Well Isn't That Special!

                                                                           

Well Isn't That Special!

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her House fellows have been quite busy since winning control of the U.S. House a month ago.

Did they come up with a fix for the ballooning national debt? No. Did they propose solutions for explosive urban crime? Sorry. No. Did they figure out a way to solve Obamacare's budget busting problems? Again, no.

What Pelosi and company have been doing is patching together their first bill for 2019. It's called HR1 and if passed would pretty much eliminate any requirement to prove citizenship when voting. Just log into Voting.Gov, provide an email address, provide a password, and vote. Hell, you can even vote more than once if you come up with multiple email addresses! The bill would also make it possible for heavily Democratic states to gerrymander voting districts, sounding the death knell for the Republican Party.

Oh but HR1 does so much more. It would codify unproven sexual accusations that would bar any Supreme Court nominee from being confirmed if even one woman came forward and claimed sexual harassment against court nominees. Apparently making conservative court nominees heft a cross up Calvary, a crown of thorns on their heads, ain't enough for the Dems.

On the campaign front, HR1 would override the Supreme Court's 2013 decision that ruled corporations are allowed to contribute to political campaigns... a la Citizen's United (The bill exempts labor unions, who would be allowed to pour even more money into Democratic coffers....and Pelosi will not mention that she raised $136 million dollars in union money to elect a Democratic majority) 

HR1 also mandates that any orange-haired Presidents currently occupying the Oval Office release his tax returns. (That portion of the bill does not require a Democratic President from releasing college records, or how many aliases folks like Barack Hussein Obama used prior to winning the Presidency!)

Then, in a flight of whimsy, Pelosi and company proposed transparency in Congressional ethics, a law that would bar those currently serving in Congress from serving on corporate boards. I personally thought this one was kind of cute. Anyone who follows Congress much will remember that Speaker Pelosi herself was nailed when it was disclosed that she participated in the insider buying of stocks using insider information where a government law would benefit specific corporations. And barring Congress from serving on corporate boards would do nothing to stop Pelosi's banker husband from owning 20 percent of Clean Energy Corporation, a natural gas company that benefited from legislation Ms. Pelosi herself introduced in the House six years ago.

Does the Democratic House hold out any hope that HR1 will pass? Of course not! It cannot get past the Republican controlled Senate. And even if it did clear both houses of Congress, Trump would veto it.

No, HR1 is just a weapon Pelosi and company can use to demonize Republicans. The law is just the first of many "side circuses" the Democrats will come up with to divert public attention from the fact that Democrats have zero answers to our nation's problems.

Now isn't that special!

                                                                                    

Dear Liberal Media

                                                                     

Dear Liberal Media,

Last week three of your networks trotted out President Reagan's liberal bastard son in order to insult Republicans. His (Ron Reagan's) exact words were: "Republican voters would vote in Vladimir Putin over a Democrat".

I must admit, that got me to thinking. Putin is a despot and a murderer. He is repugnant. His actions go against everything I believe in.

Alas, sadly I guess I got to go with Putin over Elizabeth "Pochahantas" Warren, or Bernie Sanders, or, god forbid, Hillary Clinton, or a dozen other Democratic Presidential hopefuls. Democrats want to spend us into bankruptcy, they want open borders and the destruction of ICE and to give amnesty to 30 million illegals. Democrats attack religion, embrace immigration for radical Muslims, kiss Black urban ass as never before, wish to close our prisons and open abortion clinics on every street corner.

So, yeah, I guess I gotta go for Putin if that's my only "non-Democrat" choice.

Ain't that sad?

Hey, liberal media! Lots of us don't particularly care for Trump. Lots of us wish we had President Reagan, or Dwight Eisenhower, or old Abe Lincoln back, but we don't. So Trump's our best choice for now. And, while we don't like his porn star affairs, and we're not crazy about his business dealings, and we know he's inarticulate. But, guess what? He's still a better choice than any Democrat out there!

Oh, by the way, we Republicans like you media people even less. And don't make us choose between a Democrat and Putin....you might not like the results.

Baking A Bigger Pie

                                                                       

Liberals are small-minded in every respect, none more than in their continually trying to advance the idea that one must take a slice of someone else's pie if one is to be fair.

Conservatives have always championed baking a bigger pie...one that feeds more people through the simple means of doing things more efficiently.

Those two opposing theories were formulated centuries ago. It was the liberal economist John Maynard Keynes who advocated for government masters who would control the distribution of wealth. (It was also the economic theories of Keynes who Lyndon Johnson followed in drafting his massive fail in his War on Poverty programs...programs that created whole generations of lazy folks addicted to a government check.) Conservative economist Adam Smith in his "Wealth of Nations" disagreed with Keynes. Smith said, in effect, "just grow the pie larger".

And we have. That truth played out just yesterday as I was reading through some 1976 Fresno Bees that my friends Carrol and Jerry so generously shared with me.

In looking through the grocery ads I began comparing the minimum wage in 1976 and now, then gauging whether prices were cheaper then than they are now. To do so I had to use percent of hours worked". Given the eternal erosion of the dollar, that's the only way one can accurately compare price points.

So, in 1976 the hourly minimum wage was $2.30 per hour. Today, because we've experienced a new birth of freedom across the years, the average minimum wage varies wildly, by state. However the U.S. Department of Labor helped me out a bit. Using statistical metrics for all 50 states the Labor Department says the average hourly worker is paid $10.50 an hour.

So, okay, let's get back to that grocery list from 1976. In 1976 a six pack of Pepsi ran you $1.30. To buy that Pepsi six pack in 1976 you had to work over a half hour. Today, thanks to greater manufacturing efficiencies, and the competition from free markets, you need work only about ten minutes to earn enough for that six pack....which means you're wealthier today because of free market capitalism....all because America baked a bigger pie.

But let's not restrict our comparison to soft drinks. That same 1976 ad showed a sale on chicken breasts at $1.00 a pound. So, again, you would have had to work just a bit short of 30 minutes to earn a pound of yardbird. Well, ironically, off to the right of my desk sits a current food circular for a local supermarket. They are hawking chicken breasts for .89 cents per pound. So, were I earning the average minimum wage today I could buy eleven pounds of chicken breasts for less than an hour's labor....or five pounds or so more than I could in 1976.

Oh sure, I know most of you just love reading what a gallon of gas cost in 1976. But even with gasoline, one has to compare each era's hourly wage to accurately measure price points. For example (I looked it up) the average 1976 price for a gallon of gas was .62 cents per gallon....and it is just as "cheap" today at the current national average of $2.90.

To my liberal "Keyenesian friends", who always bemoan that someone else has a bigger slice of the pie than you, I will only say that free market capitalism has grown that pie far larger, and given folks in poverty far more opportunity to have a slice than anything you and your government masters ever dreamed up.

On Friday we learned that our Gross National Product (the sum of all our nation's goods and services) grew at 4.1 percent. That compares to Obama's average over eight years of less than 2 percent GDP growth. Were you to listen to CNBC, CBS, ABC, NBC, or CNN over the last year and a half you would have heard that a 4.1 percent growth rate was impossible.

It really isn't. When the restrains of oppressive government are torn away our nation has proven again and again that we can grow a bigger pie. President Reagan threw Jimmy Carter out of the kitchen in 1980...and grew a monstrous pie.......a pie that nourished such startups as Apple Computer, Home Depot, Walmart, Intel Corporation and hundreds of other companies that made our lives better.

Grow the pie, people. Quit bitching about the size of the other guy's slice and grow the damned pie.

That's your economics lesson for today and............

you're welcome.

"...The Center Cannot Hold"

                                                                         

"The Center Cannot Hold"

After the First World War was settled a rather disconsolate poet by the name of W.B. Yeats wrote a poem. He called it The Second Coming and in that poem he wrote the end of a kindler, gentler civilization. Yeats' Second Coming was meant to convey the second Apocalypse, this one far worse than the flood.

I provide Yeats' words here, so that I might make a point later on:

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

*****************************************

"Things fall apart.......the center cannot hold"

That is exactly what we are seeing on the political and social scene today. America is experiencing a savagery we have not seen since the years immediately preceding the Civil War.

Where once America owned a political center, we are, today, choosing up sides, wholly abandoning the idea that, while we have our differences, they were, in previous years, subject to negotiation.

That is no longer true. When did we lose our "center?" We don't really know. Perhaps it began with the Clintons, two people so corrupt we hadn't seen their likes since the Harding Administration. The lies, the coverups, the hunger for power, the demeaning of a White House that once housed greatness, brought down by Oval Office blow jobs and renting out the Lincoln bedroom in exchange for campaign donations.

Perhaps the "center" weakened further when a George W. Bush, self-proclaimed "compassionate conservative" spent more federal dollars than any three President's before him, trillions toward trying to democratize Muslims, hundreds of billions more for a crumbling, union dominated education system and a $700 billion annual prescription drug program than enriched no one except the drug companies.

Perhaps the final crumbling of the "center" arrived when we elected Barack Hussein Obama, a "666" demon right out of Revelations....a man who promised unity on the stump, then after being elected, did every thing he could to divide us, racially, and economically, all the while demonizing the working class and pampering every social fringe group on the planet, most of all the Muslim world.

So, as I posted the latest poll the other day, we now have an electorate where one third believe we are nearing a second Civil War. We live in a world where everything we once believed to be noble has been turned upside down. Statues of historic figures are being torn down. Names once deemed great are now being removed from the public square and the front entrances to our universities. Whole armies of liberal university professors have taught our young that our founding fathers do not deserve our admiration, and our own founding Constitution is looked upon as something that should be changed, depending on how the latest poll numbers read.

The Republican Party itself has moved far to the Left, so much so that John and Robert Kennedy would, today, consider Republicans as wild-eyed Leftists. They would be frozen by shock and awe at the huge, budget-busting programs the Republican controlled Congress passed this year.

And the only saving grace for the Republicans is that the Democrats moved even further left, creating a demarcation between warring parties that would imply madness. Led by the Pelosi and Sanders coalitions the "new Democrat" is Marxist-Socialist, leaving even long dead Karl Marx to wonder just how they intend to pay for all this free stuff.

But perhaps the greatest tragedy is that the American people themselves have forsaken the "center". Egged on by 5th Column anarchists, Hollywood celebrates so morally impoverished they could out corrupt Nero, and power starved politicians, America is no longer America.

Mr. Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" in 1919, thinking the acopolypse was at hand. Little did he know that it would take another century for the embers of our own destruction to spark the flames that promise to destroy us.

"Careful What You Wish For, Nance"

                                                                     

Psst!  Hey Nancy, how do you like them New York apples last night?  A Hispanic Socialist by the name of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took down a liberal Congressman from Queens who had been parking his liberal ass in the House for 19 years!  He did everything, right, Nance!  He funneled federal lucre to his district, he voted against border walls, he opposed every Republican proposal that ever sailed through Congress.  Then got beat by a lady who believes Venezuelan socialism is just the ticket, and that toilet paper shortages and 300 percent annual inflation is just fine as long as every one is suffering equally.  She believes in open borders to such an extent that she wants to fire ICE, the Border Patrol, and everyone who works to curb illegal immigration.  Cool, huh Nance?

Spineless America

                                                                     

If America had been peopled by the current crop of Americans during World War II Hitler's grandson would be ruling the world and the Japanese would own Asia. Fighting and winning  that world wide war, that killed 50 million people, required great character, tremendous courage, and steely-eyed will, all traits the current crop of Americans seem to lack.

We are confronted with our societal weaknesses every day.  Cold blooded killers either sit on death row for 25 years, their lives extended by court appeals, or are coddled by life sentences, American taxpayers dishing out $44,000 a year to feed, house and medicate them.  And Americans insist that criminals who were given probation four or five times before they were finally incarcerated, are capable of being rehabilitated.  

On the wider societal front parental supervision is virtually non-existent.  They surrender their children to a horribly failing education system.  And when they are not  in school their spermal offal spend their time in front of gaming machine or texting or sexting on their cell phones.  The resultant harvest has been two generations of "everyone wins a blue ribbon" snowflakes who are dumb as door knobs and as sensitive as a pansy when they are offended by life's hard truths.

The weekend's headlines reveal just how weak we are.  Former First Lady Laura Bush has come out against separating children from their illegal invading parents.  An hour later the current First Lady entered the fray, stating that she too didn't like children being separated from their criminal parents, even if it might discourage future invasions.

And Americans seem unable to even distinguish between the processing of those who seek asylum at a border checkpoint and those who cross our border illegally.  At the border checkpoints children are not taken from their parents.  Those child confiscations are taking place only for the illegal border crossers because America has only recently discovered that, under the Obama regime, some 15,000 children were turned over to child sex traffickers....a pretty good reason to confiscate children where no parental documentation is available to prove family status.

We have become a nation that can't make the hard choices, even when it's for our own good.  We refuse to condemn urban Black thuggery.  We refuse to deport 30 million illegal invaders.  We refuse to demand good educations for our children.  We refuse to impose a military draft that might toughen up the snowflake generation and give them a sense of self-discipline....instead relying on an all volunteer force comprised of less than 1 percent of the population.  Hell, we even condemn President Trump for trying to improve our trade agreements, Americans seemingly happy with Canada imposing 300 percent tariffs and China owning a $200 billion trade surplus. 

All of these weaknesses create a void that must be filled.  A review of history proves it.  Our void will either be filled by a totalitarian from the left or right....or by a Muslim tyrant hell bent on taking control of the last fifth of the world that is not Muslim.    

America is the 97 pound weakling that is just waiting to be bitch-slapped into oblivion. 

Sad.  Damned Sad.

Trump...the "drunken sailor"

                                                                 

"Trump....The Drunken Sailor Who Demolishes The Bar"

My wife, Dam does not read, watch, or listen to the news. Any news she gets she gets through the filter of a customer who's sitting in her salon chair. Thus, the quality of her news sources are always suspect.

I do not watch the news either. I've found that I have to sift through all of the right wing or left biases so much I just read the news on seven news sites each morning, then do my own research on what's being reported. Sometimes that research takes a lot of time...perhaps five times greater than the time it takes to hear a blip on a news channel. But at least, when I've researched the issue, I know far more about it than the average citizen, even far more about it than the talking heads on the news channel.

I am always reluctant to pass the results of my own research on to Dam. It simply gets too complicated since Dam has not educated herself from point A to point M, and I'm try to discuss point R. Too tiring.

Yes, one day last week, I felt patient enough to pass along a few of President Trump's most recent adventures. I told her about how Trump had managed to bring Fat Elvis, over in North Korea, to the table for talks, even as three past Presidents had failed miserably in doing so, even with their old school diplomats and with their best manners.

I told her about Trump's revolving door cabinets and his horrendous treatment of his own attorney general.

I recited some of Trump's most audacious morning tweets.

I related to her half a hundred of the liberal media's attacks on Trump and his family, including the divorce rumors with Mellania because she chose to mend from medical ills in private. I told her about the million personal attacks on Ivanka when she posed for a Mother's Day picture with her child.

I related some of the most inconsequential attacks on Trump..about his weight, about his Quarter Pounder and fries lunches, about when he hosted a press dinner at the White House and the scribes went back to their newspaper offices and TV stations and complained that Trump got two scoops f ice cream to their measly one.

I then went into my "Energizer Bunny Trump" impersonation, pursing my lips as small as they could get, then reciting as best I could some of Trump's Twitter attacks on his liberal enemies. At this, Dam burst out laughing, encouraging me to do more of them, sometimes both of us laughing like hyenas over the ridiculousness of both left and right.

So Dam says "I like Trump. I like that he's not like anyone else. I like that he is defending American workers by attacking the unfair trade laws. I like knowing that, though he talks rough, at least he's not the typical smooth talking politician that's lying to you."

How could I disagree with that? There are tens of millions of Trump supporters who, tired of the same old politics, tired of the same old games....whether it be immigration, or trade, or foreign relations, or taxes, like the idea that Trump is so simple that they at least know what he's thinking.

As for myself? I yearn for another Ronald Reagan. But President Reagan is dead. I long for a conservative President who can speak intelligently, think complex thoughts, be more polite, be a bit more likable. But we ain't got that. We've got a small army of Republicans In Name Only in Congress, the rest of the seats filled with outright socialists...men and women who set their moral compass by the latest political poll.

So we've got Trump, the adulterer, the philanderer, the guy who has the attention span of a five year old. And Trump is the drunken sailor who went in and tore up the bar.

Except the bar needed tearing up. America got too nice. We've allowed 30 million illegal invaders to come here, then we succor them with generous welfare programs. We've doled out foreign aid to folks who hate us. We've sacrificed millions of jobs to unfair trade laws, we've said "that's okay" to half of the world who kicked us in the shins.

And now "drunken sailor Trump" is throwing America's vast weight around. He's saying no more money to those who hate us. He's saying he's willing to start a trade war if other countries won't play fair, including our NAFTA partners, Mexico and Canada, who have, for years, been a conduit for Asia and Europe to exceed trade quotas by running them through Mexico and Canada, as efficient as a Mexican drug cartel.

I hear Canada's pissed about Trump's throwing up tariff's on Chinese steel being passed through Canada. Or Korean autos being run across the border from Mexico. Yet both of our NAFTA partners have been gaming us for years. Go look at how many roadblocks Mexico throws up against American exports to that country. Go look at Canada's 300 percent tariff on American produced cheese and butter. Hell, Canada is a tariff mecca! Canadian provinces even throw up tariffs agains each other!

So, for now, I'm going with "the drunken sailor". I like my tax cut. I like my conservative Supreme Court Judge up there on the court. I like that Trump's making millions of illegal Mexicans nervous. I like that Trump brought Fat Elvis to the table with his extreme sanctions on North Korea. And I like that he's given the rest of the world a hissy fit over their unfair trade barriers.

Cold beer anyone? I think the beer cooler is the last thing standing after Trump wrecked the bar.