Who Are You Going To Believe? Me Or Your Lying Eyes And Ears?

President Barrack Hussein Obama to reporters: "Gruber? Gruber? I don't know anyone named Gruber. I thought you were asking me if  I knew 'Goober,' that brilliant economist from the Andy Griffith Show that we all loved to hear lecturing on Obamacare and how it was going to save everyone so much money."  That is not what Obama said of course, but what he did say is that he "hardly knew the guy who lived in his neighborhood". No, wait, that was Bill Ayers, the ex terrorist bomber from the 60s who is now a college professor in Chicago, who sat on several boards with Obama and, in who's home Obama kicked of his candidacy for the presidency.  Oh yeah, Gruber was the racist pastor, who married Barrack and Michelle and baptized their children, and was recorded yelling anti-American communist crap, which Obama never heard  when he attended church. No... that was the "Reverend" Jeremiah Wright who wasn't all that close to the Obamas either.  Was he the the Communist party hack/pornographer who was a mentor of Barrack's in Hawaii? No, that was Frank Marshal Davis, who Obama later tried to not remember.

Well, who is Mr Gruber? He's the latest persona non grata whom Obama and the the Democrat party wish had never been born.  He was somebody everyone on the Left knew, when they thought he was a "brilliant MIT economist who, while secretly in the pay of the White House, could be quoted ad-nauseum  about what a terrific deal Obamacare was going to be. Everyone left of center, including the liberal news media--basically everyone but Fox News--helped make the guy out as an unbiased brainiac councilor to the president.

All of that has come back to embarrass the left, when videos started surfacing this week where "Economist", Jonathan Gruber, bragged about how it was necessary to "lie" to the American voters--who are pretty stupid by the way--in order to get the the smelly and misnamed "Affordable Health Care Act" through congress and on to the president's desk.  Gruber said that, if they told the public the truth, that they would not be able to keep the insurance that like and the doctors whom they liked and that it would necessarily be more expensive for the majority of the middle class, they would never go for it. Ya think? Gruber apparently thought he and the Democrat politicians were pretty slick. Well, as slick as Pelosi, Reid and the other Fools On The Hill (TFOTH) can be considered slick (I know, they keep getting elected). But, I guess they were as slick as they needed to be at the time. Remember, "you have to pass it in order to see what is in it?"  If you could listen to that lunacy and still pull the lever for the Dems, I guess you might be considered a poster child for Lenin's (you fill the blank) and the president, TFOTH

The sad thing is that some of us aren't going to hear much about it if the left-leaning news media or the Fools On The Hill can have some say in the matter. I can't help but think of the joke where the punchline goes something like,"Who are going to believe, me or your lying eyes and ears?" Maybe Goober would have been better a adviser to the president. "Judy, Judy Judy".

I Woke Up This Morning. Did America Wake Up Last Night?

I haven't been inspired to blog about anything for quite a while. But this morning I feel like indulging myself a bit. Last night enough voters woke up politically and turned the Senate over to the Republicans.  There were several things that felt good to me. Number one is that Tim Scott won the Senate seat he had been occupying by appointment. The important thing is that Tim is of the black Conservative Republican persuasion.  Not only did he win, but he won big, by a bigger gap than fellow South Carolinian, Lindsey Graham did; Lindsey being of the white Moderate (liberal) Republican persuasion.Tim was the first black man elected senator in  South Carolina since reconstruction. What was it that Mary Landrieu said about whites in the south not voting for blacks? Of course she has her own problems getting only 42% of the vote for Louisiana Senator, against two republicans in her race. She will have a runoff with republican, Bill Cassidy, next month, to see if she can keep the seat that she has won at least a couple times before. Can she she suggest that men in the south just will not vote for a woman? Even though white men helped her get elected a couple times before, she will not be ashamed to suggest it.

My number two reason for feeling good is that the elections clearly showed that the Democrats' ridiculous "republican-war-on-women" mantra is getting extremely old and pathetic. Joni Ernst, the first female--republican or otherwise--elected from her state of Iowa. She is also the first female military veteran to be elected to the senate of any state.  Republican Shelly Moore is also the first woman in the state of of West Virginia to be elected to the senate. Then there is Republican Elise Stefanik who became the youngest ever woman (30 years old) elected to US Congress in history. It was also fulfilling to see incumbent Democrat Mark Udahl ride the "war on women" position into defeat in the Colorado senate race.

My number three reason is that Mia Love won the 4th district of Utah representative seat. I was really excited about her two years ago when she lost to phony "moderate" Matheson in a pretty close race. With Mia, we have perfect the answer to the liberal Democrats' accusations that conservative Republicans are racist and antagonistic towards women.  Mia Love is an excellent example of a Republican woman of color trusted by a generally conservative constituency. The old crap about racism and sex bigotry that the Dems trot out when they do not have a valid position to stand on is wearing thin and it looks like voters are getting wise to it.

My favorite reason for feeling good is that the deceitful, despicable and power-drunk (also creepy weird) Harry Reid will be out as senate majority leader.  In a couple months, the Senate will be able to actually vote on bills passed by the house of representatives. Since the Republicans took over the House of Representatives in 2010, the House has passed over 350 bills and sent to them on to the Senate to be voted on. Reid refused to let them come to a vote in the Senate. Why? you may ask. Probably because  he is deceitful, despicable and power-drunk (also creepy weird), and did not want any of the Democrats in the Senate to be tempted to choose between doing right and wrong and embarrassing President Obama, by joining with the Republicans on anything.

Only way last night would have been better for me is if Obama had been on the ballot. But, in essence, he and his policies were on the ballot and the Democrats suffered because of it. I just hope the Republicans will have the backbone to take on the the left and fix the destructive stuff that the Democrats have been allowed President Obama to do. We have only two years to try to keep him in constitutional check before the presidential election in 2016.  They also need to shine the light on the corruption of this administration--Bengahzi cover-up, IRS cover-up, Isis debacle, etc.  Go team!!!

Along with Joni, Republican Elise Stefanik, a college freshman in upstate New York, became the youngest woman ever elected to congress,  And of course my                    Joni Ernst, Mia Love

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/11/05/245778/republicans-widen-control-in-senate.html#storylink=cpy

Naughty or Nice: Is it Not a Laughing Matter?

I had the opportunity over the weekend to see my son, Jesse, perform his stand-up comedy at the annual Salt Lake City Comedy Carnival. He was great. He got lots of laughs by using his intellect to expose the absurdities of life. However, I can't say the same about the other comics who shared the bill with him. The MC, who introduce each act, seemed to be trying to get as many obscenities  he possibly could in each sentence. The other three comics, apart from Jesse, followed suit, adding in descriptions of their deviant sexual behavior. Everyone at my table were incapable of separating the vulgarity from the truly humorous elements of the comics' bits. Where Jesse was able to get laughter and applause by his humorous takes on modern society's love affair "gluten intolerance" and  how work and jobs are like romantic relationships, The others found it necessary to shock the audience into uncomfortable laughter.

Maybe my friends and I are the exceptions, but we don't find gutter language and foul expletives funny anywhere else, so why should we think it funny or even slightly amusing on stage when a comedian uses it.  I work with the construction trades as a safety professional, so I visit job sites most days and get to hear expletives of all kinds and in more than one language. It never thrills me. I never feel compelled to laugh when I hear limited vocabulary of the meaner kind. It seems to me that the users of offensive language were once kids trying out the "adult" words, just as they did when they started smoking and drinking alcohol because it makes them feel older and more sophisticated, but they never realized the fallacy.   I suppose the same is true with the audiences who get a kick out of hearing the silly, offensive drivel.  I picture in my mind the little kids smoking behind the garage or barn looking at porn and giggling to each other and patting themselves on the back for their "adult" behavior.

It would seem to me that the "comedians"--I use the term loosely--who go in for the crude and racy material should look around to see who are some of the most successful in their chosen field, who shy away from the   Bill Cosby, Steve Martin, Jerry Seinfeld, Jim Gaffigan, Brian Regan, etc. are largely pretty clean comedians and have really broad fan appeal. Even the very mentally sick among us would agree that they are funny. I know that some will point to the likes of Red Fox and Richard Prior and say they were really funny and successful. I just say that they knew and played to their audiences. They didn't get really successful until they broadened their audience base, to include prime time TV and PG movies.

In my humble opinion, the truth is that clean comedians are funnier and more creative in their craft than the the crude and dirty comics.  They point out the humorous reality and absurdities in the world and help us recognize them and laugh at ourselves. The dirty comedians only titillate the darker natures of humanity. The thing we don't need is more crap thrown in our faces.

My Logic Is Unimpeachable! Sorry To Say, I Suspect The Same About BarackObama

Richard Nixon resigned as president because he knew that he was going to be impeached. He was advised by the Republican party leaders that he would not get support from them to withstand impeachment. The republicans knew at that point that Nixon had broken the law by knowingly covering up the illegal actions of his subordinates. Republicans regularly turn against their own when they know that one of their own has been clearly immoral or unethical in their behaviors.

With Bill Clinton, the democrat argument for Clinton changed from "You can't trust those sleazy trailer-park women he is accused of abusing" to "Come on, every body does it, and lying about sex is understandable". Even though he clearly perjured himself and coerced others to commit perjury, the democrat party circled the wagons around him and Bill survived impeachment.

Today, we have a president who has personally broken the law numerous  times, by presidential orders, making changes to the Un-affordable Care Act--yes, I know that it was called something else by the democrats, but I am calling it what it is--and refused to enforce numerous laws on the books, because he doesn't like them, or because he can score political points with a particular voting block by neglecting his duty as president. Though he has continually broken the law and deceived the public on numerous occasions, and merits impeachment more so than any president before him--maybe even more than Andrew Jackson or Woodrow Wilson, it is impossible for me to see that happening.  Why? Because he is the darling of the media and the democrat party has shown time and time again that power trumps morality or ethics every time.

Now I know that because I find fault with our president that many think that I must be a racist. It is sad to say that that race card being played when ever anyone questions a liberal black politician's integrity or even their good judgment still seams to work for the democrats. At least it does for the most of news media. Sadly, the same cannot be argued for Allen West, Ben Carson, Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Condolezza Rice, Michael Steele, Herman Cain, Ken Blackwell, Mia Love and many other black conservatives who have been labeled "Uncle Toms" or "White Men's Pets or something just as insulting by many on the Left black and white. Go figure. Oddly, these are some of the best and brightest among us. Because republicans are so frightened of being called racist, I cannot imagine the president being held accountable for anything, because the republicans think it would go nowhere because they believe, and probably rightly so, that the democrats will never do the right thing and will never put right before power. If the need should arise, they can look directly at the sun at midday and tell you it is midnight.

So, I  hold no hope that Mr.Obama will get his just deserts. That would require that the conservatives and progressives putting expedience aside for righteousness. Though I see my logic as being unimpeachable, I suspect the same can be said for Barack Obama in today's world.

Who Wants A Federally-Mandated Minimum Wage? Only The Gullible And Their Panderers

So, our panderer-in-chief said yesterday that “it is time to give the American people a raise”. He might as well have said “It is time to make even more American people unemployed or work only part-time and give the American people a raise in inflation”. It must also be the time for the president to try to repair his sinking poll numbers.  Everybody wants to make more money, so it is a feel-good thing to say that you need a raise.  Hiking up a federal minimum wage has been a staple of the Democrats—and some Republicans, who are afraid they might not sound compassionate—for as long as I can remember. When I was a dumb kid, I remember being excited about getting close to $2.50 an hour for a job that I needed no expertise to do.  But, on the other hand, I did not like the fact that comic books were going up in price to 15 cents. As a kid I did not see that higher wages were necessarily connected to higher prices.  As I got older I noticed that, as the minimum wage rose, so did the cost of living. 

Why are there so many adults who do not get the connection between the cost of labor and the price of a product? Maybe, it is the sorry education they received from public schools, but I am not convinced that these facts are lost on the Democrats and progressive Republicans in government who climb on the progressive bus. I am sure that most of them have studied simple college math and logic enough to get a grasp on some simple truths.  But, maybe I am giving them too much credit. Even so, I am cynical enough to believe that they are educated sufficiently to know that the ignorant masses will not make the connection and they can fool them into thinking they actually care about people more than keeping political power. 

Let me revisit the” When-I- was-young” argument to further explain the logic.  I remember my father earning about $400 a week as a roofer. When I was a baby, my parents bought a home for $6,000 with a 30-year mortgage.  I can remember my parents buying a new 1961 Chevy Impala for about $2,000. I also remember our doctor making house calls. I do not remember that health insurance was as big a deal as it is today and there were not as many frivolous malpractice law suits, requiring doctors to carry expensive malpractice insurance. You could go to the hospital and have a baby for around $200. I remember that I could buy a hamburger for 12 cents. I remember gasoline in the 20 to 30 cents range where a station employee pumped the gas for you.  In my youth, sodas were 10 cents. I collected bottles and turned them in to be recycled for two cents apiece. I would collect at least 25 of them during the week so that I could buy my way into a public swimming pool on the weekend or buy the comic books that I mentioned earlier. The truth of the matter is that people made less money in the good old days, but things also cost a lot less.

So, you might say that it was a wash, when you consider both wages vs cost of living, but you must consider that our standard of living is much greater in many respects.  Air conditioning, telephone service, digital media, medical advances, transportation; in almost any area you want to focus on, our standard of living for every American is far better than it was in the not-too-distant past.  And none of it had anything to do with how high the average wage has been.  The rise of our quality of life is due to technological advancements.

Supply and demand is the overall requirement for un-artificial raises in wages.  In many ways, advances in technology kill off a lot of low-end jobs. Construction and manufacturing, for example, used to be much more labor-intensive, requiring many hands to accomplish numerous tasks. Because of advancement in technology, many of those tasks are done by robotics or machinery operated by workers who have specialized training or education.  Today’s workforce often have to meet higher standards going to a particular job or start out on a job at a lower wage to get the training needed to perform tasks which pay more once the can do the job more efficiently.  Also, technology has changed the way may people shop for their needs. Today a buyer can go online and make purchase at a moment, rather than make a trip to store or mail-order a product that they want or need.  Such technology necessarily makes the labor forces shrink.

You can also argue that, if a wage needs to be controlled, that it should not be done on a federal level. If you think that a minimum wage is needed to match the rise in the cost of living, you have to look at the cost of living in various parts of the country. I know that my cost of living changed as I have moved from city ti city and state to state. How can you think that a $10 minimum wage would mean the same to a worker in Washington DC. as it does to a worker in Burlingame, Kansas?  Can you buy a decent $60,000 home with 3-bedrooms in Washington? If anything, a minimum wage, however stupid the idea is, could only be done equitably on a state or local level. But Obama wants everything under his control, especially the stupid things.

For logic’s sake, let us imagine that a business man, John, makes widgets and he employs 100 people. John pays 10 new employees who are largely unskilled and untrained in the widget making trade a wage of $10 an hour. His 60 employees who work on the production floor and have been with him for several years and know how to do their job in an efficient more productive manner he pays $15 an hour.  John has 29 middle and upper management employees who require specialized education in business and marketing who make salaries of make, on average, $75,000 a year. John is able to earn $500,000 a year with his company, in an average year. John is in a competitive industry, so tries to keep his quality wedges as cheap as he can to make the profit margin that makes his personal industry worth it to him. Then, the government passes a law that requires him to pay a minimum of $12 an hour to his employees.

Naturally, John finds himself in a dilemma: where can he cut the expense of manufacturing his good-quality widgets so that he can still be competitive in the market place and realize the same profit margin that made being a businessman worth it? He knows that when he pays more to his entry-level employees, his other employees will also expect a raise in their wages to be uniformly fair, especially if a union is involved. If his cost for labor is increased by even 10% across the board, John will have to charge 10% more for the widgets to meet the market place. Oh, wait a minute. We forgot that John’s material suppliers are faced with same dilemma and have to raise the price of their materials, because they also were forced to pay more to their employees, so raising the selling price of the widget may be another few percentage point higher.  So, everyone in the chain of production is faced with cutting something to remain competitive in the market place. They will, in many instances, cut the number of employees, so some folks will lose their jobs, because the profit margin requires a given number of dollars devoted to labor costs. Something has to give or the price of the widget goes up.

Now let us imagine a buyer of widgets, Barak, depends on widgets for his safety and welfare. Barak has limited income from the government—I really like the sound of that, for some reason.  Barak goes to the widget store and finds that widgets have gone up in price again. Barak wonders why the greedy widget manufacturers have raised the price again. Those @#$%$^%# widget makers!    I guess Barak needs a raise in his social security to meet the higher cost of living. That is nothing pandering group of politicians cannot fix.

Now, you may think that this little exercise in logic is too simplistic, but the math always works out the same. When we take from one place in the economy it has to be filled from another place. Free markets and supply and demand take care of the appropriate wages for a given type of work. When you do not have enough people wanting to do a certain type of work and the work is necessary from the market place’s perspective, higher wages will necessarily be offered. When the wages meet the laborer’s requirement, the job will be filled.  Just look at what menial labor is earning in North Dakota with the energy boom they have experienced.  I know that I would be just happy with $400 a week and a $20,000 home mortgage, 12-cent hamburgers, 29-cent-a-gallon gasoline and all the other stuff that went with it. A minimum wage should be set at what the individual worker is prepared to do and what the market will allow. If government did not try to manage so many things in our lives we would all be better off. 

All Hail The Scary Punk On The Other Side Of The Fence!

I will try to keep this short and sweet. Well, maybe not sweet, but short. And if not short, perhaps I can make this blog shorter than usual. I Heard Obama’s scary warning to Russia that sending its military into Ukraine at this moment would not be in Russia’s interest. It reminded me of a punky kid declaring from the safety of a tall fence that a bully should leave some other kid alone, because there could be bad consequences.  In my mind I see the bully just roll his eyes and give the goodie-two-shoes punk standing on the other side of the fence a really rude gesture with his hand while he continues to flex his muscles as he starts to slap the weaker kid on his side of the fence.  I think that is a pretty accurate comparison.  Obama is the know-it-all punk who really does not have a clue about how to deal with bullies, and the bullies are quite aware of it.

Vladimir Putin is a bully of the first order. After all, he was a KGB thug during the USSR days. It has been apparent from the beginning of his reign that his goal has been to maneuver Russia back to the totalitarian state that it was under full-blown communism.  He must have thought he hit the jackpot when Obama and the democrat punkers took control of the government after the economic smack-down the Soviet Union suffered from Reagan policies.   It is ironic that Putin has had the luck of his nation developing their gas and oil to fuel a pretty good economic growth and power base, while our president has been trying to stifle our own huge gas and oil development made possible by technology, such as fracking. We could actually be completely fuel-independent, if the silly sap would get out of the way.  In case you are wondering, economies grow or dwindle on the availability of cheap fuel.  It would appear that Putin has been able to grasp that simple economic fact, while Obama has been unable to get his “giant brain” around that idea. 

Putin must wonder how we could go from a true leader like Reagan to an easy mark like Obama in less than 30 years. The fact is that Putin has gotten the best of our guy every time they have had any sort of dust-up. He knows that the punk on the other side of the fence is all talk and no action—big hat and no cattle, as they say in Texas. Putin knows he’s just a punk,  and more and more, it appears like Obama might as well be Putin’s personal punk. 

You Bought Your Favorite Brand! Do You Really Like It That Much?

I have been wondering awhile now about why voters embrace one political party and reject another. You might instinctively assume that a voter would vote for the person who most agrees with the voter’s beliefs and principles, but I dare say that you would very often be mistaken.  I have talked with way too many people who agree with me on some pretty important stuff—like “The federal government is way too intrusive in our personal lives”; “The government needs to stop wasting so much money”; “Taxes are too high”, and “I am opposed to abortion”. Yet, when they vote, they vote for someone who is guaranteed to work against everything that voter says he or she believes in. You probably know who I am talking about—friends and family members who make you want to pull your hair out when it comes to politics. Sometimes I think I would rather not know how obviously crazy those individuals are, so I could sleep better at night.  But still I wonder what is going on in their heads, or, what is not going on in their heads.

 I totally understand why I vote the way I do. It is because the man or woman for whom I vote has led me to believe, rightly or wrongly, that he or she comes the closest to agreeing with my beliefs and principles.  I cannot divorce myself from a desire to vote for someone who is as much like me as possible. I also want to vote for someone who is as good a person—hopefully, even better—as good and honest as I am.  I hate to hear people say, “They all do it”, when some political figure does something immoral or dishonorable.  For example, in my mind, a person running for the office of President of the United State of America, should be a person who exudes virtue and morality and holds himself or herself to a higher standard. After all, they will be filling the position that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln have held. Granted, George and Abe are no longer with us and it may be a little hard to find their like today, but we should at least try to put some thought and prayer into such an important vote. We should at least devote some time in doing our homework on these people.

Now, if you believe in communism or really big-brother-government or Keynesian economics, I understand where you are coming from. And I understand why you vote for the man or woman who comes the closest to agreeing with your belief system.  You are an ideologue and I am an ideologue, and we will always be in each other’s face, but—getting back to the point of why voters embrace one person over another or one party over another –why do so many of us vote contrary to our beliefs?

The answer, I think, is that they have associated themselves with a brand.  I have written before about my father being a die-hard Democrat.  His mantra was “Republicans are for the rich man and the Democrats are for the working man”.  I can also say that he was a die-hard Chevy-owner. He was also a die-hard fan of the Saint Louis Cardinals in the National League and whichever team was in Kansas City ( Athletics or Royals) at the time.  Though he was a FDR, Truman and Kennedy man, I am pretty sure he liked Ike—Ike was his commanding officer when he fought in the war, so he could break with one favorite team for an opposing favorite team, like the dilemma he would have had lived to see the Freeway World Series between the Cardinals and the Royals .  He could probably only be persuaded to vote Republican if there was an important emotional connection like he would have had with Eisenhower.  And, as most sports true fans are, he was a fan of his teams even when they were not very good. 

I have to admit that we all fall into that category when it comes to sports.  I root for the Royals, the Jayhawks, The Chiefs and the Jazz, even when they are stinking it up. Gratefully the Jayhawks are looking good again this year. And likewise, I detest the teams who may perennially beat my teams.  Because I grew up in a family who drove Chevys, I tended to prefer them myself.  I see that kind of fanaticism all over. Who has not seen a decal of a Calvin-like little boy urinating on a Chevy or Ford logo? I can safely say that there have been some good and bad years for about every make of automobile, but still people have their biases. Everybody can find something that he prefers because it is their favorite brand, even if there is substantially no difference in the product. Some people like Levis while others prefer Wranglers. And, it may not matter the monetary cost to the real fan. They are willing to pay a little more for the product because it is their brand. You might remember back when Coca-Cola tried to introduce “New Coke”.  The Coke Company had done a bunch of blind tests where the cola drinkers picked the drink that they liked best. They found that the taste testers more often preferred the Pepsi-Cola product. So, Coke decided to produce New Coke, which tasted more like Pepsi. Well, Coke fans went crazy and the Coca-Cola Company went back to what their fans wanted. I was happy with Pepsi either way.

In essence, this phenomenon of fanatical behavior—that is where the term “Fan” comes from—gives me some insight into why some people vote against their interest. For whatever reason—they were raised a Democrat, or Republican or Catholic, or Baptist and they refuse to give up their brand, even if it kills them, because it would cause their mother or father to roll over in their graves—they have become fixated by the brand.  I have heard people respond to me, when I ask them why they are going to vote for a Democrat, even when they know that it is a bad choice, that they just can’t pull the lever for a Republican.  This is precisely what I think is happening with many of the voters in America. They are not really doing their homework on the issues or the leadership qualities of the candidate, or thinking seriously about what they are buying with their votes.  When the time comes, they roll out of bed and pull the lever for their traditional brand, even though that brand now may not be as good as they remember it to be back in the day. Even when it looks to them like a Ford might be a better by than a Chevy in a particular year, they just cannot write the check for the Ford. Or they just cannot make themselves wear a pair of wranglers, no matter the fit or the price, because they would feel that they had been untrue to their team. And, what would their friends say? Well, I have a pretty good idea what I would say. I would say, “Pull your stupid head out”! “You thought you were buying a Ford Continental but you are driving around in an old Ford Pinto with a gas tank ready to explode when the inevitable rear-end crash comes!” And, If you keep this crap up, I guess I will keep beating my head against the wall in frustration.  But, I would say it in a friendly and loving way.

"Pay No Attention To Pesky Facts: The State Of The Union Is Strong!"

Obama has a big opportunity tonight to set the record straight in his State of the union Speech.  He has to say something that will help his failing image, something that will make his supporters not continue to flee from him like rats from a sinking ship. That is good accurate imagery, if I do say so myself.  To borrow a phrase from the Obama’s favorite communist pastor, the president’s “chickens have come home to roost”. Recent polling evidently shows that some folks who believed Barack Obama about the ‘Affordable Healthcare Act’—I won’t use the more popular “Obamacare “ sobriquet, because Pelosi, who claims she never called it that, no matter how many recordings show the contrary, and even Obama, himself have stopped calling it that, since it seems to be a stinker of a law—are now coming to the conclusion that the man they entrusted with creating a wonderful new healthcare system for the nation was doing one of the following:  (1) He really thought it couldn’t be that hard, because big government is the answer to all of the world’s ills; (2) He was lying the whole time because, being the Marxist Socialist that he is, he knew that the ignorant masses could be sold anything if you had said it enough times and the liberal media would stay in bed with him for the long run;  (3)He just doesn’t like the free market at all and knows that he is on the right road to prove the strategy of Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven (Sorry about this extremely long run-on sentence, but I am writing in a stream of consciousness here);   (or 4), He’s just an idiot that thinks he understands how economies work.  At any rate his popularity really tanked.

 I suspect that if you were to make a test question in a multiple choice structure, “all of the above” would be the correct answer.  I don’t think he is a total idiot, by any means—he has admitted after all, that he was a bit of a slacker in school and often times slackers can get by on native intelligence (see my own history)—h e was smart enough to work the system to get through school and into the  Ivy League stepping stones to politics and other educated idiot positions.  Incidentally, he never attended public school. When he was with his mother in Indonesia, he went to a private Muslim school—you can read his books about himself. And when he went to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents he attended a posh private high school.  He also sends his own daughters to private schools and always has. At any rate, the point I would like to make is that he appears to not be the genius that so many lefties proclaimed him to be. ( I heard James Garner say that Obama was probably the most intelligent president we have had.  I really like Garner as an actor, but now I feel sure that he should not teach history). Obama is unable, it seems, to put ideas together in public without a prompter, and he does not know how to pronounce the word “corpsman”. Now, I know that there are a lot of people behind bars who are fairly intelligent, so raw intelligence does not make you a stellar politician who would be void of misjudgment.   Look at Biden … uh, look at Pelosi… or umm Reid… Well, I can’t come up with a very good example among the Democrats at the moment that would prove my point, but there are probably some out there.  And, I am not suggesting that Mr. Obama should be behind bars. That may come in another blog, but clearly the stuff involving the roll-out of the Affordable Healthcare program  seems to show that the President is still a monumental slacker. 

As to my second conjecture, that he was lying the whole time about what to expect with his healthcare plan, we only have to compare his claims prior to the roll-out with reality.  I remember last year when the president gave his State of the Union Speech that  a Republican congressman was so shocked by what the president claimed about his plans that the congressman blurted out “You Lie”. You might think it was rude of him, but I think I would have had a hard time swallowing that crap too. Seems he was right; Obama lies. A defender of the president could say that it was a well intentioned untruth, and you that you can’t expect perfection.  You can’t expect perfection from the most intelligent president we have had? That has to be a shock to James Garner and his liberal friends.  And, a defender might also say that it was the Republicans’ fault that he had to tell some minor fibs, in order to get the smelly thing passed.  That fact is that it was smelly from the beginning. Many on the Republican side new the idea would not work and tried to tell the public that it could not work, that it was going to be a huge train wreck.  Up until the day before it started falling apart at the website roll-out, Some brave conservatives even stood up to their own party leaders in trying to stop the thing.  Hindsight has been good to those individuals. However, the fact remains that Obama was lying and our Health Care System in possibly dying.  Isn’t my little rhyme catchy? It is almost as snappy as “Bush Lied and people died”. The left somehow knew that Bush lied, even though the Democrat leadership at the time, Clinton, Obama, Schuman, Reid, et al, also believed that Sadam Hussein  had weapons of mass destruction and voted  along with president Bush to invade Iraq.  It would seem that if it is good for the goose, as they say, it should be good for the gander.  Of course, the ultra -Left couldn’t see equivalency if it could be argued against them. The bottom line is that Democrats, almost to a man or woman, will almost always say “Me Too” when they think it could be to their political benefit, while some Republicans—not all, sadly—who are conservatives first,  will stand their grounds on principle. I see the votes that passed the “Affordable Healthcare Bill” through the house and Senate as a good example:. The Bill passed without one Republican vote, while a sizable nonpartisan vote supported the invasion of Iraq. Who has more political guts and who was lying? I feel sorry for the Democrats who exposed themselves to the political aftermath of voting for the healthcare debacle. Actually, I don’t. I don’t want to get caught in a lie.

The third possible reason for Obama’s Healthcare program is his desire to fulfill Cloward and Piven’s strategy for bringing down the US government.  Cloward and Piven were sociologists and political activists who saw the easiest way to reach their goals of a socialist revolution in America  was through the Democrat party. They wrote: “The ultimate objective of the strategy—t o  wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed income—will be questioned by some. Because the ideal of individual social and economic mobility has deep roots, even activists seem reluctant to call for national programs to eliminate poverty by outright redistribution of income” It was their intention was to create a crisis in the current welfare system by focusing on welfare law and eventually bringing about its collapse under its own weight, necessitating replacing it with socialist system guaranteeing annual income. This was to be done by encouraging the poor to demand more and more benefits or entitlements and overloading the system.   I don’t think that it could be plainer to a Martian looking down at us that we are heading full speed under Obama’s steerage to the destruction of our free market system. Now it may be happening faster than he might have expected and wished for—he has been recorded as saying that he favored a one-payer system for healthcare—because the unaffordability of his programs are beginning be obvious to more and more people. He may have tipped his hand too soon. I pray that he has.

The last possibility is that he is, indeed, an idiot; an idiot who has no understanding of how an economy works. However, it may not be his fault.  After all he was sired and raised by communists and there are a surprising number of people who are unable to understand the concept of living within their means. The whole Democrat Party suffers from this incapacity these days, as well as close to half of the Republican Party.  Just as there are, for example,  a relatively small number of people in the world who are color blind, unable distinguish between green and red, there exists a huge number, perhaps a majority of people in the world who are unable to grasp the difference between income and outgo.  This is a sorry state of affairs, exacerbated by the fact that too many educators are also income-outgo-blind. They teach, and liberals and progressives are susceptible to, the Keynesian doctrine of economics.  John Maynard Keynes held to the theory that a government could spend its way out of recessions and depressions.  This will sound odd to those of us who have been taught and have come to believe that when you are lacking in income you should logically spend less and save for a rainy day. It’s possible, I guess, that some Keynesians believe this as well, as far as an individual or a family goes, or at least I hope that is the case, but it is very different when it comes to nations and their expenditures.  For Keynes, somehow the fact that that governments could print more money when they thought they needed to, absolved them from natural laws of inflation and deflation.  For the Keynesian, inflation is not a very big hurdle. They apparently believe that, as long as you can ride the wave and print more and more money, a new norm will arrive and exist for a while, until the bigger demands on the government and economic bubbles start bursting.  Then, it is off to the races again, with higher government-controlled minimal wages and so called price controls which do little but anesthetize the unwashed masses.  The reasonable among us we look at that philosophical abortion and wonder how intelligent people could fall for it. I know it baffles me. We free marketers, who see the wisdom of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman and see the opposition as crazy.   In fact, I think this picture of John Maynard Keynes supports my thoughts:     

He looks crazy to me.

So, tonight Mr. Obama will try again to make his State of the Union Speech believable , while laying the blame for his troubles at the feet of those dastardly heartless Republicans, and the Tea Party racists, especially the Black ones. Like the old joke about the man caught cheating by his wife, Obama will have to say, "Who are you gong to believe me or your lying eyes?"