Fighting to Preserve Liberty in America
Minimal to non-existent; Unlikely; No serious reforms were on the way; Needs to take a close look; Hardly the inspiring rhetoric of Knute Rockne or Winston Churchill. Tim Bishop’s back in his congressional seat starting his fifth term in office and already the group he was meeting with, the Long Island Farm Bureau, was expressing buyer’s remorse.
Maybe it was because he was trained as a medical doctor that Rand Paul knows that if you are going to lift something heavy you have to bend your knees and keep your back straight. Contrast that to the other members of Congress who stand on tiptoes, with their legs straight, bent at the waist leaning far over and picking through the $1.6 trillion deficit using only their thumb and forefinger, to find some morsel that they can extract from the budget, crying all the while “It’s too heavy, it’s too heavy.”
To No Fly or Not to No Fly, that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of indecision
Or take arms against a tin pot dictator
And by opposing end him. To golf, to play
No more – and by play to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand responsibilities
This job requires. ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To golf, to play –
To play, perchance to bracket: ay, there’s the rub,
To watch one’s pick, march on the final four
When at last we watch Duke play Pitt,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of getting elected.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of this job,
Bush’s problems, the Tea Party’s contumely
The pangs of despised polls, the Constitution’s stubbornness,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his departure make
With an electoral loss? Who would want this job?
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after this office,
The undiscovered retirement, from whose bourn
Only Bill Clinton returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than to fly to others that we know not of?
Thus making decisions does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of
Longing to be a community organizer again
Or to be able to vote “present”
And lose the name of action. – Soft you now,
Jimmy Carter, to you I will be compared
By all my sins remembered.
Apologies to William Shakespeare
That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.
You almost have to wonder, why in the world did he run for president? Was he swept up in the ego trip? Was he reading too much into his own press clippings? Did the historic opportunity of being the first real black president, sorry Bill Clinton, in U.S. history overwhelm a careful consideration of what the job entailed?
It’s a term I haven’t heard for a while but it came back to me when listening to Mary Katherine Hamm comment on how President Barack Obama always seems to make the big speech, the bold pronouncement and then doesn’t follow through, rather leaving that to others. Back when the term was popular it stood for an important looking individual in a position of power with nothing inside.
Vice President Joe Biden, the man President Barack Obama put in charge of the stimulus spending because, “nobody messes around with Joe,” met with Congressional leaders to talk about the budget for the remainder of this fiscal year. Jingling in his pocket was an additional $6.1 billion in change as all the Democrats had to offer, after the Republicans forced them to agree to $4 billion in cuts to get a two week extension from shutting down the government.
So here’s the bottom line. Once fully implemented, I’m convinced the Affordable Care Act will do what it was designed it to do — cut costs, cover everybody, end the worst abuses in the insurance industry, and bring down our long-term deficits. I am not open to re-fighting the battles of the last two years, or undoing the progress that we’ve made. But I am willing to work with anyone — anybody in this room, Democrat or Republican, governors or member of Congress — to make this law even better; to make care even better; to make it more affordable and fix what needs fixing. – President Barack Obama addressing the National Governor’s Association.
Is President Obama addressing members of the House of Representatives or the Senate? No. If he were, I would have no problem with what he said. Both he and the members of both houses of Congress are part of the federal government. No law gets passed until all three play their part. There are checks and balances between them, but they do negotiate and can take various positions.
When the unions and their progressive supporters hit the streets in Madison, Wisconsin the news cameras didn’t have to look high and low to find the Hitler posters, they could probably spot them from a hundred yards off, but honestly, who didn’t think there would be Hitler posters at a left wing rally? But in a effort to modernize, somebody found a newspaper and saw there was some unrest in the Middle East and voila, we had comparisons to Hosni Mubarak and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. So Governor Scott Walker, we are to believe, is acting like a dictator not a democratically elected governor working through a democratically elected legislature? Hmmm, I wonder how the public sector unions got the “rights” they ferociously cling to?
To hear the progressives talk about the public sector unions in Wisconsin and other locales you would think collective bargaining was enshrined in the Bill of Rights. We have a right to bargain collectively. The unions are fighting for their rights. The Bill of Rights was won through the fighting of a bloody revolution. The right for all citizens to vote was won through the passage of an amendment to the Constitution. So, naturally, the right of public sector unions was won through a similar groundswell of popular support, right? No. Actually it was started by one man, fighting for his political life, in the shadow of Tammany Hall.
It seemed an unlikely place. But then so was Gettysburg. If you asked anyone at about the time the Tea Party started if Wisconsin would be a major battleground, I don’t think they would have agreed. But in the last few days, a new Republican governor has taken on the public unions and they have fought back with a vengeance. It is a battle they can little afford to lose.
