Walking around on Resurrection ground
April 25, 2012 Leave a comment
Yeah, this is so funny Mr. POTUS. Millions are out of work and you are on the Jimmy Fallon late night show exercising your smirk.
Somebody should tell Obama that we are headed toward a double dip recession just as Britain and much of the European continent is already experiencing. Rioting in the streets will not be far behind…
November 2012: Replace Obama with a President. Can I get an Amen?
April 22, 2012 Leave a comment
No, I am not talking about Obama’s campaign war chest. The “class warrior” who recently made a jab at Mitt Romney with a silver spoon reference regularly charges “regular folks $1000 for a handshake at fundraisers” (see the Sunday April 22, 2012 Chicago Tribune column by John Kass linked in blue below). Class warfare depends on the treasure of the rich in so many ways!
From Kass’s Sunday Trib column, Obama Ladles Up Hot Bowls of Class Warfare:
And, Obama is of the people, so please forget that presidential media guru David Axelrod just dropped $1.7 million on a gorgeous Chicago condo.
In America, only snobs and fools look down upon someone born poor. It’s un-American. But if your father’s poverty isn’t your fault, then, why should your father’s wealth be a sin?
The opportunity to seek wealth is why our people (Kass is Greek) came here, why they left their villages overseas to ride in steerage, seasick, eating black bread and spooning out the stew with wooden spoons, just on the chance that their grandchildren might hold a silver spoon someday…
Romney, of course, took great umbrage at Obama’s silver spoon crack, saying it was aimed at his father, former Michigan Gov. George Romney, a former president of American Motors.
“The president likes to attack fellow Americans,” said Romney on Fox News. “He’s always looking for a scapegoat, particularly (those who) have been successful like my dad, and I’m not going to rise to that.”
I find both of them flawed. Romney as the ring bearer for all that’s wrong with the corporatist Republican smothering of the conservative spirit, Obama as the keeper of the federal leviathan, feeding it as it grows larger, squeezing the life out of entrepreneurship.”
There are two kinds of politicians: those without personal wealth, and those with personal wealth. Those with money don’t need politics to make more. Those without money need friends as they climb the ladder of public service.”
Michelle Obama had such friends…
And the President had such friends. One is named Tony Rezko. He’s rotting in a federal prison, although it was Rezko and his wife who put together the strange deal that helped Barack and Michelle buy their dream house in Kenwood that they never seem to visit anymore.
In prison, Tony Rezko doesn’t use a silver spoon. He uses a plastic fork.”
Obama, via his constant “fair share” campaign speeches, relates opportunity directly to having money and not to liberty and self-determination. How strange and how short-sighted this is.
What Obama is really telling inner-city people is that they are not going to make it, they will not have opportunity until and unless they other people’s money in their pockets. This is “in your face” class warfare, blatant materialism and an obvious trashing of the human spirit.
Underlying Johnny-one-note-Obama’s fair share speeches is the same inane logic of the Left: if someone has more that means that there must be less for you. But, life is not a zero-sum proposition. Everyone can benefit from hard work and self-determination and not just those who already have done so and have earned money.
It is those on the Left who spend all of their time trying to slice the current pie into exactly equal “fair share” pieces. It is those on the Right who want to make a bigger pie so that everyone can have a big slice of it and can eat it in peace, free from the tyranny of big government.
Obama’s implied message: Forget contentment, you must have what others have or you are missing out, otherwise your treasure chest is empty.
Now with White House silverware in hand, Obama spoons out the parasite-laden bread pudding of class warfare to those standing in the food lines willing to pay a $1000.00 a plate. He lectures to those anxious for any crumbs that may fall from the table of the Dear Leader and to those of the liberal media anxiously waiting another feeding frenzy.
I ask God for my daily bread and He provides.
April 21, 2012 Leave a comment
Not only does Obama continually scrounge for dollars, begging with his frequent “Fair Share” teleprompter-thons but we were recently reminded that Obama had poked through the garbage dump for third world sympathy stories to blather up his memoir.
And, now we know what Obama meant when he said everything is on the table!
(h/t Legal Insurrection et al)
(And lest you think I am being too cruel to the dog connoisseur-in-Chief Obama just remember that it was Obama’s emissary, Democratic strategist and attack dog David Axelrod whose Jan. 30th Tweet began the canine convulsions:
February 4, 2012 Leave a comment
I have noticed a definite pattern emerging ever since before the 2008 election of BHO: many voters have given up thinking and have decided to vote for the popular shills of humanism, otherwise known as the educated elite.
BHO, the POTUS, is surrounded by Harvard grads, each of whom has been steeped in liberal mores taught by educators who have risen to the level of their incompetence (the Peter Principle). I like what Tomas Sowell, economist, said about these professors:
“Too often what are called “educated” people are simply people who have been sheltered from reality for years in ivy-covered buildings. Those whose whole careers have been spent in ivy-covered buildings, insulated by tenure, can remain adolescents on into their golden retirement years.”[1]
And, Walter E. Williams:
“People who denounce the free market and voluntary exchange, and are for control and coercion, believe they have more intelligence and superior wisdom to the masses. What’s more, they believe they’ve been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Of course, they have what they consider good reasons for doing so, but every tyrant that has ever existed has had what he believed were good reasons for restricting the liberty of others.”
In my estimation the American voter, though often degreed, has become less educated and intellectually apathetic. This voter has become a stage-one thinker – someone who finds some humanist value in a policy, votes for the person promoting it and doesn’t want to think any further about it, believing that they have done their good deed for the day. Yet, the policy does not operate in isolation and, typically, havoc and damage control ensues when the policy is implemented. Our nation is left ever more crippled. The Minimum Wage Law (MWL) is one prime example of this stage one thinking implemented and voted for by people who let others do their thinking.
Thomas Sowell in his excellent book the Thomas Sowell Reader, a compendium of his many newspaper articles and essays, wrote an article titled Minimum Wage Laws. Here are some of his thoughts from that article to ponder deeply before the next election:
“By the simplest and most basic economics, a price artificially raised tends to cause more to be supplied and less to be demanded than when process are left to be determined by supply and demand in a free market.”[2]
“The unemployed are made idle by wage rates artificially set above the level of their productivity. Those who are idled in their youth are of course delayed in acquiring the job skills and experience which could make them more productive – therefore higher earner – later on.”[3]
“Although most industrial societies have minimum wage laws, not all do. Switzerland and Hong Kong have been among the exceptions – and both have had very low unemployment rates.”[4]
“Higher costs for a given quantity and quality of labor tend to produce less employment, just as higher prices for other things tend to produce fewer sales. Moreover, higher costs in the form of mandated benefits have the same economic effect as higher costs in the form of minimum wage laws. The explicit minimum wage rate understates the labor costs imposed by European governments, which also mandates various employer contributions to pension plans and health benefits, among other things. Europe’s unemployment rates shot up when such government-mandated benefits to be for by employers grew sharply during the 1980 and 1990s.”[5]
Average hourly compensation in Europe of manufacturing employees in the European Union countries in general is higher than in the United States or Japan. So is unemployment.”[6]
“Labor unions also benefit from minimum wage laws, are among the strongest proponents of such laws, even though their members typically make much more than minimum wage rate.”[7]
“Just as businesses seek to have government impose tariffs on imported goods that compete with their products, so labor unions use minimum wage laws as tariffs to force up the price of non-union labor that competes with their members for jobs.”[8]
“…when all is said and done, most empirical studies indicate that minimum wage laws reduce employment in general, and especially the employment of younger less skilled, and minority workers.”[9] (emphasis mine)
Thomas Sowell’s article is chock full of empirical information and common sense economics. I could continue to quote many of his insightful words. I’ll provide one more series of quotes about minorities and the implementation of MWLs the past century:
“Again, it is necessary to note how price is a factor even in racial discrimination…It was only after a series of minimum wage escalations began that black male teenage unemployment not only skyrocketed but became more than double the unemployment rates among white male teenagers.”[10] (emphasis mine)
Stage-one voting creates unemployment. Obama, the educated One, Jesse Jackson and the Congressional Black Caucus should know the facts. But in ignoring the economic data they choose “navel-gazing, hand-wringing or self-dramatization” to preach a Liberal Utopia that will never arrive on this earth. MWLs produce the opposite effect, in fact!
Don’t ignore the data. Read. Understand. Think beyond stage-one. Uncle Sam needs You more than ever.
Again, Thomas Sowell:
“People who cannot be bothered to learn both sides of the issues should not bother to vote.”[11]
[1] Thomas Sowell, The Thomas Sowell Reader, p. 401
[2] Ibid., p. 108
[3] Ibid., p. 108
[4] Ibid., p. 109
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid., p.110
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., p.111
[10] Ibid., p. 115 & 117
[11] Ibid., p.397
Note: Mitt Romney has come out in favor of auto-increasing the MWL. I am voting Newt Gingrich in the Illinois GOP primary.
Update: In a 02/07/2012 RCP article regarding Mitt Romney’s faux conservatism, Thomas Sowell said:
“Nor are such consequences of minimum wage laws peculiar to blacks or to the United States. In Western European countries whose social policies liberals consider more “advanced” than our own, including more generous minimum wage laws and other employer-mandated benefits, it has been common in even prosperous years for unemployment rates among young people to be 20 percent or higher.
The economic reason is not complicated. When you set minimum wage levels higher than many inexperienced young people are worth, they don’t get hired. It is not rocket science.
Milton Friedman explained all this, half a century ago, in his popular little book for non-economists, “Capitalism and Freedom.” So have many other people. If a presidential candidate who calls himself “conservative” has still not heard of these facts, that simply shows that you can call yourself anything you want to. “
Thoughts from Uncle Miltie:
January 27, 2012 Leave a comment
Obama and the Dems want to bring everyone down to the same “bottom-feeder” level called “fair”. In lieu of a good record to extol, Obama’s campaign plea is take more money from the so-called 1% and then to redistribute the money according to some vague notion of fairness to the 99%. Obama is not about wealth creation. Obama is about wealth redistribution. Obama doesn’t want to make the pie bigger. Obama wants to slice the pie into smaller slices. Obama and the Dems don’t create wealth, they syphon off wealth by all manner of taxation. The Dems also build casinos or as I call them, shell games, to gain revenue money from the fools who happily play their life away hoping to “Win the Future” (a Obama campaign mantra). And with no money yet in hand Obama, the snake-oil salesman he is, makes financial promises to his base (e.g., college kids, unions, banks, etc.) and does so without regard for the taxpayer who would foot the bill.
After destroying America’s financial future his first term with bailouts to his cronies and the passing of Obamacare, Obama now seeks a second term to continue the pillaging process. Obama is hell-bent on wiping the American slate clean with a rag he calls “Hope” and then spray painting his own perverse ideological graffiti, “Change”, on the walls of history. For Obama and his posse the U.S. Constitution is just another authority to hold in contempt. This is Obama as Ludicrous, a political class gangsta member from Chicago with the same old denigrating street rap – “I’m for me and my crew. The rest can go to f___ themselves.
Think about this. Do you really want someone defining fairness? Do you really want someone to pick and chose who wins and who loses? Do you really think that government will stop private property encroachment (taxes) with the 1%? Once you give government the rights to your pocketbook (healthcare included) you lose complete control of it regardless of your democratic representation.
Now for social gospel junkies, this type of ideology is nowhere near Christianity – robbing Peter to pay Paul. For the voter, this socialist ideology is nothing other than giving him a false hope of security wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper. It certainly smells like day-old fish.
True conservatives like myself want everyone to have an opportunity to succeed, to rise up to a new level called “personal success.” Think about this: if your money is being taxed away to feed a socialist’s irrational vision than you have less money to provide for your family, less money to build a successful business, less money for charity. Government becomes the focus of your life – not God, family, friends or the needy.
A vote for Obama will bring you and your family down to a new low and will suck the life out of our nation. His re-election would move our country from constitutionalism to despotism. If you vote for that you deserve it.
This next presidential election we must not put our votes out to the “hope and change” pasture. We must think and choose wisely. Just say “No” to the stupor inducing drug called socialism and its street-corner salesman Obama.
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770)
November 19, 2011 Leave a comment
Thomas Sowell, in his excellent book A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, discusses the two main opposing ways of viewing the political, economic and social landscape. These views have come down through time to the present dichotomy of visions, namely the Left or Liberal (modern sense) vision and the Right or Conservative vision. Sowell denotes the two visions: one being the unconstrained vision, the former, and the constrained vision, the latter.
I will try to make this a short post. Here is my brief take on The Unconstrained Vision:
The unconstrained vision relies heavily on surrogate decision makers, men or women of “superior” intelligence and virtue, to make our decisions for us. The implication of this vision is that the common man does not know what is good for himself and for those around him. But those with super-rational intelligence and sincerity do. And because of our lack of “fair and just” decision making, we the people need an over-arching Decider – someone to rein in society.
I recently read what I would call a perfect description of this viewpoint’s totalitarian heavy-handedness, an oppressiveness which is often disguised as omniscient benevolence which hides its use of debilitating control methods:
“…Nurse Ratched is the Decider; under her unblinking gaze, the privileges, rewards, punishments, dosages, and furloughs for the patients are parceled out or denied. Time itself seems to run at whatever speed Nurse Ratched decrees, the clock slowing down to bring everything to a snow-globe standstill to conjure a sense of suspended animation, a zombie twilight. Sparks of resistance are ruthlessly snuffed. Waiting in the wings is the Shock Shop, where you go in as a person and are wheeled out as a vegetable after sufficient voltage to the brain…” (source listed below)
If you haven’t noticed by now, we are living in the “zombie twilight” of the Obama Presidency. Obama is our country’s Nurse Ratched. He is a prime example of the unconstrained vision’s all-powerful omniscient Decider. He is someone who talks down to people. And enabled by the main stream media He has become the Chosen One, the chosen articulator of reason and we are his hapless patients waiting for him to put us in our place. Obama certainly believes that we the American people should follow his lead down the road to social justice and fairness. He believes that he knows what is best for us because he also believes that we the people are inept, confused and inferior in intelligence, unenlightened, lazy and worst of all, free to think for ourselves.
It certainly appears from Obama’s messages to the American people that his vision, historically filtered by the teachings of the radical Bill Ayers and “God damn America” Jeremiah Wright, has given him the understanding that he has seen the light while we the people walk in pre-enlightenment medieval darkness. It is with unbridled hubris that he stands above society, a mullah standing in an ivory tower minaret, lecturing us and calling us to pray to the god of one-world socialism and to the jihad of class warfare.
Those with this unconstrained vision see institutions as being at fault for man’s condition and not man himself. They believe that man is a victim of inept policies and inadequately funded schools, food programs, housing programs, bailouts, etc. And the free market, where Capitalism operates, is the impersonal culprit who steals fairness away from the victimized society. The unconstrained vision seeks to reign in the free market in order to control the outcomes of supply and demand using price controls, wage controls, unions, rent controls, quotas, the Dodd-Frank Act, ad infinitum.
Controlling the market place and controlling outcomes are what those with the unconstrained vision use to promote social justice and fairness. They want the results of economic, political and social activity to be fair in terms of their rationalistic values. Yet, they will often, in fact, bypass statistical fact to promote fairness and equality. In so doing they will often create a domino effect of economic havoc and inequality. This type of Stage One thinking is common for those with the unconstrained vision. They want “fairness” implemented now at any cost regardless of the many negative repercussions that will be sure to ensue (e.g., Obamacare).
For the Left life is a zero sum game. If someone gains then someone else must be losing out – there is only so much pie to go around. The Left must “right” this perceived wrong.
The legal system is another thing to be controlled by those with the unconstrained vision. Instead of black and white laws known to everyone they seek to implement ad hoc reasoning per every legal situation. Take for example a man who steals and is arrested. He knows that he will be punished for his crime. The law clearly states the crime and lists the options for punishment that the judge may impose. The criminal knows that everyone will be treated the same way in the same situation within the letter of the law. Even though the criminal does not like the situation he still knows that the law applies to everyone and therefore deemed fair by everyone. In fact, he stole knowing the law and the consequences of his actions.
An activist judge with an unconstrained view, on the other hand, will have the same law before him but he will use his own ad hoc articulated reasoning to determine whether the man should be punished. This judge may decide that the criminal acted badly because of his poor living conditions or because he was having a bad hair day or…and then decide to let him go. The judge would consider this a just outcome. The victim would not, of course, consider this fair.
While the unconstrained vision is all about controlling the political, economic or social landscape for specific outcomes the constrained vision is hands off or laissez-faire in its dealings, seeing man as having sufficient accumulated knowledge and being capable of making prudent trade-offs that would benefit himself and society in the process. Nothing is done in isolation. Benefits abound because for the Right life is not a zero sum game. Everyone can win. Everyone can have their own pie.
The constrained vision sees man as he really is: self-motivated. This realistic vision sees man as selfish and greedy but also willing to respect tradition and rules and certainly able to make prudent trade-offs based on knowledge gained from centuries of accumulated knowledge and wisdom, knowledge and wisdom not confined to an omnipotent Decider. One with a constrained vision doesn’t have all the answers. He or she must operate with humilty, tolerance and cooperation in order to support the freedom and liberty within which they seek to live.
While there is much more to be said here I promised to keep this short. I highly recommend Thomas Sowell’s book, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, as a means to understand the vast differences of the two visions behind the political, economic and social struggles affecting our world today.
Quote source: Vanity Fair article, Still Cuckoo After All These Years, by James Wolcott, December 2011 issue.
*****
“The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A thing which is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing.” Thomas Aquinas
*****
**An aside into constrained thinking:
October 11, 2011 Leave a comment
Below are excerpts from an article written by FRANK MIELE posted on the Daily Inter Lake website on Sunday, July 12, 2009. The article is titled “Lincoln’s warning: Beware changes brought about by ‘towering genius’”. Miele contrasts the protector and conservator of the union, Abraham Lincoln, using Lincoln’s own words and the ambitious, legacy driven, Barack Obama hoping to be seen as Lincolnesque:
Lincoln warned against those who would strive to reshape the institutions of America for their own purposes of legacy building, and it is worth considering today whether President Obama and his “transformational” presidency would fall under Lincoln’s watchful eye as a potential danger….
“Men of ambition and talents’ will continue to spring up among us, he warns – men comparable to “an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon” – and, when they do, “they will… naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have so done before them… Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.”…
“Towering genius disdains a beaten path.” Lincoln warns us. “It seeks regions hitherto unexplored… It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.”…
“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”..
Lincoln referred to the arrival of an ambitious leader as one such “probable case” and classifies it as “highly dangerous’ to the future of the union.
“Distinction will be ‘such a leader’s’ paramount object; and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.”
“Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense. Let those [materials’ be molded into general intelligence, ‘sound] morality and, in particular, a reverence for the Constitution and laws,” said Lincoln.
Cindy Wity 
Change Is a Required Course
April 28, 2012 Leave a comment
Here the roots of Obama’s rage are exposed by self-revelation, exacting fully documented scholarship and historical fact.
Note:
We as Americans must not want the American Moment to pass. Our nation has historically done the most good for the most people and more than any other nation at any other time in history. We are not a perfect nation but on balance we have exceeded every other nation in the world’s history with our kindness.
What makes America exceptional? It is our generosity. It is our impulsive bigheartedness born out of a Judeo-Christian tradition. (It is not the ad hoc reasoning of a Ruth Bader Ginsburg that makes America Special. ) It is our system of government, ours laws, our liberty and our justice all enacted to create a nation of free people under God.
Be warned though. As America abandons God and embraces secular humanism we will lose our country and ourselves. America’s rock solid foundations are now being replaced with the sands of hope and change.
As this continues American exceptionalism with its outward focus will sink into American hedonism with a collapsing inward narcissistic focus, a focus of wish-fulfillment under the pandering likes of Obama, the Progressives and the Democrats.
You have been warned.
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Filed under 2012 election, Political Commentary, Politics Tagged with 2012 presidential election, Africa, American Exceptionalism, anti-colonialism, Dnesh D'Souza, Indonesia, Obama, politics