Obama's State of the Union Address 1/28/2014: A Sneak Preview

Once again I have obtained a partial copy of President Obama’s State of the Union speech next Tuesday and am leaking it three days ahead of schedule.

Here it is:

My fellow Americans, today we find our nation on the upswing! Everything is fine! Ok, things could be more fine but really, everything is going great. Just look, we’re dropping the unemployment rate figures on a weekly basis. Pretty soon the rate will be 0.0% and that will mean we will in fact be entering a “Golden Age”. The Golden Age of Obama! Isn’t that wonderful? But wait, there’s more…

We will do more to get people working! We will entice more private companies to join a “Partnership” with government if they know what’s good for them, to create even more “shovel ready” jobs. Just like last time. And maybe this time I won't have to threaten them with IRS audits or Justice Department investigations!

Oh yeah, and if Congress doesn’t act, I will raise the minimum wage myself to $ 12.00 an hour. And why not? If you can’t find a job paying $ 7.25 an hour, you’ll look a whole lot better on paper being out of work for $ 12.00, right? No, don’t thank me yet, there’s even more…

If you are out of work and just haven’t felt like looking for one of these 9 million jobs we used to have in this country, your government will keep the unemployment checks coming for a third year and double your food stamp allowance. And if you should feel like you really should get out of the house, we will now create and fund new “Job Training” centers so you can learn from the best that government has to offer. Our NSA and Covert Operations apprenticeships are filling up fast.

And about these so called ‘Illegal Immigrants” running around our country, 11 million of ‘em they tell me, well I’m just going to go ahead and make them all legal. That’s right, they shouldn’t have to abide by legal immigration rules just because others before them have, they are yearning to get free benefits so to not want them here collecting benefits and mowing lawns on the side, well that’s downright mean spirited I’d say. By keeping them on the public benefit plan I’d say that would be a hell of a voting group to overcome, eh? 

And this leads me to another thing bothering me: Income Inequality! People work hard. People who work at McDonald’s work harder and they should get the same stock options and benefits that the CEO of the company gets. That’s right, it’s not their fault the only jobs out there right now are these crumby minimum wage fast food jobs, it’s mine. So to correct this inadvertent and unforeseen consequence of my own fiscal policies, I will command that these people make more money. Where's my pen?

And for women, it doesn’t matter that women are making the most money in the work force and have reached a higher level of autonomy and independence in this country than ever before, I’m going to fix that!  

And as I was coming here today through the cold and the snow I could not help but think that man-made Global Warming…er, I mean man-made “Climate Change”, excuse me, is the BIGGEST threat to our nation, right up there with the Tea Party, Edward Snowden and a Successful Russian Winter Olympics.

We’ve got to do something about this in a hurry and if I’m re-elected…I mean, sorry, I misspoke, if Congress doesn’t act I will sign an executive order to stop the exhalation of non-oxygen gases from all that emit them. With the exception of all branches of government and the U.S. Mint.

As for foreign policy, I think we’ve had a pretty good year with the exception of Libya, Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, Russia, Syria, China, France, England and Iraq. And although it’s getting harder by the month, I’m confident we will eventually find another country to screw with so we can test out more communications surveillance equipment and satellite guided drone missiles which are major parts of our foreign policy strategy. Whoa, I feel safer already.

The infrastructure of our nation is crumbling so I propose that we increase expenditures to make our roads and bridges better so that businesses can get their products to market and people can get to work on time and it doesn't matter so much if you no longer have a job to go to or a marketplace to take your products to, those roads, built by workers loyal to your government, will look so fine!

We will continue to subsidize green jobs, continue to choose which businesses are viable ones and that we want in our country and we will continue to pursue our enemies here on U.S. soil and, well, here on U.S. soil mostly, yeah.

Yes, with the Government on your side, you cannot fail. We will take care of everything. We will expand the economy, we will feed your kids, we will give them a good home and we will educate them too. With the power of all invasive government, we can make sure that you all will be well taken care of and so don’t worry, we’ve got it covered.

Just like always.

NSA Searches, Big Government & the 4th Amendment

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the person or things to be seized.”

The NSA, as an agent of the law, is bound like any other, to adhere to and uphold the Constitutional protections outline in the Bill or Rights. Without the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Constitution would not have been adopted by the States and therefor e is the lynchpin of all it stands for and the modern structure of the United States of America. To think otherwise is to ignore history and reality.

The whole idea of the term “Probable Cause” has been that authorities have to prove adequate reason to arrest someone or conduct a search, or seizure of their property. Probable Cause is required to be declared in a document where the facts for the arrest or search are detailed and a judge must agree, even if this step is a matter of course, for a warrant to be issued. These facts must be specific and not based on a “hunch”.
 
Now does any of this sound like what is going on?

Is the possibility that “Everyone could be a criminal.” a good enough excuse or that “it’s for the good and protection of the country.” when it clearly is not. However, it IS good protection for the preservation of the status quo of Big Government.

Does anyone believe, in light of the Internal Revenue Service scandal regarding the targeting of opposition groups and individuals for audit, denial of due process and exemption approval and the sharing of private tax information with the ruling party members that the NSA would NOT be called into service to listen in on and provide additional surveillance of these people?

And so this vague and general reason for the NSA listening in on conversations and sweeping and storing phone data and the ability and execution of reaching into a citizens computer records is a clear violation of the truths we hold as self-evident: It is wrong.

The NSA, thanks to Edward Snowden, has been revealed as yet another tool of the Authority State.

The current government and its agents the NSA and the IRS are acting in the unconstitutional exercise of authority.

This harkens back to the British “Writs of Assistance” exercised in 1761 where an officer of the British custom houses court could walk into any house and search it for smuggled goods without specifying the house or the goods. What is the difference between then and now except the means of the search?

The protection of the 4^th Amendment is not limited to one’s home but extends to one’s personal effects and papers where ever they may be. It does not mention “telephone” for obvious reasons but what is stored on today’s personal communication devices of only which part of is a phone these days should obviously be regarded as “your papers”. And in this world of converged networks where your personal computing device whether it be your laptop, tablet computer or your smartphone, you have a Constitutional protection from intrusion into your personal effects.

This is important to note because this amendment is specifically believed to have come from an incident when the controversies between England and the Colonies were reaching confrontational proportions whereby certain prominent opposition colonists were targeted for prosecution by the English state. Sound familiar?

Our ancestors didn’t bust their asses to come here to be held to an allegiance with the government for their sustenance, livelihood and well-being. They came here for the opportunity, the chance, to make the most of themselves in a free market of ideas and industry and to carve out a life of their own, free of an overbearing presence that dictates their behavior and customs. They had lived without the freedom of worship; they had lived without the right to be private in their homes and their affairs and without the protections from unreasonable searches and seizures. The challenge is what to do about these rights being ignored.

This is not a case of the Government preserving itself, this is a clear attempt at one party seeking to hold power into perpetuity and subverting the process of purging and renewal that keeps this country growing and going forward. Should this succeed even in the short run, stagnation and decay shall follow.

It is ironic that these United States, a country that has stood as a symbol of freedom and liberty throughout the world attempts to secure itself by rescinding the very statutes that made the nation what it was.

Hospital Code of Silence

The case of David Kwiatkowski, the cardiac technologist who was recently convicted of infecting a total of 48 people so far, patients in hospitals in New Hampshire, Kansas, Pennsylvania and Maryland where he worked, with hepatitis C has brought to light an aspect of America’s politically correct and legally confused healthcare establishments.  

This man, an intravenous drug addict, worked in a total of 18 hospitals across the country and from at least 4 of them that we know of, was fired for drug abuse and theft. Did any of these 4 hospitals call the police and have him arrested? Bet they didn’t. They let him walk out the door knowing he was a liability and an accident waiting to happen…to somebody else.

And did any of the hospitals he applied to for jobs afterwards check his references or call his previous employer? If they did, the chances are that all they got were the dates of his employment.  “Mr. Kwiatkowski worked for St. Lady of the Consumption Hospital from such and such a data to such and such a date.” And that’s all the information their HR department can legally provide. They can’t legally say; “Well he was stealing drugs so we fired him.” Because heaven forbid the guy sues them because he can’t find a job. No, that’s more important to the hospital’s bottom line than either having the bum arrested or telling a prospective employer that they should take a pass on this guy. It’s only a HOSPITAL after all, what could possibly go wrong?

I bring this up because of a conversation I had with a person who’s nephew is a registered nurse and also a drug addict. He has also been fired from two hospitals for stealing drugs. He is currently working at another hospital in the same city.

He is also an accident waiting to happen. But because nobody has taken any steps to either have him arrested which would give him a legal paper trail to follow AT LEAST, or attempted to have his nursing license taken away, this man is free to possibly infect people in his care with lord knows what.

There are probably a couple of thousand David Kwiatowski’s out there working in America’s hospitals. These are people who know that nothing is going to happen to them if they get caught stealing drugs.  The worst thing that happens is they have to go work someplace else. Just like the hospitals that enabled Mr. Kwiatkowski to keep moving from hospital to hospital to spread his disease.

And it was all preventable.  

Had some hospital Human Resources person spoken up or if someone had the sense turn this guy over to the police, this wouldn’t have happened. But since the bottom line apparently trumped their common sense, we get the suffering of his victims and their families. These people should fry along with Mr. Kwiatowski.

It's a matter of trust. Trust in an institution that has taken an oath to "Do no harm" or is it just the Doctors who have to pay attention to that one?

But no worries folks, hospitals also give the same silent treatment for bad Doctors who they simply just ask to leave with no questions asked.

I hope that Kwiatowski’s previous employers are held accountable for withholding what they knew about him. They must share the responsibility for doing nothing until it was too late and having the knowledge that they could have done something to prevent it. I hope these people know it and have to live with it.

It’s time hospitals stepped up and start protecting their patients to the level that they protect their bad employees.

Isn’t that what they’re in business for?

Our Ever Changing HealthCare Law

Just what healthcare law did the Supreme Court uphold anyway?

Was it the Affordable Care act of 2010 or the 14 different versions of that law that has been passed to the American public by word of mouth from the White House?

Was it ever even a law? I've heard it was and people are acting like it was a law but there doesn't really seem to be a law.

As the late, great Harry Nilsson wrote in his epic story The Point: "A point in every direction is like no point at all!"

When you try to cover everything, you end up covering nothing.

We have no President and we have no Healthcare Law.

Not if you don't want it to be at any rate.

Unlike what you may be reading in the government newpapers and hearing on the government news channels, the Affordable Care Act is not what President Obama says it is whenever he gets around to telling us what it’s going to be about THIS WEEK. Has anybody check the latest presidental TWEET?

In the 237-odd years that the country has been the United States, laws have tended to be more static in the past once they are signed into law. Now they are anything someone might tell you they are.

What makes anyone believe that any of this is going to be enforceable?

Challenge away o’ folks who still have enough money to actually be able to afford justice in this country, you will have this law tied up for a decade. All you have to do is ask for a dated copy of the new provisions passed by Congress. What? It WASN’T passed by Congress? Well then, were the new provisions signed by the President? They WEREN’T? Trying to find somebody who can interprete THE AIR will be a daunting task don't you think? Or maybe they just find some crazy homeless person who'll wave his hands around and tell the court what it's all about. And who's to say they would be wrong?  

And how the hell is the IRS going to enforce these tax penalties? Challenge away you scofflaws. The wheels of justice have been moving slower than ever before and will most likely grind to a halt over numerous and consistent court cases asking for proof of the new measures.

There is no law, not this law not ANY law anymore.

Maybe it won't be long now before the police will be shaking pedestrians down for cash and he courts will fine you for just about anything you can think of. The country is descending into one big  money-grab.  

It's been the American Way for way too long. You can live like a cricket and spend everything you earn and at the end of the day the government will take care of you. You can toil like the ant, scrimp and say and all you do is end up paying for the crickets healthcare plan. So why bother?

Forget Congress, they aren’t enforcing their own laws and have passed laws exempting them from being subject to laws in the first place which makes me wonder if they are actually subject to the laws they’ve passed making them not subject to the laws they have passed. Right?

So do as you please these days. Get health insurance, don’t get health insurance. Pay the fine, don't pay the fine or don't even pay your medical bills. They can't do anything to you by law anyway. They can't charge you interest and they can't put it on your credit report. All they can do is have someone call you on the phone so what the hell does it matter anymore?

Doctors should go back to the way things were before Medicaid and the meddling of the government in the business of providing healthcare. They should go back to coming to your home to give your kids a shot in the ass. Growing up in the Boston Projects, we had a doctor who visited our place to do just that since when one kid in the project got the measles, all the kids got the measles. The doc would come buy, give you a shot (Penicillin, remember those days before they shot all that shit into the livestock and screwed everything up?).

Anyway, the doctor gave us a shot in the patoot and my mom paid him and he left. No office manager, no insurance claim, no discount, no offset, no government overhead and no bullshit.

And it all worked just great. I got a shot in the butt, the measles went away, the doctor got paid and my mom got some sleep.

So what went wrong?

Government of course, solving problems that weren’t problems in the first place and buying their way into the industry with promises to the doctors that they wouldn’t lose a dime if they went along with their plans. And in the beginning they didn’t.

But look at them now.

Doctors have to consolidate their services in order to survive. There aren't many single doctors offices anymore. Now doctors have to be affiliated with a larger medical group to absorb all the liabilities that come with the field and that the ACA never even addresses.

Doctors should drop all insurance carriers period, especially the government ones that drive up the costs of patient care and just administrate their own billing. They’ve got their own billing and  collections departments now already anyway; they wouldn’t even have to gear up. All they have to do is drop the government plans and quit taking their filthy money. And need I remind anybody that it’s OUR filthy money which has gone to everything BUT us and which is used to batter any dissatisfied citizen challenger into the ground.  The government has taken all the resources before you can even think to fight them.

So then let the government take everybody to court and try to drive "rouge" medical centers out of business. Like they aren’t going to be forced out of business ANYWAY by ever increasing government intervention and the prospect of receiving ever decreasing payments for the services they provide. Their dead ducks either way so they might as well fight for their rights and their livelihood.

Let the government try to enforce their ever-changing illegitimate bullshit iron-gloved Healthcare boondoggle of a law that nobody on God’s Green Earth really knows what it does anymore.

So ultimately we should pay our doctors directly and CUT OUT THE MIDDLEMAN, namely THE GOVERNMENT and let them try to stop us.

National Public Radio: Last Believers in Global Warming

It’s about time that our nationally sponsored government radio stations across the United States just drop the whole Climate Change/Global Warming shtick once and for all since it’s quite obvious that nobody inside or outside of the public sector still believes it was actually happening.

The revelations of collusion between the Global Warming science “community” has long been brought to the light of day as is clear and mounting evidence,formerly suppressed or just never reported in the mainstream, revealing that for the last 17 years temperatures have not been rising but actually dropping after all.

Even staunch Leftists have been coming clean about the situation, the smartest of them already seeing the writing on the wall. Some have simply stopped attacking the Denialists and have just shut their mouths already.  Perhaps they can tour the talk circuit with the tagline: “I was a Climate Change believer” thereby gaining some added sustenance by reveling how they were duped or coerced by an evil government management into going along with the game. Maybe they could go on Oprah and talk about how they feel so used.

But tune into any NPR radio station any time of any day and you will never know that anything has changed. They will have either a panel discussion or a guest commentator who talk about how "more needs to be done" concerning the “settled science” of Climate Change which is how they’ve been trying to structure the argument ever since they realized their pseudo-science wasn’t holding up to scrutiny. 

Changing the name, it was hoped, would lend an air of ambiguousness to their Climate Science since people were seeing through their bogus Global Warming cabal that saw people like former democratic presidential candidate for the presidency of the United States, Al Gore, go from a lowly Millionaire to a more respectable Billionaire and saw just oodles of public funds funneled to American universities and scientists to “study” the problems in the fevered hope that someday they will find a solution, wink wink!

And the change in semantics was so clever, so subtle, one day the phrase is Global Warming and then the next day it’s Climate Change and so NOBODY NOTICED!

But it is a new world these days. There are no secrets. Or at the very least there aren’t enough people who can keep a secret anymore and so everything comes out eventually.

So it’s time for the good Leftists over at The People’s Radio Station to just drop the act. They’ve been able to keep a straight face for this long and that’s a marketable skill when one works for the government, especially the kind of government we’ve had to put up with for the last couple of decades, but it’s over.

It’s time that someone tell them that the propaganda war is over and THEY LOST.

To continue with an obvious charade is tiresome and, frankly, embarrassing. The money is sure to dry up so isn’t there some “Income Inequality” or “Services Access Disparity” for these good Comrades to jump on now? Surely there is another rainbow to chase now that the Political Lefts Holy Grail has turned out to be a shoddy pewter beer mug.

Maybe they can hold a fund raiser to retrain all the Climate Chicken Little’s to do something else with their lives. Perhaps they could be retrained for a new and completely different line of work. How about Journalism School?

Or perhaps the best of these Global Cooling Deniers at NPR could just transfer over to Bloomberg Radio and add a little more mileage to their careers since it will likely be Bloomberg , the station started by the former Crazed Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg renowned for his Billions of dollars and certifiable odd behavior, that will hold onto the Global Warming party line to the last man, woman and Bolshevik.

But it makes no difference at this point in time since the argument, science, and quixotic belief in Global Warming as a man-made phenomenon is over.

It’s about time NPR got the news.

When Governments Try to Create Markets

It always ends in failure.

When the government decides there is not enough of something and gets involved in its manufacturer, sale and distribution, what soon will follow is Waste, Financial Loss and Corruption.

Example #1: Ethanol

George W. Bush, that Leftist spendthrift in a Republican cloth coat, decides to boost the agricultural industry by requiring the combustible derivative of corn, Ethanol, be a part of ALL gasoline sold in the United States. What a great idea! First the farmers will have a market for their corn since now we HAVE to have a percentage of corn squeezin’s in the nation’s gas tanks. It’s a Biofuel so it will be good for the environment, right?

Well the problem with corn as a crop is that it beats the crap out of the soil and requires intensive fertilization and attention. It’s not a cheap crop to grow. But the government is driving the bus on this industry and so set a very good price for what it will pay for Ethanol. It’s a higher price than the market would pay otherwise. But what the hey, it’s not THEIR money the good Senators and Representatives are playing with, it’s TAXPAYER money and who knows better than Congress about what to do with THAT when there are votes to buy from the Biofuels lobby, the Agribusiness lobby and the Environmentalist lobby even though NONE of them would ever think of voting for a candidate with an “R” by their name BUT they will gladly take the money. Thanks George!

So what happens? The Corn Boom literally caused an environmental disaster!

The fertilizer and insecticide run off from all the land that was thrown over to corn production has been killing our waterways. Land that was not a profitable environment for farming now becomes fields of corn.  If you are a farmer, what now becomes your motivation? “Why am I growing wheat when the government is paying so much for corn? Why am I dealing with dairy cows when the government is paying top dollar for corn?” etc.

Corn is now grown on over 400,000 farms across the nation making the U.S. the number one corn producing country in the world.

But is the nation any cleaner?  That’s a NO. Has the economy been improved by this government intervention in the marketplace? Again that’s a NO. Most of us don’t get to witness the areas of destruction that happens in the nation’s bread basket, and we don’t know what goes on when areas of an industry are never created. We just see the price go up on a gallon of milk or on a loaf of bread but we don’t know why.  Well, this is why.

Example #2: Clean Energy

When there is the Alternate Energy industry. This is an industry with more good intentions than demand behind it. There are many people who like the idea of using solar power and wind energy and in some places it is very practical like the “Cabin in the Clouds” on top of the windiest place on Earth, New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, where solar and wind power is the only source of electricity. But mostly solar and wind power has been a cottage industry since the solar panels, wind turbines and especially the batteries are expensive, providing the user with no monetary savings and the manufacturer with little or no profit.

Enter the U.S. Government!

With its subsidies, tax breaks and outright massive loans to their friends and lobbyists, the Federal government has injected heaping wads o’ taxpayer cash into this industry which have erected big manufacturers of solar panels, wind turbines and high-stress batteries almost overnight. And almost as quickly these manufactures are tanking, filing for bankruptcy protection and taking all that “investment” money with them. You’d think it was the 2007 housing crash all over again. 

By forcing automobile manufacturers to make electric cars that NOBODY wants and that can’t function to an enth of the ability of an internal combustion engine, the government has attempted yet again to make a market where none existed.

Who wants a car that has a range of less than 100 miles per charge, takes hours to replenish that charge, has a very expensive and highly toxic battery which is fully 1/3 the cost of the entire automobile, and even with massive subsidies still costs $40,000.00?  I'll take a show of hands...anybody?

And if you live in New England or worse, the Midwest, where it’s snowy, blowy and friggin' cold all Winter, the range is reduced dramatically by a force no government can legislate, PHYSICS! Batteries just don't perform well in cold weather.

Then there is that little problem of electric cars BURSTING INTO FLAMES.  No problem, we’ll fix that issue eventually, hop in!

This massive “Pay for Influence” racket is a gamble governments make to try to stay in power. Other industries that could have used that money, profitable industries, never got to see it because it was siphoned away from the buying public in taxes and then squandered on a useless commodity that people wouldn’t buy on their own. This is the insidiousness of government intervention in the marketplace.

This also causes a slippery slope for Government since once the effects of their bad policy become evident; there is no stepping back because the groups whose pockets they’ve lined with money now become the enemy, vowing to fight to keep their favors. Even if they do try to pull out of the mess they've made, the markets will be affected by the sudden pullout of funds. Corn prices would plumet to it's actual market rate and corn farmers take the hit until the market can regain it's natural balance.

Another clear example would be the current QUANTITATIVE EASING being applied by the Federal Reserve. If they should suddenly stop buying those Billions of dollars of bonds each month, the Stock Market, being dependent on that ready cash, will have a deep adverse reaction in the short term.  It's quite a hole the Federal Reserve has dug for the financial markets since even the mear talk of backing off their bond buying program shows up on Wall Street's leader board. And to think these guys went to school for this.

Example #3: The Electric Automobile

Yet another example of the government's attempt to create a market where one does not exist.

The "new" electric car is falling short of expectations. Expensive to make, expensive to buy and maintain, they can't compete with the efficiency and reliability of the gasoline engine. If the electric car was a good idea, it would have already been a mainstay in the marketplace already and not a government subsidized novelty item.

Perhaps most people don't realize that the electric automobile has a long history in the U.S. and at the trun of the last centry once competed with the gasoline engine on the open market...and lost.

Since the early 1900s the electric car hasn't really gotten any more efficient. Its range, weight and unpredicatbility in cold weather have not changed much in over 100 years. 

The electric cars biggest enemy is Physics. It doesn't operate well in cold weather and just where do you suppose all this electricity to run them comes from, electric powered power plants? Nope! It's Coal that drives this electric bus!

Electric automobiles have always been a Fad and had we put as much resources into developing a more efficient gasoline engine, Billions of dollars I might add, we coudl well have been seeing gas engines that get 100 miles to a gallon of gas by now.

But we don't get to see what does not get to happen.

The only way the electric car will catch on is if that was the only thing out there for the public to buy. Sorta like the old Soviet "that's all you're going to get" approach to marketing.

Which leads me to the last example...

Example #4 The Mercury Light Bulb

The incandecent light bulb has been outlawed by the U.S. government. If light bulbs are outlawed, only outlaws will have light bulbs. Actually they didn't ban them outright, they only placed a mandate that they reach an efficiency that they cannot reach.

But the result is the same. You will not be able to buy an incandecent light bulb. What you CAN get is the grossly unatractive and somewhat toxic Mercury light bulb. Yes, there is Mercury in them and so you are not really supposed to just throw them away. They should be disposed of in an environmentally safe manner. How's that for convenience? We all know that this is not going to happen.

But the main point is that government once again attempts to make us take a lesser product that has not proven to be popular and isn't even a good source of light.

Summary

This is for all those who still actually believe that Government is the answer to the nation’s problems. This is for people who think the government just has to “pass a law” and it will make things right. This is for people who think that FORCE in necessary to make people to comply with an arbitrary law. You can plainly see that these efforts always end in failure since solving problems is not what motivates government anymore.

Government creates problems it then tries to solve by more government and in the words of that great cartoon character, Rocket J. Squirrel from the Rocky & Bullwinkle Show; “But Bullwinkle, THAT trick NEVER works!”

A government subsidy or assistance may make you happy today but it will only lead to tears tomorrow. Depend on government if you want to cry and if you want to beg. Depend on yourself if you want to prosper and move forward and become a free person.

Recognize that today’s short-money handout is tomorrow’s dependency and a path to servitude. If you think that today you will take it so that your children will break out in the future, you are mistaken. If you as a parent don’t break out now, where will the example be set?

Fight for you human dignity. Fight for your right to grow and to learn from mistakes.

Start today.

Venezuelan Citizenry Losing Moral High Ground

This is the trick of the Socialist System: Make the slaves love their slavery

Make them embrace their servitude and instill the fear that they can’t function on their own without the heavy hand of government. This is where the people of Venezuela are right now. There are many who still understand how their country is supposed to work but they are outnumbered by those who just blindly WANT and will run to the hand that will GIVE it do them. Enter El Presedente Maduro or should I say "Robin Hood".

It is disturbing to read the quotes from the “bargain hunters” queuing up at the Daka electronics chain recently seized by Venezuelan government troops to hear them say they have no love for the government BUT are still all too willing to take a cheap Television basically at the retail electronics chain's and their 500 employee's expense.

There is a lesson to be learned in all of this.

The Venezuelan people have shortages of the most basic products of human sustenance: Chicken, rice, coffee, sugar, cornflour, cooking oil, milk and yes, even the most important paper in any business or home; toilet tissue, and yet will queue up and purchase at a "discount" a Television when Mr. Maduro sends his goon squad to set up an organized looting of a Venezuelan electronics chain. 

People can rationalize anything.

Venezuela USED TO produce rice and USED TO produce coffee, good coffee too but since the government introduced price controls producers of these products dwindled and when the government eventually took over most of the fields, these products have all but disappeared in quantity that can feed a town never mind a nation. This is the same sort of process that led to the former Soviet Union’s disappointing 76 year crop “Drought”.

Yet the recent hordes that lined up as soon as the government solders jailed the Daka chain’s store managers and started selling the inventory at “fair” prices, all that is apparently forgotten and what the government has done is a GOOD THING. It has become obvious that the Venezuelan people either don’t know or don’t care and for this I have lost my sympathy for their situation since we here in the formerly industrialized Northeastern part of the United States face a similar situation in the future. They have made their choice and they are to suffer the consequences since there will be no one to help them. Socialism isn't about helping oneself unless you include "helping yourself" to the fruits of someone else's labor. But how long will that last?

I hope those TELEVISIONS last awhile since I have a feeling that this will be the last crack most of the Venezuelan people get at them. I find this more than ironic since Venezuela is also a country that can’t seem to keep the electricity running on a weekly basis, having frequent blackouts across the Provinces. The Venezuelan infrastructure is crumbling.

The Venezuelan economy has too much money chasing too few goods. This means that the Venezuelan government has created money in excess of production. That means inflation or rather "Inflación increíble!".

When a government taxes, regulates, price controls and downright seizes the assests of private busnesses, you essentially drive them and the businesses that produce the goods they sell out of business and production halts. The Venezuelan people may love the idea that they have money in their pockets but since the means of production has been confiscated, consumers can't purchase what isn't made. This is the lopsided economic model that Socialism produces and has never failed to reach: Inefficiencies, shortages and hardship.  

In a Free Market system manufacturers will increase supply to meet demand and bring a balance to a products availability and its pricing. This is what leads to new hiring and the growth of industry, production and wealth. Lacking this, Venezuela is a poor country.

But Venezuela does have oil. Venezuela has LOTS of oil. Problem is they can’t seem to get it outta the ground on their own yet they seem to hate the people that help them. They’ve seized oil platforms from private drillers but now those ungrateful people have pulled out of the country so there won’t be any more where that came from.

Taking things from Free Market enterprises does not serve as a long-term economic strategy.

But that's the basic Method of Operation for Socialist/Totalitarian regimes. They HAVE to take from the producers since these systems don't produce. Mr. Maduro’s government, like his predecessor Hugo Chavez, have to continue to seize private enterprises until there is nothing left to take. That's when the failure of these "Business Models" show their gapping flaws: They don't make any money.

And this is all come about because of Capitalism. That’s right. Or to be more exact the Free Market principle of Capitalism which raises many boats and allows for more than a single power structure. This has to go since it is in direct opposition to a Totalitarian power structure. We can’t have multiple groups with resources and means of self-fulfillment and quality of life. Totalitarians everywhere agree that the people must only come to them for sustenance.   

Yet the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace is still all around us, it is born into us right from the very beginning of our lives.  It motivates us to do things for ourselves and by ourselves we can serve others and ourselves at the same time. It raises all boats, or rather all boats that want to float, and rewards those who wish to work and who have a better idea, to reap the benefits of that work and those ideas.

No, it's not Utopia and it has never passed itself off as such. Not everybody makes it to the top of their profession but then again, everybody's idea of the Top is different. You'll at least be better off at the level you achieve then if you never went for it and if you go out to buy  a steak, sushi, chicken or rice, the chances are very good that you'll be able to put your hand right on them and that you can afford to buy them.

Without this Work/Reward dynamic, there are no new ideas, no new industry and no prosperity. If you want something, anything really, understand what it will take to achieve and are willing to do the work for it, you can get it. Better to have a chance on a level playing field and fail than to never get a chance in the first place. To lock oneself in a cycle of dependency is the greatest failure.

The Venezuelan people appear to not realize what an opportunity they have in their hands since they are not without the industrial spirit. They just don’t know who to blame for their current situation. Right now, it looks like THEMSELVES. After close to two decades of Socialist claptrap, it appears a majority will still pull the lever for President Maduro.

Oh, but Capitalists loot and exploit the people! They only work for profit and grow rich through the toil of the downtrodden. Why should the top people in the organization get paid more than the lower people? Why don’t they pay people “Living” wages? It is the Capitalists who have TVs and the people get nothing!

Ok, then feel free to move to Venezuela where they’ve managed to get rid of those evil Capitalists.

They’re doing so much better there.

The NSA: Keeping America Safe from Angela Merkel

We can all sleep more soundly in our beds with the knowledge that the multi-billion dollars spent on the National Security Agency is well worth it so that Angela Merkel won’t be sneaking into the country to carry out her nefarious evil deeds upon an unsuspecting American public.

Our government’s most prominent anti-terrorist organization has taken the necessary steps to insure that Ms. Merkel , along with a reported 35 other world leaders, will not pose a terrorist threat to the United States.

Does anyone actually believe that the NSA is not doing the same thing to the American people? If millions of phone conversations in France, Spain, Brazil and Germany are being monitored, how could the government not monitor communications in the U.S.?  They are supposed to have a warrent here and they're supposed to have probable cause but that means nothing any more. We're told that the White House just didn't know about it, that's all.

And who believes that tight-ass of a president didn’t know about it? The same person who couldn’t delegate the reading of an 1-800 number on TV for his cratering Affordable Care Act and who has the last word on pushing the button on one of our Drones to bring death from above to Middle Eastern terrorists and civilians alike isn’t going to know? Sure he knows.

And yet, according to the administration, they never saw Bengazi coming. Let’s ask Ambassador Stevens about how safe he feels with the NSA monitoring phones and computers. Wait, you can’t, HE’S DEAD!

Let's ask U.S. Boarder Patrol Agent Brian Terry how safe he feels that the U.S. Department of Justice is doing all they can to protect our agents on the U.S. boarder with Mexico. Oh snap! You can't 'cause HE'S DEAD TOO!

What else will Obama and "his people" claim they don't know about?

The NSA and its sister groups the CIA and the FBI are all in place to do one thing first and foremost and that is to keep the people who are currently in power, in power.  This is why they’d rather tap millions of devices in Spain, Germany, Brazil and Russia than find out where all those guns they let walk across the Mexican border went to and who was behind it. Those people are to be protected.

Is protecting the American public really the NSA's top priority?

Who will protect us from them?

Perhaps this is why, as more and more people are growing dissatisfied in this country about the way the present administration is treating private enterprise and squelching individual freedom, that the national policing agencies have become more aggressive towards the citizenry. One need only look at the “non-government shutdown” where the National Parks Service and other “cop” agencies just closed parks and the businesses on them for the sole purpose to inflict pain upon the American Taxpayer who wanted to frequent them. An especially smart thing to do given the current state of the economy. But it wasn't about being smaret, they just wanted you to know that it’s THEY that control access and you…do not. Ditto concerning your privacy.

But it looks like the cat is out of the bag about the United States ambitious attempt at becoming the worlds new evil empire despite an 11th hour charge by the National Media outlets that are printing accounts of how other countries are spying on us also. Too late.

So once again it's the United States that proves the biggest threat to the United States, the biggest casualty being our credibility. How does it look now when we condemn hackers from around the world and it turns out we’re hacking almost every device on the plant, certainly every wireless device.

Thanks to Edward Snowden, everybody knows. The problem now is what are we going to do about it?

Karma Bites Big Government Healthcare in the Ass

A funny thing happened on the way to the takeover of the American Economy...The Totalitarians forgot that they don’t know how to do it.

Just like when would-be Captain Hillary tried to take over back in 1993 and then realized she couldn’t actually fly the USS Enterprise, the Imperial President has been shown what happens when ideology slams into that hard stone and unforgiving surface called: Reality.

They say Karma never loses an address and right now it’s hitting 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500 pretty hard.

And why not since what the Obama Regime and their cadre of Communist traitors to the American Way deserve everything the thinking American is currently powerless to give them: Some Comeuppance.

But it’s not like anyone will actually lose their job over it or that anything will change in the short run. In the Obama government there is no accountability, only excuses.

We all know that this government’s idea of success is not in the execution of any of their counter-intuitive Communist programs; it is only that they come into existence and in this case that driving the best healthcare system the world has yet to witness into the ground is not the point.

The point is that they were able to force you into it like it or not.
 
That National Healthcare doesn’t work and will never work is no longer the government’s problem. The law as passed does not apply to them or their Bolshevik brethren so it’s now OUR problem.

But the longer this goes on the more will be affected just the same. As hospitalization becomes more and more dangerous, people will stay away. As hospitalization becomes more and more expensive, the people who still have to pay will stay away. As more and more doctors come from Third World hell holes, EVERYONE will stay away unless they’re so sick they figure a 50/50 chance at survival is now good odds.  Just think about all the good those Cuban doctors did for Hugo Chavez.

National Health Care will ensure that there will be a two tiered healthcare system just like the one England has: Those that have money pay for good care. Those that don’t take their chances in the standard sub-standard Death Spiral known as the National Health System. Good doctors will become very hard to find and will be able to name their price outside the system. 

Only people like millionaire Canadian Premier Danny Williams, who headed south for his heart surgury rather than have the procedure done in a Canadian facility, will be able to afford to go to a good U.S. hospital. The rest of us will have...less.

Technological advances will be sacrificed to the bottom line since the system will quickly become cash poor. The Massachusetts model and the reason Mitt Romney lost the last presidental election, has never been in the Black. The only reason it's still running is because Governor Deval Patrick, a close personal friend of Mr. Obama, has thrown ever increasing resources at it on one end while trying to keep spending down on the other. It isn't working since the Massachusetts tax rate keeps increasing to keep up with MassHealth's expenditures. Co-pays and Deductibles for the people paying into health insurance plans continue to climb and have doubled in as little as four years. RomneyCare has made Massachusetts the most expensive state in the union for healthcare while emergency room visits and wait-times for doctor visits have increased. No, there is no cure in RomneyCare.  

There is no free lunch and you can’t give anything away for free for long. To defy this most basic economic rule is like attempting to defy gravity. You will ALWAYS fall back to Earth.  

The Obama government is trying to keep secret the numbers and the money it’s giving away for the Food Stamp program, the Welfare Program, the School Lunch Program and all the subsidies it’s issuing to who knows where and for how long. When this all sees the light of day, it will be astounding. Then we’ll have to put up with the same crap that we heard during the 2007 collapse: How could this happen?

Pul-eeze! It hasn’t happened yet and I’m already tired of it.

So now the latest pie-in-the-sky plan that never was intended to actually help anybody but the government cronies and their big business providers has come to fruition. Well, sort of.

The plan everybody knew would crash and burn is crashing and burning. But there is no pleasure to take from this since it’s not going to go away any time soon unless businesses and people openly defy this law. They should defy this law but will they have the balls to risk being shut down?

It will take companies: insurance companies, healthcare providers, large businesses and small to just decide to not comply.

Everyone affected will either need to raise a stink or just walk away so that the NEXT President of the United States will actually have to do something about it since Lord knows the Obama will do nothing while people live in fear of having no healthcare and of having that All-American terror group, the IRS, come for what they have left after what they've already taken for taxes.

President Obama, who has never eve run a hot dog stand yet has managed to become president will continue to spend money the nation has not made for the next two plus years and then pass the whole mess he’s made along to someone else and go down in history as the only president to never submit a budget for the nation despite there being a law that says he is supposed to.

Though we didn’t need any more evidence, the latest avoidable turmoil thrust upon this nation at the hands of the president only underscores that he, Barak Obama, is a failure of epic proportions and history will eventually be allowed to reveal the real extent of it. He never had a plan because he never thought he’d actually get this far but here he is and we’re stuck with him for at least the next two years.

You never know, depending on how the 2014 elections go in the House of Representatives, we could see Obama declare he’ll run for a third term. If the Political Left manages to gain a majority in the House I can see him declare that “There’s more to be done, I’m not finished yet!”

I wouldn’t put it past him.  

The Republic’s Last Stand

The holdout Tea Party Republicans are staging a stand for the Republic of the United States. They lose here and there’s no reason to believe they will ever get another chance.

With the government subsidizing minority populations, non-working populations and illegal immigration which as Ronald Reagan so popularly said: “Whatever the government subsidizes, we get more of”.

The biggest mistake of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign was when he said; “We’re going to put the country back to work!” And then they made the distressing discovery that there are a great many people living in the United States these days that don’t want to do just that. Why work when the difference between working and not working has become rather small. People are finding that if they make less, they will receive more from the government. That’s a hell of a voting block they’ve created.

The biggest threat to the individual freedoms of the American people right now is the over reach of the government, it's disregard of the U.S. Constition and it's flagship takeover program, The  oxymoronic Affordable Care Act and everybody who cares even a little bit knows it.

As we can see by the government’s reaction to the so called “Shutdown”, they have taken control of all the public lands and even though they were set aside for “future generations” and for the American people to enjoy, it doesn’t look like this confiscated land is going to be used by anybody but the U.S. government into perpetuity. The government has made no bones about it, these lands are THEIR lands and, surprise, you were never entitled to them and are now not even allowed to LOOK at them unless they say so, so SHUT UP AND SIT DOWN! Call in the guards!

These are the King’s Lands now and you have no right to them even though you PAID for them. This is where our government is today; right back to where we were with King George the 3rd and his haughty Parliament.

This also is just a dress rehearsal for when they can assert control over the public streets to the point where they can keep you confined to your state, your town and even your home. But this assumption is preposterous, surely that can't happen here, right?

So with this all in mind, the lone holdouts in the government right now are the Tea Party candidates trying to keep the rest of the GOP honest. There will not be another chance beyond the discord that will follow after the collapse of the economy and the government to follow. The only question now is when this will happen since the government can keep kicking bricks under the pyramid for maybe even another decade. But the house will fall.

And what kind of life can we expect to be living through the next decade?  Yes, better to fight now and risk the entire nation to collapse economically than to be nickel and dimed to death and drained of our individual resources slowly over the next ten years. The EU and other U.S. debt holders have already been calling for increased “revenue enhancement” in the face of the nation’s mounting debts. And where is THAT money going to come from? Why the U.S. taxpayer that’s who. Like the tax burden isn’t high enough already and with the price increases that nobody seems to be talking about, the situation is shaping up into a Death by a Thousand Cuts. The Middle Class, the people who work, are being drained of its resources and everybody in government has their hand in our pockets.  

But the kicker is they’re just strong arming us more and more. We are denied access to government and the lands they occupy and we don’t have the right to question it, we only have the right to PAY.

So let’s live and die on this new battlefield right now. In a purely figurative sense, it's better to die with our boots on rather than living on our knees because once we’re all flat broke, we won’t have a leg to stand on.

So go for broke boys since we're on our way there anyway.

China Gets Burned by Communist U.S. President

And they have nobody but themselves to blame.

The way I see it, if China didn’t buy all that debt, then Washington wouldn’t have been able to spend it. And if they didn’t sink all that dough into President Barak Obama’s election in 2008 and 2012 then we all wouldn’t be stuck with a guy who is only interested in forcing his Communist Ideology on the United States citizenry and champion the destruction of all that made this nation great. And yet the President has managed to have kept all the parts of the U.S. government machinations that people all over the world decidedly do not hold the U.S. in high esteem for, mainly: War Mongering, Spying, Economic Imperialism and screwing with the politics of foreign nations. Go figure.

So I won’t be crying any tears if and when the U.S. tanks and China is left holding $ 4 Trillion in promissory notes from the U.S. Treasury. That’s the way the cookie crumbles and that’s American Politics.  I just thought the Federal Reserve was just going to devalue the dollar to the point where paying the debt would be as simple as running the printing press but I guess China isn’t going to get even that.  

China's money men are now at risk of having an "accident" since they went all in on the U.S. debt. But countries can and do go out of business. Look at North Korea, they're out of business. The USSR had a big "Going Out of Business" sale sign on their wall in Berlin back in the 1990s so don't say it can't happen and after their debacle with Greece, I wouldn't suspect Germany to offer receivership any time soon. As a shady investment broker once confided to me: “Do you want to know how to make a small fortune in the Stock Market?  Start with a large fortune!” after which he proceeded to put my 401K rollover funds into a high Commission Yield Fund, for him! I learned a lot from that guy. And so will China.  

But seriously, a default is inevitable since the next 2 1/2 years is going to be like this. Just like everybody with a little common sense knew in 2004 that the housing market was going to tank well before it finally did in 2007 and nobody with the ablity to do anything about it did anything about it. So who expects something good to suddenly happen? The Pope maybe but nobody else. Rather we default now instead of defaulting 4 years from now when Hugo Chavez Obama completes his mission.

And the Chinese State should know better than anybody in the world today that Communism doesn’t pay the bills. That’s why they got out of the "Share the Wealth" business and changed over to a market economy some time ago now. It’s still an Imperial Totalitarian State but they’ve obviously got money to burn. And burn, I hope, it will.

It is my profound hope that Speaker Bohner holds the line with my fellow freedom loving Tea Party citizens of the United States House of Representatives and succeeds in defunding the disastrous and devious Nationalization of Healthcare and derails this anti-capitalist demagogue in the White House.

And if it crashes the economy and we default on the nation’s debts, it will be a small price to pay for freedom and the United States will be better off for it in the long run. And a default will be the only way to get the government to stop spending money the nation has yet to earn. China, although not alone in its complicity, has played a very big role in that spending spree.

If a default does come about then the Chinese will have plenty to think about while they’re kicking the Tibetans to death in the streets of their home town, forcing women to have abortions, breathing their fetid air and building their war machines to carry escalate their war-like stature and intimidate thei neighbors.

Good luck with that. We’re all going to need it.

The Government Empire Strikes Back

With the government shutdown it has become clear just how dangerous and vindictive our government has become.

By shutting down enterprises even remotely linked to the government in violation of the law and their leases, the government of the United States has shown it is more willing to punish its citizens than to listen to or even help them. This is no longer the point of their existence.

Government autobots have been given their marching orders and have carried them out to the letter in order to give the government shutdown more of an impact than it would have otherwise. They are trying to justify their existance since we know well more than half of them are not necessary. But they are now carrying on an aggressive campaign against the people who have the nerve to go to work every goddamed day to pay the taxes to pay their salaries. These are the acts of the truely depraved and desparate.

Perhaps this is how terror networks start. The government minions can just come and throw up a sign in front of your business and declare it closed and what are you going to do about it? There is nothing, now, that you can do about it except risk arrest and prosecution for trespassing upon your own enterprise.

This underlines an issue that has been griped about for ages in this nation: That you don’t really get to own anything anymore. Even though the businesses that leased the land from the U.S. Government have a legally binding lease, they were still shut down because the “landlord” simply decides to do so. The government is in violation of the law and of the lease they signed but so what? You’re out because “We Say So!”

But it is all in keeping with the growing trend in the government and it takeover of private enterprise and it’s intrusion into the comings and goings of law-abiding American Citizens.

The government’s spying, paranoia and militarization of local police forces should not be tolerated. Its actions to restrict access to public works and lands THAT THE PEOPLE HAVE PAID for should not be entertained or explained away.

The government is coming after us, the taxpaying U.S. Citizen and the shutdown only underscores its intentions and abilities to shut people out of the political process and participatory recourse.  
But like every totalitarian regime, the most intense scrutiny and repression falls upon the free citizen and not the illegal, the immoral and the criminal. Police the good people and let the rest slide to impose terror and divisive anarchy upon the masses. This is the United States today.

But what can you, as a Citizen do?

If you aren’t willing or find it useless to join a Tea Party group you can still do other things to fight.

• Don’t go back to government. Boycott it where ever you can and certainly stop giving them your time and your money. 
•  Skip your hunting or fishing license this year.
• Check your W-2 and declare 1 or 2 if you’ve declared zero. This puts more money in your pocket and not the governments. Don't use the IRS as a savings plan.
• Make plans for a modest Christmas with less spending.  
• Cross the border into a less taxed state for purchases.
• Use Online Bill-Pay through your bank instead of using the U.S. Postal Service.
• Avoid the Sales Tax whenever you can by using online secondary market tools like Craigslist.

Anything you knock off your spending also knocks off the tax that goes to the Town, State and Federal Government. It may be a little to you but it adds up. Reduce your "tax footprint". 

Check this: There is a $10.00 tax in the city of Boston per car rental transaction. There is also a parking surcharge of $2.00 per day. Meals taxes can be upwards of 7% of the cost of the meal in any town in Massachusetts. Think about that when you're on your morning coffee run. Think! Gas is taxed at $ .42 per gal ($ .18 to the Feds). Hotel/Motel rooms are taxed at 8.75% in Boston.  It’s a $ 25.00 flat fee in NYC per night. Look up the rates on your local Department of Revenue website and see what their take is on your money.
 
This doesn’t mean going without, it means being wiser with a buck. You’re going to need it anyway in the future.

Refuse to participate in government. Don't cooperate. Skip the census, jury duty and don’t answer demographic questions from government on forms. Refuse to shake a politician’s hand when campaigning. You aren’t free and he’s only campaigning to get on the government gravy train. Don’t back these guys just because they say they’re on your side, ignore them all because, lets face it, they're lying to your face.

Our parents and grandparents sacrificed through the first Great Depression and World War II. They withstood shortages, quotas, alternate day purchases, gas rationing and the lack of goods to help the war effort, for years!

We, on the other hand, have experienced NONE of this and what we consider suffering and sacrifice these days is not having a good connection on our iPad or the cable is on the blink and we can’t watch The Game.

If you can’t manage to go without a fishing license for ONE SEASON or cutting cable or delaying the payments of your medical bills, esentially taking SOME kind of monetary action, then SIT DOWN and SHUT UP. If you are unwilling to cut back for even a little while then it’s obviously not important to you and perhaps you should just GO FISH.

Put your money where your mouth is. Don't pay for a government that abuses you. What good is complaining if you are unwilling to provide anything but Lip Service?

Live it. Tell your friends. Starve the Beast.