Date Night To Go See 2016? Go For It!

Friday night my wife and I went to see the documentary, 2016: Obama's America. I did not learn much new about our president, but that is because I have not been asleep the last five years and I have educated myself about who Barack Hussein Obama is and what he would be expected to do as president. Having said that, I have to say that the Dinesh D'Souza film is brilliantly put together and lays out the Obama story better for the casual investigator than anyone else has been able to in books, news articles or political blogs. Incidentally, D'Souza is a brilliant Indian-American author who has publicly, and brilliantly, debated the late Christopher Hitchens numerous times over the existence of God.

Okay, so Randy liked the film. Big stinking deal. Why should you see it? Well, If you are an Obama fan, who is politically aligned with the extreme left and you believe that he has done no wrong, you can probably watch the film and say, "Yeah, well so what? That makes sense to me. I'm proud to be an Obama supporter!". If you are an Obama fan and you think he has done no wrong and that any Obama criticism is racist in nature, then you might be interested to see that it is not just conservative white people who have problems with what he has been doing. If you are an Obama fan, but you are secretly confused by some of his actions or lack of actions in various situations, you might have your eyes opened. If not then you may also be extremely stubborn or have a very severe case of political conjunctivitis. If you have no deep philosophical convictions but was swayed by the shallow "Hope and Change" huckster's pitch, you might watch the film and then slap yourself in the forehead and declare,"Wow, I could have had a V-8!" If you voted for Obama, feel disappointed, but think it might be worth try giving him another another four years, you definitely better see this film. Otherwise, you will be kicking yourself within one year. If you are not political at all and did not vote last time, you better see the film and vote this time, especially if you sort of like this country. If you just think both political parties are the same and nothing will ever change, you better see this film.  If you are sitting sitting on the fence and do not know what you believe, now is the time to educate yourself with 8 to 10 dollars and go to the polls this time.  If you care about this country at all, please see 2016: Obama's America.

Abortion: Who Are The Radicals?

I think that reasonable people can agree that Republican senatorial nominee from Missouri, Todd Akin, was profoundly mistaken in his apparent belief that a woman has natural defensive measures that, if she is raped, shut down the reproductive system to avoid pregnancy. Clearly, that idea is wrong and a myth or, as some might say, an old wives tale.  A lawyer friend of mine tells me it was an argument used in the 19^th century to argue that a rape did not occur, if the victim was impregnated.  It has been suggested that Akin may have gotten his faulty information from Dr. John Wilkie, a pro-life physician who apparently wrote a paper on the subject around ten years ago. I can safely say that Wilkie is probably a crank.  As I understand it, the idea was also promoted in the 70s in a supposed study by another doctor. I’ve tried to find it, but I can’t find information on any serious study that suggested such a thing. If anyone else can locate it for me, it would be great. I’m just curious.

Now, having agreed that such a belief is pretty crazy, I want to say that his basic argument, apart from trauma prevents pregnancy, is that the baby is not responsible for the unwanted pregnancy. This has been lost in the uproar over the science of procreation.  Frankly, abortion results in the death of a baby. I would have to say that there is a good argument that exemptions in the case of rape or incest are still troubling for me.  However, somehow the Todd Akin business is a way for liberals to suggest that we conservatives are Neanderthals, who want to control women’s reproductive rights, that we conservatives are extremely radical. This is like Nancy Pelosi calling anybody else an ignorant witch.

I suspect that most people, when they consider the realities of the procedure, would say that partial-birth abortion was extremely radical. In this procedure the abortionist jabs a sharp object in the brain of the living baby human’s brain before the head can follow the body out of the birth canal. Why do they do this? Because if the baby were to be completely born, killing the baby would be considered murder. This is a very small point, especially for the dead baby. You want more extreme radical?  President Obama has always supported and voted for any kind of abortion on demand.  He even voted 3 times as an Illinois state senator to protect the practice of allowing a baby born alive from a botched abortion to go without medical attention. If a wounded baby were to come to the emergency room, law would require that medical attention not be withheld. Every baby born on purpose could expect the same medical attention to save its life. However, if a baby somehow survives an abortion attempt, according to President Obama and his fellows worshiping at the altar of abortion, that little human must be left alone, even though it might survive with medical care. Who convinced them that babies who can survive outside the womb—science and medicine has made that a possibility earlier and earlier in the pregnancy—are not human beings?  The idea that abortion does not kill a baby human being is a much bigger and deplorable misunderstanding of human physiology than Akin’s.  Akin’s wrong opinion has not ended a single human life. As I once told my professor and other liberal students in a college American history class—they loved to bring up liberal political points when discussing every historical subject—I predict that humanity will eventually be brought, by the religious community, to the moral realization that abortion is abhorrent, even as happened with slavery. Again, who are the radicals and who are the most misguided? 

Choosing A President: The Crap Shoot or The Educated Guess.

I was born in 1952, so I have good bit of history to work from when it comes to in choosing a worthy a president.  Harry S. Truman was in office when I was born, but he obviously made little impression on me at the time.  However, my study of history suggests that he was a pretty decent president and a worthy office-holder, though he was a horrible businessman in his youth and only came to political office through the patronage of the corrupt Missouri Democratic political machine in power at the time in Kansas City. He later showed personal integrity by turning on the hometown rascals who went to jail.  He only came to the presidency because he was considered harmless by the Democrat party and they had no idea that the eternal president, FDR, would soon be sleeping in the dirt. Truman, to his credit had a sign on his desk that said, “The Buck Stops Here”.  Unlike some presidents before and after, this was not in reference to the dollar bill, but to the political art of passing the “buck” or skirting responsibility.  He was wont to take the responsibility for his decisions and their good or bad results, as with his decision to drop the atomic bombs to end the war with Japan.  Speculation is still being weighed on that decision, but Harry did not shy away from it.  Granted, that may not be as gutsy a decision, as some would have you believe, as when our current president had to make the gut-wrenching decision of whether or not to give the go-ahead to snuff Bin laden.  Yeah, I know, I know it would have been gutsier not to give the order and have the word get out that he could have. Any self-respecting moron would have that decision easily, and probably just as soon as he knew Bin Laden was there and not several weeks after the fact. As the Bard said, “These are the days that try men’s souls”. It makes laugh.  Truman would have ordered it the very moment he knew where the little rabbit was.

Ike Eisenhower was the president I remember first.  He was a pretty good one for all intents and purposes.  He had a healthy reputation as an intelligent warrior and had the respect of most of the free world.  He was as economically conservative as he knew how to be. Eisenhower appointed chief justice Earl Warren to the Supreme Court and the Warren Court overturned Plessy v. Ferguson in the Brown v. The Board of Education decision.  Eisenhower ordered federal troops—the first time federal troops were called in to protect American blacks since the reconstruction period—into Little Rock to support desegregation in schools, much to the dismay of the majority of southern Democrats.  That was back when Democrats were perceived, and rightly so, as the party who wanted to keep minorities from voting and sitting in the back of the proverbial buss.  Eisenhower pushed of the Civil Rights acts of 1957 and 1960, which could not have happened with a Democrat majority in Congress, without the Republican members being whole-heartedly behind it. All in all, Ike was a pretty good president for his time and helped make the United States a more equitable place to live.

I remember looking at a newspaper in 1960, which showed pictures of all of the men, both Republican and Democrat, who were vying for the presidency. I saw a picture of a nice-looking young guy named John F. Kennedy and thing to myself, “he is my choice.” Why did I think that? you might ask.  Well, the answer is simple: I was a dumb 10-year-old kid and he was a nice-looking young guy.  That’s all that is need for many of our voters in this country, especially in today’s world:  A ten-year-old mentality and a nice-looking young person who they can vote for. It also helps if they think they are cool.  Kennedy would never have gotten my vote today. He was a terrible womanizer, even compared with Bill Clinton who purportedly idolized Kennedy.  He was, of course, assassinated in his third year, so we don’t have too much that was known about him by the general public, so he holds a mythical position in many Americans’ minds. He was good on taxes, having pushed to cut taxes which resulted in increased revenue—it always does—and he stood up to the Soviets when they tried to place nuclear missiles in Cuba, in retaliation for the placement of our missiles in Turkey. However, his handling of the Bay of Pigs affair in Cuba before that was a total embarrassment.  It was Kennedy though who began America’s space exploration in earnest, pledging to land a man on the moon within a decade. That was also pretty bold, since we had not even out a man in orbit yet.

 Lyndon Johnson was a mixed bag of probable good intensions and out-and-out mistakes. While Senate Majority Leader during the Eisenhower administration, he had helped push through the two Civil Rights bills against the will of the majority of the Democrat party and with likely good motives tried to expand on helping Black Americans with Great Society and War on Poverty agendas. I would argue that the public broadcasting segment of the Great Society program was not a very good idea. Billions of dollars have been spent propping up an institution which has become nothing more than a government-paid source of liberal propaganda.  Then again, maybe it was a good idea, from liberal democrat perspective.  The War on Poverty gave us a government welfare program run amuck.  The war on poverty, in my opinion, has almost single-handedly destroyed the black family. It has also contributed significantly to many of the poor’s belief that government owes them a living and has created a reliable voting block for the Democrats. Again, though a bad idea for the country, this was probably a good idea for liberal Democrats. Then there was Johnson’s decision to escalate American presence in the Viet Nam war and micro-manage the effort, not allowing American forces to just win the blasted thing.

Richard Milhous Nixon once stood in front of television and proclaimed to America, “I am not a crook!”  It turns out that he pretty much was a crook. You can argue that he was no different than many other politicians, that he just got caught. You can also argue that he personally didn’t do anything wrong, that he didn’t personally know about break-ins and all that, that he was trying to protect his friends and supporters. That all might be true, but the truth remains that he lied to the American people.  Some might also argue that even though he was a “crook” he was a pretty good president—I wouldn’t  necessarily—that he was a genius on foreign policy, that he was good because he supported  OSHA and Affirmative Action—I wouldn’t, necessarily .  For me, he was not the Devil, as he was for many on the left, but a weak man who tried to be pragmatic and probably never should have been president. When Ford and Carter were vying for my vote in 1976, I voted 3rd party.   I didn’t like the idea that Ford had pardoned Nixon—the law is the law in my mind—and figured the fix was in when Ford was chosen to fill Agnew’s place when he resign—a certain crook—and I didn’t want another less-than-honest president any longer than necessary. And, Carter was a clear idiot. Everything Carter did was a mistake when he became president: Department of Education, price controls, giving the Panama Canal away, not going to and getting the hostages in Iran and kicking handing their butts to them. I know I’m leaving stuff out, but this blog is going to be pretty long as it is. I had been for Reagan during the 76’ election and I was very disappointed that he didn’t get the nomination. As it turned out, I later changed my mind about Ford. He was just a less-than-bright politician in my mind, but I think he may have been right about pardoning Nixon. But, I never, ever, had a reason to change my mind about Carter. The only dimmer bulb that close to the Presidency in the past century, who always seems to have the wrong opinion about anything might be Biden.  Let me say here that I will never cast a protest vote for a third party again.

I guess I have already given you my thoughts on Ford and Carter, so I needn’t go there.  Reagan was a breath of fresh air for me and you can go to an earlier blog of mine on this site to get my flesh-out on the Great Communicator.  George H. W. Bush was a very good man and a pretty decent president. He was great in creating a coalition and going after Iraq and pushing them out of Kuwait, but he should have gone into Bagdad and turned it over to non-thugs.  He also had a hard time sticking to his guns and worried too much about trying to get along with the left side of politics. Trusting them to keep their word on cutting spending, if he would agree to raising taxes, along with that crazy man from Texas, Ross Perot, siphoning off conservative votes, cost him his re-election.  I think I already said that protest votes for a 3rd party are not a good idea. Ross helped Clinton again four years later. What a dolt.

William Jefferson Clinton stood before the television cameras and declared to America, “I never had sex with that woman…I never lied…I never lied…I never asked anyone to lie…not a single time!”  It turns out that he was right about the “single time” part.  He actually did all of those things multiple times.  Then, he perjured himself in a legal proceeding and apparent suborned perjury.  He was impeached by the House and found not guilty by the Senate. If I could have, I would have voted against every Senator, Republican or Democrat who voted not guilty. The idea that perjury is okay, if it is about sex, is pathetic and appalling to me.  Some will argue—liberal Democrats—that he was a good steward of the economy.  That may be the case, but he tried to sneak an Obama-like health care system through, that would have hurt us as much as then as one we one that was forced on us a couple years ago when Obama had undefeatable control of both houses of congress. Lucky for us that we Republicans were able to gain control of the House of Representatives and forced Clinton to sign welfare changes that cut those particular expenditures in half. If unchecked, we don’t know what kind of steward of the economy he might have been.  We also had a peace dividend and Clinton took the opportunity to cut military spending, creating the impression—there was a huge bubble in cyber investments at the time—that we were more in the black than we were.  Yes, you could argue that he was a very good steward of the economy, but then you would also have to argue that the Republicans and Newt Gingrich were too.  But the president will generally get the credit, for the good and the bad. By the way, I have not changed my mind about the Senate finding Clinton not guilty, not even a little bit.  If a man will cheat on his wife and break a covenant before God, he will most certainly be able to be tempted to cheat on his country and break his oath of office.  Case in point, perjury: To save yourself from public embarrassment. 

When George W. Bush came along, it was obvious to me that there was some regret by many on the right for turning his father out of office and getting the Perjurer-in-Chief.  After the 2000 election was finally put to bed and the antics of Gore and the demented left, I felt happy that we dodged the Gore bullet. After the attack on 9-11, I was ecstatic that we had dodged the Gore bullet.  I was exuberant, when we dodged the John (I am reporting for service) Kerry bullet.  George W. Bush, like Ronald Reagan before him, had to rebuild a military which had been decimated by liberal Democrats before them. He also cut taxes, as Kennedy and Reagan did before him with the same results: increased revenues. But having to rebuild a military at the same time as fighting a war against Muslim terrorists cost us a lot of money. Couple that with the housing bubble created by cheap and unprotected loans to thousands upon thousands of home-buyers buying more home than they could afford, thanks to the work of Frank and Dodd and their cronies in the loaning institutions, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and economic trouble came a-knocking. Of course the Left declared it was Bush’s and Wall Street’s fault.  I buy some of that. The Bush administration tried to draw in the reins on Freddie and company, but Frank and Dodd, “there is no problem there, besides its racist to not give a loan to someone because they can’t afford it”.  Bush should have stood his ground and not worried about being called racist. They would have done that no matter what he did.

Then, we elected a man named Barack Hussein "" The Buck Stops With everyone Else, Especially George W. Bush" Obama.  It was a perfect storm for the advent of maybe the most polarizing president in the last one hundred years. The huge housing bubble finally burst a couple of months before the 2008 election, the stock market was in shambles and there was huge scare that the banking institutions would tumble. And, the other western economies were on the verge of collapse. The country was at a time and place in history when a black man or a woman of any ethnicity might be elected.  Enter the ten-year-old voting mentality and a nice looking young black man (technically half black), Barack Hussein Obama.  The liberal media was not interested in Obama’s past or what his philosophical beliefs were. He was a black “liberal’ who was not Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Sheila Jackson Lee or any of the other liberal blacks who had un-coverable faults which would turn off mainstream voters.  Of course if they looked too closely, they would find out some interesting facts which might put people off, such as: His father and mother were avowed communists; his grandparents were avowed socialists; his mentor in Hawaii, Frank Davis, was an avowed communist; he attended a black liberation theology church (very socialistic , if not communistic in its theology) presided over by Jeremiah Wright, who has repeatedly disparaged America in his sermons for the twenty years that Obama attended the church; he was close friends with communists and domestic terrorists, Bill  Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn—he says they were just people in his neighborhood but he opened his campaign in their home; Tony Resko, the slumlord real estate buddy who got Obama his property for his home in Chicago at a sweetheart price and is currently cooling his heels in the pen for fraud and bribery along with his other buddy, Rod Blagoiavich, who thought it was a workable deal to ask Obama to pay him for appointing a US Senator of Obama’s choice; and many more that could also be added.  The point is that the media did not want to look too closely at Obama for fear that what they found and then report on it might hurt Obama’s chances of being the first “Black President”. Obama was touted as very intelligent, if not the most intelligent man to live in the White House.  There is actually not that much that substantiates that belief.  All of his college records, including applications, have been sealed, with a lot of money invested that they stay that way. Obama has admitted that he was a doper and slacker in high school and Occidental College, so one might ask how was he able to get into Brown, an Ivy League school, when even really good students in the tops of their classes find it extremely hard to get in. Even his major papers have been sealed. We know that he was President of Harvard Law Review and that might suggest that he had some smarts, but we are unable to see his writings. Why would he not be proud to let the world know what he was capable of?  A skeptical and questioning mind like mine might think there is something there that he would rather we not know.  And, given some silly things he has said on the campaign trail about the number of states there are in the country and his perplexity over the pronunciation of the word “corpsman”, I’m rather doubtful of his intellect. Then you have to consider his ideas about building the economy by spending money and borrowing 40cents of every dollar doing it. What can I say? He is still a mystery man. We now have a federal deficit of nearly $17 trillion and climbing, and he is doubling down on Keynesian economic philosophy, which has always turned out badly when inflicted on an unsuspecting populace.  I have blogged plenty on Obama’s deficiencies, in various posts the last three years, so you can look for those on this site to gather more of my opinions on the man, and I’ll leave it at that.

That brings me to Mitt Romney. The Left would tell you that he is an unscrupulous businessman who hasn’t bothered to paid taxes for ten years prior to running for president this time around, tough he ran four years ago for president and ran for governor of Massachusetts before that and Senator of Massachusetts before that. He would have to be pretty stupid to do that with all the red flags that would show be hoisted up for the IRS to ignore. They would also have you believe that because he headed up his company, Bain Capital until 1999, when he left to pursue other non-business activities, that he was somehow responsible for a woman’s death of cancer seven years after the fact.  It was alleged by Obama’s administration employees that he caused the steel company, for whom her husband worked for, to go bankrupt, leaving him and his wife without  “HEALTH INSURANCE”!  As I have pointed out anyone who will listen, the CEO of Bain at the time of the closure was an Obama bundler and the guy was offered a buyout which he refused and that his wife had her own health insurance through her job for two years after he lost his job.  Meanwhile, our current president is bankrupting us.  We know what the Left thinks they can convince the uninformed of Mitt Romney, so let us look at Mitt Romney’s unsealed records. Part of the following was forwarded to me in an email and I think the substance is worth looking at:

Willard Mitt Romney

He was born March 12, 1947 and is 65 years old. I think he would provide a birth certificate, the first time asked.

His Father: George W. Romney was born American citizens in Mexico in a Mormon community. He was only a high school graduate, but worked his way to be the head of American Motors and is credited with turn that company around in troubled times and saving it from bankruptcy. His popularity as a good and honest businessman led to his being elected Governor of the State of Michigan.

Mitt was raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan

He is Married to Ann Romney since 1969; they five children.

Education:
B.A. from Brigham Young University,

J.D. and M.B.A. from Harvard University

Religion:
Mormon - The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints

Working Background:

After high school, he spent 30 months in France as a Mormon missionary at his own expense—Mormon missionaries and lay clergy receive no compensation for their labors.

After going to both Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School simultaneously, he passed the Michigan bar exam, but never worked as an attorney.

In 1984, he co-founded Bain Capital, a private equity investment firm, one of the largest such firms in the United States.

In 1994, he ran for Senator of Massachusetts and lost to Ted Kennedy.

He was President and CEO of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. He was asked to take over the enterprise when it had fallen into deep financial mire and serious allegations of bribery to the international Olympic Committee.

In 2002, he was elected Governor of the State of Massachusetts where he eliminated a 1.5 billion deficit.

Some Interesting Facts about Romney;

Bain Capital, starting with one small office supply store in Massachusetts, turned it into Staples; now over 2,000 stores employing 90,000 people.

Bain Capital also worked to perform the same kinds of business miracles again and again, with companies like Domino's, Sealy, Brookstone, Weather Channel, Burger King, Warner Music Group, Dollarama, Home Depot Supply, and many others.

He was an unpaid volunteer campaign worker for his dad's gubernatorial campaign one year.

He was an unpaid intern in his dad's governor's office for eight years.

He was an unpaid bishop and stake president of his church for ten years.  These callings are more than the equivalent of part-time jobs.

He was an unpaid President of the Salt Lake Olympic Committee for three years.

He took no salary and was the unpaid Governor of Massachusetts for four years.

He gave his entire inheritance from his father to charity!  This would seem an unlikely action for the money-grubbing scoundrel the Left would like for us to believe him.

Mitt Romney is one of the wealthiest self-made men in our country but has given more back to its citizens in terms of money, service and time than most men.

And in 2011 Mitt Romney gave over $4 million to charity, almost 19% of his income.... Just for comparison purposes, Obama gave 1% and Joe Biden gave $300 or .0013%. Obama and Biden are wealthy men in their right. You would think that they would shy away from comparing tax returns with Romney, but it’s clear that they are counting more on the ignorant not being able to differentiate between tax percentages for the income tax they pay for their income from their “Jobs” and the percentage of income Mitt pays from his investment—he no longer works at a job and thus only pays taxes on investment income. That is called CAPITAL GAINS TAX! It is assumed that money invested has already been taxed once and should be only taxed again, if there is a return on that investment, at a lesser rate than regular income (from a job) to encourage investment, which helps grow the economy and creates more jobs—this tidbit of understanding is lost on a lot of Democrat voters.

Mitt Romney is Trustworthy—nobody who has worked closely with him has found fault with him, except perhaps an imaginary friend of Harry Reid, which is more than can be said for Harry Reid.

He will show us his birth certificate, the first time asked.

He will show us his high school and college transcripts.

He will show us his law degree.

He will show us his draft notice.

He will show us his medical records.

He will show us enough of his income tax records as is reasonable. Two years has been sufficient for most others running for president.

He will show us he has nothing to hide.

Mitt Romney's background, experience and trustworthiness show him to be a great leader and an excellent citizen for President of the United States.

We now find ourselves at place where we can make an important decision about our country’s future. It is time to make educated choices. We tried the uneducated choice four years ago and it has left us teetering on a precipice of disaster. We need to catch our balance, step back and change course.  If there are enough of us who can leave our ten-year-old selves behind and use common sense, we might be able to do that. If there should be any suspicion cast on anyone, it should not be on Mitt Romney. We could not do much better at this point in time, and we could continue to do much worse, as history has shown us. And we can pray that it is not too late.

Who Are The Evil Rich, And Why Do They Hate The Poor?

Liberals and traditional Democrats—traditional Democrats are not necessarily liberals-- are fond of saying that Republicans are for the rich and Democrats are for the poor.  This argument is difficult to sustain however when you analyze specific data. Who are the richest among us and what is their party affiliation? Of top twenty richest Americans are all Democrats: Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Larry Ellison. Of the top 100, as reported by Forbes, 60% are Democrats, but if you take into consideration  that individual people from the same families, like Walton and Koch, are included twice in the numbers.

Analyzing the data takes us even further. Not only are there more Democrats in the Top 20 list, but those Democrats are a lot more stingy with their money when it comes to campaign contributions. Republicans coughed up $5.2 million while Democrats squirted out only $2.1 Million. These statistics would indicate that the more you have, the less you give. We can assume that these folks of the infamous “1%” contribute to the Democrat party.  The funny thing is that these rich Democrats have only contributed $6 to their party for every $10 contributed by their Republican counterparts.
  

And who is more likely to donate to charity, conservatives or liberals? Author, Arthur Clark has studied the subject and reports that conservatives and religious conservatives in particular, will donate three and half times more than liberals.  So, who are the stingiest among us? It appears that it may not have as much to do with how much you have or make as it does with your political philosophy.  Those who want government to take from one group to give to another tend to not dig as deep in their own pockets to help. This is lamentable, since the net worth of the Democrats of the top 20 richest Americans is reported to be a combined $144 billion compared to the $143 billion of the Republicans in that list.  I’m not saying the liberals are the evil rich, but they are more stingy with their own money.  So, the data would suggest. Do they hate the poor? No, they just do not seem to care as much about them as the conservatives do, if you judge by data.  

BLUE MUNDY (Part 2)

I just realized that this blog was never posted. Keep in mind that this CD has been available for well over 2 years and my Kansas City Kid CD with the Mundy Mourning Blues has been out for a couple months. So, let it be known that this blog is belated but still gives you all an idea of what I was up to when I finished it.  



                                                                                                 Well the second part of my "Blue Mundy" CD project is done. I mastered it last nigh and am getting the burning and packaging done this week. Hopefully it will be available for those who come see the Randy Mundy & The Mundy Mourning Blues Band's shows this weekend at the Lehi City Arts Theater in Lehi Utah. I'm glad to have it finished. Now I can concentrate on some other things before Christmas, like trying to book the band after Christmas and New Years in some other venues here along the Wasatch Front. Our performance a month ago at the Utah Festival of Arts in Salt Lake was fun. We had the whole group of eleven there, thought the background singers had not been able to rehearse with us for about six weeks and did not remember everything. We sounded pretty good anyway. This weekend's shows should also be fun, though we will be missing one of the background singers for all of the 3 nights and one will miss Friday night.

In Order To Form A More Perfect Union...

The phrase, “In order to form a more perfect union”, in our constitution has taken on new meaning in our president’s pursuits. Most of what he does is to curry favor with unions, like repaying the auto workers unions by protecting their pensions with the auto company bailouts and giving them profit from GM and Chrysler, while putting investors last and telling the non-union employees from the subsidiaries to go pound sand, that there was no help for them. Did it occur to anyone on the left that the worker pensions were killing the companies? No, I guess there were more potential votes among the auto workers past and present than there were among investors. Then there is the practice of closing GM and Chrysler dealerships, who’s owners had not been friendly to the Democrats with donations, or dumping billions of newly printed dollars into green companies, like Solindra, who had made sizable donations to the green-loving Obama administration knowing that they would be their “bank”. Is everyone aware that Obama’s politically correct choices for investing stimulus money (Obama Bucks) have all resulted in bankruptcy, lost jobs, outsourcing of jobs, and huge bonuses for the company bigwigs? Is Romney’s business background and remarkable record of success at Bain Capital looking more appealing to anyone. This is called “Crony Capitalism”. Few people realize that the Wall Street investors donated more to the Obama campaign than to McCain for the 2008 election. They apparently got their money’s worth. One of the biggest contributors was General Electric, who, last I heard because of loopholes created by green energy policy, did not pay any corporate taxes. I wonder if Harry Reid could look into that. Green businesses just keep on costing us money and don’t produce anything. Oh yes, and is everyone aware that GM has yet to pay back all of the bailout money. That means that all of the American taxpayers are helping to buy the Chevy Volts that so few people are stampeding to buy. I think I should get to drive one once in awhile, since I am part owner.

The Democrat party has long depended on union support to stay in power, and the unions have long depended on the Democrat party to legislate in their favor. Take for example the card check laws that unions and the Democrat party want to implement. This would do away with secret ballots for employees who choose not vote for a union in their place of work. Why would someone not want to belong to a union? Perhaps they would feel as I do that they would not want their union dues handed over to a political party or candidate whom I disagree with. Or, they may not like the idea that the pyramid scheme protects the union bosses and the earliest  to join in over the rest of the rank and file members. Or they may not like the cosey relationship between labor bosses and Democrat party bosses--SEIU bosses brag that they have been to w the White House more often than any other entities. Does this seem democratic to anyone who is not a blithering socialist? This practice of scratching each other’s backs between unions and the Democrat party would also be considered crony capitalism to a logical mind. Why, you might ask, would it be a good idea for government employees to unionize and bargain with government for wages and pension plans? Well, it’s a good idea from the unions’ and the Democrat party’s perspective. If you can pay off the public worker unions for their continued support, you can amass more and more power and stay in affectively stay in power. The process of growing government larger and larger to create more dependency and a bigger voting block to draw on is identical to that of growing the welfare state and creating dependency. “The Republicans are going to cut your welfare!” Has anybody else noticed that the states which are struggling the most tend not to be right-to-work states? The also tend to be states with Republican Governors and republican control of their legislative bodies.

Of course, the unions and Democrats would want everyone to be in a union. In essence, this is what the minimum wage is all about. The reality of the minimum wage is that it only creates inflation and pushes, in theory, people towards unions. When the minimum wage goes up, the unions cry that their wages needs to go up to keep them relative to where they were before the minimum wage went up. Higher wages necessarily increases the cost of everything, which makes all goods and services go up. If profit margins suffer because entry level wages are higher, the business man must naturally cut back on employees or raise the price of his goods or services. The same is true about higher taxes. If taxes cut into profit margins, the business has to raise prices. Higher prices for goods and services naturally make the workers clamor for higher wages. The unemployment level for youth (18%), especially black youth (46%), is horrible. Thank you, minimum wage and the Democrat party. Then there is the protection that unions often provide for those workers are inadequate in the jobs they have. Almost everyone is aware of how difficult it is for some companies and institutions to fire the shiftless and undeserving workers. It used to be that meritocracy was the rule for those who wanted to climb the ladder to success. It would seem that the Democrat party is afraid of that idea. It might actually lose them a voting block, if more people had to work hard to protect their income stream.

Liberals seem to believe that the tax payer can be manipulated to fund everything eternally. As cities, counties and states begin to bankrupt themselves, because they thought the taxpayer gravy train would never dry up, they look to the federal government for bailouts. It seldom occurs to the union leaders that unrealistic union pensions are the major culprits for government failure. Just as in the private sector, public service unions want the moon if they van get it. But, private sector unions are not able to lean on companies and vote for their own pay increases, while the public service unions can. Companies often try to weigh their choices based on the dollars and cents returns on their investments in labor when they bargain with organized labor. If they choose badly, they run the risk of putting themselves out of business and the workers run the risk of bargaining themselves out of jobs. Governments who bargain with a labor force tend to not worry so much about the costs, because they will likely be out of office and they can always raise taxes, at least they think that if they are liberals. In fact, they think they have a better chance of staying office if they can grow the size of their government and promise more and more stuff to the government employees to keep them voting for those controlling the money faucet. However, when the money pond runs dry, the local governments turn to the feds. Businesses, unless they are deemed too big to fail, cannot do this.

Theoretically, the federal government, unlike the local governments, can just print more money to help them pay off their debts. However, we are now in new territory. Our national debts and deficits have never been bigger and the plan to spend more money has never been bigger. The problem is clear to some of us: We spend more than we produce, so we must have self-destructive tendencies, or we are just plain stupid. Even the feds cannot print money enough without creating huge inflation—that worked really well for the Carter administration—and they cannot raise taxes on the 53% of the public who actually pay income tax without killing the economy even deader than it already is. Ten out of ten people with any brains agree that we have to cut expenses to survive. This is the reality that “working” people deal with every day. If you live beyond your means, you will eventually go bankrupt. Still, the Democrats want to continue with huge deficits and think that raising taxes on everyone making $250,000 a year will save us.

Here is a bit of news: Raising taxes on the few rich does not and never has equated to increased revenues. I know President Obama lives in a world where history means nothing, that he believes that free markets and low taxes have never worked, but he is counting on the ignorant masses largely living in that same history-free world, to keep his dreams of a socialist utopia alive. In the real world where history is studied, we know that lower taxes and fewer constraints on the free market actually increase revenue—every time it’s tried. You can look to Calvin Coolidge, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush for good examples of this. Yes, I know, George W. Bush also saw the big economy crisis of 2008, caused by the housing mortgage bubble, but you must remember that Pelosi, Reid, Frank and Dodd ran interference to protect their cronies at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae from stricter federal oversight, which led to the crisis—I still believe Frank and Dodd should have been brought up on charges along with their buddies at those institutions. Funny that the Democrats wanted someone to go to jail over that stuff, but as the culprits, have come to light and their party affiliations and political donations have been realized, the clamor for justice has been silenced.

But let us get back to unions. In our nation’s past, unions served a purpose—some times, it had nothing to do with racism and keeping undesirables from competing with established whites for labor in the market place . Unions were helpful in creating safer conditions in the work place and afforded protection for children in the work place, but for the last century they have caused more harm than good, enhancing corruption in politics and, in some cases, embracing organized crime. The need for private sector unions has run its course, in my opinion. There are plenty of laws on the books, both federal and state, to protect worker rights, and the market place will naturally determine what wages and pensions should be, just as the mark place will determine what prices need to be, as the scarcity of workers and resources naturally dictate. There has never been a need for public sector unions. In fact, as I have argued, their existence has been destructive to our economic balance. Even F.D.R. warned against public sector unions. Wisconsin—no surprise here, perhaps—was the first state (1959) to agree to collective bargaining for government employees. Since then the idea has spread and helped destroy economies in liberal states like Illinois and California. These states are essentially bankrupt and their progressive politics threaten to drown us all in debt. The only real answer is to let them go bankrupt. Let them fail. The truth is there is nothing to big to fail. As I said, if we all joined a union, the Democrats would be perfectly happy, but our union would not be the more perfect union described by Madison. It would be more like the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was not too big to fail.

The Audacity of Dopes

This is not a blog about president Barack Hussein Obama's heralded drug abuse in his youth, which made him the cool guy that the majority of the youth of America voted for in 2008.  Maybe I'll get to that subject in the future. The subject this time will be the audaciousness of Obama supporters in general.  Maybe, I can convince some of the Obama addicts--I'm not too hopeful here, to be honest-- to rethink the "Audacity of Hope" slogan, as I tried with the other baffling Obama battle cry, "Hope and Change!" But then I am an eternal optimist, I guess.

I noticed that Susan Fluke has gone out on the campaign trail with President Barack Husein Obama (umm,  umm, umm) in Colorado to help stoke up the "women’s vote". If you have been paying attention you know that Miss Fluke testified before Congress about the need for “free” contraception for American Women. She argues that Romney wants to take away women’s health care.  If you remember, the question at the time of Fluke appearing before Congress was whether government could force religious institutions to provide contraceptive and abortion services to their employees when their doctrines are in opposition to those services.  Since Miss Fluke, a law student,  apparently had a very healthy sex life—she said the cost for her contraceptives for a year was more than she, as student made during the summer—she was called as an expert witness.  Clearly, if any normal contraceptives buyer were to check into the costs they would be surprised that pills or condoms could cost so much.  Would it be unfair the suggest that the unmarried Miss Fluke engages in sexual intercourse as a source of entertainment, since it seems to be engaged in pretty often?  Maybe it's her hobby. Of course if she is prescribed birth control pills to help control migraines, which I understand can be the case, it might be a different argument, but she says it is about women’s reproductive health.  Therefore, I assume that unmarried women, single by choice, either by choice, divorce or the death of their spouse, are wanting to be able to have unhampered recreational sexual intercourse.  Should I also assume that Miss Flukes entertainment costs as regards to sex are hers alone?  Be that as it may, how does she and the millions of other women who apparently agree with her come to the conclusion that the rest of us should help pay for her leisure activities?  Why not pay for her other date activities? Why not pay for the dinner, the movie, the play etc? How about her big flat screen HDTV and her cable bill? I probably shouldn’t even kid about it because ten years ago we would have laughed about tax money being “given” to women to express themselves sexually without consequences.  Let’s face it: Fluke and her ilk are dopes and they are audacious. Oh, I almost forgot, should we assume that Miss Fluke has cut back on her ponderous sexual activity to be able to afford to go on the campaign trail with the president? A trip like that might take a lot of her summer income. Maybe the tax payers should reimburse her for that so she can afford her hobby.

Then there is the report today that we now have 110,000,000 Americans receiving government assistance (Welfare) of some source.  This number precludes social security checks or Medicare or Medicaid.  Social Security is owed to the recipients because they or those they depended on paid into the program their whole lives.  Incidentally, we are now paying out more than we are taking into the Social Security coffers—of course there are no such coffers, they have been open to government uses since the Johnson administration and his Democrat controlled Congress. If you are 50 or younger, you will likely never get anything back for your S.S. contributions.  That 110,000,000 Americans number represents 1/3 of the country’s population.  Also, we have nearly 46 million on food stamps, (15%).  I’m guessing a lot of these people have cable TV, a couple cars, buy cigarettes—possibly dope as well— alcohol and lottery tickets.  Don’t get me wrong, I understand that all of these things are legal, except dope in some states. The problem is that people are losing their shame and the governments, especially the democrats in government, are perpetuating such shamelessness. Have you heard of the woman who won millions in a lottery but continued to use food stamps? She said, in essence, that since the government continued to give her the stuff and she was unemployed that it was okay. I mean really? We want this to continue? Does the words “$16,000,000,000,000 in government debt” mean anything to the 47% of Americans who do not pay federal income taxes—again , social security taxes are supposed to be returned to us when we retire, so it should not be considered a tax—but seem to expect the other 53% (NOT JUST THE TOP 1%) to pay for their jollies? Pretty audacious, I would say. They obviously think we tax payers are dopes. If we let this continue, we will prove them correct.

"Tolerating Intolerance?"

One of my favorite quips was the statement by friend in church: Our humility is what we are most proud of. Recent events concerning Chick-fil-A and that company’s owner’s comment of support for traditional marriage, and the uproar that followed it, by the Democrats trying to make political hay, and the radical homosexual community doing what they typically do, brought a similar thought to my mind: Intolerance is something we cannot tolerate!


If the state of affairs we find ourselves in was not so sad, it would be comical. Those of us who prescribe to traditional family values are repeatedly called haters—this is usually done with offensive expletives to drive the point home—and if we say we believe that our president’s (Barack Hussein Obama, umm, umm, umm) policies are destructive of our capitalist system and tearing down the fabric of our economy, we are told that we are just racists who do not want a “black man” in the White House—often with further offensive expletives. The only conclusion they on the left can come to is that we on the right are intolerant.

Then there is the latest barrage from the left concerning Romney’s wealth. They would like the public to believe that a rich man would never be able to relate to the poor man, or even understand the plight of those of us in the middle class. Of course, a thinking person would perhaps ask, well, what about the Kennedys? They were pretty rich, weren’t they? Of course, to them that is a no-brainer: They were liberal Democrats! Democrats intuitively understand the poor and middle class Americans, no matter how much money they personally have. Do the names Gore, Pelosi, Kerry, Biden, and Reid, among omany others mean anything to you Democrats? They are all multi-millionaires. They have also spent the vast majority of their lives at the public feeding trough, berating Republicans for being wealthy and stingy, while pandering to their poor and ignorant constituents whom they have created. By the way, we can point to the bad economy and our morally bankrupt society and say without equivocation to the Democrat Party, “YOU DID BUILD THAT!”

Class warfare has always been a staple of the Democrat argument. My father was a child of the depression and basically grew up with F.D.R. He told me more than a few times that the Republicans were for the rich man and the Democrats were for the working man. I loved my pop. He was a patriot who fought for our freedom during World War II and he was the hardest working man I knew. But, bless his heart, he was just as ignorant about politics and economics as roughly half of the American population today. As I say, the Democrat play book has always had the dog-eared class warfare page to turn to, but they also have the race-bating page that they can turn to when need be, or even if not need be. As of late it looks like it need be. They are pulling out the stops this year. Nothing is off the table. Where a simple, but illogical, “he’s-too-rich-to-be-president” argument would have sufficed in the past, the demonization page has to be turned to. Now, “Mitt Romney is a tax cheat!” And, it would appear, from the latest political ad atrocity trotted out by Obama PACs that Mitt Romney is an “accessory to second degree murder”.

The truth of the matter is that there is no argument for re-electing Mr. Obama. His policies, as I predicted a couple of years ago, are heading us towards a double-dip recession, if not a depression. As I explained in an earlier blog, FDR’s policies of federal regulation actually lengthened the Great Depression. It was World War II’s aftermath that brought us out of it. We were virtually the only big country left, who could produce the stuff that the rest of the world needed. So, we thrived, and as the other countries affected by the world-wide depression and world war adopted more free market principles, they began to thrive as well. This point has been lost on Obama, because he has been taught Marxism and Socialism from his childhood. He promised something unintelligible, which, as you know, I interpret, as “opium and chains” and which relied on the uniformed masses to swallow and left-leaning media to cover his faults. A lot of voters, especially young voters, wanted to be on the side of making history by electing the first black man president. Of course, they made history by electing one of the worst presidents ever—I know, that opinion makes me a racist.

As I was saying, the “he’s-too-rich-to-be-president” argument will not be enough to get the president re-elected this time around. Romney must be painted as a tax-cheating felon and a second degree murderer. The ridiculousness of this should be apparent to even the most insipid intellect out there. If anyone were to go ten years without paying taxes, as that paragon of truth and virtue, Harry Reid, has claimed a friend told him Mitt Romney did, the IRS would have jumped down his throat with an audit. With Romney being a potential Republican presidential nominee for the past eight years, I would suspect that he would have been audited every year.

And to the point of Romney’s supposed complicity in second degree murder, we should only look at facts. The political ad in question was so full of crap that it is a wonder the producers of the ad did not die from the smell. Somehow Bain’s closing of a steel plant in 2002 resulted in a steel worker’s (Joe Soptic), wife dying of cancer. The truth is as follows: Bain and some other investing partners purchased the failing GST Steel plant in 1993; Romney left Bain in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympics and left the day-to-day operations of Bain capital in the hands of Steven Paliuchi, an Obama bundler and contributor; after buying the steel company, Bain was able to keep it afloat for almost ten years longer than it probably would have otherwise—Soptic would have most likely lost his job much earlier, without the intervention of Bain and their partners; Soptic’s wife had health insurance through her own employment for two years following the closing of GST Steel—this must have been forgotten by Mr. Soptic; and, Mrs. Soptic died in 2006—my college math suggests that it was about seven years after Romney gave up control of Bain Capital. Maybe, the Obamaists can retool their ad to attack Mr. Paliuchi, the Obama supporter. An actual argument can be made that President Obama is a potential accessory to murder or murder cover-up, since he has resorted to an executive order to stop the investigation as to who knew about the “Fast and Furious” gun sale debacle.

The truth is that Romney is a squeaky clean guy. He has not cheated on his wife or gone through a messy divorce that the Obama people can dredge up to attack him with. As Ann Coulter reminds us in one of her recent columns, Obama has resorted to this tactic each time he had stiff competition in a campaign—it is the Chicago way. He is also most assuredly not a tax cheat or a murderer. The hypocrisy on the left is stunning. Not one of the top Romney critics calling for him to release ten more years of tax returns has been willing to release their own. Then there are all of the sealed school transcripts, college applications and passport—I understand that a hefty sum was paid to keep them sealed—that President Obama refuses to release. You might ask why, but you would be a *&^%$#@! racist homophobe. And let me just say here that Harry Reid is a fraud, a punk and a phony! I HAVE A HARD TIME TOLERATING THAT GUY!