Oh, that was choice!

First lady Michelle 0bama was the main speaker at the democrat convention on Tuesday and the reviews seem fairly uniformly positive for her trip down memory lane.

Oh yes, she has now assured us that she and the president are just normal folks - they came from families with little money, owed far too much on their student loans when the graduated: young, foolish, and in debt - or words to that effect.

(I wonder if anyone noticed the similar state of our new people's republic: young, foolish, and in debt - but I digress.)

The topic that really caught my attention and in my craw was the touting of national health care as being about choice for women or some such lunacy.

"Hey, we're women, we're adults, and we can make our own choices about our own health care! That's what my husband has done for us! Go team!"

Good grief - doesn't anyone think anymore? I don't mean just at the democrat convention, either: why hasn't there been a huge chorus of folks explaining that being forced to buy insurance from approved companies who are told exactly what they can offer for sale isn't exactly the same as making choices about our own health care? Am I the only one who can't hold this many contradictory clauses in the air while smiling seraphically as if I really believed at least some of the crockery that's going to break when it finally hits the floor or the fan?

What in the world is wrong with Americans these days? Have schools been so bad so long that no one here can think his way out of a paper bag or a government program?!

I'm getting close to the point where I'll despair for these once-great United States of America.

Posted by: Lewis Cannon

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Color Me Bloviated

Color Me Bloviated

OK, no big, long, involved, well-reasoned post here this time.  Instead, here's a quick note about my current state of confusion.

So the other day, president 0bama says that nobody does it by himself - we're all where we are because of other people.
Of course, he always says there's no reason for us to worry about the people in his past - it's not like the people we associate with have anything to do with who we are; the implication being that we're all self-made individuals (or "folks" as he loves to call us when he's trying to be folksy).

Does he really think we're so stupid or so skilled that we can believe both of those things at the same time? Sorry, I guess that was a rhetorical question, and who needs rhetorical questions?

We're getting worse than we deserve these days.

Posted by Lewis Cannon

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A Hole In Mars?!

1. Scientists at NASA have found what they're calling a hole in Mars.
2. There is a perfectly circular crater with a hole at the bottom leading to underground caves of undetermined size.
3. This 35 meter hole leading to the 20 meter deep cavern is said to be a good candidate to contain Martian life.

What could have caused this hole in the surface? Could it be the remnant of an ancient weapon?
What kind of life do they anticipate finding down there? Are we being prepared for something they already know?
Why does our government continue to push out tantalizing tidbits like this, rather than coming clean and telling us what's actually out there?
Do they fear the reaction of the populace? Is this why the President has signed so many executive orders giving the government extraordinary powers - in case of emergency?


Posted by Listener 43

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Now It's A Tax?!?!

I'm afraid I have not words capable of expressing the disgust and dismay rattling back and forth in my brain at the utter chicanery practiced by all three branches of the federal government upon its constituents (which should read bosses, but seems to read as bank accounts these days).
"There is no way this can be construed as a tax," said our fearless leader, president 0bama.
"The individual mandate cannot stand under the commerce clause, but this is allowed as a tax," says our supreme court.

Good Lord, it's as though there is no understanding of the concept of limited government left in DC.

Throw them all out! A pox on all their houses! I despair for liberty and justice for any.

Posted by Lewis Cannon

They Backed Down, But So What?

Good grief folks, you'd almost think the 0bama administration was actually on the side of the American family farm the way they're getting a pass on this "backdown" from outlawing chores for kids!
First off, they thought this was a good idea - they really did - it wasn't like they accidentally made a rule that surprised everyone by applying to kids on farms. These blowhards in DC really think they know how to raise kids on a farm better than the kids' own parents do.
Secondly, the retraction of the rules is done in conjunction with the development of a curriculum to be used in the government schools to train farm kids on how not to get hurt with equipment that won't be in the schools. Anyone care to guess how much of the "teaching" will be of the "your parents can't make you touch these dangerous machines that will likely kill or maim you, and they're evil and don't love you as much as the government does if they try to get you to do anything around the farm," as opposed to actual safety instruction? It seems like a pretty difficult thing to get a teacher to do, doesn't it? How are they going to train kids on how to safely use whatever particular stuff they have on their farm when there aren't any sample machines there at the school? That will be especially hard when you realize that they don't really have much time to spare for this kind of instruction when the time is already committed to learning the latest song in praise of our glorious leader president 0bama, how to put condoms on cucumbers and bananas, and which aggrieved group is most deserving of everyone else's money. I mean, there's not enough time to teach them how to read, add and subtract, that the Founding Fathers were actually a pretty smart bunch of dudes who knew better than to trust a powerful central government with any more power than is absolutely necessary, and that we have rights that were granted by our Creator, not by the feds (not even by the Constitution!).

Good grief, they're just going to go about it in an even sneakier way, so don't go giving them any credit for backing down - they haven't backed down any more than the roaches that scamper under the cabinets in the White House have backed down: they're just waiting until the lights go out again and we're not looking.

Posted by Lewis Cannon

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The Man's A Tool - UPDATED

Updated 4/2/12 - see below

Now that the Obama campaign is in full swing - despite not having a particular Republican opponent yet - the president is letting his Vice Gaffer out without a short leash (or should it be a short bus?) to make policy proclamations that the Pres himself couldn't get away with and still have any hope of reelection but this fool can - and does - say whatever comes into his "mind" and gets away with it like he's your crazy and/or drunk uncle at a family reunion spouting his aliens are in the government telling us all what to do crap only this time he's the bizarre alien telling us what to do instead.

Now vice president Biden thinks we need a global tax because it's not enough that people get taxed by their own nation, they should be taxed by the one world government   League of Nations United Nations or whatever cabal or group he thinks is best these days.

I know sovereignty is hard to spell, Uncle Joe, but the concept isn't really that difficult, is it? I'm sure there must be someone in DC who knows what it means - please, try to get a clue, OK?

Good grief, what a tool.

Posted by Lewis Cannon

Update:
Biden was speaking to a Democratic fundraiser in Chicago Thursday night, when he turned to praise the work of Richard M. Daley, the city’s former mayor of over 20 years.

“I never had an interest in being a mayor, ’cause that’s a real job. You have to produce,” Biden said, according to a White House pool report. “That’s why I was able to be a senator for 36 years.”

As noted above, good grief, what a tool.
LC

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Congress Is In Recess When I Say It's In Recess

Once again, president 0bama is ignoring reality as the rest of us perceive it and blithely going off on his own. Congress is not in recess, but they're not meeting for regular-enough business for his taste, so he simply re-defines recess and makes a raft of recess appointments.
 
This is just one more of those moments for me when I try to decide if these thugs are just incompetent or if they're really that little concerned with doing the right things in the right way - and then I try to decide which I would prefer.
 
Pretty much every time I have one of these moments (and they happen far too often), I realize that it doesn't much matter which description is correct - the country is getting hosed by a bunch of thugs pretending to be politicians pretending to be public servants pretending to be statesmen.

Holy Constitutional Crisis, Batman! My guess is that the Constitution itself wasn't required reading in the classroom when 0bama "taught" Constitutional Law.

Posted by Lewis Cannon

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Think of the Children!

Planned Parenthood is celebrating the inclusion of birth control in all 0bamacare plans with a dance video featuring a package of birth control pills cavorting in Bollywood style for some bizarre reason. If you ask me, the producers of Slumdog Millionaire should sue the crap out of them for doing such a rotten ripoff of their movie.

The whole idea seems to be, at least according to Nancy Pelosi, that whenever people have children it costs the government money, so by paying for the pills to stop kids from being born we'll all save money and not have so much medical spending coming out of our tax coffers in the future. Somehow the "logic" escapes me.

If kids grow up to have jobs and pay taxes, they should be a net plus, even to the government. If that's not how it works, then that means that each person in the nation is costing our leaders more money than he or she is worth, so by that logic we ought to just all drop dead in order to save the country.
It seems to me that even the knuckleheads in DC should be able to figure out that with the Ponzi scheme they like to call Social Security, we need more workers all the time to pump the SS taxes into the system for the retired folks who are drawing it out.
If we're not going to have kids of our own any more, are they planning on importing a bunch of Mexicans to pay the taxes for us? Don't they know that a bunch of that money gets sent back to Mexico to keep that economy alive and functioning (such as it is)?

You say unintended consequences. I say morons.

I'm right.

Posted by Lewis Cannon

Raise Taxes Or The Old Lady Gets It!

Listening to president 0bama brings back thoughts of FDR and National Lampoon, because I can remember that National Lampoon had a cover where they were threatening to shoot a dog if you didn't buy a copy of the magazine and then I also remember that FDR said the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. It's kind of amazing that from one Democrat president telling us not to be afraid of anything we moved on to another Democrat president telling us we'd better be afraid of pretty much everything and give him what he wants or else he'll take away our parents and grandparents by not giving them money and medicine from the feds.

Good grief, people, are you even thinking out there? Here's the man who said he was going to fundamentally transform America and he's doing it right in front of our faces in ways no thinking person can possibly think is good, nice, American, or Constitutional and we're not doing anything other than saying that John Boehner better not cave and we hope he doesn't cry about it but that doesn't really amount to much of a hill of beans in the final analysis since the president seems to think he can do whatever he wants by bureaucratic fiat or by executive orders and he's got some tame senators who don't understand that giving the Executive Branch the powers that are clearly reserved to the Legislative Branch would be a bad idea and so it's time for someone other than just yours truly to stand up and say I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more, just like Howard what's-his-name in that movie from a pretty long time ago.

Posted by Lewis Cannon

Parsing the Prez

"The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. government can't pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government's reckless fiscal policies. ... Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that 'the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better." 

- Senator Barack Obama, 2006

It hardly takes any parsing to see that Senator Obama is in total disagreement with President Obama, and that he's desperate to keep us from knowing what he used to know.

Posted by Pygmalion 56

Parsing the Prez

"America, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home," said president 0bama in his address regarding pulling troops out of Afghanistan.

A few points might be helpful in translating this for normal people:

• No, this doesn't mean that he doesn't realize that we already have a nation here; it means he doesn't like the nation that we already have here.
• Remember that he promised to "fundamentally transform" America when running for President; this is likely his realization that he isn't likely to get reelected, so this next year and a half will be all the time he has to pull down the current structures and rebuild America in his own image.
• Europe hasn't fully imploded yet, so he can still point to his friends as examples of mature folks who don't treat rich people as well as poor people. Once Greece defaults and takes Italy with it, he knows he's going to have an even tougher time convincing anyone that his new way forward is anything but a rabbit-hole to insolvency and serfdom.

So what he said is, if you like these United States of America, too bad for you.

Posted by Pygmalion 56