Category: Current Posts

The violence in the Middle East appears to have caught the ruling Democrats totally by surprise and they, with the help of their fellow travelers in the MSM, are trying desperately to assert that the obviously coordinated attacks on US embassies and consulates are spontaneous reactions to an obscure movie trailer critical of Islam.

After all, Muslims were supposed to love Obama, right? Since he had been one of them? So, White House spokesman Jay Carney said “obviously” the riots and murders were NOT the result of American administration policy.

“Obviously”? Far from being innocent, the Obama administration’s crown jewel of its reelection campaign, the killing of Osama bin Laden, IS the reason for the multiple attacks of September 11, 2012.

I could say that the president doesn’t understand how deeply certain Muslim factions hate the United States, but I think he knows that. I think he might even AGREE with them. After all, Obama’s policies, beginning with his “apology tour” speech in Cairo ironically, have been calculated to reduce America’s wealth, power and influence in the world. Barack Obama clearly doesn’t like America either, if that America is strong, rich and able to make it’s interests succeed.

But while Obama’s efforts are directed at building up backward countries and reducing the prosperity and power of developed countries, reaching some kind of socialist-style mutual misery, the focus of radical Islam is the ERADICATION of all non-Muslim influences, especially the United States and Israel.

The left-most elements of our country began on Sept. 12, 2001 blaming America for the attacks of Sept. 11. The MSM is trying desperately to blame the current attacks on Republicans(!), who do not control the White House or the Senate. Some newsies have even blamed Mitt Romney, who doesn’t hold any political office currently. It’s really difficult to understand how their minds work.

Administration officials like Hillary Clinton have chosen to condemn the filmmaker and apologize to the rioters for our First Amendment, rather than condemn the barbaric attacks and closed mindedness of Muslim fundamentalists. This communal Stockholm syndrome of the left, where we blame ourselves and sympathize with our attackers, is really crazy.

We desperately need leadership who will assert the superiority of America’s vision of freedom and opportunity and personal empowerment, like Reagan did 30 years ago. By clearly stating the superiority of democratic capitalism over repressive communism, he caused the Soviet Union to collapse of its own weight. So, with an example of unambiguous celebration of freedom, eventually Muslims will realize that their cause is hurt by the barbaric tactics of 1,000 years ago and the radicals will be ultimately marginalized by Muslims who actually practice Islam as a “religion of peace”.

I hope that’s not too idealistic, but the only other alternative is to meet the Muslims in their “holy war” until one side destroys the other.

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The gavel has come down to close the Republican National Convention. I DVR’d the prime time speeches and have seen most of them. How anyone could listen objectively and not be uplifted and inspired, I don’t know. But apparently the loony left has been able to criticize.

I don’t pay much attention to what we laughingly call the “Mainstream Media” anymore, but I’ve heard just a few extreme examples of the reported “racism” at the convention. Of course the most blatant examples of the racism charge were probably on MSNBC so no one heard them. Apparently it’s now racist to refer to Chicago, golf and to hold a convention during hurricane season.

Anyway, the MSM intimated that the GOP only had one black or Hispanic speaker after another to pander to those voting groups, as if the speakers were ringers and not ACTUAL Republican politicians. Former Democrats Artur Davis and New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez were especially effective I thought.

Yes, there were many more white faces than other ethnic groups at the convention, but that’s not because the Republicans don’t want other ethnic groups to participate, but because the Democrats have perpetrated a fictitious story line that they are the party that works for minorities.

Some of what follows I have written about before, but it bears repeating to counter the fiction about Republicans being racists.

The party that grew out of the movement to abolish slavery: Republican.
The party that started the Civil War rather than end slavery: Democrat.
The president that issued the Emancipation Proclamation to free the slaves – Abraham Lincoln: Republican.
The president that tried to start a new country where the institution of slavery could be preserved – Jefferson Davis: Democrat.
The party that gave freed slaves the right to vote in the 15th Amendment to the Constitution: Republican.
The party that instituted Jim Crow laws, poll taxes and literacy tests to obstruct African Americans’ right to vote: Democrat.
The first African American members of Congress: Republican.
The founders and members of the Ku Klux Klan: Democrat.
The members of Congress who voted as a bloc for the Civil Rights Act of 1964: Republican.
The members of Congress who voted against the Civil Right Act of 1964: Democrat.

Oh and one last thing. The party to which Martin Luther King Jr. belonged: Republican.

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It seems on Twitter there is a constant argument between Christians and Atheists about whether God exists or not. Most of the time they are talking past one another. Too many Christians offer Bible proof texts, and Atheists insist there is no God because science can’t prove His existence.

Trying to use the Bible to prove God’s existence too often results in circular reasoning: The Bible is true because it speaks of God; God exists because the Bible says so. Note to my fellow Christians: Don’t do that. People who don’t believe in the Bible won’t accept it as proof of God’s existence.

On the other hand, Atheists who demand “proof” of God’s existence reveal that they are “spiritually challenged”, because relationship with God is by definition a spiritual, not physical (scientific) relationship. While science is not able to detect or quantify the spiritual, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

The fact that only 5% of Americans say they are Atheists and 92% say they are believers in God should explain the bunker mentality of Atheists who demand “proof”. The fact that they will not accept any proof that is offered makes them feel smug, as if they know all the answers and the question has been settled.

But the fact that 92% of Americans say they believe in God (with varying definitions of course) says that the awareness of a reality beyond the physical is strong in most of humanity. Obviously, 92% of Americans are not ignorant bumpkins who don’t understand biology or physics. While they know science, they also know there’s more.

Bad behavior by believers doesn’t disprove the existence of God either. While people of faith sometimes do stupid or horrific things in the name of their faith, that is evidence, not that what they believe is untrue, but that they don’t understand their faith and are poor examples of it.

The proof that there is a spiritual realm including God takes the form, not of photographs or DNA or bent light waves or whatever. It comes from the day to day experience of the believer. Once you take the illogical step of believing, you begin to experience things you could not have imagined before. Atheists are prisoners to their logic, so they are unable to take the “leap of faith”.

As a believer, I do not have the certitude of the Atheist who demands that I provide proof of God. When asked about God, I have to say, “Yes, I believe He exists, most of the time anyhow”. Far from making me a poor believer, I think it just points out how difficult it is to maintain a relationship conducted entirely through faith. My occasional doubts say nothing about God’s existence, only about the fickleness of my faith.

Perhaps the reason that only 5% of Americans are atheists after 160 years of Darwinism and decades of Evolution taught as fact in public schools is that Atheists, though they are humanists, don’t have much to offer humanity. Depression, despair and death don’t sell like the hope, purpose and eternal future offered by faith in all its various manifestations.

While Atheists may scoff at the rewards of faith in this life and the next, what if believers are right? We have a full and rewarding life here and an eternal life in a paradise in the afterlife.

And what if Atheists are right: that this life is all there is and the grave is the end? Then I guess believers will still have a full and rewarding life in the here and now and won’t ever know the Atheists were right.

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In Roanoke, Virginia, President Obama finally revealed his utter lack of faith in people and his total and complete worship of government. He also revealed that he is not especially bright.

In yet another campaign speech, he was riffing about entrepreneurship, one of a long list of things with which he has no experience, and he first said something about roads and bridges and then said something like “If you built a business, you didn’t build that; somebody else did that!”

Huh?

This will be news to the millions of entrepreneurs who have worked 60, 80, and 100 hour weeks to get a fledgeling business off the ground. The point he was apparently trying to make, is that government built the roads on which you drive to work, so your work wouldn’t have been possible without government. “You didn’t” create your business; “You didn’t” create those jobs; “You didn’t” create wealth; “You didn’t” create opportunity.

Government did.

What complete and idiotic nonsense (A string of expletives would have gone very well here but I don’t generally “cuss”).

Government doesn’t have one thin dime with which to build roads and bridges that it didn’t confiscate from someone who owns a business or works for a business or buys products from a business or owns stock in a business. Government doesn’t create wealth. Businesses, and especially small businesses, are the source of ALL wealth, period.

I could spend a lot of time here talking about what a bad bargain government services are: the high cost, the poor quality, the waste, the wooden-headed bureaucratic obstinacy, the “my-way-or-the-highway” attitudes. But that’s not my focus right now.

Mr. Obama also mentioned the Internet as a government project, a subject that’s important to me, since I’m an Internet entrepreneur. While it’s true that it was a government agency that first linked computers together into ARPA-net and that became the Internet, no government agency or bureaucrat could have envisioned what the creativity of the producer class has been able to do with it and the jobs and wealth that has been created since 1970.

It wasn’t government that created the first web browser and launched the World Wide Web. It wasn’t government that created HTML, Javascript, PHP, ASP, Cold Fusion, Access, SQL, JQuery, Flash, PhotoShop, Wi-Fi, flat-screen monitors, screaming-fast processors and phones that surf the web, take pictures, and talk to you, and on and on and on, to name a few of the things government didn’t do.

When you think of it like that, we realize that it’s just a coincidence that government linked a few defense department computers together for their own purposes, with no thought about other applications. The real explosion in technology took place after private entrepreneurs got hold of it and let their creativity soar. Those creative people would have had the first thought if government hadn’t.

In fact, government continues to be uncomfortable with all that freedom and activity on the Internet and longs to be able to tax, regulate, and effectively kill it. And I predict they will not rest until they have ruined it.

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In C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, he pictures Hell, not as a fiery place of torment, but as a drizzly, grey, depressing village where people are doomed to live dull, desperate, repetitive existences forever. Heaven, on the other hand, is a place of brilliant color, sensory adventures and thrilling surprises. Heaven is hyper-real, so that even the grass is almost sharp and hurtful until one becomes accustomed to its vibrant reality.

Back at 2004, when Barack Obama strode onto the stage at the Democrat National Convention as a virtually unknown Illinois State Senator, he electrified the delegates with his speech and became a household name.  Then in 2008, when crowds swooned at the eloquence of his oratory, it was represented to us that his would be an administration of lofty goals and soaring ideals.

Instead…

As we approach the presidential election, I am surprised that I see President Obama, not as the charismatic leader he sold himself as, nor even as the dangerous idealogue he appeared to many of us, but as an aimless, dull functionary. I suppose that shouldn’t be surprising, since he did little to distinguish himself in the Illinois legislature and was mostly AWOL in the Senate. Even after becoming president, he essentially outsourced his signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act – ObamaCare, to the Democrat majority in Congress.

Instead of wow-ing us with innovative, revolutionary solutions to the problems facing humanity, Obama has done very little of substance, except try to remake America into Greece or the Soviet Union when it was in decline. Lewis’ grey Hell.

In The Amateur, Ed Klein reports that early on, Obama was already worrying about his legacy and asking random staffers which president he was most like. His boosters have said FDR or JFK; his detractors have said Carter or Wilson. However, in June it began to appear that his administration is more like Nixon’s, but without the foreign policy successes. He seems to have achieved the unlikely stance of having a bunker mentality while appearing on TV almost everyday. Though always in the public eye, he has become increasingly isolated even from Democrats.

We learned that he has a “kill list”, and enjoys personally directing the firing of missiles from drones to kill terrorists. But he also regularly rails against his perceived enemies in the press and Congress, as well as his favorite whipping boys on Wall Street, reminding us of Nixon’s Enemies List.

And then, to avoid handing over damning documents concerning “Fast and Furious”, he invoked Executive Privilege. I wonder, when we do finally see the documents, if they will have an 18-page gap? But, nobody died in Watergate.

His speeches lately have the petulance of a teenager who has been told, “No, you can’t have the car tonight.” He apparently believed his own PR: that everything would come up roses if he was just allowed to be in charge. But there’s always someone who isn’t cowed by his greatness: the Republicans, Wall Street, Congress, George W. Bush, Europe, Israel, Japanese Earthquakes, etc. The president’s irritation at encountering the slightest difficulty or disagreement betrays his lack of experience and knowledge of the basics of leadership, such as team-building, inspiration and marketing. He complains bitterly about having to talk to “Podunk congressmen” to get his policies passed.

The president, at his theatrical Nomination Victory Ceremony, said that it was “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow”. That sounded delusional to most of us at the time, but now it appears he thought it could really happen and he wouldn’t need to break a sweat.

It appears now that Obama’s view of the world is anything but optimistic. The “Hope” was just hype and the “Change” was not for the better. The academics he brought to Washington are now known to be sniping amateurs, very much out of their depth, with virtually no experience in the private sector, where results matter, or even in government for the most part. Obama’s erudition during the 2008 campaign now just sounds like idealistic naivete divorced from the experience of grappling with real problems.

Problems can be solved, however it takes more than condescending, elitist theorizing. Work hard or work smart, but either way, rolling up your sleeves and working is not optional. Obama has made criticism of Mitt Romney’s business experience a centerpiece of his 2012 campaign, but it only serves to highlight his own inexperience and ineffectiveness in generating the “recovery”.

Unlike the leftist vision of Big Government, Big Business, Big Unions and Big Journalism, in which everyone must fit into prescribed pigeon-h0les and face a dull life with little opportunity for betterment, conservative/libertarian policies promote creativity and limitless horizons for personal and professional development for everyone, with opportunity for lifting oneself and others from poverty and the accomplishment of great goals. We just need a lean, limited government to do what only it can do and leave the rest to us: private citizens, private business, etc.

With the Supreme Court upholding Obamacare last week, we now see that, barring a successful repeal, we can look forward to a fresh, grey Hell in which layers of soulless bureaucracy are superimposed on our already byzantine health insurance system, making patient-doctor confidentiality less possible than it is now and making appeal for soaring premiums or denied coverage impossible.

Obama’s ideal of the state-run economy is nearly a reality with the sweeping nature of the  “Affordable” Care Act, but the oppressive behemoth forebodes a dreary, one-size-fits-all life for us all. Instead of aiming for the stars, or at least the moon, President Obama has chosen to fire his arrow into the dirt.

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After the Supreme Court’s reading of its ruling on ObamaCare yesterday, I first thought that Chief Justice Roberts had betrayed Republicans, Conservatives, Libertarians, et al, by joining with the liberals on the court to uphold the individual mandate that requires all Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a fine.

In fact, I “tweeted” “et tu Roberts” to indicate I felt we had been stabbed in the back. Then I started to hear details.

While liberals were dancing in the street and high-level Democrats were posting vile, profane taunts to celebrate their victory, the reality of the majority ruling began to be clarified.

While the mandate was upheld, it was not upheld under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, but under the government’s right to tax. So now, it’s clear that Obama has broken his promise to not raise taxes on the middle class. And yet his supporters are celebrating!

The other side of the coin is that Roberts’ majority decision disallowed the mandate under the Commerce Clause, now setting precedent for LIMITING the use of that means of enlarging government and its control over the lives of individual citizens.

Until now, the Commerce Clause had been seen by liberals as a gaping hole in the Constitution through which they could drive Mac Trucks full of goodies for their supporters, making government bigger, more intrusive and more corrupt. With this ruling that can finally be curtailed. And yet, liberals are celebrating!

While at first I thought Roberts had stabbed us in the back, I now think he may have just set a precedent that will aid small-government conservatives and libertarians in protecting our freedoms in the future and at the same time caused liberals to praise him.

And tucked into the ruling was a message that he was not going to undo what could be done at the ballot box. In other words, see you in November.

Genius!

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Two things happened this week which, while nominally unrelated, paint a complete picture that gives insight into the Statist mind.

First was the Wisconsin recall election, in which several Republicans, but notably Governor Scott Walker, were challenged by the leftist, union forces of the state after Walker, by a vote of the legislature, made modest adjustments in the benefits and collective bargaining rights of the government employee unions in order to bring balance back to the state’s budget, which was threatening to sink beneath waves of red ink.

In spite of suspicious vote tallies equaling 120% of registered voters in some precincts (due to same-day registrations?), Walker was resoundingly reaffirmed with a larger percentage of the vote than in 2010, the shrill unions were repudiated, and his reforms stand.

I’m going to put aside speculation about ramifications for the November national elections, since the people of Wisconsin may have just been angered that better-than-average-paid government employees tried to recall a governor who hadn’t done anything criminal.

But something else happened this week that adds to our understanding of the Statist mindset. President Obama had a press conference.

Which immediately blew up in his face, because at one point he said, “The private sector is doing fine; the problem our economy has is in state and local governments.”

There are plenty of reasons to argue with the first part of that statement, and they are already being recited by Mitt Romney and others, but here in my corner of Georgia, residential housing is still down 75% from what it was during the Bush Administration. And we never really had a bubble. Anybody who doesn’t have a private jet, play golf every other weekend and hobnob with Hollywood realizes that the private sector is NOT “doing fine”.

But the second half of the obviously off-teleprompter statement is that state and local governments are the ones really hurting. Shortly after that he urged Congress to pass legislation(!) to FORCE states and municipalities to hire more (union) teachers.

Perhaps the big loss for his union cronies in Wisconsin was in the back of his mind, but the statement made it obvious that a couple of good days for the Dow Jones Index was enough for him to consider the “private sector” taken care of and he could again focus on his favorite thing: Government and making it bigger.

As has been said by many, both FDR and George Meany thought government employee unions were a bad idea, and the condition of many states’ budgets make it abundantly clear why. Politicians, especially Democrats, who receive a lot of money from unions for their campaigns, are on the “management” side of the table in public-sector union negotiations. The money being discussed in the negotiations is not the politician’s money, like it would be in a private business setting, but taxpayer money. And if the politician needs more money to pay the union workers who put him into office, he can simply raise taxes. No skin off his nose.

At least until the budget reaches the breaking point, as it did in Wisconsin.

So, my modest proposal is that, instead of politicians, there should be a Tax-Payer Advocate board in each state and at the Federal level which is unpaid and bi-partisan, but whose purpose would be to sit across the table from the union representatives to conduct the negotiations. As it is currently, the politicians are in sympathy with the unions because of all the campaign cash unions provide and they have no incentive to represent the interests of “we the people”.

Of course we would have to pay for body guards for the Tax-Payer Advocates. Just sayin’…

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