Dumping Ground for Random Thoughts

Not long ago I read a joke… It said all the politicians running for president are promising change to the American people. We send them billions and billions of tax dollars and they send us the change.

Funny? Not really; there is too much truth in it to be funny.

But that got me to thinking… They all promise change. A restoration that would take us back in time to a place where things ran better, smoother and life was more enjoyable.

Change? That, in truth, is what they have been giving us all along.

We used to have a strong dollar… Politicians changed that.

Marriage used to be sacred… Politicians have changed that.

We used to be respected around the world… Politicians changed that.

We used to have a strong manufacturing economy… Politicians changed that.

We used to have lower tax structures… Politicians changed that.

We used to enjoy more freedoms… Politicians changed that.

We used to be a large exporter of American made goods… Politicians changed that.

We used to teach patriotism in schools… Politicians changed that.

We used to educate children in schools… Politicians changed that.

We used to enforce LEGAL citizenship… Politicians changed that.

We used to have affordable food & gas prices… Politicians changed that, too… and one could go on and on with this list.

What hasn’t been changed, politicians are promising to change that as well, if you will elect them.

When, oh when, is America going to sit back with open eyes and look at what we once were and where we have come and say, enough is enough?

The trouble is, America’s youthful voters today don’t know of the great America that existed forty and fifty years ago. They see the world as if it has always existed, as it is now.

When will we wake up? Tomorrow may be too late. When will America realize… Politicians are what is wrong with America? This goes for BOTH parties… Republicans and Democrats, there is no difference anymore… they all do only what they can to be re-elected, not what is best for the citizens!

What is needed is for the constitution to be amended to limit all Senators two term and Representatives to two terms in office like the President. They must take their staffs with them. Please do not leave the residue.

Oh, by the way, no big pension either, social security just like the rest of us. How do they rate bigger and better entitlements than the people THEY WORK FOR… WHICH IS US!

Being a politician shouldn’t be a persons life work but rather a call to public service then back to being an honest hard working citizen. Politicians are no more than housekeepers and janitors… unfortunately they act like they own the building

by Kyle-Anne Shiver • August 7, 2009

Our esteemed new President, graduate of Columbia and Harvard, took his little show on the road this week. Thursday, he took $39 million in taxpayer money to Elkhart, Indiana, where of course, he made a little speech about the Crimulus Stimulus, the multi-billion dollar boondoggle that was supposed to save us from the economic conditions, which now persist despite it.

My question, after reading his remarks, was a bit cynical. How is it that a man, hailed from every liberal enclave on the entire planet as brilliant-beyond-brilliant, has utterly failed to master fourth-grade arithmetic? Unless, of course, his mouth, that organ of masterful oratory, is not, in fact, connected to his brain at all.

If the dear folks at the crashed-and-burned RV factory in Elhart, Indiana bought this little spiel from President Big Mouth, then there might be another explanation for their failed business than the horrible economy. Read this, but don’t weep. Just pass it around to your friends and see if they still think this President is a really smart guy:

“And let me just talk about the so-called stimulus package, or the Recovery Act, because there’s been a lot of misinformation out there about the Recovery Act. Let me tell you what it is and what it’s not.”

“The plan was divided into three parts. One-third of the money has gone to tax relief for families and small businesses. One-third of the money is cutting people’s taxes. one-third of the money was tax cuts. Another third of the money in the Recovery Act has been for emergency relief that is helping folks who’ve borne the brunt of this recession. So that’s the second half. First half, tax relief. Second half, support for individuals, small businesses, and states that had fallen on hard times. The last third of the Recovery Act — and that’s what we’re going to talk about here today — is for investments…”

Granted, there were a few other garbled sentences that filled in between the fractions, so that one who was not listening carefully, might have missed the President’s confounded sums.

However, just ask yourself this: If President Bush had delivered such a pitifully flawed summation of an economic package, would it not have led every major network’s primetime newscast?

When the press covers for this President every day, 24/7, I must begin to ask myself whether they are exhibiting condescending racism, the kind that honestly does believe a black man cannot be held as accountable as a white man in the same position, simply because he is racially disadvantaged by lesser intelligence. I have known many racists like this in my life, as have you.

Condescending racists pretend, often even to themselves, that they are genuinely lovely people, who harbor only the kindest thoughts and beliefs about African-Americans. But every time they cover for someone, just because he is black, they exhibit their true beliefs. Every time they fail to use the same standard of judgement for an African-American as the one they use for a European-American, then they demonstrate plainly and simply that they are racists to the core. Racism is the internalized belief that one race is genetically and inherently superior to others. Only if one truly believes that whites are superior to blacks will he use a lower standard to judge the words and actions of black citizens.

Whenever a white commentator covers for the missteps of our African-American president, they display one of the most disgusting forms of racism there is, the kind that portrays themselves as “nice,” while hiding purely vile racial condescension.

Racism, whether dressed in a white hood and burning a cross, or dressed in a suit and tie, and wielding an elite microphone, is just as ugly, just as vile, just as un-Christian as a thing could possibly get.

When our news media finally starts — if they ever do — pointing out, with consistent regularity, the foibles of President #44, then you’ll know they’re trying to be colorblind in the true MLK tradition. Until then, they’re just a bunch of racists with their blinders turned inside out.

By SHARON THEIMER, Associated Press Writer Sharon Theimer, Associated Press Writer – Wed Aug 19, 6:08 pm ET

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama’s push for a national health care overhaul is providing a financial windfall in the election offseason to Democratic consulting firms that are closely connected to the president and two top advisers.

Coalitions of interest groups running at least $24 million in pro-overhaul ads hired GMMB, which worked for Obama’s 2008 campaign and whose partners include a top Obama campaign strategist. They also hired AKPD Message and Media, which was founded by David Axelrod, a top adviser to Obama’s campaign and now to the White House. AKPD did work for Obama’s campaign, and Axelrod’s son Michael and Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe work there.

The firms were hired by Americans for Stable Quality Care and its predecessor, Healthy Economy Now. Each was formed by a coalition of interests with big stakes in health care policy, including the drug maker lobby PhRMA, the American Medical Association, the Service Employees International Union and Families USA, which calls itself “The Voice for Health Care Consumers.”

Their ads press for changes in health care policy. Healthy Economy Now made one of the same arguments that Obama does: that health care costs are delaying the country’s economic recovery and that changes are needed if the economy is to rebound.

There is no evidence that Axelrod directly profited from the group’s ads. Axelrod took steps to separate himself from AKPD when he joined Obama’s White House. AKPD owes him $2 million from his stock sale and will make preset payments over four years, starting with $350,000 on Dec. 31, according to Axelrod’s personal financial disclosure report.

A larger issue is a network of relationships and overlapping interests that resembles some seen in past administrations and could prove a problem as Obama tries to win the public over on health care and fulfill his promise to change the way Washington works, said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a government watchdog group.

“Even if these are obvious bedfellows and kind of standard PR maneuvers, it still stands to undercut Obama’s credibility,” Krumholz said. “The potential takeaway from the public is ‘friends in cahoots to engineer a grass roots result.’”

White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said that Axelrod has had no communications with Healthy Economy Now or with Americans for Stable Quality Care, and his payments aren’t affected by the ad contracts. Axelrod’s son, a salaried AKPD employee, doesn’t work with either coalition “or stand to benefit from that work,” LaBolt said.

“David Axelrod has fully complied with the toughest-ever ethics rules for administration officials, including divesting from AKPD before the administration began,” LaBolt said.

Ken Johnson, a PhRMA senior vice president, said GMMB and AKPD were the only two firms working on the $24 million in ads. He declined to reveal how much each was paid beyond saying that each received a small percentage of the total. The coalition’s campaign team decided to hire the two firms, he said.

“In a perfect world, it’s a distraction we don’t need right now, but these are very gifted consultants who have done very good work,” Johnson said. “And it’s also important to remember that at the end of the day, the coalition partners determine the message.”

Healthy Economy Now spokesman Jeremy Van Ess said the two firms were hired because “they are the best at what they do. Period.” The coalition didn’t seek approval or direction on any of its activities from the White House, said Van Ess, a partner in a consulting firm that has worked on Democratic Senate election activities and a former speechwriter for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

AKPD and GMMB both proudly proclaim their connections to Obama on their Web sites.

AKPD has a full page on Axelrod that includes pictures of Obama. In one photo, Obama hugs Plouffe on election night.

“We are deeply honored to have been part of Barack Obama’s historic campaign to change America and the world,” GMMB says on its Web site. GMMB’s partners include Jim Margolis, a senior strategist for Obama’s presidential campaign.

Both GMMB and AKPD also have worked for Democrats this year. The Democratic National Committee paid AKPD at least $106,000 for polling, media production, communication consulting and travel costs from February through April. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee paid GMMB roughly $75,000 from February through June for ads. And GMMB took in at least $9,000 this year from Senate leader Reid’s political action committee for communications consulting.

Fri Aug 21, 2009 6:50pm EDT

By Jeff Mason

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration will raise its 10-year budget deficit projection to approximately $9 trillion from $7.108 trillion in a report next week, a senior administration official told Reuters on Friday.

The higher deficit figure, based on updated economic data, brings the White House budget office into line with outside estimates and gives further fuel to President Barack Obama’s opponents, who say his spending plans are too expensive in light of budget shortfalls.

The White House took heat for sticking with its $7.108 trillion forecast earlier this year after the Congressional Budget Office forecast that deficits between 2010 and 2019 would total $9.1 trillion.

The following was posted as a comment on a recent article in our local paper about Planned Parenthood now performing abortions:

Interesting how the same people who want to control what light bulbs you use, what kind of car you drive, what you do with land you own, how cool you keep your thermostat, where you drive your boat suddenly are so concerned about choice.

Obama’s health care plan will be written by a committee whose head says he doesn’t understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn’t read it and whose members will be exempt from it, signed by a president who smokes, funded by a treasury chief who did not pay his taxes, overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that is broke.

What could possibly go wrong?

August 09, 2009

By Kyle-Anne Shiver

What happens when the middle class feels even more victimized than the nation’s poor? When American middle-class citizens feel that they are being steamrolled by a Changeopoly Blitzkrieg, engineered by the principalities and powers of overreaching government and corporate oligarchs? When the only answer they’re given to their just concerns about unsustainable debt is “We won.”?

Well, those beleaguered middle-class folks might take a look at the tactics which have been working against them for four decades and decide to make use of some of those tactics themselves. Middle-class Americans, myself among them, have watched for 40 years, as one angry group after another has managed to get its way, and more and more entitlements from our purses to theirs, using the tactics designed by the liberal fascist revolutionary, Saul Alinsky.

One would need to be buried under a rock not to understand by now that small groups of angry people can get what they want.

Think ACORN and NINJA home loans.

Think Code Pink and the tarring of GW as a “war criminal.”

Think ANSWER and the closing of Gitmo.

This list could fill a museum on the success of “community organizing” for “change.”

So, what in the world is the legacy media doing going bonkers about it now? Why on earth would media elites not give glowing coverage to this democracy in action, the same kind they’ve been unabashedly heralding for decades now, every time a dozen live bodies show up with signs in a public place?

Why, I do declare, they seem to be saying with a rather concerted effort, “Protest for me, but not for thee.”

What the Democrats and their bullhorns in media are telling us, the folks, is that they are plum scared down to their woolies because they now know they’ve lost their monopoly on information. And the left has lost its monopoly on grievance, too.

For 40 years, this Country has been blackmailed by angry Alinskyite protest into redistributing great chunks of wealth to aggrieved-status mobs under the pretense of charity or entitlement. The scales of grievance have now tilted so far to the left that it is the middle-class, which feels itself most endangered, most unable to make its voice heard in the Halls of Congress.

Saul Alinsky, for his part, told the young radicals of the 1960s that they had to bring the middle-class into the revolution by the mid-1970s or give up altogether. Alinsky understood where the real power in America was held. Alinsky understood that power wasn’t in the board rooms, but in the middle-class consumer’s purse. It wasn’t in the school board, but in the middle-class parent’s expectations. Power wasn’t even in Washington, but in the demands of the most populous group of Americans: the vast middle-class, whom he called the “have-a-little-want-mores,” in keeping with his solely material worldview.

But Saul Alinsky’s vision amounted to making the middle-class so “rubbed raw” with “discontent”, making them feel so downtrodden that they would demand more government handouts for themselves and more government control in the hands of their political masters. Government controlling everything in the whole society was Alinsky’s idea of “freedom” and “liberty.” He disavowed the power of a single individual to affect change in his own life, and always, every single time, looked to collectivist power for strength. Alinsky’s vision was, of course, Marxist, but with fascist elements thrown into the mix.

Alinsky’s first successes, during the 40s and 50s, were in getting the Catholic Church and other fair-weather liberals to sign onto the radical labor agenda, which has now successfully crippled the American auto industry and put it at the mercy of a federal takeover. This corporatist model, of leaving big business in private hands, while a central government calls all the shots, is one of the hallmarks of fascist third-way activity.

But as we’ve learned to our dismay, the left has successfully branded conservative Americans, who continue to believe in limited government and the true separation of powers, as fascist. So, in Nancy Pelosi’s addled imagination, protesters against government control of yet another still-mostly-private American enterprise, are the ones carrying Swastikas.

Doesn’t Nancy Pelosi remind you, dear readers, of the mindless scarecrow in Oz?

With no independent mind of her own, she’s giddily traveled the yellow-brick road and now depends upon her Wizard in Chief to call all the shots for her ninnified illusions.

What we are seeing now in townhalls across this country are middle-class people demanding that their government drop any and every plan to convert America’s healthcare system to one like those failing throughout socialized Europe and Canada. Anyone who honestly believed that a man, who had done nothing whatsoever in his entire life but go to school, shout slogans at rallies, and run for office could be an able president, have now been disabused of that fantasy. Anyone who believed that Barack Obama was a conciliator who could de-polarize a Nation, purposely polarized for 80 years by his own side, has now awakened from the spell.

Honey, even a complete nitwit knows that a president, who hires out his real job to 32 czars, is not CEO material.

And, it is those people mostly, who now are coming out of their homes and businesses in earnest dissent. They oppose the takeover of yet another part, perhaps the most intimate part, of their already over-controlled lives. And middle-class America seems anything but ready to concede and give life-and-death decision making over to the Wizard and his loyal band of Alinskyites.

The American people are anything but mindless dolts, most especially our vibrant and diverse middle-class. We are seeing some of the same Alinsky tactics employed at townhall meetings, but by a group opposed to more government control, not demanding more of it. They are the anti-fascist, anti-socialist, anti-Alinsky folks, who would prefer to keep the liberties they have, even if it means sacrifice and suffering.

This ain’t what the leftists in charge expected to see. The Democrats envisioned the middle-class welcoming, with spread-wide-open arms of gratitude, these new power plays that would put more control into the hands of their beneficent bureaucracy.

Instead, the Alinskyites are being met with 1776 Redux, and all they can do is yell “Fascist” at the top of their lungs, just as they’ve been doing for 40 years.

What a heap of malicious poppycock.