Monthly Archives: September 2006

Politics

Giuliani Weighs In On The Clintons

The country’s honorary mayor, Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, takes the high road. Which leaves Bill and Hillary down there.

“I know President Bush doesn’t say that about President Clinton,” said Giuliani. “I think the reality is that any American president, if they had known about an attack, would have done everything they could to stop it.” The real fault for 9/11, Giuliani says, lies squarely with the Islamic terrorists. He added, “I think we should stop trying to blame our presidents for 9/11.”

A presidential match-up between Rudy and Hillary would be delicious. Her campaign will focus on Rudy, and Rudy’s campaign will focus on Americans. Hillary would get spanked. And I apologize for that image.

Politics

7-Eleven Makes Up Their Mind On Chavez & Citgo

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It’s good to see business taking community and country responsibility seriously. Now what about our U.S. Navy getting another gas vendor in the Navy Exchanges in this country? Citgo is an exclusive vendor there.

7-Eleven stores 20-year supply agreement with CITGO Petroleum Corporation, a U.S.-based company, ends next week, and 7-Eleven, Inc. is now making the switch to its own branded gasoline. Distributors for the gasoline that 7-Eleven stores begin selling in October is provided to us by U.S. companies, such as Tower Energy Group in Torrance, Calif., Sinclair Oil of Salt Lake City and Frontier Oil Corporation of Houston.

Slurp It: 7-Eleven Dumps Chavez’s CITGO.

Race Relations, Uncategorized

Homeschooling Up In Black Families

Homeschooling, school vouchers, accountability, all are ways to combat ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’ when it comes to educating our children to become successful and productive members of society.  That goal isn’t a race thing, its a human thing.   The demographics of ‘the educated’ can, however, be described in racial and ethnic terms, but only at the risk of being counterproductive.  There is evidence now that homeschooling among Black families is on the rise, the results of which can only be good for the kids, the families, and society.

What matters is what counts, and what counts is our children, not brick and mortar schools, not teachers unions, not bureaucrats.

ref: A new homeschooling movement led by Black families.

Politics, Uncategorized

Investing In America Will Save Social Security

President Bush began his 2nd term with fixing Social Security being a priority. Social Security as it exists today is doomed to fail. On that, there is no disagreement.

Bush told us his plan at the State of the Union speech. First, he had to convince Congress and the American people that there is a problem.  After getting that consensus, he wants suggestions on how to fix it.  He has ideas of his own of course, but wants participation by everyone in coming up with recommendations on how to fix it.  Then he’ll fix it.

So the President and Vice-President, and others in the administration are out on a 60 day campaign to educate the public on the matter.  I call that fulfilling a campaign promise.  The biased media mocks the process as if the president was selling used cars.  He’s out ‘pushing his plan,’ putting on the ‘hard sell’. I’m sure the word snake-oil has come up somewhere too. You get the point.  What’s the left call it?  They call it pandering to Wall Street.

The last thing the dems want to do is fix Social Security using any part of private accounts.  Their answer is higher taxes. Isn’t investing in America and its future, with rates of return higher by orders of magnitude than anything Social Security could possibly provide under current legislation, better than investing in a government hell-bent on taxing you more to give to someone else?  What Winston Churchill said:

We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.

Buying U.S. Savings bonds won’t create jobs. Investing in America does.  Everyone wins. Even democrats if they’ll admit it. Isn’t it a little ironic that the government has taken this long to see the benefits of that which made us a superpower, our freedom and free enterprise.

What really drives dems crazy about the people owning their own accounts, is that they really will own it and be able to pass it on to survivors upon your demise, and, out of their reach to tax.  Not possible under today’s system. The government gets to keep it, your family gets nothing of what might have been paid out in benefits regardless of how much the departed had paid into SS over the working lifetime.  Dems today are benefiting from the peoples’ false impression that the money they’ve been paying for taxes is being held for them until they retire, so they don’t see any difference between private accounts and the current system.  You can see the hill the administration has to climb to win this debate.

Uncategorized

Dems Help Systems, Not People, In Social Security Reform

So Sen. Minority Leader Harry Reid, Tom Daschle’s successor, turns out to be an amalgamation of Tom Daschle and John Kerry.  There isn’t a winning combination of any of these democrat politicos, although they try.

On judicial nominations, Senator Reid, in 2001, said that every judicial nominee should get an up or down vote in the judiciary committee and the senate.  We all know what an obstructionist Tom Daschle was on judicial nominees, which is why he’s living high on his retirement benefits we pay for.  It’s cheaper for us this way than if he were still in Washington.   Now however, Harry Reid has voted NO on cloture votes in the judiciary committee, ie. to deny an up or down vote in the committee as well as the senate, on Pryor, Estrada, Brown, and several others.  He was for the normal judicial nominee processes before he was against it.

On saving Social Security, Sen. Harry Reid in 1999, was an advocate of private investment accounts as part of Social Security reform.  This was when Bill Clinton first pointed out the problem Social Security faces when it comes time for the baby boomers to retire.  At that time you didn’t hear anybody, republican or democrat, disputing the fact that there was a looming problem for Social Security, that the present system was headed for insolvency.  No one disputed that, although the ‘when’ this would  happen would differ, but the end result was the same.  Here again, Senator Reid was for private citizens to hold a small percentage of what would be their taxes to be invested in private and public sector money market accounts that they own.  Historically, these investments pay from 2 to 8 times the return that SS historically contributes.  He saw the wisdom in this plan 6 years ago.  Now however, he says there is no problem in Social Security that raising taxes won’t fix. I guess you can say he was for private investment accounts before he was against them.

We are left to wonder why a few years ago when a democrat was in the White House that the problem was perceived to be real, why they now think not only that there is no problem but that private investment accounts will kill Social Security instead of saving it?  The fact that a republican is in the White House now seems to have changed the way they see Social Security.  It’s purely political, which should now be obvious.

Another obvious conclusion one can draw is that, it isn’t the peoples’ welfare they are seeking to preserve, but rather the inadequate and antiquated Social Security system itself.

Organized Labor, Politics

Outsourcing & The Left

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The political left are on the wrong side of outsourcing. Why? Because they ignore insourcing. To listen to a Democrat speak of outsourcing, it is always about how high paying jobs are going overseas and this is wrong. That, like the missing explosives ‘under our watch’ is simply not true. It’s spin.

If you imagine our economy as a superhighway, you can find these Democrats on the exit ramp, demagoging the economic function of outsourcing. All they see is jobs that ‘go overseas’. They refuse to see what’s going on at the on-ramps. So, as per their playbook, they make sure you only see what they’re losing and none of what they’re gaining.

This is a simple concept. Outsourcing is not an exclusive function of employers in America. Businesses do it where they can to cut costs, which means they can be more competitive and solvent to their investors (more increasingly you and I), and their customers in offering more bang for the buck. Fact is, countries around the world also ‘outsource’ where they feel they can benefit. And, not surprisingly, many of them outsource to the good ole U.S. of A. In the final analysis, more jobs are created as a result of ‘outsourcing’ than are lost. But the left, standing on the off-ramp is oblivious to this phenomenon. Studies show that over the past 15 years, foreign corporations have moved jobs to the United States at a faster rate than jobs have left. “Jobs insourced to the United States increased from 4.9 million in 1991 to 6.4 million in 2001.” There’s been an 82 percent increase in insourced jobs compared to a 23 percent increase in outsourced jobs.

Source Bruce Bartlett, a senior fellow at the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. In their ‘perfect’ world, the Democrat party would like to eliminate outsourcing to appease the unions. It’s purely a political calculation for them, not an economic one. They claim outsourcing will increase unemployment here in the U.S. If that was true, then how can they explain our current unemployment rate, which the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics put at 5.4 percent in September 2005, is one of the lowest in the world and in our history. (This article originally published in October 2005, it is 4.4 percent as of October 2006, and is now the lowest in history.) France’s unemployment rate is 9.4 percent, Germany’s 9.9 percent and Italy’s 8.6 percent. Our Canadian neighbor’s is 6.6 percent. Quoting Walter Williams here “The next time you hear a politician whining about our “awful” job climate, ask him which European country we should look to for guidance in job creation. The fact of business is that our country is the world’s leader not only in job creation but in terms of where the world wants to invest its money.” Outsourcing is not a dirty word. And the party stuck on the off-ramp does not have the answer. Only spin.

Politics, War On Terror

Free, But Not Free To Kill, Patriot Act

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It should be of no surprise to anyone that since the Patriot Act was passed, the vocal minority that wants it abolished will not shut up about it and get on with their lives. Well, unless you can propose something that can protect our lives better than that, you should just shut up. When you don’t like the law that you made, you change it. Pretty much the same way it was made. Meanwhile, about 63 percent of the country believe it is just fine.

This vocal minority spans party lines; it is the wacko ends of the democrat and republican parties. Talk about strange bedfellows. No, we won’t go there. I checked my thesaurus on wacko and it came up with crackpot, weirdo, lamebrain, nut, kook, dingbat, screwball, oddball, and ding-a-ling. So for lack of a more descriptive term, ‘wacko’ will do just fine.

The common thread in their opposition to the Patriot Act is their fear that it will be abused. If you follow this logic to it’s ultimate conclusion, they hold to the notion that we would be better off dead without the Patriot Act than to effectively deal with the real threats at hand. This perverse denial of reality defies reason. The reality is, there are people who want to kill us. The reality is, it’s going to take physical intervention to stop an attack from occurring. The reality is, shredding a document called the Patriot Act will pretty much guarantee that physical intervention will not occur.

How would these people answer this question? “Knowing that the enemy is in 68 countries and probably still in the United States, and knowing that they need money to operate, and knowing they use electronics to communicate, and knowing they fly airplanes, and have in fact used them to kill, and have hundreds of other ways to kill us, and will if given the chance: What would you do that would enable the government to pre-empt an attack here in the United States, better than what the Patriot Act can? You simply have to draw the line that yes, we are a free people, but we are not free to kill.

To Believe This

Is To Ignore This

Race Relations, Uncategorized

Democrats Are Color-Blind On One Thing, Liberalism

The shift to the left in the political spectrum that the democrat party has achieved in the last year, has caused them to leave their legacy-base behind.  As a result, Sen. Joe Lieberman is now running as an independent for his own three-term seat because today’s democrat party has shunned him.  What with his 90% voting record in sync with his party.  About the only thing I can think of that democrats are color-blind in with respect to race is their quest for the liberal mantra.  Now Blacks aren’t liberal enough.  And this, from a constituency that votes 92% democrat. 

Aside from the arrogance of this party in, by everyone’s estimation, taking Black voters for granted, now they are tightening control and telling Blacks that they aren’t liberal enough?  

This repulsive thought aside, all I can say to Black voters is, the republican party welcomes you.   Politics aside, your vote is not decided by party affiliation.   The Florida panhandle is a good example.  The legacy democrats down here are more conservative than their party leadership and vote with less emphasis on the D than on the issues.   It’s not so much that there aren’t democrats down here that the party talks about writing off the south.  It’s that a lot of democrats down here will vote for a republican or a republican policy.  They were left behind long before Joe Lieberman.