Monthly Archives: September 2011

Economy, Media, Pensacola, Politics, War On Terror

Remembering 9/11

Reflecting back on the 9/11 attack is easy for me, because I’ve never forgotten it or the aftermath. The prayers and sympathy for the victims and their families goes without saying.

I remember vividly how that horrific attack galvanized America as one unit focused on helping the victims and, at the same time, finally fighting back at those who had been killing Americans for years.

 

Our enemy had a good day. Aside from killing innocent Americans, they hurt our economy so badly that it took years to recover.

Feeling eerily uncomfortable with pro-American unity in both political parties, Sen. Ted Kennedy must have felt his party was threatened to minority party status for decades unless he could do something to stop it. Sadly, I remember how America’s unity ended when Sen. Ted Kennedy made the false accusation that the Bush administration believed Saddam Hussein had “planned the 9/11 attack.” I remember how quickly the political Left ate that up, buttressed by a willing media. It was the ‘lion of the senate’ who politicized what was called the ‘war on terror.’ For that strategy alone, Ted Kennedy deserves credit for being the one person most responsible for prolonging the war to a tenth anniversary, and counting. That’s what I remember.

The reason I’ll never forget it goes to survival. Because the people in charge of the war on terror now, all Ted Kennedy acolytes, want to give the enemy our constitutional protections, lowering the bar to a criminal matter. They want to scrap the ‘war on terror’ and the most effective parts of the ‘Patriot Act,’ calling it an ‘overseas contingency operation.’ And we have Ted Kennedy to thank for it.

There’s a saying, “what goes around comes around.” This applies to Sen. Ted Kennedy too. He went from the lion of the senate to a maggot in hell. A small consolation in the fight that continues to this day.

Link: Schneider: Tell us what you remember, why you will never forget  | Media Research Center video

Update 9/11/2011: This is a repost from August 14, 2011. Didn’t make the cut for today’s edition of the Pensacola News Journal. And so it is that the political aspect of the aftermath will only be found here. Just added a video “Tribute To The Media” put together by the Media Research Center.

Economy, Politics

Obama’s Jobs Plan, WPA v2.0

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If you missed the president’s address to the joint session of congress last night, here’s the short version. He wants to spend a half trillion dollars more, ostensibly believing that what didn’t work the last time, and the time before that, will work this time. To build roads, bridges, and infrastructure.

Is the country suffering from amnesia? That’s what the first $785 billion so-called stimulus bill was supposed to have been used for.  And it wasn’t. And we are just supposed to ignore the failure of his plan and the fraud that it was?

What President Obama’s problem is, well, aside from not having a clue about capitalism and free-market economics, is that he is a victim of FDR syndrome. His only plan is to spend money on temporary make-work projects (remember that shovel-ready pitch?) while waiting for the economy to rebound. Recovering from the worst economy since the Great Depression is a “slow process,” the president said. Like the WPA, the economy would improve faster if the president would just get government out of the way. It’s like the WPA version 2.0.

2012 Election, Economy, Politics, Race Relations

Obama Did Not Fail, He Succeeded

As an example of just how divisive and mean-spirited the political Left is, Democrats in Washington included, if you oppose Obama’s agenda to remake America into something like Europe is trying to get away from, then you must be a ‘racist.’

Three years later, with ample evidence that Obama is making America worse; no economic recovery, national debt so high as to equal generational theft, no job growth, ‘adjusted’ unemployment over 9 percent, real unemployment double that, and black youth unemployment over 50 percent in urban areas like Washington, D.C., and if you still support him, doesn’t that make you a ‘racist?’

Oh yeah, give me more of this.

 

Organized Labor, Politics

Labor To Obama, Where’s Mine?

Labor Union chiefs are not happy with President Obama. They bought and paid for his election with “grand visions of pushing through a sweeping agenda that would help boost sagging membership and help revive union strength.”

Now labor unions are talking about ending the symbiosis between them and the Democratic party. They will stand by him for re-election, using their SEIU goons where necessary. What’s different is that they have come to the realization that, like any other business, they have to grow their business (membership) on their own. Sink or swim. Thankfully, they simply can’t count on the government making laws to do it for them.

The AFL-CIO’s president, Richard Trumka, says it’s part of a new strategy for labor to build an independent voice separate from the Democratic Party.

Big Labor is facing a new reality alright. They are beginning to see that it is not the job of the federal government to boost union rolls or union jobs. Or at the very least, that President Obama can’t deliver what they paid for. They shouldn’t feel singled out though. President Obama hasn’t a clue how to create permanent jobs for anyone, union or otherwise.

Link: Labor unions adjust to new reality under Obama  |  It’s Not A Story About Wisconsin

2008 Election, 2012 Election, Economy, Florida, Organized Labor, Politics, Race Relations

A Time For Choosing

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Since we were never given the choice in the last presidential election, the next election will be the time to choose. The 2008 election culminated in eight years of bashing Bush, and Bush not responding once. Americans were offered only hope and change. And who is against hope, and who is against change that makes things better? ‘Better’ being the operative word.

Obama never said, elect me and I’m going to nationalize health care and interfere with free-market economics by declaring some industries and businesses as ‘too big to fail,’ and borrow and spend trillions of dollars, not to stimulate the economy, but to ‘save’ union jobs in the public sector and the auto industry. He never said elect me and I’ll make it the responsibility of government to increase labor union membership.

Did we elect a President to put America on the fast track to Socialism? Do you think he would have beat Hillary Clinton in the primaries if he ran on what he is doing to this country today?

But now there is a choice. And it is no better illustrated than in Florida’s new law to drug-test welfare recipients and certain state employees in order to enforce a drug-free workplace. Progressives argue that Gov. Scott was trying to save money on the backs of the poor.

I don’t think it’s a matter of fiscal conservatism. Whether conservative or liberal, broke is broke. Just because someone is using drugs is no justification for spending more than we have. And it’s not that Scott, or Republicans, don’t care about poor people. They care about people who are on drugs and getting public monies.

The disintegration of the family among many poor people is a good reason to make bad choices. And it is welfare programs that tend to replace the father, or mother, and create this welfare class that is evermore dependent on the government. What Gov. Scott is doing is a move in the right direction. A move in the direction of teaching people some personal responsibility. Get off the drugs and you can continue to receive help.

This bill brings out the differences between the political Left and Right. One endeavors to fix the problem by attempting to fix the person. In this case, to provide an incentive to kick the habit and become self-sufficient again. The other seems content to be the giver of money, with no reason or motivation to quit a bad habit, which also tends to garner a strong voting block of welfare recipients.  In this context, it is Republican policies that try to heal and raise the poor by making them independent, if not just less dependent on government. It’s the old, “Give a man a fish and he won’t starve for a day. Teach a man how to fish and he won’t starve for his entire life” thing. It is Democratic policies that tend to keep the poor right where they are, dependent on the government for their livelihood, meager as it might be. The uneducated will easily identify with the person who gives them what they want instead of the one that wants them to earn what they want on their own. It’s about trying to teach people how to get off of welfare instead of trying to find out how we can find money to subsidize destructive behavior. Healing the person or family is better, more compassionate, than keeping them where they are. The bill isn’t about hating poor people.

Let’s look at the results of a landmark Democratic program. Nearly half of the country is getting some sort of government assistance. Does it look like the war on poverty (that began 50 years ago) has worked? There are drug rehabilitation programs out there, some at no cost. Individual responsibility means taking advantage of it and choosing to use what would be their drug money toward their own rehabilitation. How else does one teach personal responsibility if they have to do nothing on their own to make a change? They can get their welfare, if they choose to get off drugs first.

Democratic programs do nothing to reduce the number of poor people. What they have done is grow government and make poor people more dependent on government, and on the Democrat party. That is the result, whether intended or not.

There will always be people at the bottom of the ladder. The bottom of the ladder for U.S. citizens is half-way up the ladder compared to other countries. Democrat’s policies tend to make that ladder horizontal, destroying the notion of the individual.

Similarly, you will hear Democrats complain about the so-called income gap. They think it is evil that some people can make and accumulate wealth while some don’t.  I wouldn’t be so concerned about a gap between the rich and poor. I’d be concerned to make sure that the poor have every chance, the same chance, to get rich on their own.

Republicans have a HUGE up-hill battle to get people to understand that their policies are geared toward people helping themselves instead of relying on the government as their caretaker. Encouraging personal responsibility is so easily demagogued as Republicans hating the poor. And Democrats never miss the opportunity to do just that.

The immoral aspect of the Democratic social vision is that they put their faith in the government instead of the individual, which conditions poor people to look to them for sustenance. The fact that it builds strong voting blocks is no coincidence.

I’d like to see no minimum wage and no capital gains taxes. Since that has never been the case in my lifetime, one can only wonder how much better off ‘the poor’ would be. Again, it highlights the difference between the competing philosophies. Big government and control of economic conditions, or less government involvement and allowing free-market economic principles to work.

You don’t have to look far to see the difference. The free-market capitalism camp made us the greatest country in the world in under 200 years. The rest of the world is in the other camp and has nothing but shared misery to show for it.