Happy New Year! Have more fun in 2014!

"So here's a resolution for you: In the new year, obtain more liberty for yourself and for your friends and for your family."



Because government will no longer protect our rights; it upslurps them, we have to assert our rights if we wish to keep them.

u·surp

yo͞oˈsərp/

verb

1. 1.

   take (a position of power or importance) illegally or by force.

   "Richard usurped the throne"

   synonyms:

   seize, take over, take possession of, take, commandeer, wrest,assume, expropriate More

up·slurp

upˈslərp/

verb

1. 1.

   take (a position of power or importance) illegally or by force in large volume, as with a hydro-vac truck.

   "Richard upslurped everyone's rights without authority or due process"

   synonyms:

   seize, take over, take possession of, take, commandeer, wrest,assume, expropriate More

We Are Not Subjects!

by Laura Hollis

The unveiling of the dictatorial debacle that is Obamacare absolutely flabbergasts me. It is stunning on so many levels, but the most shocking aspect of it for me is watching millions of free Americans stand idly by while this man, his minions in Congress and his cheerleaders in the press systematically dismantle our Constitution, steal our money, and crush our freedoms. 

The President, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid (with no small help from Justice John Roberts) take away our health care, and we allow it. They take away our insurance, and we allow it. They take away our doctors, and we allow it.They charge us thousands of dollars more a year, and we allow it. They make legal products illegal, and we allow it. They cripple our businesses, and we allow it.They announce by fiat that we must ignore our most deeply held beliefs – and we allow it.

Where is your spine, America?

Yes, I know people are complaining. I read the news on the internet. I read blogs. I have a Twitter feed. So what? People in the Soviet Union complained. People in Cuba complain. People in China complain (quietly). Complaining isn't the same thing as doing anything about it. In fact, much of the complaining that we hear sounds like resignation: Wow. This sucks. Oh well, this is the way things are. Too bad.

Perhaps you need reminding of a few important facts. Here goes:

1. The President is not a king. Barack Obama does not behave like a President, an elected official, someone who realizes that he works for us. He behaves like a king, a dictator – someone who believes that his own pronouncements have the force of law, and who thinks he can dispense with the law's enforcement when he deigns to do so. And those of us who object? How dare we? Racists!

And while he moves steadily "forward" with his plans to "fundamentally transform" the greatest country in human history, he distracts people with cheap, meaningless trivialities, like "free birth control pills"! (In fact, let's face it: this administration's odd obsession with sex in general - Birth control! Abortion! Sterilization! Gay guys who play basketball! -- is just plain weird. Since when did the leader of the free world care so much about how people have sex, who they have it with, and what meds they use when they have it? Does he have nothing more important to concern himself with?)

2. It isn't just a failed software program; it is a failed philosophy. People are marveling thatHealthcare.gov was such a spectacular failure. Well, if one is only interested in it as a product launch, I've explained some of the reasons for that here. But the larger point is that it isn't a software failure, or even a product failure; it is a philosophy failure.

I have said this before: Obama is not a centrist; he is a central planner. And this – all of it: the disastrous computer program, the hundreds of millions of dollars wasted, the lies, the manipulation of public opinion, the theft of the public's money and property, and freedom (read insurance, and premiums, and doctors) -- IS what central planning looks like.

The central premise of central planning is that a handful of wunderkinds with your best interests at heart (yeah, right) know better than you what's good for you. The failure of such a premise and the misery it causes have been clear from the dawn of humanity. Kings and congressmen, dictators and Dear Leaders, potentates, princes and presidents can all fall prey to the same imperial impulses: "we know what is good the 'the people.'

And they are always wrong.

There is a reason that the only times communism has really been tried have been after wars, revolutions, or coups d'état. You have to have complete chaos for people to be willing to accept the garbage that centralized planning produces. Take the Soviet Union, for example. After two wars, famine, and the collapse of the Romanov dynasty, why wouldn't people wait in line for hours to buy size 10 shoes? Or settle for the gray matter that passed for meat in the grocery stores?

But communism's watered-down cousin, socialism, isn't much better. Ask the Venezuelans who cannot get toilet paper. Toilet paper. ¡Viva la Revolución!

Contrary to what so many who believe in a "living Constitution" say, the Founding Fathers absolutely understood this. That is why the Constitution was set up to limit government power. (Memo to the President: the drafters of the Constitution deliberately didn't say "what government had to do on your behalf.") They understood that that was the path to folly, fear, and famine.)

3. Obama is deceitful. Just as the collapse of the computer program should not surprise anyone, neither should we be shocked that the President lied about his healthcare plan. Have any of you been paying attention over the past few years? Obama has made no secret of his motivations or his methods. The philosophies which inspire him espouse deceit and other vicious tactics. (Don't take my word for it: read Saul Alinsky.) Obama infamously told reporter Richard Wolffe, "You know, I actually believe my own bullshit." He has refused to be forthcoming about his past (where are his academic records?). His own pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, told author Ed Klein, that Obama said to him, "You know what your problem is? You have to tell the truth."

Did Obama lie when he said dozens of times, "If you like you plan, you can keep it. Period!"? Of course he did. That's what he does.

4. The media is responsible. And had the media been doing their jobs, we would have known a lot of this much, much earlier.

The press is charged with the sacred responsibility of protecting the people from the excesses of government. Our press has been complicit, incompetent, or corrupt. Had they vetted this man in 2008, as they would have a Republican candidate, we would have known far more about him than we do, even now. Had they pressed for more details about Obamacare, Congress' feet would have been held to the fire. Had they done their jobs about Eric Holder, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the IRS scandal, NSA spying - or any of the other myriad betrayals of the public trust that this administration has committed, Obama would likely have lost his 2012 reelection campaign. (A fact that even The Washington Post has tacitly acknowledged. Well done, fellas! Happy now?)

Instead, they turned a blind eye, even when they knew he was lying, abusing power, disregarding the limits of the Constitution. It was only when he began to spy on them, and when the lies were so blatant that the lowest of low-information voters could figure it out that they realized they had to report on it. (Even in the face of blatant, deliberate and repeated lies,The New York Times has the audacity to tell us that the President "misspoke.") They have betrayed us, abandoned us, and deceived us.

5. Ted Cruz was right. So was Sarah Palin. The computer program is a disaster. The insurance exchanges are a disaster. What's left? The healthcare system itself. And this, of necessity, will be a disaster, too. Millions of people have lost their individual insurance plans. In 2015, millions more will lose their employer-provided coverage (a fact which the Obama administration also knew, and admitted elsewhere). The exorbitant additional costs that Obamacare has foisted on unsuspecting Americans are all part of a plan of wealth confiscation and redistribution. That is bad enough. But it will not end there.

When the numbers of people into the system and the corresponding demand for care vastly exceed the cost projections (and they will, make no mistake), then the rationing will start. Not only choice at that point, but quality and care itself will go down the tubes. And then will come the decisions made by the Independent Payment Advisory Board about what care will be covered (read "paid for") and what will not.

That's just a death panel, put politely. In fact, progressives are already greasing the wheels for acceptance of that miserable reality as well. They're spreading the lie that it will be about the ability of the dying to refuse unwanted or unhelpful care. Don't fall for that one, either. It will be about the deaths that inevitably result from decisions made by people other than the patients, their families, and their physicians. (Perhaps it's helpful to think of their assurances this way: "If you like your end-of-life care, you can keep your end-of-life-care.")

6. We are not SUBJECTS. (or, Nice Try, the Tea Party Isn't Going Away). We have tolerated these incursions into our lives and livelihoods too long already. There is no end to the insatiable demand "progressives" have to remake us in their image. Today it is our insurance, our businesses, our doctors, our health care. Tomorrow some new crusade will be announced that enables them to take over other aspects of our formerly free lives.

I will say it again: WE ARE NOT SUBJECTS. Not only is the Tea Party right on the fiscal issues, but it appears that they are more relevant than ever. We fought a war once to prove we did not want to be the subjects of a king, and the Boston Tea Party was just a taste of the larger conflict to come. If some people missed that lesson in history class, we can give them a refresher.

The 2014 elections are a good place to start. Call your representative, your senator, your candidate and tell them: "We are not subjects. You work for us. And if the word "REPEAL" isn't front and center in your campaign, we won't vote for you. Period."

Laura Hollis is an attorney and teaches entrepreneurship and business law at the University of Notre Dame. She resides in Indiana with her husband and two children.

(Sent to me by several readers. ~ KU)

Update: Here's the original post, on Town Hall.

Kakistocrat of the Year Award

The suspense has been building all year. Who will it be? Well, who else? Last year's winner -- Teh Won, the only, the most selfie president in history, Emperor PotUS himself, Barack Hussein Obama!

Here's an image of il douche for you to gaze upon while we wait for the applause boos, catcalls and groans of the newly-uninsured and soon-to-be-uninsured to die down:

Creepy: Barack Obama portrait at the US Embassy in London (Size Matters)

I should probably list some of the other kakistocrats that were in the running for the KotY awards.

1. Kathleen Sibelius -- Responsible (or not) for the worst roll-out of a government program in the history of the nation since prohibition. I decided against her because what she had to work with was so bad to start with. Besides, who was responsible for giving her a job that she was unqualified for (hint: BHO)? And who was responsible for creating an environment in which managers are hesitant to tell the CEO that the project was coming in over budget and over schedule (hint: BHO)? Kathleen is pathetic, is all. She may be a kakistocrat, but her boss takes the cake on this one.
2. Harry Reid -- Responsible for invoking the "nuclear option", breaking a rule that has governed Senate procedure since the body was founded. In a political ploy to stuff the courts with 'progressive' judges, he simply changed the rules to suit his whim. So much for a nation of laws. That is very unstatesmanlike behavior (the definition of a kakistocrat).
3. There were other, distant runners-up, such as Eric Holder (who might be a bigger kakistocrat than Sibelius), but Sibelius beat him out in sheer luzerdom. Reid narrowly beat him out in sheer craven-ness. Others, too numerous to mention, populate the halls of Congress and the Senate.

This year's award has to go to the KotY-LotY-PotUS, Mr. Barack Hussein Obama. The serial supra-constitutional executive orders; the doing an end-run around Congress to delay phasing in ObamaCare until after the pivotal mid-term elections was a very shameless bit 'o constitutional vandalism. The politicization of the Trayvon Martin affair was also a very kakistacular stunt.

The thing that really clinched it for me was the Lie of the Year (LotY): "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it." (and the corollary, "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.") Period. End of story. Although the lie was told ad nauseum in 2012, it was largely responsible for KotY-LotY-PotUS-BHO's re-election. So it really didn't take effect until 2013, and many people didn't really find out about it first-hand until 2013. Therefore, the effective date of the lie was 2013. (I should point out that I knew it was a lie -- or at least a falsehood -- when I first heard it, based simply on my knowledge of economics and government track records on every social program in history.)

Here's the thing about lies: I really don't like to call something a lie when it is merely a mistake (cf. the "Bush lied; people died" meme). But this was no mistake. KotY-LotY-PotUS-BHO himself might not have known it was a lie. Obama is nothing more than a text-to-speech converter -- mindlessly reading whatever appears on his TelePrompTer. (We could fix a lot of problems with this regime simply by putting the Constitution on his TelePrompTer.) But whomever was responsible for programming KotY-LotY-PotUS-BHO had to know it was a lie, because even a casual reading of ObamaCare would reveal that it could have no other effect. Frankly, no matter how insulated KotY-LotY-PotUS-BHO might be, it is hard to imagine him not getting at least a whiff of the lie that was, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it." I can imagine Sarah Palin saying, "I can see Obama's Pinocchio nose from my house!" Hell, I bet we could see the nasty thing from the international space station.

KotY-LotY-PotUS-BHO was lying his keester off. Here's your award, KotY! You've earned it!

Merry Christmas! God Bless Us, Every One!

Bill Whittle talks about faith, morality and the American form of government:

My Annual Christmas Post

This never fails to choke me up, especially since it was mainstream when I first saw it in 1965, and it is considered controversial today.



They would never put this on network TV today. How far we have fallen.

A Fool's Paradise

This is from an email that has been circulating around the Interweb. It's another cautionary tale.

---

"Winston, come into the dining room, it's time to eat," Julia yelled to her husband. "In a minute, honey, it's a tie score," he answered.

Actually Winston wasn't very interested in the traditional holiday football game between Detroit and Washington. Ever since the government passed the Civility in Sports Statute of 2017, outlawing tackle football for its "unseemly violence" and the "bad" example it sets for the rest of the world", Winston was far less of a football fan than he used to be. Two-hand touch wasn't nearly as exciting.

Yet, it wasn't the game that Winston was uninterested in. It was more the thought of eating another Tofu Turkey. Even though it was the best type of Veggie Meat available after the government revised the American Anti-Obesity Act of 2018, adding fowl to the list of federally-forbidden foods, (which already included potatoes, cranberry sauce, and mincemeat pie), it wasn't anything like real turkey.

And ever since the government officially changed the name of "Thanksgiving Day" to "A National Day of Atonement" in 2020, to officially acknowledge the Pilgrims' historically brutal treatment of Native Americans, the holiday had lost a lot of its luster.

Eating in the dining room was also a bit daunting. The unearthly gleam of government-mandated fluorescent light bulbs made the Tofu Turkey look even weirder than it actually was, and the room was always cold. Ever since Congress passed the Power Conservation Act of 2016, mandating all thermostats - which were monitored and controlled by the electric company - be kept at 68 degrees, every room on the north side of the house was barely tolerable throughout the entire winter.

Still, it was good getting together with family. Or at least most of the family.Winston missed his mother, who passed on in October, when she had used up her legal allotment of life-saving medical treatment. He had had many heated conversations with the Regional Health Consortium, spawned when the private insurance market finally went bankrupt, and everyone was forced into the government health care program. And though he demanded she be kept on her treatment, it was a futile effort. "The RHC's resources are limited," explained the government bureaucrat Winston spoke with on the phone. "Your mother received all the benefits to which she was entitled. I'm sorry for your loss."

Ed couldn't make it either. He had forgotten to plug in his electric car last night, the only kind available after the Anti-Fossil Fuel Bill of 2021 which outlawed the use of the combustion engines - for everyone but government officials. The fifty mile round trip was about ten miles too far, and Ed didn't want to spend a frosty night on the road somewhere between here and there. Thankfully, Winston's brother, John, and his wife were flying in.

Winston made sure that the dining room chairs had extra cushions for the occasion. No one complained more than John about the pain of sitting down so soon after the government-mandated cavity searches at airports, which severely aggravated his hemorrhoids. Ever since a terrorist successfully smuggled a cavity bomb onto a jetliner, the TSA told Americans the added "inconvenience" was an "absolute necessity" in order to stay "one step ahead of the terrorists."

Winston's own body had grown accustomed to such probing ever since the government expanded their scope to just about anywhere a crowd gathered, via Anti-Profiling Act of 2022. That law made it a crime to single out any group or individual for "unequal scrutiny," even when probable cause was involved. Thus, cavity searches at malls, grocery stores, train stations, bus depots, etc., etc., had become almost routine. Almost.

The Supreme Court is reviewing statute, but most Americans expect a Court composed of six progressives and three conservatives to leave the law intact. "A living Constitution is extremely flexible", said the Court's eldest member, Elena Kagan. "Europe has had laws like this one for years. We should learn from their example," she added.

Winston's thoughts turned to his own children. He got along fairly well with his 12-year-old daughter, Brittany, mostly because she ignored him. Winston had long ago surrendered to the idea that she could text anyone at any time, even during Atonement Dinner. Their only real confrontation had occurred when he limited her to 50,000 texts a month, explaining that was all he could afford. She whined for a week, but got over it.

His 16-year-old son, Jason, was another matter altogether. Perhaps it was the constant bombarding he got in public school that global warming, the bird flu, terrorism, or any of a number of other calamities were "just around the corner", but Jason had developed a kind of nihilistic attitude that ranged between simmering surliness and outright hostility. It didn't help that Jason had reported his father to the police for smoking a cigarette in the house, an act made criminal by the Smoking Control Statute of 2018, which outlawed smoking anywhere within 500 feet of another human being. Winston paid the $5,000 fine, which might have been considered excessive before the American dollar became virtually worthless as a result of QE13.

The latest round of quantitative easing the federal government initiated was, once again, to "spur economic growth." This time, they promised to push unemployment below its years-long rate of 18%, but Winston was not particularly hopeful.

Yet the family had a lot for which to be thankful Winston thought, before remembering it was a Day of Atonement. At least, he had his memories. He felt a twinge of sadness when he realized his children would never know what life was like in the Good Old Days, long before government promises to make life "fair for everyone" realized their full potential.

Winston, like so many of his fellow Americans, never realized how much things could change when they didn't happen all at once, but little by little, so people could get used to them. He wondered what might have happened if the public had stood up while there was still time, maybe back around 2009, when all the real nonsense began.

"Maybe we wouldn't be where we are today if we'd just said 'enough is enough' when we had the chance," he thought.

Maybe so, Winston. Maybe so.

---

Thanks to Dave and Maddie for sending me this.

Is this over the top? Maybe so, dear reader. Maybe so. But look how oppressive statism is today. For those of you who were in high school in the 1970s, or grew up in the 1960s, like me, you remember what life was like. You remember the freedom. Sure, pot was illegal. Nobody even considered gay marriage (some of us knew gay people but we didn't persecute them; we simply were at liberty not to celebrate or condone their lifestyle).

People were responsible about gun ownership, and you could even openly carry a rifle or a handgun around town (taking it in for service, or buying or selling) without a police escort. You could have a fire in your fireplace, or burn some brush if you needed to, without fines or special permits. You could build a shed on your property (or tear one down), or do some landscaping without being fined or hauled to court by the county government. Oh, and it wasn't legal to kill unborn children by the millions each year.

Meanwhile, we have not reduced poverty; we have institutionalized it. We've created a dependent underclass. We've reduced self-respect. We've increased crime. We've reduced upward mobility. We've reduced liberty. Then, there's this from Bill Whittle:



So is this cautionary tale so outlandish? If we follow the current 'progressive' trajectory, I'd say it's a tad conservative in it's projections. Many of these prognostications are already in force, or nearly so. If you call that 'progress'. The end.

All In All, We're Just Another Brick in the Wall

Wealth Redistribution - A Cautionary Tale

From an email circulating on the interweb...

---

Barack Obama discovers a leak under his sink, so he calls Joe the Plumber to come and fix it.

Joe drives to Obama's house, which is located in a very nice neighborhood and where it's clear that all the residents make more than $250,000 per year.

Joe arrives and takes his tools into the house. Joe is led to the room that contains the leaky pipe under a sink. Joe assesses the problem and tells Obama, who is standing near the door, that it's an easy repair that will take less than 10 minutes.

Obama asks Joe how much it will cost. Joe immediately says, "$9,500."

"$9,500?" Obama asks, stunned, "But you said it's an easy repair!"

"Yes, but what I do is charge a lot more to my clients who make more than $250,000 per year so I can fix the plumbing of everybody who makes less than that for free," explains Joe. "It's always been my philosophy. As a matter of fact, I lobbied government to pass this philosophy as law, and it did pass earlier this year, so now all plumbers have to do business this way. It's known as 'Joe's Fair Plumbing Act of 2013.' Surprised you haven't heard of it."

In spite of that, Obama tells Joe there's no way he's paying that much for a small plumbing repair, so Joe leaves. Obama spends the next hour flipping through the phone book looking for another plumber, but he finds that all other plumbing businesses listed have gone out of business. Not wanting to pay Joe's price, Obama does nothing. The leak under Obama's sink goes unrepaired for the next several days.

A week later the leak is so bad that Obama has had to put a bucket under the sink. The bucket fills up quickly and has to be emptied every hour, and there's a risk that the room will flood, so Obama calls Joe and pleads with him to return. Joe goes back to Obama's house, looks at the leaky pipe, and says, “Let's see - this will cost you about $21,000."

"A few days ago you told me it would cost $9,500!" Obama quickly fires back.

Joe explains the reason for the dramatic increase. "Well, because of the 'Joe's Fair Plumbing Act,' a lot of rich people are learning how to fix their own plumbing, so there are fewer of you paying for all the free plumbing I'm doing for the people who make less than $250,000. As a result, the rate I have to charge my wealthy paying customers rises every day.

"Not only that, but for some reason the demand for plumbing work from the group of people who get it for free has skyrocketed, and there's a long waiting list of those who need repairs. This has put a lot of my fellow plumbers out of business, and they're not being replaced - nobody is going into the plumbing business because they know they won't make any money. I'm hurting now too - all thanks to greedy rich people like you who won't pay their fair share."

Obama tries to straighten out the plumber: "Of course you're hurting, Joe! Don't you get it? If all the rich people learn how to fix their own plumbing and you refuse to charge the poorer people for your services, you'll be broke, and then what will you do?"

Joe immediately replies, "Run for president, apparently."

---

Thanks to Elliott.

What Americans Can Learn From The Constitution Nelson Mandela Signed

Oh boy. This article is so wrong: 

The South African Constitution, by contrast, devotes 32 different articles to individual rights before it even mentions the structure of government. While America’s founders were primarily worried about how lawmakers would be selected and what powers they would and would not have, South Africa’s Constitution begins with a statement of human rights. It’s drafters wanted first and foremost to ensure that nothing like apartheid would ever exist again.

Our US Constitution doesn't start with a list of rights, because government cannot grant rights! We're born with them by virtue of being human (not by being US citizens). The principles of good government were given in our Declaration of Independence; the Constitution is the specification for the government that implements it. Even our Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to our Constitution -- not an afterthought) acknowledge that they are not granting these rights, and the tenth amendment further states that the Bill of Rights are not a complete list -- and cannot be (because government cannot grant rights that we're born with). 

The US Constitution is the "white list" of things our government must do. The Bill of Rights is the "black list" of natural rights on which no good government should ever infringe. Guess what? The US government infringes on several of them routinely.

I respect Nelson Mandela, and everything he had to endure under apartheid (not that dissimilar from our own slavery, Jim Crow laws and segregation), but all of those things are already supposed to be illegal -- problems we had to work out under our own form of government. No constitution can prevent tyrants from ignoring it or circumventing it, as we see playing out in abundance today by the US government.

The article is from the website, Think Progress (as in 'progressive'), so you just know I'll disagree with them. Nelson Mandela was an avowed communist, so whatever "individual rights" his Constitution arrogantly granted most likely involved little or no economic freedom, but rather provision without consent, by the productive members of society, for the non-productive members. When done by anyone but government, it is the definition of "theft".

From each according to his ability; to each according to his need is a beautiful thing when it is done voluntarily. But it is slavery when earnings are redistributed by government, without the consent of the worker-producers.

ObamaCare: Success Beyond Their Wildest Dreams

I keep seeing reports and comments that ObamaCare has failed. It has not failed. It is succeeding beyond their wildest dreams. The only people who believe it has failed are the people who believe ObamaCare was intended to make health care more affordable. That was never the goal. The objective was Cloward-Piven.

The only risk now is that ObamaCare succeeds so effectively that it causes blow-back to the extent that Democrats are adversely affected in the next election.

It looks like some Democrat politicians have too little faith in their Messiah, or place their own selfish job security above the objective of the collective.

Efficient Gun Control That Makes Sense

This is adapted from an email that is circulating on the Interweb, that my dad forwarded to me.

---

Efficient Gun Control that makes sense. 

• In 1863 a Democrat shot and killed Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States. 

• In 1881 a left wing radical Democrat shot James Garfield, President of the United States , who later died from the wound. 

• In 1963 a radical left wing socialist shot and killed John F. Kennedy, President of the United States. 

• In 1975 a left wing radical Democrat fired shots at Gerald Ford, President of the United States. 

• In 1983 a registered Democrat shot and wounded Ronald Reagan, President of the United States. 

• In 1984 James Hubert, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 22 people in a McDonalds restaurant. 

• In 1986 Patrick Sherrill, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 15 people in an Oklahoma post office. 

• In 1990 James Pough, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 10 people at a GMAC office. 

• In 1991 George Hennard, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 23 people in a Luby's cafeteria. 

• In 1995 James Daniel Simpson, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 5 coworkers in a Texas laboratory. 

• In 1999 Larry Asbrook, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 8 people at a church service. 

• In 2001 a left wing radical Democrat fired shots at the White House in a failed attempt to kill George W. Bush, President of the US . 

• In 2003 Douglas Williams, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 7 people at a Lockheed Martin plant. 

• In 2007 a registered Democrat named Seung - Hui Cho, shot and killed 32 people in Virginia Tech. 

• In 2010 a mentally ill registered Democrat named Jared Lee Loughner, shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed 6 others. 

• In 2011 a registered Democrat named James Holmes, went into a movie theater and shot and killed 12 people. 

• In 2012 Andrew Engeldinger, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 7 people in Minneapolis .   

• In 2013 a registered Democrat named Adam Lanza, shot and killed 26 people in a school. 

• The Latest... An angry Democrat shoots 12 at a Navy ship yard.

One could go on, but you get the point, even if the media does not.  Clearly, there is a problem with Democrats and guns.

No NRA member, Tea Party member, or Republican conservatives were involved. 

Solution: It should be illegal for Democrats to own guns.

---

Note: I did not Snopes this. Maybe some of the claims are false. But like Dan Rather at CBS, the claims may be false, but the narrative is true so it's fair game, right? Oh, who cares? Under Alinsky rules, all's fair.

But here's the deal: 'progressives' seem to judge others by themselves, i.e., "We can't be trusted with guns, so we have to ban guns. They're not safe for anyone." There are two problems with that.

1. Lots of people can be trusted with guns, and they can do a lot of good in society, especially during the crucial average 20 minutes it takes for a 911 response ("You better not rape me! I called 911!"). Guns prevent a lot of crime just by the perps not knowing who's carrying and who isn't. Violence is prevented with nary a shot being fired. 
2. Banning guns will not eliminate guns from society. It's 300 year-old technology. That genie is so out of the bottle, and has been for centuries. Best to get a grip, and get real. The world's a dangerous place, and while guns can be dangerous, in responsible hands, guns can actually make the world safer.

I keep a loaded fire extinguisher under my kitchen sink, and a first-aid kit in my medicine cabinet for the same reason I keep a loaded pistol in my (none of your business). Because when seconds count, help can arrive in minutes. 

Check One: Self-Serving Bald-Faced Liar, or Clueless, Pathetic Tool?

This morning, Dillon Honcoop asked the question on the KGMI Morning Show, "Barack Obama, apology accepted?"

Let's see... the serial lie that we could keep our health care or our doctor if we like... period - has turned out to be patently false for literally millions of Americans. Barack Obama forcefully repeated that lie throughout his campaign. I see only two possibilities:

1. he's a self-serving bald-faced liar or 
2. he's a clueless, pathetic tool. 

Either way, it got him re-elected, and his signature legislation passed.

Now that the chickens are coming home to roost, and people are discovering their loss of liberty, financial security and prosperity, he thinks he can make it right by saying, "Oops! Sorry, my bad!" Apology accepted? Not bloody likely!

The only way for him to make us whole would be for him to resign the presidency that he retained under false pretenses, and for congress to repeal ObamaCare, and start all over with the truth this time. That's also not bloody likely.

BOHICA Folks, You've Earned It!

Q: Can this problem be solved with more freedom, instead of less? ~ Penn Jillette

A: HELL NO! It cannot! Our problems can only be solved with fewer choices and dictatorial 'solutions' handed down by people who 'know better' than we do! ~ Whatcom County Voters

I think about half of the voters in yesterday's election have never known what it was like to live in a free country. It was a wonderful place! Sure, we had our problems, but we were at liberty to work them out for ourselves, make our own choices in life, and adjust our own behavior if we guessed wrong. Live and let live, we didn't try to force anyone else to do what WE thought was right.

Well, you have made your choice, and you deserve to get what you voted for, good and hard. BOHICA, folks, you've earned it!

ObamaCare: Define Success!

Local morning talk show host Dillon Honcoop noted that people focusing on the failure of the HealthCare.gov website were missing the big picture, namely that millions of people are losing their health insurance due to ObamaCare.

While I believe Dillon was correct as far he went, I think he is missing an even bigger picture: ObamaCare was never intended to succeed in the way you or I, or dozens of Democrats in the US legislature who voted for it, would define success.

The progenitors of ObamaCare measure success by the degree of chaos that it can cause in the health insurance and health care provider market. Because the ultimate goal is single payer, which will be much easier to implement when people are demanding relief from the bomb that is ObamaCare. Who knew?

I think Obama knew, Pelosi knew, probably Harry Reid, and a handful of other Democrats in the legislature knew. The rest of them were hornswoggled into believing that ObamaCare was this benevolent thing that would bring affordable health care to the masses. They were the useful idiots.

They were the useful idiots who didn't read the bill, because the bill was designed to be unreadable. Most of the text simply modifies arcane elements of other laws. It would take a team of lawyers months of research to make sense of it. The rest of them simply read the executive summary, assumed it was an honest representation of the bill's intent and scope, and voted on that basis.

President Obama famously said (numerous times), "If you like your plan, you can keep it. Period". That is now obviously false. Since I believe Obama knew, I'm calling this a lie. So, why would Obama lie? He had to lie, in order to make ObamaCare succeed in the way he wants it to succeed. You might say I'm a conspiracy theorist, but a week ago, you would have called me that for saying millions would lose their health care coverage. There's a big difference between conspiracy theory and conspiracy fact.

Grammar and Cultural Chauvinism

Supposably, for all intensive purposes, irregardless of the fact that I could care less, I'd buy an expresso, excetera, pacifically for anyone who realized that it is of upmost importance that we use proper spelling and grammar. Otherwise, we'll look dull and uneducated, and no one will read our resume'.

Does anybody else think our preoccupation with spelling and grammar is a trifle arbitrary? I have always been a stickler for good spelling and grammar, but seriously, it is arbitrary, right? It has to be. English grew out of a need to communicate, long before we had any concept of English grammar. The English language is an ad-hoc hodgepodge of other languages and dialects. 

Shakespeare liked to toy with the language, and he frequently invented new words. He had the liberty of defining the part of speech and the spelling. Why did that spelling have to be locked in place for ever after? Spelling wasn't actually "standardized" until the first dictionaries began to capture the current (local) spellings, or assigned spellings based on the current (local) pronunciation. That was arbitrary. 

I think the current preoccupation with spelling and grammar actually stems from a need for educated people to be able to draw a line between themselves and other, uneducated people. I honestly do believe that. The same goes for the disdain for "Ebonics", various southern dialects, the use of "ain't", and so on. 

When we say, "nice day, eh", we're either mocking or identifying with Canadians, eh? When we say, "We be racis'", we're either mocking or identifying with the black culture. When we say, "Oh my God! Gag me with a spoon!", we're mocking the Valley Girl culture. And it works both ways: When a Negro uses "good" grammar, s/he is said to be "acting white". 

I think we humans engage in cultural chauvinism without realizing it, even at the very same time we denounce it. We want to be accepted by our culture and by our peers, and language is just as much a badge or uniform as skin color or clothing. "Good" spelling and grammar are just other ways to impose uniformity. It doesn't bother me, but I think this observation will irritate 'progressives' who pride themselves on their expensive liberal arts education and impeccable spelling and grammar. 

Obama Death Star

I saw this over at Common Sense with Paul Jacob, and I liked it so much that I stole it:

It accompanies his article, Affordable [sic] Healthcare [sick].

LA Times Censoring Scientific Debate

I heard on the radio yesterday that the LA Times will no longer print letters to the editor denying climate change, on the assumption, I guess, that such denial would be tantamount to racism or gay-bashing. They evidently do not understand science, the scientific method, or how these issues are settled. Did you know that Einstein's theory of relativity is still being tested? So far the tests continue to support and validate the theory, but even at this late date, we could find something that blows it away. But at least relativity is testable.

I think it’s important to note that the LA Times, as a private newspaper, may exercise their first amendment rights as they see fit. Freedom of the press means newspapers, blogs and broadcasters are free to publish, or not to publish whatever they like. The fact that they have their heads in the sand (or up their asses) is their prerogative. The appropriate response is to start your own publication. “Fair and balanced” isn't a single-publisher proposition. Competition is.

I do not deny that climate changes all the time, as it has done since the dawn of time. We have incontrovertible records of it. I do not deny that we may still be burrowing out of the last ice age. We have incontrovertible records of that too. But I do deny that there is any incontrovertible evidence that humans are in any way responsible, nor can there be. It isn't testable! That's because in order to verify anthropogenic global warming climate change chaos (AGCC) experimentally, we would need a "control planet" (a duplicate earth, but without humans, or at least not industrialized -- it doesn't seem practical to me).

The climate science community has tried to address this shortcoming through computer modeling, but computer models are simply buggy self-fulfilling prophecies. There is no natural real-world way to prove that the computer models have accounted for everything - initial conditions, seemingly negligible factors, getting cause and effect reversed, and the unknown. We can't model what we don't know, and we can't validate what we can't test. It's all synthetic.

I think it's ironic that many of the people espousing computer modeling as a reliable way to prove the AGCC hypothesis are the same ones who denounce genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in foods, artificial flavoring, and who demand "naturally organic" foods. It's inconsistent, to say the least.

'Progressivism' is a Religion: Faith Based, Not Fact Based

Gaia Thingy

For 100 years, classical liberals* have been trying to discredit 'progressivism', A.K.A., socialism, communism, statism, whatever you want to call it. 'Progressives' resent the open market, capitalist system that is based on merit, productivity and industry, because either they, or the people they claim to sympathize with, cannot compete.

While classical liberals have always relied on charity to help the less fortunate (but not the indigent), 'progressives' want to rely on government for that function. While neither mechanism is perfect, government has been tried for the past 100 years, and all we have to show for it is more poverty and more debt. That is because government cannot produce wealth, and when it tries to redistribute wealth, that merely discourages productivity and encourages dependency.

So why has 'progressivism' continued to flourish, while classical liberalism continues to decline? Is it because people don't really want to be free? Is it because people are fundamentally lazy? Is it because people don't like the prosperity that comes with freedom? I think not. So what then?

Well, I think we have been going about discrediting 'progressivism' all wrong. We've been using facts and logic. Facts and logic don't work on 'progressives', because 'progressivism' is a faith-based dogma. It's like a religion. Nowhere is this more evident than with anthropogenic global warming climate change chaos. As I said in an earlier post,

The man-made climate change hypothesis has so many discrepancies, loose ends, untestable truth-claims and outright fraud that it is just begging for some critical analysis. Sympathetic peer review and "consensus" is not experiment. Without rigorous experimental confirmation, the climate change hypothesis is simply a matter of faith -- another religion. If it was properly called religion instead of science, the fact that it should have no role in public policy would be a no-brainer.

When the watermelons call us deniers instead of skeptics, I want to yell, "Don't you mean heretic? This isn't the Holy Roman Empire! I'm sorry about the rest of the world, but here in the United States, we have something called 'The First Amendment'. We don't have to subscribe to your religion!"

The fact is, classical liberals need to find out if anyone has ever discredited a religion before. If so, then we need to use that tactic. If there is no tactic, we need to invent one. The 'progressives' found a tactic that works well against us, namely Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. There are some books that claim to use Alinsky's rules against 'progressives' without compromising our principles, and maybe that will work. 

However, I don't think a derivative approach is necessarily the best approach. I would like to come up with something purpose-built for defeating faith-based systems. So I started looking for articles on the web that claim to discredit established religions. I found one, but this argument fails against Christians, because it makes a fundamental error as to why Christians believe in God. Now don't get me wrong, many Christians and scientists have this wrong also (as I explain here), but this guy doesn't get it right. 

So I don't have any good ideas yet, but let's all start thinking. Just remember that the same tactics that work against 'progressives' may also work on Christians and Jews. I don't want to hurt them, so we need to give them a heads-up. These are dangerous times. 

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*Classical liberals are people who believe in liberty, as opposed to those people who call themselves liberals, but who are really illiberal control freaks, A.K.A., 'progressives'. I'm reclaiming the word, "liberal". 

Murphy's Other Fifteen Laws

Most of you have heard of Murphy's Law: "If anything can go wrong, it will". Or "Anything that can possibly go wrong, does." It turns out there really was a man named Murphy - Edward Murphy, although he really did not coin the phrase. According to Wikipedia, he was blaming an assistant for his own lack of verification of some accelerometer sensors at an Air Force proving site.

Anyway, the following were also not coined by Murphy, but they are similarly cynical:

1. Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
2. A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.
3. He who laughs last thinks slowest.
4. A day without sunshine is like, well it's night.
5. Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.
6. Those that live by the sword get shot by those who don't.
7. Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool.
8. The 50-50-90 rule: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there's a 90% probability you'll get it wrong.
9. It is said that if you line up all the cars in the world end-to-end, someone from California* would be stupid enough to try to pass them. 
10. If the shoe fits, get another one just like it. 
11. The things that come to those who wait, may be the things left by those who got there first.
12. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will sit in a boat all day, drinking beer.
13. Flashlight: A case for holding dead batteries.
14. God gave you toes as a device for finding furniture in the dark. 
15. When you go into court, you are putting yourself in the hands of twelve people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.

*or any other neighboring state or country.

(Thanks to Uncle Richard for sending me these.)

Where Are You on the The Nolan Chart?

What is your political persuasion? As you can see, I sit in the libertarian corner of this chart. It says that I am about 80% classical liberal on personal issues, and about 90% classical liberal on economic issues.

How did I find that out? I took this quiz. If I took it again, I might get a slightly different answer. The quiz consists of ten questions. I think that might be too few to get a truly accurate reading, but it is interesting.

The really interesting thing about this is that most 'progressives' would call me a right wing conservative, which I most certainly am not. That would demand that I tolerate far less personal freedom than I am comfortable with.

A hard core right-winger would demand nearly zero personal freedom and nearly 100% economic freedom, while a hard core left-winger would demand nearly zero economic freedom and nearly 100% personal freedom. Interestingly, a statist demands nearly zero personal freedom and nearly zero economic freedom. A libertarian demands nearly 100% personal and economic freedom.

I am not an anarchist though, which brings me back to this other chart that I made a couple of years ago:

It isn't to scale, of course. There is no scale. But it does illustrate how individual liberty increases with increasing government - up to a point. Beyond that point, government becomes oppressive, and self-determination begins to diminish. So in the general scheme of things, I believe that I am more of a centrist - perhaps to a little right of center. The Nolan Chart may require some more calibration. 

Epic Fail, and Fail, and Fail, and Fail Again!

I adapted this from an email circulating the interweb, entitled "Walmart vs. The Morons" (snopes...) (my contributions are highlighted):

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• Americans spend $36,000,000 at Walmart every hour of every day.
  
• This works out to $20,928 profit every minute.
• Walmart will sell more from January 1 to St. Patrick's day (march 17th) than target sells all year.
• Walmart is bigger than Home Depot + Kroger + Target +Sears + Costco + K-Mart combined.
• Walmart employs 1. 6 million people, is the world's largest private employer, and most speak English.
• Walmart is the largest company in the history of the world.
• Walmart now sells more food than Kroger and Safeway combined, and keep in mind they did this in only fifteen years.
• During this same period, 31 big supermarket chains sought bankruptcy.
• Walmart now sells more food than any other store in the world.
• Walmart has approx.3,900 stores in the USA of which 1,906 are super centers; this is 1,000 more than it had five years ago.
• This year 7.2 billion different purchasing experiences will occur at Walmart stores. (earth's population is approximately 6.5 billion.)
• 90% of all Americans live within fifteen miles of a Walmart.

You may think that I am complaining, but I am really laying the ground work for suggesting that maybe we should hire the guys who run Walmart to fix the economy. This should be read and understood by all Americans Democrats, Republicans, everyone! To president Obama and all 535 voting members of the legislature; it is now official that the majority of you are corrupt and ineffective. To wit,

• The U.S. Postal service was established in 1775. You have had 237 years to get it right and it is broke.
  
• Social security was established in 1935. You have had 77 years to get it right and it is broke.
• FannieMae was established in 1938. You have had 74 years to get it right and it is broke.
• The war on poverty started in 1964. You have had 48 years to get it right; $1 trillion of our money is confiscated each year and transferred to "the poor" and they only want more.
• Medicare and medicaid were established in 1965. You have had 47 years to get it right and they are broke.
• FreddieMac was established in 1970. You have had 42 years to get it right and it is broke.
• The department of energy was created in 1977 to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. It has ballooned to 16,000 employees with a budget of $24 billion a year and we import more oil than ever before. You had 35 years to get it right and it is an abysmal failure.

The reason of course, is that these services are socialistic in nature, not privately run, profit-based enterprises. There is no incentive to become more efficient. In the private sektor, if an enterprise fails to fulfill its mission (i.e., make a profit), it goes broke and goes away. When a public program fails to fulfill its mission, you statists and 'progressives' constantly harp that you just need more money (which government can and will happily print if taxpayers won't cough it up – the resulting inflation is just a hidden tax). But more money will make you less efficient, not more. It has always been thus.

No, you have failed in every "government service" you have shoved down our throats while overspending our tax dollars. And you want Americans to believe you can be trusted with a government-run health care system?!

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(Thank you Joan, for sending me this.)

I Call B.S.!

My Grandfather used to tell me, "If you can't express something numerically, you don't know what you're talking about." I realize that there are exceptions to that rule, in art, music, and other things. But not science. Having said that, read this article posted at the Washington State Department of Ecology website. This is supposed to be an academic article about modeling household water use. I think our taxpayer dollars paid for this.

An Agent Based Model of Household Water Use

Abstract: Households consume a significant fraction of total potable water production. Strategies to improve the efficiency of water use tend to emphasize technological interventions to reduce or shift water demand. Behavioral water use reduction strategies can also play an important role, but a flexible framework for exploring the “what-ifs” has not been available. This paper introduces such a framework, presenting an agent-based model of household water-consuming behavior. The model simulates hourly water-using activities of household members within a rich technological and behavioral context, calibrated with appropriate data. Illustrative experiments compare the resulting water usage of U.S. and Dutch households and their associated water-using technologies, different household types (singles, families with children, and retired couples), different water metering regimes, and educational campaigns. All else equal, Dutch and metered households use less water. Retired households use more water because they are more often at home. Water-saving educational campaigns are effective for the part of the population that is receptive. Important interactions among these factors, both technological and behavioral, highlight the value of this framework for integrated analysis of the human-technology-water system.

Keywords: agent based modeling; behavioral factors; residential water use; buildings

Now, I majored in mathematics in college, so I was naturally intrigued by this piece of crap about halfway through the article:

Other factors affecting the agent decision-making process are water saving campaigns, water metering and household values and resulting norms of acceptable water use behavior. The intention of individual agents to save water in the model is a function of these factors, which can be expressed as follows:

IntentionToSaveWater = a + b + f

where, a = care for environment/10 if water saving campaigns = true otherwise a = 0, b = 0.4 if water meter = true otherwise b = 0 and f = 0.1 is a constant to avoid the value zero as equation outcome. 

Care for the environment divided by ten? Ten exactly? Zero point four? Where do those numbers come from, anyway? The zero point one is an admitted fudge factor just to make the result turn out the way they want. They actually say it! Why does IntentionToSaveWater need to be non-zero anyway? Can't someone intentionally waste water? Believe me, after reading this, I'm tempted. Yeah, it'll cost me, but it might be worth it. I guess I'm not one of the receptive.

Is this hypotheses testable? Peer reviewed? Do we have independently reproducible results? Or is this just more poli-sci, sociology mumbo-jumbo? Those classes were graduation requirements in college, but we hard science and math students used to sit in our dorms, read the textbooks and laugh our keisters off. I sure hope this isn't how they're modeling global warming climate change chaos, but it would not surprise me. This isn't science or mathematics. It's pure B.S.!  Totally made up, and put in the form of an equation to look "scientific". Maybe that'll bluster someone suffering from math anxiety, but as a lifelong student of science, it merely makes me want to puke.

Let me tell you what stuff like this does to my "care for the environment" quotient: It makes me bloody reactionary, is what. It makes me deliberately do things that I would not otherwise do, like burn my paper and cardboard waste in my fireplace (even in summer) just to preserve my sense of self-determination. Not that it really hurts the environment anyway, but I know it would piss off the environmentalists if they found out about it (oops!). You know, water is not destroyed by use. It evaporates and comes right back down as rain. I'm probably drinking some of the same water that was drunk (and peed) by the likes of Jesus H. Christ, or Sir Isaac Newton. (Or Josef Stalin and Sigmund Freud, but I try not to think about that.)

This is what makes me extremely dubious of bureaucracies like EPA and WSDOE. I'm almost certain my tax dollars paid for this tripe. I don't want it, and we don't need it. But it just keeps getting worse. Bureaucracies never look for ways to reduce their budgets, or shrink their scope. Quite the opposite. I for one am getting very tired of it. It's time to curb the bureaucracies!

Need Less Freedom, More Control

I was on facebook the other day, and I became embroiled in a health care discussion. I asked the Pen Gillette question, "Is it possible we can solve this problem with more freedom instead of less?" The answer from the other participants was a resounding, "No, we cannot". They didn't even want to consider free market solutions. They don't understand free market economics 101, or they think the free market has already been tried, and failed. (We haven't had a free market in health care for over half a century, and it's getting less free all the time.*) The other commentators couldn't possibly see how it would even work.

According to them, we need more control and less freedom, and ObamaCare is just the ticket. It's sad, frustrating and frightening. Check it out... There are a few locally well-known names in that discussion. I really had to flap my gums rapidly on this one to un-twist my words, and dodge bullets.

*Is it any surprise the cost is going up? I realize that correlation does not imply causation, but this is an easily testable hypothesis. Hardly anyone wants to test it though.

Letter to Patty and Maria

The following letter was composed by a local resident, name of Bill Schoonover.

April 3, 2013
Senator Patty Murray
Senator Maria Cantwell
Washington, DC, 20510

Dear Senator:

I have tried to live by the rules my entire life. My father was a Command Sergeant Major, U.S. Army, who died of combat related stresses shortly after his retirement. It was he who instilled in me those virtues he felt important - honesty, duty, patriotism and obeying the laws of God and of our various governments. I have served my country, paid my taxes, worked hard, volunteered and donated my fair share of money, time and artifacts.

Today, as I approach my 79th birthday, I am heart-broken when I look at my country and my government. I shall only point out a very few things abysmally wrong which you can multiply by a thousand fold. I have calculated that all the money I have paid in income taxes my entire life cannot even keep the Senate barbershop open for one year! Only Heaven and a few tight-lipped actuarial types know what the Senate dining room costs the taxpayers. So please, enjoy your haircuts and meals on us.

Last year, the president spent an estimated $1.4 billion on himself and his family. The vice president spends $ millions on hotels. They have had 8 vacations so far this year! And our House of Representatives and Senate have become America's answer to the Saudi royal family. You have become the "perfumed princes and princesses" of our country.

In the middle of the night, you voted in the Affordable Health Care Act, a.k.a. "Obama Care," a bill which no more than a handful of senators or representatives read more than several paragraphs, crammed it down our throats, and then promptly exempted yourselves from it, substituting your own taxpayer-subsidized golden health care insurance.

You live exceedingly well, eat and drink as well as the "one percenters," consistently vote yourselves perks and pay raises while making 3.5 times the average U.S. individual income, and give up nothing while you (as well as the president and veep) ask us to sacrifice due to sequestration (for which, of course, you plan to blame the Republicans, anyway).

You understand very well the only two rules you need to know - (1) How to get elected, and (2) How to get re-elected. And you do this with the aid of an eagerly willing and partisan press, speeches permeated with a certain economy of truth, and by buying the votes of the greedy, the ill-informed and under-educated citizens (and non-citizens, too, many of whom do vote) who are looking for a handout rather than a job. Your so-called "safety net" has become a hammock for the lazy. And, what is it now, about 49 or 50 million on food stamps - pretty much all Democratic voters - and the program is absolutely rife with fraud with absolutely no congressional oversight?

I would offer that you are not entirely to blame. What changed you is the seductive environment of power in which you have immersed yourselves. It is the nature of both houses of Congress which requires you to subordinate your virtue in order to get anything done until you have achieved a leadership role. To paraphrase President Reagan, it appears that the second oldest profession (politics), bears a remarkably strong resemblance to the oldest.

As the hirsute first Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton (1834 - 1902), English historian and moralist, so aptly and accurately stated, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." I'm only guessing that this applies to the female sex as well. Tell me, is there a more corrupt entity in this country than Congress?

While we middle class people continue to struggle, our government becomes less and less transparent, more and more bureaucratic, and ever so much more dictatorial, using Czars and Secretaries to tell us (just to mention a very few) what kind of light bulbs we must purchase, how much soda or hamburgers we can eat, what cars we can drive, gasoline to use and what health care we must buy. Countless thousands of pages of regulations strangle our businesses costing the consumer more and more every day.

As I face my final year, or so, with cancer, my president and my government tell me "You'll just have to take a pill," while you, Senator, your colleagues, the president, and other exulted government officials and their families will get the best possible health care on our tax dollars until you are called home by your Creator, while also enjoying a retirement beyond my wildest dreams, which of course, you voted for yourselves and we pay for.

The chances of you reading this letter are practically zero as your staff will not pass it on, but with a little luck, a form letter response might be generated by them with an auto signature applied, hoping we will believe that you, our senator or representative, has heard us and actually cares. This letter will, however, go online where many others will have the chance to read one person's opinion, rightly or wrongly, about this government, its administration and its senators and representatives.

I only hope that occasionally you might quietly thank the taxpayer for all the generous entitlements which you have voted yourselves, for which, by law, we must pay, unless, of course, it just goes on the $17 trillion national debt for which your children and ours, and your grandchildren and ours, ad infinitum, must eventually try to pick up the tab.

My final thoughts are that it must take a person who has either lost his or her soul, or conscience, or both, to seek re-election and continue to destroy this country I deeply love and put it so far in debt that we will never pay it off, while your lot improves by the minute, because of your power. For you, Senator, will never stand up to the rascals in your House who constantly deceive the American people. And that, my dear Senator, is how power has corrupted you and the entire Congress. The only answer to clean up this cesspool is term limits. This, of course, will kill the goose that lays your golden eggs. And woe be to him (or her) who would dare to bring it up.

Sincerely,
Bill Schoonover

Obama: Make it Hurt!

Executive summary: The regime is scared to death that We the People might discover that we can live without "non essential" government, and demand our money back. So they're making this government shutdown hurt.

Obama Went Freaking Nuts After Being Told “No!”

By Curt Dale

Bobblehead Obama is totally off his meds and having a hissy fit from being defied on his precious Obamacare’s funding. I’ve been looking at the blatantly insane things he’s causing around our nation as he takes the government shutdown to completely unconstitutional, intentionally harmful, logically warped and malicious levels. I’ve been looking for those things that stand out most to me. Only a total imbecile would go to this level of vindictiveness, and that imbecile is the President of the United States. Does Congress share any responsibility for the shutdown of government? Of course! A large number of us see the actions the House took as doing their job. But Obama is at fault and responsible for the beyond-the-pale stupidity we’re seeing blamed on the shutdown. He went nuts on Sequestering, and now he’s in high gear with outrageous actions and trying to blame them on Congress.

Possibly, Obama’s most stupid, yes, stupid, is making the National Park Service tell charter fishing boat captains that they have closed the Florida Bay due to the shutdown. Fishing boats can’t operate here to take fishermen into 1,100 square miles of wide, open ocean during shutdown. He added Biscayne National Park to the same closure. Anglers can’t go out with family and friends to enjoy fishing. The Park Rangers will have to police this area, shooing people out, keeping them from the waters, maybe even arresting them if threats are carried out. During sea survival training, I parachuted into Biscayne Bay and enjoyed the comforts of a tiny one man raft for some 6 hours right in the middle of Biscayne Bay. So, I appreciate the size of even that policing task. Thinking he can keep people out of 1,100 square miles of open ocean in the Keys is akin to early dementia. This effort will take more Park Rangers to police the POTUS ban than would normally be on duty. So, it is a vindictive exercise to “make things as difficult as possible on the people.” Why would I claim that? One Park Ranger supervisor reported that he was told “to make things as difficult as possible” on the people, is guidance issued Rangers by the National Park Service part from the Administration. He also declared, “It’s disgusting.”

We know that he had the World War II Memorial and all the other Memorials on the Washington Mall closed in a fit of pique, only to have WWII Veterans from the Invasion of Normandy cast the barricades aside and go in to see THEIR memorial. Washington Monument, the Vietnam Memorial, the Korean Memorial, Iwo Jima Memorial are barricaded from any entrance by their veterans and dear families. (I love the play on words used by “The Great One,” talk show host, Mark Levin. He said they are “Barrycaded.” How appropriate his coined word! I intend to use his term as it’s so perfectly descriptive of the presidential snit.) I see that not only the WWII Veterans are defying and ignoring the Barrycades. Veterans and visitors are throwing them aside at the Vietnam Memorial (“The Wall”), and at the Korean War Memorial as well, under threat of arrest. Vietnam Veterans and visitors who had knocked the Barrycades aside were escorted out by police, but they immediately went right back in, defying the Barrycades again. Seems there are some patriotic and thinking Americans who know how to lead the charge to defy stupid. Have they decided it isn’t unlawful to defy the unlawful. Is it surprising that many of the brave veteran chucking aside the heinous Barrycades were the ones who charged Normancy, Bastogne, Inchon, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Hue and a long list of other enemy fortresses. Obama even had the American Battle Monuments Commission shut down two dozen US Military cemeteries in foreign nations, and closed all its memorials and monuments. How many family members saved for year and crossed the ocean to visit the grave of their fallen loved one, only to be denied access to salve Barrys EGOBAMA. Does this help Barry feel he “rules the world?” I am in no way surprised at how heavily Obama has targeted the military, past present and future, in his frenzy. I’ve written about his closure of the Military Commissaries. That affects the active duty military, taking money from them by forcing them to buy necessities at higher commercial prices, does the same to military retirees, and depletes the personal funds of both for the future. I thought I knew Obama’s disdain for the military, but these actions go beyond my wildest imagination, and they certainly cement that thought for posterity.

Here’s what he’s doing to Catholic Priests as they attempt to carry out their religious duties for US Military members on bases as reported by John Schlageter, the general counsel for the Archdiocese for the Military Services USA, in an op-ed this week. “With the government shutdown, many [government service] and contract priests who minister to Catholics on military bases worldwide are not permitted to work – not even to volunteer. During the shutdown, it is illegal for them to minister on base and they risk being arrested if they attempt to do so.” Not only did Obama violate First Amendment Rights by impeding the rights of these people to practice their religion in the way they choose, but he violated the right of peaceable assembly for the Veterans and others going to the wartime memorials. Will any future president and administration have the gumption to take him and his cohorts to task for such illegal actions against Americans?

He has had Mt. Vernon, the Plantation home of President George Washington shutdown by having his federal workers close the parking lot, cutting off the privately owned memorial. The federals government merely shares ownership of the parking lot with the private organization that restored, maintains and operates the national treasure. So, Obama’s overbearing directions take precedent in the shared ownership and closes Mt. Vernon to tourists who want to visit there.

We know that the National Parks are closed, as we expected, but closure of these open air Memorials is a display of his incredible dislike for anything patriotic, for the military or even the memory of what heroes of the past have done. I will continue to maintain that Obama wants all adulation, all ceremony, all celebration focused upon him and him alone. His Imperial Presidency is his first priority. He’s willing to make things “as difficult as possible for the people” if they choose to look toward anything else as being more praiseworthy than he. It’s perfectly ok to herd them like cattle, fence them out like livestock, and punish them for any complain against his repressive and costly policies.

I contend that the Republicans, or anyone who is defying Obama on funding Obamacare, are not ultimately responsible for these horrible consequences of this government shutdown. Yes, fundamental things happen in a shutdown, but not the absurdities he has invoked. I’ve lived through many of them. He’s taken what has been a rather orderly, mildly disagreeable process in the past and fomented it into scorched earth vengeance and retribution because his ego is bruised. I hope the thinking people of American can comprehend this fact. And anyone who says, “But he’s not responsible; the government is so big, he couldn’t be responsible for all of this,” I say, “He’s the President. These outlandish slaps in the face are the fruit of his whimsy. Let “Make it as difficult as possible” for the people ring in your ears incessantly. That is Obama’s unalterable, inflexible form of governing. He knows nothing else but force, coercion and blackmail!

Colonel Curtis D. Dale, Ph.D. USAF (Ret)