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It's been said that we get the government we deserve. If we continue to vote for free bread and circuses as did the ancient Romans for a few centuries, without consideration of the costs, then we will get what the Romans got: ruin. Downfall.
Obamacare was sold to us as free health care for all Americans. I am an American, and Obamacare is certainly not free to me. My premiums have doubled, and my deductibles have tripled. Free? Not even close. And yet Barack Obama was re-elected by wide margins based on these false promises. Of course, some Americans are getting free care, but it is at the cost of other Americans such as me getting hammered. I would not call that kind of free health care free.
Obama has been on a green rampage now since his initial inauguration in 2008. He warned coal companies during that campaign that his goal was to bankrupt them, in favor of unproven and costly wind, solar and other alternative energy sources. Energy costs, other than oil, have soared since 2008. The only reason oil is cheap right now is through technology that Obama despises: fracking. He is certainly scheming as we speak to put an end to that, you can bet your bottom dollar.
One way all socialists (including Obama) appeal to the masses is to provide social programs (welfare, Obamacare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, Obamaphones, and on and on....), and pay for these costs through transfer of wealth in the form of taxes and gutting the military. The American armed forces are now at their weakest and smallest stance since World War II.
Accordingly, American involvement in festering hot spots around the world that threaten our allies and world stability is minimal. To fill that leadership void, rotten actors such as Russia, China, Iran and ISIS have all stepped forward to grab whatever power and land is now available, now that American power has withdrawn.
We indeed get the government we deserve. Unfortunately, the silver cloud in all of this chaos created by Obama and his Democrat party philosophy is that things will get so bad that it will in time negatively affect those constituencies that in the short term have benefited from all of these flawed socialist policies.
The health care system in the U.S., once the best in the world despite its warts, will get overloaded by those clamouring for 'free' care. The only way that an overloaded system can cope is by either restricting access, or by rationing services. Both are now happening, and oldsters who need these services most are feeling the brunt. They will start to get the message that all of this free stuff is killing them. An unfortunate silver cloud here.
All of this punishment meted out to the coal and oil industries will drive the costs of energy up to the point that heating a retirees house during the winter will require a home heating loan. Another unfortunate silver cloud, as in time people will rebel against such policies.
Most oldsters remember the days when they could count on interest payments from structured certificates of deposit bearing 6% annually and greater. They haven't seen those days in decades now. Their money may as well be stuffed in a mattress in the face of a 2 year CD now paying about one half of one percent interest: 50 basis points. Which rounded to the nearest significant number is about zero. Another silver cloud amid the ruins of what used to be what oldsters considered their 'Golden Years.' These years are turning from gold to granite. It is just a matter of time before these oldsters grab their walkers, teeter on down to the polling places and vote for a better future.
The ancient Romans never figured it out, and while half the population of the Roman empire was watching their free circuses and eating their free bread, the Visigoths showed up and sacked Rome around 410 A.D., and Rome was no more.
And the Dark Ages began.
I will not live to see how things turn out for the U.S. We still have time to see what socialism has done to past fallen civilizations, and that without a change in course, the same thing will slowly happen here. We can either turn against this pathology that is socialism, or we will see the New Dark Ages born.
It's hard to predict which future will prevail.
What are the presidential polls telling us?
On the GOP side, non-politicians like Donald Trump and Ben Carson are polling very well. Democrats seem to like Bernie Sanders, who is hardly what anyone on either side of the aisle would call your run of the mill 'politician.' Hillary Clinton's polling numbers are tanking each and every poll, going from a lead-pipe cinch for the nod to under 40% of approval.
The presumptive nominees' prospects on each side months ago are now iffy, at best. This includes career politicians such as Hillary Clinton on the Democrat side and Jeb Bush, a career politician on the Republican side. Neither of these candidates have ever held a job of any significance outside of politics: neither has ever had to meet a payroll, make decisions as to how best to allocate privately held resources, or please a consumer base by providing any product or service that anyone wants or needs. All either knows is how to win elections, or position themselves to win elections.
And "We The People" are sick to death of those who only seek power without understanding what the rest of us want out of our government. This includes Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush: we are sick of those guys. Sick to death.
I don't want to launch into the shortcomings of Hillary Clinton as a leader, it would take way too much time and keystrokes. Just leave it said that she is the last person America needs right now calling the national shots.
Jeb Bush wants to project himself as being able to deliver a better government to us in 2016. And what does he base this on? That his grandfather (Prescott Bush) was a U.S. senator? His father and brother were U.S. presidents? Those credentials to me merely suggests that Jeb Bush feels he is entitled to lead us because he is related to career politicians before him. He has said that he describes the invasion (yes, flat-out INVASION) by illegals into our country is 'an act of love.' He says these people simply want a better life for themselves and their loved ones.
Jeb Bush is a huge supporter of the educational system called "Common Core." This debacle of a scam of a sham of a system is concocted of leftist standards that protect teachers and teachers unions, and are dictated from on high from an over reaching federal government. This alone should eliminate Jeb Bush from consideration. How we teach our kids should be up to parents and local considerations, not the know-it-all politicians at the national level. Common Core would more closely be associated with past similar efforts by Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-Tung and Josef Stalin.
And this 'act of love' he believes are motivating illegals invading our country? His brother as president once stated that American 'compassion doesn't stop at the Rio Grande.' These illegals are not invading us as 'acts of love.' They merely want to suck off of the efforts of our fore bearers who died in many foreign battles to secure our way of life from those who would become dictators over us and enslave us. These 'act of love' invaders respect nothing of our heritage, or our national sacrifices to make our country the freedom magnet that draws them: they want the goodies that the American way of life affords, but they do not want to pay any homage to our culture, our language or our institutions. They will huddle in their own little ghettos, speak their own language, wave their own flags, and send their under-the-table money back to the 'old country', pay no taxes and suck off of our generous social programs, and then vote for the Democrats who allow them to be the evil and damaging parasites to our country that they all are.
These invaders are not driven by 'acts of love,' as Jeb Bush erroneously believes. They are evil invaders, lawless and rotten to the core, and need to be repulsed and expelled. Every stinking one of them.
All of our politicians are weighing in on the side of 'amnesty.' And none of us want that. All of our politicians resist building a fence and protecting our borders. These politicians on both sides have watched this illegal horde invade our southern border now for over 50 years, and have not done squat to stop it.
Most Americans want our borders protected against invasion. Career politicians don't seem to want this at all, and accordingly have not taken a single step to stop it.
Is it any wonder that Donald Trump's polling numbers are surging when he swears to build a great big, fat wall, evict all of the illegals and make Mexico pay for everything?
You do the math. "Act of Love." Bunk. Crap. Garbage. We want nothing to do with any of that malarky. Career politicians are killing our way of life, and we don't want to elect yet another clueless politician to move into the Oval Office.
The current 'establishment GOP' crowd absolutely hates Donald Trump. They loathe him, and everything he does.
The 'Old Guard Republicans' can't understand why Donald Trump is getting the polling success he has despite the many insults to many constituencies: women, Hispanics, low energy people, you name it.
News to you 'Old Guard' GOP-types: YOU are the ones who are driving Donald Trumps ratings through the roof. And yet you are still befuddled as to what this guy has that you don't.
The Republicans have repeatedly told us conservatives that if they are elected, they will repeal Obamacare - they funded it instead. If they are elected to a majority, the Old Guard tells us they will get the spending under control - they are in cahoots with the big spending Democrats and have not done a thing about the drunken sailor spending in Washington.
In other words, the Old Guard tells us things that, when the vote is delivered to them, they forget once the gavel is handed to them.
Donald Trump is sticking his thumb in the eye of the Establishment GOP types. He is saying that he doesn't like their lying ways, either, and will do something about it.
Sounds good to me. Sounds good to a lot of us.
And now the GOP establishment types are trying to tell everybody that Donald Trump was a liberal, voted for and funded Democrats, and was pro-choice, was for Obamacare, supported Harry Reid, blah blah blah.
Nobody cares about any of that. The Old Guard GOP themselves have no credibility about delivering the goods with us conservatives anymore. Conservatives (and a goodly amount of independents and Democrats) hate the ruling class politicians and their lying ways.
We know that Donald Trump is imperfect. We don't care. He is telling us that he will fix a lot of things, and he has a track record of doing what he says he will do. Much like Kurt Russell's character "Snake Plisskin" in "Escape from New York", where the administration turns to an arguably slimy, dubious scumbag to rescue their leader from the hands of bad guys. They hand him a pardon for his old nefarious ways if he comes through with the goods.
It's an old plot, but a good one. We want our own "Snake Plisskin" coming in and cleaning things up. GO SNAKE!! PLISSKIN for President!!
We believe him (Donald Trump), and we don't believe the Old Guard GOP anymore.
Donald Trump will likely get the nomination, despite his warts. And despite his resemblance to 'Snake Plisskin.'
Whether Hillary Clinton survives her current email-gate woes, or if Joe Biden jumps into the race, or even the grouchy, curmudgeonly Bernie Sanders prevails, liberals will have no choice this time around but to run on socialism.
We all know that Obama is a dyed-in-the-wool, dues paying avowed socialist, and accordingly so is his second banana. Joe Biden will lead the country down the road to ruin and bankruptcy with at least another four years of sour economic policies that punish achievers with ever increasing taxes, and then turn around and hand out freebies to an ever increasing dependent constituency.
Hillary, with absolutely no doubt, is a raging socialist in her own right, and will wage a war on capitalism with a purple vengeance and wreak virtual havoc on an already downtrodden economy if (God help us) elected as President of the United States of America.
The only honest socialist in the bunch (if that is even possible) would be Bernie Sanders. He is openly and unapologetically a practicing card-carrying Socialist, with a Capital "S." Of course he hates the meanness and unfairness of capitalism, and will ensure that not one American has a dime more than any other American: otherwise, things would be unfair.
Running on the tenets of socialism is problematic for the Left. First and foremost, Americans don't like to think that they live in a socialist country. They just don't. I don't know why this is, because Americans sure elect a LOT of socialists to public office.
Secondly, socialists/liberals still need a humming economy to generate enough taxes in order to re-distribute them from those who pay them to those who take them, and if they inflict full-blown high octane socialism into the economy, we will turn into Greece faster than a bottle of Scotch disappears within the Kennedy compound. And believe me, that's fast. And accordingly, there go those taxes that were scheduled for re-distribution, right down the ol' crapper.
Uber-liberal journalist Chris Matthews asked Debbie Wasserman-Schultz a few weeks ago on "Hardball" if she could explain the difference between a Democrat and a socialist. And Debbie, a true-believer in all things socialist, could not come up with a single difference. Not one. But this is not what Democrats want to convey if they want to win in November, 2016. Of course they want things to BE socialist, but they would never succeed in CALLING their philosophy and policies socialist.
It must be tough to be a Democrat these days.
There are lots of dumb ideas floating around, and some are dumber than others. My pick of the dumbest of the dumb ideas follow:
1. Pay everybody $70,000.00 annually. Of course, when Dan Price of Gravity Payments decided that everybody would be happy if all his employees received $70K a year, liberals everywhere declared him brilliant, a thought leader, and his model would be the stuff of Harvard case studies. 3 months later, almost nothing is working out like Dan Price figured it would: his brother who was a principal of Gravity Payments sued the company, many of his clients withdrew their accounts, and lots of higher skills employees quit because the janitor who dropped out of 3rd grade was making the same pay as those who slogged their way through MBA's at the University of Washington. Who saw this kind of backlash coming? Well, just about everybody who isn't a brain dead liberal did. Duh.
2. Make a deal with Iran. Yes, it is a brilliant move to remove sanctions against the world's leader in exporting terror, freeing up oil sales on the world market, allowing about $150,000,000,000 (that's 150 BILLION dollars annually) to flow into the mullah's coffers; money to fund world-wide terror in perpetuity. And in an effort to stall the mullahs getting a nuclear weapon, allow only Iranian inspectors to verify nuclear free military sites and report to the world that they are indeed in compliance of the accords. What kind of morons would do this? Well, that would be the Obama administration, the smartest people in the world. Right.
3. Hillary Clinton decides to use private email servers in her position as U.S. Secretary of State instead of the mandated, relatively secure government servers. Of course, Hillary is touted as the worlds' smartest woman. Now the fact that she used these unsecured private servers to process classified TOP SECRET intelligence reports has surfaced. And these servers were physically located in an unsecured, solitary bathroom in Denver, when we were told by this extremely smart woman (worlds' smartest woman, or so we are told) that she had U.S. Secret Service agents standing guard over these servers night and day. Right. The world's smartest woman sure didn't think any of this through.
Lots of dumb ideas out there, ladies and gentlemen. Lots and lots. I could go on, but I won't.
The cable show "Wheeler Dealers" aired on The Discovery Channel's affiliated 'Velocity' channel features two Brits, a tall skinny guy (Edd China, the mechanic) and a short fat guy (Mike Brewer, the used car salesman) buying classic cars that need work, fixing them and flipping them 'for a profit.'
I haven't missed an episode, and "Wheeler Dealers" has been around for over a decade now. And each and every episode, I end up yelling at the screen once they start adding up their costs on each project to figure their 'profit.' Their math is so rotten, it drives me nuts.
A typical episode has Mike flying over to the U.S. from the U.K, kicking the tires on several candidates on, say, a Chevrolet Camaro. He then beats the guy down to a low ball price, and ships the car back to merry old England. Edd gets his wrenches out (or 'spanners', as loyal British Subjects call them), does his thing on the clunker and presto, chango: the car looks like it just rolled off the show room floor.
Here's the rub: when calculating the profit, there are just so many large costs that are completely ignored when adding up what they spent. They only include the cost of the car, the cost of any parts they purchased, and any vendor costs such as chroming and specialty work, and if purchased from a foreign country, shipping costs only, that's it. What they DON'T add in are the following:
* Labor. This is a biggie. Edd works his butt off putting these pieces of crap back into working order, and not a dime of his massive efforts are calculated. Some of these jobs Edd takes on take him weeks and weeks. He is an accomplished mechanic, and should bill his time out at approximately $80 and hour or so, but he works for nothing, apparently. And then there's Mike's time and energy spent running around finding these cars, tracking down parts, and never including a dime of his efforts. This line item is huge.
* Overhead. Edd has quite the nice shop, with every imaginable tool needed for virtually every obscure job, to include computers for tuning, an overhead hydraulic lift, and all manner of hand tools and often expensive systems. Not a dime of the rent, mortgage payment, maintenance, etc. or any other cost of this is included in their "profit." And advertising, nothing is mentioned of the cost of marketing these cars. Not one penny of any of this huge overhead these guys have invested in their operation is considered at all.
*Additional labor. Edd at almost every job calls over his mate (or 'friend,' as we say across the pond) Paul to give him a hand on some of the more cumbersome efforts, or when more than one guy is required. Paul apparently works for free as well, I never see an invoice from Paul when it comes to adding up the costs.
*Travel costs, shipping costs, etc. Lots of plane tickets, hotel bills and gasoline/trailer costs are completely ignored. Edd carts cars off to the paint shop about every other episode, returns to the shop with his trailer and truck. Once the car is done, he drags the trailer and truck back to the paint shop, picks up the finished car and returns to the shop. Not a dime of all of this is recorded. These thousands of dollars per car can add up to big money, but these lunkheads never account for a penny of it.
So when comes time for Mike to boast and crow of a huge profit, don't believe a word of it. Just double the costs they have admitted to, and you will have a more accurate idea of what it costs to bring a piece of crap that was heading for the crusher back to life.
And I still look forward to every episode. So that I can yell at Mike and Edd some more.
I love this show. I know it certainly doesn't sound like it, but I do.
There he goes again, legacy building. Barack Obama told us 7 years ago that he was intent on bankrupting the coal industry. Well, the other shoe has finally dropped, and he has issued yet another edict from on high that coal fired power plants better start shuttering their doors sooner rather than later owing to new strict environmental standards on greenhouse gas emissions.
Barry is starting to rush things, as he knows he only has another 15 months or so to wreck America to his liking, and establish the transformation of the country from the world's only super power to a third world banana republic. Barry likens this transformation as one from a fossil fueled polluting country to a renewable, fresh green country. Right. And still, there are not enough windmills or solar panels that can be stapled or glued onto a Boeing 777 to get it even an inch off the ground.
One thing Barry hasn't accounted for, however, is that his legacy is not subject to the political winds of today. It will be determined in the fullness of time by others, and others who are not deterred by which way the current political winds are blowing. History has a way of diluting such influences, and objectively looking at results, not the spin issued by the current regime.
Barry thinks that history will have determined that he saved America from a depression of epic proportions since he inherited a full blown economic disaster...created by his own party and its desire to give free houses to bums and losers who could never, ever service a mortgage on even a dog house, much less a McMansion.
When these fake mortgages went bust after the fake occupants with their fake paychecks came into full view of the lenders, Democrat policies of a house for every beggar blew up in all of our faces. And yet Barry, ramming through massive government spending programs of Keynesian origin, thinks he saved the day when future historians will determine the truth. And that truth will not be flattering to Barry's legacy.
Barry will think that his legacy will be one of a peace maker, the president who ended two wars and brought our troops home. Again, the future historians will look at this quite differently: Barry will be hung with losing two wars, one which had already been won (Iraq) and one that was winnable (Afghanistan), and creating the new Holocaust of ISIS.
Barack Obama's legacy will be one of legend. But not the way he thinks. Rather than America's greatest president, Barry will come down in history as the most damaging, dishonest and God-awful president the country has ever seen, or ever will see.
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