measurable amount of intelligence, grasp of common sense, leadership skills or any other differentiating attribute indicating even a minimal difference between them and the rest of this nation’s society. The ability to maintain sobriety for a few hours, one day a week, or just long enough to barely pass the weekly tests required to achieve the minimum passing grade ultimately results in graduation, but it is no indication that the bearer of that magnificent looking diploma is any more intelligent than the average sixth grader, and anyone willing to look closely at the miscreants populating the halls of American government will discover ample substantiation for this statement of fact.
Prospective U.S. Senators and members of the House of Representatives are not required to undergo a battery of intelligence tests, they are not subject to periodic drug testing, they are not examined for mental stability, maturity, and they are not only entirely free to lie about their true intentions for seeking political office, it is a natural expectation. Three quarters of our congressional representatives couldn’t pass the most basic civil service exam. If these individuals applied for landscaping maintenance positions with any American city the majority of them would be rejected after failing the written exam, most of them couldn’t pass the psychological tests required to be a police officer, and many couldn’t even pass the piss test required to work at a Burger King. Despite this, they are elected to high political offices in Washington D.C. and given the authority and responsibility to determine what we, the American people can and cannot do, who will and will not sit on the bench in the Supreme Court, how much of our hard-earned income we are allowed to keep and which gaggle of lead-assed social malcontents will receive the money that is taken away from us. This is why the United States government is populated by people who have never owned, operated or even worked for a private business and yet they are entrusted with the authority to determine how U.S, businesses should operate, this is why there are individuals who have never served in the U.S. Military determining American military strategy and rules of engagement for combat situations they can’t even begin to imagine, and characters who have never even balanced their own checkbook determining economic policies that will affect every man woman and child in this nation for decades to come. Regardless of the abysmal performance of these well established simple-minded twits the American people continue to either keep them in office or replace them with even more dim-witted and witless imbeciles in every single election. Is there anybody out there in the real world that sees even the slightest problem with the continuation of this manner of selecting our elected representatives?
Has it occurred to anyone that the political endorsements made by the PTA, the AARP, the millions of special interest groups out there, our local union leaders, and every single newspaper on the planet might be compiled by individuals who are attempting to fulfill their own personal goals at the expense of the American people? As a former high-ranking officer in a major Southern California labor union, I have sat in stunned silence while the rank and file members of the local were instructed to vote for candidates and local initiatives decidedly not in their best interests. I have attended countless executive board meetings where disbursements from the local’s treasury were authorized to support the political campaigns of candidates who, once elected, immediately turned on the middle-class workers by raising their taxes and attacking the companies those workers depended on. Throughout my twenty-four year affiliation with that organization, from my first day of employment to the date that I became fed up with the lies and became the most outspoken critical scab that group has ever experienced, not one single member ever managed to connect the dots between their financial suffering, the decimation of their once lucrative benefits, the never-ending waves of lay-offs, force-reductions and forced early retirements, and the local’s campaign support for the political candidates who later proposed and supported the legislative acts that resulted in their pain and suffering. What I witnessed as one of the top officers of that local is not uncommon. The same thing happens in the meeting halls of every local union in America and millions of American union members routinely buy into the lies they are told without question. Independent thought is the scourge of any collective advocacy group and critical reasoning is enthusiastically discouraged. The continued growth and financial stability of labor unions, parent-teacher associations, the AARP, La Raza, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party is entirely dependent on these groups ability to convince their members that their sole purpose for existence is to benefit the people they serve regardless of what they are actually doing. Given the simple fact that most Americans would rather acquiesce to a lie than exercise their atrophied ability to think independently, the advocacy group’s ability to perpetuate the myth of benevolence is not difficult to perpetuate. The United States of America now stands on the brink of destruction because the American people would rather follow than think. If you believe that this statement of simple fact needs to be substantiated with examples and proof beyond those that are already banging away at your mind twenty four hours a day, seven days a week then you are a clueless follower of the herd in front of you and you need to quit reading and catch up before you find yourself lost and being forced to think.
Admittedly, I have always been pretty hard on the Democrats, or at least what passes for a Democrat these days. For the most part they are a spineless lot willing to trade entitlements for votes and they could care less about the people they serve as long as they stay in control, however, the Republicans politicians are no better and I consider them more despicable simply because I expect more from them and they have proven themselves incapable of their own high standards. Generally speaking, the American people expect their political representatives to be wiser, more intelligent and steadfastly truthful and honest but we vote for liars, cheats and con artists time after time because our choices are intentionally limited between a Democratic crook or a Republican crook and ultimately, the choice is not being made by the American people but by the political parties who control the campaign funds and finance the entire charade. When the American people voted for Barack Obama in 2008 they were voting for what they hoped would be an end to the extreme corruption of American government by self serving politicians and special interests. It is pretty obvious that they were sold a bill of goods and our current political environment is a continuation of the same old garbage. If anything, we are far worse off now than we were and disaster is knocking even louder than ever before. Not only do we have to deal with the political bickering of self-serving politicians slashing and stabbing away at each other but we’ve allowed them to manipulate us into believing that We are a part of that fight and that we need to choose up sides and start slashing and stabbing away at each other, and the most ironic thing about it is that no matter who wins that battle, the American people lose. As long as we have a two party system where both groups are predominantly a bunch of self serving, dumb as a bag of hair, dishonest jerks, we are better off if neither side wins an overwhelmingly dominant position.
If political wisdom (an oxy-moron if there ever was one) were the product of scientific reasoning and experimental research, the state of California would be viewed as the classic example of a carefully conducted experiment. The state of California has been said to lead the entire nation with its progressive trends, fashions, economic policies and legislative proposals. With two brief exceptions the Democratic Party has had a solid lock on the state of California’s legislature since 1959. The Democratic Party has accomplished this feat by trickery and the most extreme form of gerrymandering imaginable. It is nearly impossible for an incumbent to be voted out of office in California, and despite the fact that the state has had quite a few Republican governors the state legislature has remained under Democratic control for nearly fifty years.
California is the most populous state in the nation and the second most populous sub-national entity on the North American continent. Some years ago it was noted that if the state of California were a nation it would rank among the ten largest economies in the world. It is home to the nation’s second and sixth largest census statistical areas as well as eight of the nation’s fifty most populous cities, and it has an estimated population of 36,961,664 people. Unfortunately, approximately one third of the nation’s illegal aliens reside in the state of California and while the estimates of the state’s illegal alien population range from 4 million to 13.2 million, anyone brave enough to drive through downtown Los Angeles, Santa Ana, Boyle Heights or any other densely populated area of the state would be willing to swear that the higher estimate is more credible. The high density of illegal aliens in California is the result of having nearly thirty major California cities publicly announce their defiance of federal immigration laws and proclaim themselves as “Sanctuary Cities” where illegal aliens are free to do as they please without fear of apprehension.
The economy of the state of California represents about 13% of the United States gross domestic product or approximately $2 trillion dollars annually. The gross domestic product of California alone is larger than all but eight countries in the world. However, despite the wealth of the “Golden State” California’s state government has managed to accumulate an estimated $40 billion dollar deficit by nearly tripling their state spending in the last ten years to finance entitlement programs aimed primarily at the massive influx of illegal aliens. The state government’s sole source of income is the state income taxes imposed on its legal residents and citizens and 97% of those individuals contribute less than 40% of the taxes collected. A mere 3% of the state’s inhabitants contribute more than 60% of all state taxes collected. Meanwhile, anywhere from 3 million to 13.2 million illegal aliens contribute little or nothing to the state coffers and serve primarily as a massive drain on the state’s economy. Incredibly enough, the state’s predominantly Democratic legislators have futilely tried for years to plug this drain with huge piles of tax dollars. It hasn’t worked yet, but it’s possible that it might work next year, or the year after. The logic of their actions is not apparent.
In order to maintain the high level of entitlement programs for illegal aliens the state legislators have cut deeply into the educational budget for the state. Hundreds of classes were eliminated altogether, thousands of workers were forced out of jobs and state college tuitions were increased by 32%. More than $16 million dollars derived from the increased tuitions and fees paid by the state’s legitimate resident college students will go directly to pay for the financial aid benevolently handed out to individuals who entered the United States illegally. Young American students, the sons and daughters of the state’s legal residents and citizens whose tax dollars were used to build, maintain and operate the state’s universities, are already being forced to finance their own way through school by working two or three part time jobs, and now the cost of their tuition, text books and miscellaneous school fees are being significantly increased to provide virtually free college educations to the state’s overwhelmingly large population of young illegal aliens. Ironically, upon the successful completion of their studies, illegal aliens with college diplomas, master’s degrees and even doctorate degrees remain legally unemployable because they entered the United States without legal authorization. Then again, the illegal alien graduates of California’s tax payer subsidized state universities and colleges can and do find positions of employment in the state of California and elsewhere across the nation by illegally falsifying their identities and their immigration status, or by going to work for any one of the multitude of American companies who are more than willing to consciously accept obviously false identification papers and immigration documents in order to fill their vacant positions providing the bearer of those blatantly phony papers willingly acquiesces to drastically discounted wage scales. The businesses and multi-national corporations operating out of California have led the nation in new and ingeniously clever ways to get around the federal prohibition against hiring illegal alien workers. Entire departments of many large companies in California have been outsourced to temporary agencies who hire illegal aliens to perform the parent company’s work as independent contractors. This quasi-legal arrangement provides the company with an unlimited supply of dirt cheap workers. They cannot be held accountable for the immigration status of another company’s employees and they have the advantage of not having to pay worker’s compensation, provide benefit packages, 401 K plans or complying with state and federal overtime laws. Temporary agencies sprout up like mushrooms all over the state and disappear just as quickly. By the time the federal government becomes aware of their existence, they’ve moved, changed names, and continue their operation from another location. Some of these temporary agencies have never even had an office inside the United States where the work their U.S. educated employees perform originates.
The state of California is the Petri dish where the future of ultra progressive American culture grows and any prudent American citizen concerned for the welfare of this nation would do well to carefully examine the cause and effect of California’s legislative history and government policies. The ludicrously idiotic, illogical and amoral legislative acts passed into law by the state’s execrably myopic political “representatives,” the irresponsible, inane, dangerous and downright stupid local government policies and ordinances adopted by self-serving, bribe taking, treasury dipping, pathological malcontents who have lied, cheated, purchased and manipulated their way into positions as civic leaders, representatives and supervisors of city and county boards and mayor’s offices, as well as the goatish inbred political elitists squatting over the state’s population at the executive level in Sacramento have turned the “Golden State” of California into a blighted, feculent, malodorous festering, scum-covered 163,696 square miles of overflowing cesspool.
Fifty-five years ago California might have been worth emulating. It was a classic example of this nation’s cutting edge technology, it lead the nation in scientific and academic achievements and the state’s prosperous manufacturing capabilities were marvels of human ingenuity and it served not just the United States but the entire civilized world as a center of technology and engineering competence, the home of the world’s most prosperous entertainment and music endeavors, and the center of American agricultural production. California’s seemingly endless supply of natural resources, massive oil deposits and mineral resources remained at full production levels long after the demands of World War II subsided. The state’s countless defense manufacturers, pumped up by more than 12% of the U.S. government’s wartime defense contracts quickly adapted to manufacturing industrial goods after the war. Los Angeles became the fastest growing metropolitan area in the nation and millions of people poured into California from the eastern, southern and mid-western states where joined hundreds of thousands of returning American soldiers to create the most populous state in the Union. California was where businesses thrived, countless good paying jobs waited for willing workers and housing tracts developed into sprawling suburbs complete with department stores, restaurants, public parks, libraries, schools and hospitals interconnected by a spider web of roads and highways packed with affordable automobiles as everyone scuttled about in pursuit of the American dream. The prosperous American middle class, consumerism, credit cards and amusement parks were born in the state of California and the state’s massive entertainment industry effectively, and very deceptively, demonstrated the multi-faceted pleasurable nature of California’s newly developed lifestyle to the rest of the world through the miracle of modern television. The state of California transformed the entire nation with its technological advancements, scientific achievements, agricultural developments, manufacturing, entertainment, and music industry. However, that was fifty-five years ago.
The California of 2010 is a very different place. It is still the most populous state in the nation with 36,756,666 residents. Ridiculously conservative estimates indicate that California is home to around 3 million illegal aliens. More realistic estimates range from to 6 to more than 9 million illegal aliens in California alone. The state’s agricultural industry is entirely dependent on the ever expanding population of illegal aliens. In many respects the relationship between the agricultural industry in California and the illegal aliens they employ is remarkably similar to the relationship that once existed in the southern states between the plantation owners and their slaves. The illegal alien field hands receive little compensation for working 12 to 16 hours a day in the hot sun of California’s fertile agricultural areas. They are paid far below the legal minimum scale and receive no additional compensation for the many hours of overtime they are required to put in. They housed in dilapidated rat and cockroach infested shacks that goats wouldn’t walk into. The state required portable toilets parked nearby can be easily located on the darkest of nights by the thick putrid stench of receptacles filled to the breaking point with human excrement. In many cases the portable toilets are supplied by the same outfits that broker the illegal laborers and haul them from one field to the next in antiquated, over packed school buses purchased for next to nothing at state sponsored auctions. The brokers that supply them also charge them for the meager food they receive, the hovels they live in and the blankets they sleep under. They also supply them with cheap liquor to drink at expensive prices and occasionally arrange for underage females to be smuggled into the country to satisfy the sexual needs of forty or more workers in a single day. Commonly these young girls are lured into making the trip up here with promises of good paying jobs in the garment factories of Los Angeles, and more often than not, they are abandoned by the side of the road, penniless and traumatized. Those that are not abandoned are hauled off to the next waiting group of less than discriminating field hands. As ignorant and uneducated as these field hands commonly are, few of them spend more than one season in the fields before either returning home or heading into the nearest large city where they can find better paying employment as temporary workers for landscaping companies, restaurants, car washes owned by unscrupulous American businessmen who would rather cheat an illegal alien out of wages than pay an American citizen minimum wage for doing the work that needs to be done. In 2010 the once glorious state of California is buried in debt up to its eyeballs. It is 163,696 square miles of crime ridden cesspool interconnected by thousands of miles of ill-maintained, antiquated and ridiculously over-crowded highways that allow the millions of daily commuters the ability to travel back and forth at a maximum speed of 10 miles per hour. The manufacturing industry and the entertainment industry have folded up shop and moved to other states where the taxes are lighter and regulations less harsh, and the most conspicuous characteristic of the state’s vast shopping malls are the empty windows of the bankrupt stores. Huge healthcare complexes lie vacant and unused, hammered out of business by the unfunded mandate to treat those who will not pay. The only things that are actually growing in the state are the unemployment rate, the illiteracy rate of recent high school graduates, the population of homeless people and the state income tax.
In 2005 a study conducted by the California Research Bureau estimated that the cost of providing health care to illegal aliens in California alone was $10.5 billion per year
In 2006 the California Department of Education handed out $122,389,686 in grants to roughly 22 regional centers through a federally funded program that was authorized under the “No Child Left Behind Act” called “The Migrant Education Program.”
In 2008 the Los Angeles Department of Public Social Services indicated that 25% of Los Angeles County’s welfare and food stamp benefits are going directly to the children of illegal aliens, and it was costing the L.A. County taxpayers $36 million a month.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the current unemployment rate in California is around 12.3%. American citizens are going broke, facing bankruptcy and losing their homes by the thousands and yet the policy makers, the movers and shakers in Sacramento who were elected to represent the people of the state refuse to acknowledge any correlation between the illegal aliens and the high rate of unemployment; furthermore, they blatantly deny that illegal aliens have anything but a positive impact on the state’s economy. The Sacramento politician’s delusional belief that the millions of illegal freeloaders form the foundation for a healthy state economy is, bluntly speaking, crazier than shit. It is another classic example of a liberal lie told often enough to become accepted as a popular truth despite the absence of logic, substantiating factual evidence or supporting statistical research. It is a delusion that is enthusiastically propagated by the liberal news media through bold headlines declaring “UCLA Study Says Legalizing Workers Would Aid Economy” as the Los Angeles Times recently did on January 7, 2010. Unfortunately, the left-leaning newspaper declined to explain to it’s readers that this purported scholarly study was slapped together by a UCLA professor working in the “Chicano Studies” department. Obviously, someone in the newspaper’s editorial staff felt that the full disclosure of this relevant bit of information might reduce the overall credibility and impact of the article and raise questions about the possibility of the lone researcher’s favorable bias towards illegal aliens. From the viewpoint of a far-left newspaper struggling to justify a popular, but entirely unjustifiable delusion, such a concern would be warranted. There is no legal, moral, statistical or logical argument of substance for the legalization of this nation’s estimated thirty to forty million illegal aliens, and there is no place in the United States where the cold reality of this fact is made more apparent than it is in the state of California. Ton after ton of well documented statistical data derived from state and federal law enforcement, welfare, and educational agencies clearly demonstrating the detrimental and very expensive impact of illegal aliens on the United States, and most especially, on the U.S. tax payers can only be countered with hype, spin, fraudulent studies, meaningless rhetoric, misleading newspaper articles and outright lies. It’s the tried and true strategy of the left, it worked well for health care reform and there is little reason to believe that it won’t work for amnesty. That is, as long as the people of this nation don’t look too hard at the state of California.
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I have come to the conclusion that thinking like a modern politically progressive liberal is an art and a science that takes many years to acquire and hone to perfection. As evidenced by this morning’s Los Angeles Times, it is an ability that I have failed to develop a true appreciation for and it is quite possible that I will never comprehend the full complexities of this complex process.
Every morning when the paper is delivered I pull out the main news section, the business section and throw the rest in the trash without even looking at it. I quit reading the comics section when it ceased to be funny and became another outlet for simple-minded political expression. Truth be told, I despise the Los Angeles Times, but I switched to it from the Orange County Register because the Orange County paper eliminated most of the news to make room for more advertising, they abandoned their Libertarian mission statement and became more liberal than the “Socialist Weekly,” so I figured that as long as I my choices were going to be limited to a selection of left wing propaganda rags I may as well pick the one that had at least some relevance, however small it might be. The Los Angeles Times is not a step up from the Orange County Register, but it does supply me with more packing material when I need it and it soaks up paint and wood stain as well as any paper around, and for someone who works diligently towards an understanding of liberal thought, the Los Angeles Times is a veritable gold mine of politically correct bullshit. With that being said, I must admit that I still have much study to do before I figure out the idiosyncrasies of the liberal thought process and this morning’s edition made that fact very clear to me.
On A34 of this morning’s LA Times there appears an article entitled “The enduring wisdom of Special Order 40″ praising the new police chief’s dedication to the city’s long standing policy of not enforcing immigration law and prohibiting the police department from cooperating with the federal government’s immigration authorities. This appears to be one of the cornerstones of California’s liberal communities and similar “sanctuary” policies have been adopted in more than 23 large California cities. Essentially, these policies allow convicted illegal alien felons, rapists, murderers, pedophiles and all sorts of other violent criminals to do their time in the state’s prison system and be released into the neighborhoods they were arrested in rather than being deported. From a liberal standpoint, this is viewed as a benefit because more than 30% of the nation’s illegal aliens reside in the state, and contrary to popular belief, they participate in all state and federal elections by loyally supporting the Democratic candidates who are the primary source of the entitlement programs they depend on. If they all voted for conservative candidates, the Liberals would hunt them down like plague carrying ground squirrels and get rid of them, but that’s not the case so they are portrayed as a beneficial part of our society regardless of the burden they pose to the California tax payers and the drain to the state’s rapidly dwindling finances.
On A5 of this morning’s paper there appeared an article that clearly demonstrates the actual cost of Special Order 40 in much more personal terms. That article included the security video image of a 72 year old legal immigrant seconds before he was fatally shot in the back of the head by three armed gang members holding up his 98-cent store in the Pico-Union area. Ironically, “The enduring wisdom of Special Order 40″ explains the vital importance of Special Order 40 in the Pico-Union, the Westlake District and Temple-Beaudry areas of Los Angeles which are all busting at the seams with illegal aliens from southern Mexico and Central America, and this is the same Pico-Union area where Fereidoun Kohanim, 72, a kindly old man known for handing out free candy to children at his 98-cent store was shot in the head.
As far as the liberals of Los Angeles are concerned, there is no correlation between Special Order 40 and the rampant crime that plagues the predominantly illegal alien neighborhoods of the city. Sixty percent of the city’s gang members are illegal aliens and they spend most of their time preying on the other legal and illegal aliens who live and work in these areas. When they are not busy waging turf wars with competing gangs of illegal aliens they concentrate on expanding their territory by intimidating, harassing and often killing the African-Americans who live nearby. The liberals who control the positions of authority in Los Angeles consider the murders and the high crime rate in these areas as a simple coincidence rather than a consequence of the laws and policies they have created. I suppose it is a matter of perspective that I have yet to fully comprehend. If I survive long enough maybe I will figure it out. If I live to be very old it is possible that senility will help me appreciate this perspective.
Fifty years ago, before common sense was over-ruled by political correctness, problems like these could be dealt with. Raids would take place and people would be rounded up and locked away in deep dark dungeons. They would be prosecuted, deported, gassed or electrocuted and the law would be enforced, justice was done, sometimes in the courts, sometimes in the streets. Regardless of where or how it happened, the bad guys got the idea, and even a lone ten year old white boy like me could walk the streets of downtown Los Angeles without being victimized. Fifty years later we’ve progressed to the point where law enforcement no longer holds the shackles, it wears them. Criminal gangs can’t be rounded up without the appearance of racial profiling, mass protests and outraged community activists, demands for investigations, possible riots and certain repercussions. The citizens are no longer safe, not on the streets and not even in their own homes. This is an improvement? This is the legacy of enduring wisdom? If so, the logic escapes me so I will wait for senility to make it easier to understand, and in the meantime I will merely watch and marvel at the genius of liberal thought.
Elderly shopkeeper fatally shot in ’senseless crime’
The enduring wisdom of Special Order 40
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The federal government has reported a drop in unemployment for November. The current unemployment rate is estimated to be approximately 10%, however, to get a more comprehensive measure of unemployment the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) developed the U-6 measure. The official unemployment rate reported by the politicians in Washington uses a methodology referred to as U-3. U-3 is less accurate because it only counts the individuals actively enrolled for unemployment benefits and it does not count those who have exhausted their benefits and those who are no longer considered eligible because they have given up looking for work. The U-6 method gives a more precise measurement because it reflects both those receiving unemployment as well as those who have fallen between the cracks. The U-6 measurement indicates a much darker but far more accurate picture of unemployment in America, and from the looks of things, the American economy has gotten a lot worse than the Democrats want us to know.
The Democrats are sweating bullets over the skyrocketing unemployment rate. They are afraid that if they don’t do something and do it quick, the 2010 mid-term elections may spell doom for their total control of the American government. They’ve done everything possible to discredit the E-Verify program and reduce immigration enforcement, and as a result, millions of American citizens, including high percentages of blacks and Hispanics are out of work while millions of illegal aliens have replaced them. Union members are being laid off by the thousands and their jobs are going to illegal aliens. The labor leaders don’t care as long as they keep getting those union dues. Dues money, I might point out that is going into the coffers of the Democratic Party to campaign for the Democrats immigration reform measures and amnesty that will encourage even more illegal immigration.
Ironically, there is absolutely nothing the Democrats controlling the federal government can do to create jobs, so don’t hold your breath waiting for things to get better. Jobs are created by businesses, not politicians, and as long as business owners are feeling threatened by potentially higher taxes and the threat of having to pay a larger chunk of their employees medical care in the future, they are not going to start hiring. In fact the larger the threat becomes the more layoffs there will be. It isn’t just the threat of higher taxes and increased medical costs that’s scaring the business owners, the Democrats have a whole horde of environmental items on their agenda that will make it nearly impossible to manufacture anything inside the United States, and when you get right down to it, there is no legislation the Democrats are considering that will do anything even remotely beneficial for business owners. Financially speaking, the Democrats have already shot their wad. Generations of future Americans will be working to pay off the debts they’ve already created and if they push for more foreign loans they could end up bankrupting the entire country.
While common sense tells most of us that you can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip, the Democrats are not characterized by their strong grasp of common sense. Despite the tight financial situation most Americans are currently in the Washington brain trust is planning to raise taxes across the board. Businesses will be hit especially hard and that will result in higher prices for consumer goods, food and other necessities. The Neanderthals among us believe taxing the “rich” and the big corporations is good thing for the government to do, but those of us with a few brain cells left realize that the “rich” and the big corporations simply pass those increases along to the middle class and poor in the form of higher prices and more lay-offs, and ultimately the people who end up getting hit the hardest by every tax increase, regardless of where it is aimed, are the people who can least afford it, the poor and the borderline middle-class citizens struggling to make ends meet and failing miserably. Every time the liberal’s talk about raising taxes on the wealthy what they are really saying is that they intend to screw everybody, some directly and the rest by consequence.
The liberal’s demand for more relaxed lending standards to help individuals with poor credit histories and few or no assets qualify for home mortgages they could never hope to pay off is what brought about the subprime mortgage crisis. Their attempt to fix the problem by throwing vast sums of money at the banking industry has accomplished nothing but create a massive debt that will take many future generations of American citizens years to pay off. The foreclosure rate is still increasing, new home construction has dwindled away to nothing and more Americans are out of work than ever before and the financial problems facing American citizens are getting worse by the minute with no indication of relief at any point in the future. While the middle-class, American born construction workers, once the backbone of the American economy, are sitting at home doing nothing, the illegal aliens are filling their former positions for less than a third of the income and the government tells us that this is a sign of growing economic stability.
Amidst the bleak, gloomy landscape of economic ruin building up around us, the Democratic controlled United States Congress has re-doubled their push for health care reform. The proposed legislation has grown to nearly four thousand pages in length and it reads like a Christmas list of benefits for the insurance companies and the large pharmaceutical concerns that have bought and paid for most of it. Despite the revelation that the majority of American citizens do not want this legislation to pass, the Democrats forge ahead with their agenda. Sure it will increase the tax burden of the American citizens, it will reduce the quality of health care in the U.S. and raise the cost of medical insurance for everyone, but the Democrats have too much invested in it to back down now. They have come to see the failure of health care reform as a loss of their political power, and to get their proposal to this point they have made so many secret deals with lobbyists that failure could leave them embarrassingly exposed. What is good for the nation is not a concern because the future of the Democratic Party is at stake and that is their only concern at this point. Reversing directions is not an option. They will pass the proposed legislation regardless of the consequences. Like they have tried to do with the economic situation, they will falsify the data to show improvements where none exist. They will ignore the problems caused and inflate everything that can be made to look like a benefit whether it is or it isn’t. The insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry will fund the propaganda that will fill the airwaves, and for the most part, the gullible American citizens will believe what their told because that’s all they will be hearing about. By the time the 2010 mid-term elections roll around a new crisis will be invented. The liberals will be out in front with the only possible solution. Their opponents will be demonized for causing the problem and the American people will unfailingly swallow the bait, the hook, the sinker and maybe even the bobber as they turn out in droves to vote for more of the same. Obviously, fifty years of dumbing down America’s public school system has worked well for the Democrats.
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According to a report on Fox News, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has indicated that the senate health care reform bill currently under consideration would increase the insurance premiums for people not currently covered under an employer based health plan, and for the majority of those who are currently covered under an employer offered health care plan, the price will go up. The Congressional Budget Office also stated in their report that if the senate reform measure passes, by 2016 the premiums for health insurance can be expected to rise by as much as 13 percent.
At this point it appears that the only people who will benefit from health care reform are the insurance companies who will get to sell more insurance policies and charge a higher price for doing it, and the extremely impoverished people who have no insurance coverage and will be treated to a government subsidized insurance policy at the expense of the American taxpayers. The rest of the nation is getting screwed at least twice and in some cases, three of four times. The first time is the increase in the cost of your own health care insurance premium and the second time is for the increase in taxes to pay for the health care of those who receive government subsidized policies. The elderly on Medicare will get an additional screwing by having their benefits slashed and I forgot to mention the fact that we are getting screwed by simple fact that the quality of health care in the USA will drop through the floor. Private practice doctors, the hub of the American health care industry, will get screwed so many times over that they might as well start dressing like hookers. Not only will their insurance rates and their income taxes go up but they will be getting less for each patient they take care of, plus they get the added benefit of having to fill out tons of new government documents for every patient, as well as the cost of having to hire additional personnel to fill out all the new forms. Meshing their current office software with the new government system and forms will undoubtedly be another cost that doctors and hospitals will have to face, because the government is fairly insistent about be able to access all of the accumulated personal data now stashed away in those fat manila folders.
As the Democratic National Party’s candidate for the office of President, Barack Obama repeatedly promised the American people that lobbyists would no longer run the American government. However, that was before he took office and it was certainly long before the DNC pinned their hopes for the future on the proposed Health Care Reform Act. Six months following the start of the health care reform debate the Obama administration reluctantly released the list of major players who have purchased ring-side seats in the formative discussions taking place behind closed doors regarding the proposed reform measures. While this is merely a partial listing it is still nice to know at least some of the people who are making the decisions that will affect the American people in such a significant manner as health care reform will undoubtedly do. The list includes the insurance companies that are looking out for themselves, the pharmaceutical industry which is there to ensure that their profits will not be affected, the labor movement is there simply because wherever you find dogs you find fleas, The AARP and the AMA are there to sell out their members for whatever they can get out of it and a whole slew of lobbyists are there to look out for the best interests of the companies that pay them. From the looks of the list the only people not being effectively represented are the American tax payers who will foot the bill for the mess once the U.S. Congress shoves it down our throats.
George Halvorson, chairman and CEO of Kaiser Health Plans
Richard Umbdenstock, chief of the American Hospital Association
Laird Burnett, a top lobbyist for insurer Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc.
Scott Serota, president and CEO of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association
Kenneth Kies, a Washington lobbyist who represents Blue Cross/Blue Shield
Billy Tauzin, head of PhRMA the drug industry lobby
Merck & Co. Inc. chief executive, Richard Clark, and a vice president, Richard Pasternak, along with in-house lobbyist Jane Horvath and Jonathan Hoganson, a lobbyist representing both Merck as well as PhRMA, the drug industry’s major trade association
Amador “Dean” Aguillen, former aide to Nancy Pelosi, turned lobbyist for pharmaceutical companies SanofiPasteur and Takeda Pharmaceuticals America, Pfizer Inc., and Amgen USA Inc.
Joseph Swedish, Trinity Health’s chief executive
Joshua Ackil, a lobbyist for U.S. Oncology Inc.
Joel Johnson, a lobbyist for United Healthcare Services Inc. and Kinetic Concepts Inc., a medical products maker
John Sweeney, former president of the AFL-CIO, and Gerald McEntee of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and their top lobbyists, Bill Samuel and Chuck Loveless
Richard Trachtman, Lobbyist for the American College of Physician Services Inc.
Dr. J. James Rohack, the AMA’s president and Richard Deem, the AMA’s top lobbyist
Barry Rand, the AARP’s chief executive, and top lobbyists, John Rother, Nancy LeaMond and David Sloane
At this point is anybody’s guess what sort of a truly bizarre nightmare the Democrat’s health care reform act will stir up. We are, after all talking about a government that can’t effectively place an order for a sufficient amount of swine flu vaccine to inoculate every American citizen. This is the same American government that created the Department of Education and sent our public school system into a fifty year downward spiral that has culminated in the dumbest generation of American teenagers in the history of the nation, and it is the same government that has largely banned drilling for oil anywhere in the U.S. and then needs an investigation to find out why we have become so dependent on foreign oil. How anyone in this country could come to the conclusion that government run health care would benefit the American people is simply beyond my wildest imagination. Then again, there may not be any American citizens worth talking about outside of the U.S. Congress that actually support the Democrat’s health care reform measures. A July 2009 Rasmussen poll indicated that just 28 percent of voters strongly approve of the way that the President is doing his job and the approval rating for the U.S. Congress is so low that it isn’t even worth looking at. Practically the entire country thinks we’re headed off on a wild tangent and nobody appears to be at the helm of this ship. The Democrats keep inventing one crisis after another and using them as excuses to spend huge sums of money that we don’t have and there is no accountability anywhere.
Make no mistake about it, the Democrats have far too much invested in health care reform to walk away, they’ve cut too many deals with all the big players, the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, the AMA, the AARP and the in-bred union leaders to back off now. They are going to pass something even if they know it is going to be a disaster, after all, they can always find somebody else to blame it on later. Between now and 2010 the Democrats are going to pass all sorts of legislation in the attempt to ensure their own job security. Health care reform will be the first of many and you can bet that amnesty for the nation’s 40 million illegal aliens will be right behind it.
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The Christmas decorations being pulled out for sale at Costco in the middle of July doesn’t signify the arrival of the Christmas spirit as much as the annual Black Friday battles fought in the aisles of Wal-Mart. This year the Wal-Mart’s in Rancho Cucamonga sported a fist fight in the electronics department just a few hours after a fight broke out in the Upland Wal-Mart. At least nobody got killed in this years Wal-Mart riots and Wal-Mart officials reported that “There have been a few scuffles, but overall it’s been a very safe event with no major issues.”
Personally, I never shop at Wal-Mart regardless of how low their prices are, and I certainly wouldn’t go into a Wal-Mart during flu season unless I had a death wish. I have been in a few of them and I have never seen anything worth kicking somebody’s ass over, then again, it’s probably not the merchandise that gets people to throwing punches, more than likely its the customers they cater to.
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