As the Occupy Wall Street movement starts to sputter and annoy people, a recent announcement by New York University pretty much sums it up.

New York University is introducing two classes for credit studying the Occupy Wall Street movement. The undergraduate course will be offered through the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. The course will be titled, “Why Occupy Wall Street? The History and Politics of Debt and Finance.” Another professor will offer a graduate level seminar on the demonstration.

In a previous post, I wrote about Charles Murray’s speech on the state of post-secondary education. His main thesis was that employer’s have no idea the value of a degree today, because of all the nonsensical courses that are being offered. So having a degree is often meaningless. He pointedly remarked that the attractiveness of a Yale degree has nothing to do with what the student learned at Yale, but rather that as an eighteen-year old he was able to get into Yale, meaning that there had to be some raw material there to work with.

So the protestors take to the street to complain that they can’t get a job and blame it on Wall Street. They leave college with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and no way to pay it off. When a potential employer looks at the applicant’s transcript and sees two courses on Occupy Wall Street, what conclusions does the employer draw with regard to hiring that employee? Couldn’t the applicant have taken Advanced Statistics instead? You decide. Oh, by the way, there aren’t any courses that I am aware of that teach about the Tea Party Movement. Maybe it’s because most Tea Party protestors already have jobs.

 
That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

Photo by Neil T

I had no idea. I thought that runaway spending was a bad thing. I know that in business as well as in our personal lives when we borrow and spend far beyond the amount of money we take in, trouble comes calling. How did I get it so mixed up?

What did I do? I spoke up along with my Tea Party brethren. I should have kept my mouth shut. After all, John Kerry said so, and John Kerry went to Harvard. This is what he said,

On NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, the Massachusetts Democrat called Standard & Poor’s lowering of the nation’s credit rating from AAA to AA+ as “without question, tea party downgrade.”

“A minority of people in the House of Representative countered even the will of many Republicans in the United States Senate, who were prepared to do a bigger deal,” he said.

Kerry defended President Barack Obama’s repeated efforts to put a grand bargain deal on the table, which would have cut upwards of $4 trillion from the deficit over a decade, rather than the final debt ceiling deal that cuts between $2.1 to $2.4 trillion.

It makes perfect sense. John Kerry was for out of control spending before he was against it. He makes it crystal clear. The Tea Party which sprang up like the grass roots movement that it is, after TARP and the stimulus spending passed the Democrat controlled Congress and was signed by the Democrat President Barack Obama, spoke out against the spending and made it a front and center issue and then demanded a smaller amount of spending cuts? How could that be? (Hint: John Kerry likes taxes; lots of them).

Since becoming a Tea Party activist, I have visited Washington several times. It looks like a normal city. I guess you have to live there or work there a long time before you realize that up is down and down is up. It takes a lot of imagination to grasp that spending a little more money than spending a lot more money is a cut in spending, even though you are spending more. We rubes who don’t live in Washington don’t get it and the politicians keep rolling their eyes to let us know they are tired of explaining it to someone who didn’t go to Harvard. The real estate market in Washington is doing fine, but the real estate market in the rest of the country is in the tank. How does that happen? (Hint: all those additional federal government workers have to live somewhere).

How could I be so foolish? I guess I needed another lecture from David Axelrod to ‘splain it to me. And, hey, here he is:

“If we had defaulted on our debt, the consequences would have been dramatic and lasting,” Axelrod said. “It was the wrong thing to do to push the country to that point. It was something that should never have happened that clearly is on the backs of those who were willing the see the country default, those very strident voices in the tea party.”

I need to work on lowering my strident voice. I should have shut my mouth so that the debt limit could have been raised without a peep and the spending binge could have continued. I didn’t realize that I was jeopardizing Barack Obama’s chances for a second term. How could I possibly expect the dear man to fix “the mess” he inherited in less than eight years? After all, Roosevelt couldn’t get us out of the Great Depression in eight years until he hired all of those unemployed men into the Army, Navy and Marines. Obama is following Roosevelt’s playbook and it is not working today either. If Roosevelt could get elected four times, why not Obama? (We’ll get around to that Constitutional Amendment problem later).

Defaulting on our debt means not paying the interest or principle on our debt not on the failure to subsidize ethanol or Chevy Volt cars. As President Obama holds the checkbook, he could always make those payments on time with the tax revenue coming in, but somehow default, default, default is all we heard. I guess the “devil would make him do it,” the Tea Party being said devil.

The Tea Party supported strong fiscal conservatives in the 2010 election. How dare we?! Those we elected put together a budget in the House of Representatives shortly after taking control. How reckless! The Senate hasn’t passed a budget in over 800 days. John Kerry ,call your office. The Republicans in the House of Representatives passed a plan called Cut, Cap, and Balance that would actually bring down the spending and toward a balanced budget. When that bill arrived in the Senate, it was immediately stuffed in a drawer. John? Rand Paul, a freshman member of the Senate who has not yet breathed enough of the rarefied air there to understand that spending is cutting, put together his own plan to cut $500 billion from the deficit immediately and balance the budget in four years. Does John Kerry know who Rand Paul is?  John, look him up, you can probably find him easily enough on the floor of the Senate when you are not out wind surfing or figuring out how not to pay sales tax on your multimillion dollar yacht.

So, I apologize for causing the downgrade of America’s debt. I didn’t mean to cause so much trouble for the ruling class. After all, they are very busy meeting at the Harvard Club deciding how to run our lives, so that we don’t screw that job up, with all that Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness crap. I will try very hard to mind my peas and cues, or is it, mind my cues and eat my peas? Whatever. I will try very hard…but don’t bet the ranch on it.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

This is a story you are not likely to hear about from the mainstream media. As previously reported on this site the Obama administration, led by Hillary Clinton, came down hard on the sovereign country of Honduras for upholding their constitution and fighting against a Chavez style, “leader for life” power grab by their president Manuel Zelaya.

To summarize, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was coming up against term limits. His buddies, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and the Castro brothers in Cuba, wanted to help Zelaya transform Honduras into another socialist enclave.  The Honduran legislature and Supreme Court blocked his efforts as unconstitutional. When the head of the army tried to enforce the ruling of the Supreme Court, Zelaya fired him and then with his thugs stole referendum ballots from an air force base where they were being held after the Supreme Court ruling.

Zelaya was removed from office and exiled. The presidential elections proceeded on schedule, a new president was elected and democracy was preserved. As a result of the commotion an inquiry panel of the Organization of American States (OAS) was formed to investigate what happened. Here are some of the conclusions they reached.

“the political crisis was set off” in January 2009. That’s when officials from the president’s office met with congressional members of his own Liberal Party and “threatened them with the rupture of the constitutional order if they did not choose—as supreme court justices—lawyers who were not on the list of 45 supreme court candidates” officially nominated through a legal selection process. According to the full report, Mr. Micheletti testified that U.S. Ambassador Hugo Llorens was party to this pressure on Congress to break the law.

Why is American Ambassador Hugo Llorens pressuring legislators in Honduras  to break the law and to pack the Honduran Supreme Courts with Zelaya puppets?

The report also says that ahead of the crisis, the international community did nothing to help defend the democracy. On the contrary, the OAS decided to send a mission for the referendum, “despite the fact that every state institution with competency in the matter had issued resolutions that it was illegal and that it should not take place.”

When the Honduran government acted against its rogue president, Hillary Clinton immediately labeled it a coup d’etat and pulled the visas of the fifteen members of the Honduran Supreme Court so they could not travel to the U.S. So why does the United States immediately come to the defense of Manuel Zelaya who is backed by Hugo Chavez and the Castro brothers instead of the rule of law? Everyone who has looked into this has come down on the side of the Honduran government and democracy.

There are many people who are bending over backwards to claim Barack Obama is not a socialist merely because he hasn’t taken over all of the means of production. When it starts to rain, I don’t need to wait until I am drenched to head for cover. This is just one more piece of the puzzle that this is someone we have to get out of office in November of 2012, before he does more damage than we can recover from in our lifetime.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

Mommy! Johnny Boehner didn’t return my phone call! Waaaah! Seriously? Is this what a president says in a press briefing? Good Grief!

Peggy Noonan wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, that captures the character of this president quite nicely.

For the longest time he wouldn’t engage, and now he’s engaged. For the longest time he didn’t care about spending, and now he cares about spending. Good, both in terms of policy and for him. But his decision to become engaged has become a decision to dominate, to have his face in front of the television cameras with his news conferences, pronouncements, and what his communications people are probably calling his “ownership” of any final agreement. He’s trying to come across as the boss, the indispensable man, the leader. And, of course, the reasonable one.

That’s all very nice and part of Political Positioning 101, but at this point it’s not helping. He’s becoming box-office poison. His numbers are falling. The RealClearPolitics composite job approval poll rating has him down six points since June 2, when the debt-ceiling crisis began. That fall, from 52% to 46%, exactly tracks his heightened media presence and his increased attempts to be seen as dominant. Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, said that if he ran for president today he’d lose, that his job-approval numbers are “worse than they appear,” and that he continues to have real trouble with undecided voters.

And if you’ve watched him lately, you know why. When he speaks on the debt negotiations, he is not only extremely boring, with airy and bromidic language—really they are soul-killing, his talking points—but he never seems to be playing it straight. He always seems to be finagling, playing the angles in some higher game that only he gets. In two and a half years he has reached the point that took George W. Bush five years to reach: People aren’t listening anymore.

The other day he announced the Gang of Six agreement with words that enveloped the plan in his poisonous embrace: “I wanted to give folks a quick update on the progress that we’re making.” We’re. He has “continued to urge both Democrats and Republicans to come together.” What would those little devils do without Papa? “The good news is that today a group of senators . . . put forward a proposal that is broadly consistent with the approach that I’ve urged.” I’ve urged. Me, me, me.

The Republicans have put forward plan after plan, the Democrats acting alone, none. Yes there is that gang of six or seven or whatever, but you will notice that the Democrats will not take a step into that minefield without a Republican at their side. But what have the Democrats done by themselves? President Obama puts forth a budget and when that is laughed off the air, he comes back a couple of weeks later with a new one. It’s unheard of for a president to do that, and then his budget is put up for a vote and it goes down 97-0. He couldn’t even find a single Democrat to vote for it? Do the Democrats in the Senate under Harry Reid vote for anything other than to block it?

Let’s recap the plans on the table:

While Obama, who shunned press conferences and briefings for months, now seems to hold one like Grace before meals, is all posturing all the time. He is also trying to paint the Tea Party patriots as unreasonably stubborn. Well, let’s revisit that one.

Do you remember a negotiation a few short months ago, after the 2010 election. The Republicans ran on a platform of fiscal responsibility and were rewarded with the overwhelming support of the American people. So they set about to work cutting $100 billion from the current fiscal year. Through intense negotiations with the president, the $100 billion became $30 billion (it’s okay, because it’s less than a full year). Then when that onion got peeled back there were only about $300 million in real immediate spending cuts. Snookered?

It is a time honored Democrat tradition to negotiate a deal and then welsh on it if they can. Ronald Reagan negotiated with Tip O’Neill to raise $1 in taxes for every $3 in spending cuts. The tax increase was immediate, the spending cuts never came. George H. W. Bush, negotiated spending cuts and the Democrats insisted on tax increases. Bush went along and then the Democrats ran on a platform that Bush broke his “Read my lips…” pledge. Let’s see, you get what you want and then you beat up the other guy for giving it to you?

So does anyone wonder why the Republicans might be digging in their heels. I have a suggestion for Speaker Boehner. Go play golf. Start the August recess early. Send everyone home. When the Democrats and the president find enough of a spine to put their plan on paper and present it to the Republicans to accept or reject, then perhaps we can consider this a negotiation among adults. But for right now it is the Democrats who are blocking every effort to put our fiscal house in order.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

As the brinksmanship over the debt limit heats up, we can still hear the progressives saying that we are in this fix because we cut taxes without “paying” them. Let’s drive a stake through the heart of that one.

First of all, nobody “pays” for tax cuts.  A tax cut means that the taxpayer gets to keep more of his money. Period. It doesn’t have to be budgeted or paid for. Let me make it simple enough that a nine year old child could understand it. When you were a child and your father cut your allowance, how did you pay for it? Huh? Exactly. You don’t pay for something you never received.

Okay, now that we have that squared away, let’s look at the total amount of revenue taken in by the federal government.

Federal Government Revenue over Time

You will notice a sharp drop off beginning around 2000, that is the dot-com bubble and recession. The Bush tax cuts took place in 2003, just about in the valley on the graph, and as you can see revenues not only recoverd but hit an all time high. That means we are not in the fix we are in because of the Bush tax cuts. We are in this jam because of spending and the anemic Obama recovery, which is buried under the stimulus debt, bailouts, ObamaCare, mult-thousand page bills and tens of thousands of pages of regulations. It’s the spending. We don’t need any recovery killing tax increases.

By the way, when the Bush tax cuts passed, and as you can clearly see increased revenues, only seven Democrats in the House and two in the Senate voted for them. These are the same people today who are telling us they must be repealed.

Stop the spending. Any questions?

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

How many times are we going to hear asinine comments like the following from Zack Burgess at the Philadelphia Tribune?

After Monday’s debates it seemed at times as if the GOP was focused on bashing the president vs. dealing with the problems that face the country. At this point I would like to hear from  presidential scholars, people within the GOP and the Democratic party about how the next nominee from the GOP will run their campaign. Does the GOP have a plan? Or will their platform be solely based on bashing the president? It really didn’t look as if they had an answer for high unemployment, a stalled economy  and soldiers bogged down in Afghanistan. And believe me, I’m not taking the president off the hook, but I want to know about the  GOP and where they seem to be going, because right now it doesn’t look like they have a clear strategy or answer…besides bashing the president. Is this strategy going to work? Most times it doesn’t. Your thoughts. Zack Burgess Enterprise Writer The Philadelphia Tribune

Let me try to explain it so that even Zack Burgess can understand it. The problem, my friend, is in Washington not out among the everyday folks. The Republicans, unlike your fellow travelers, do not think they are smarter than 340 million of their fellow Americans such that they can command and control the economy, like some Soviet politburo which, by the way, couldn’t do it either. This economy is recovering, far more slowly than it should, not because of Obama’s policies but in spite of them.

This administration has thrown more monkey wrenches into the economy than I thought existed. The housing market? It is still in the tank because the administration is trying to micromanage everyone’s mortgage. Get the hell out of the way, let the market find a natural bottom and it will resume its historical 3.5% per year growth rate. Unemployment? Stop throwing program after program on small and medium businesses so that they have no idea what it will cost to hire the next employee. That includes ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, cap and trade, card check, QE2, subsidies for green energy, Chevy Volts. Stop throwing away money on stimulus that did not work, and if you don’t believe me, ask your president what a shovel ready project is. The stimulus was one big, massive, porkulus bill to pay off supporters with taxpayer dollars, e.g., public sector unions. Remember, in selling the stimulus program we were warned that if nothing was done, unemployment would rise to 9%. So, by that very definition the stimulus program made the problem worse than if we did nothing.

President Obama is the most inexperienced person ever elected to the office. He is so clueless he thinks ATM machines are the reason we have high unemployment. Shall we return to to using quill pens?

So here is what the Republicans stand for. We are spending too much money. Stop it. We are putting too many programs on small and medium businesses such that they cannot calculate the cost of hiring, so they are not hiring. Stop it. We have public sector unions who are bankrupting state and local governments and it cannot continue. Stop it. Businesses have trillions of dollars overseas that they don’t want to bring back because if they do, a very large chunk of it will go right into the government spending machine. Stop it. We have program after program in Washington that has no basis of authority in the Constitution (Article 2, Section 8). Stop them.

Mr. Burgess seems to believe that if you don’t like his massive government program, you have to show him your massive government program. He doesn’t seem to grasp the idea that massive government programs are the cause the problem. It wasn’t deregulation that caused the financial crisis, it was everyone following the government’s lead to have every Tom, Dick and Harry own a home whether they could afford it or not, and if you stood in the way, the government was going to steamroll you, paint you as racist, or otherwise destroy you. The government took the lead and Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and others dutifully followed along.

The plan and the strategy of the Republicans is to cut government down to size. Limit it to the authority granted by the Constitution, stop running ponzi schemes that would make Bernie Madoff blush, and get spending under control (see Paul Ryan plan). I guess what confuses people like Mr. Burgess was that all seven candidates at the debate seemed to agree on this. The idea is to grow this great economy, not try to micromanage it by picking winners and losers.

As former New York City mayor Ed Koch once famously said to a reporter who kept asking him the same question, “I can explain it to you. I can’t comprehend it for you.”

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

The Democrats are banking on the American people returning to the days of voting by sound bite. They believe the Tea Party is an anomaly that will go down as a blip in the history books, rather than a force for educating the electorate on the issues. It is a strategy that has worked for them, even as recently as the 2010 election. In the First Congressional District of New York, Congressman Tim Bishop ran for reelection entirely on bashing his opponent, and not mentioning his record of voting with Nancy Pelosi 97% of the time.

The most recent trial balloon was in New York’s 26th Congressional District special election. There Democrat Kathy Hochul ran on the demagoguery that Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which her Republican opponent Jane Corwin supported, meant the end of Medicare. Hochul said:

“We had the issues on our side—did we not have the right issues on our side?” Ms. Hochul said at her victory party, as supporters chanted “Medicare! Medicare!”

We had the issues on our side? “We can balance our budget the right way and not on the backs of our seniors,” she said. Democrats said the program [Medicare] should be steadied through other measures. Okay, tell us, just what are those measures? Anyone?

Where is balancing the budget on the back of seniors in the Ryan plan? Better yet, how does the Ryan plan stack up against the Democrats plan? Oh, that’s right, the Democrats don’t have a plan. The Democrats want to continue the status quo of spending us into oblivion. They want to take the only real plan on the table, the Ryan plan, and not challenge it with ideas of their own, but try to hang it around the necks of the Republicans.

Senate Democrats were expected to bring up the House Republicans’ 2012 budget plan for a vote this week, but not their own plan, which remains under lock and key.

The Democrats want to get the Republicans in the Senate on record as supporting the Ryan plan as did all but four Republicans in the House. They believe that by pointing to support for the Ryan plan, they are home free to retake the House while retaining the Senate, reelect President Obama and finish the job of destroying America, the America we know and the America our founders envisioned. But don’t take my word for it, listen to Harry Reid.

“There’s no need to have a Democratic budget, in my opinion,” Reid told the Los  Angeles Times last week. “It would be foolish for us to do a budget at this  stage.”

After all if you have a plan, people can look at it and evaluate it and from where the Democrats are coming from it would be suicidal to actually admit through a vote what they are trying to do.

Next to the lackluster economy and a persistently high 9 percent unemployment rate, runaway spending and debt remain among the voters’ greatest concerns. But the Democrats‘ strategy right now is not to grab the deficit by the horns and wrestle it into submission. It is to play political games with the issue and with the American people, to help the Democrats win back control of the House and rebuild their dwindling forces in the Senate. — Washington Times, 24 May 2011

The Democrats who have added $5 trillion to the debt since re-taking control of Congress in 2006, have not passed a budget and have no intention of doing so and as every household and business knows, without a budget spending will be out of control.

While the Democrats draw up their battle plans to smear, lie, and distort the issues, and terrorize seniors in the hope that they will remain ignorant and not question the accuracy of their statements, it will fall upon the Tea Party to ramp up another education effort to spread the truth. I’ll let Mr. Ryan lead off here:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJIC7kEq6kw&feature=player_embedded

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

We knew it was coming because the situation was so clear. Congressman Paul Ryan introduced a bold plan to deal with out of control government spending and the Democrats had no credible plan of their own. So what does one do in a case like that? Lie, smear, distort, and scare the uninformed into thinking that we should shut up and surrender our liberties to the government. But the level of the latest lies is remarkable if only because of how shameless it is.

Here is the ad in question from the Agenda Project, titled “America the Beautiful.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGnE83A1Z4U&feature=player_embedded

The message they want you to belive is simple. Paul Ryan’s would end Medicare, period. Seniors would be pushed to their deaths by Ryan and his “friends.” This is a blatent lie. The Ryan plan says that no one over the age of 55 would see any changes to their plan. Bill O’Reilly thought the ad was so dishonest that he ran a segment on his show, The O’Reilly Factor to address it, and right from the start his guest, Sally Kohn, scoffs when O’Reilly points out that no one under 55 would see any changes, saying perhaps they should put in a disclaimer saying the woman in the wheelchair was 54. Really? Did the woman in the wheelchair look like she was 54? or 84? Kohn said it was not a distortion, it was an exaggeration.

Distort, v. 1) to twist awry or out of shape; make crooked or deformed. 2) to give false, perverted or disproportionate meaning to; misrepresent: to distort the facts

Exaggerate, v. 1) to magnify beyond the limits of truth; overstate; represent disproportionately

Some might call that a distinction without a difference. Either way it is not true and she claims it is harmless. She then tacks hard left and says ads during the ObamaCare debate about death panels was an exaggeration and also a lie. Not even close. It is a fact that Ryan’s plan does not affect people over 55. It is a fact that ObamaCare wanted to install a government panel that would advise doctors on treatments that took into consideration how many years of quality life a patient had remaining. The only exaggeration was that ObamaCare didn’t actually call them death panels.

O’Reilly pressed on with the ads and Ms. Kohn poo-poo’d it away, “It’s a silly ad. I’m not going to defend a silly ad.” So telling outright lies is okay as long as you are silly when you do it? She continued, “We’re having this conversation because of this ad.” What conversation? A conversation about lying and silliness? What about debating what you don’t like in the Ryan plan and what the left has that is better? No chance. The smirk on her face gives it away. She is tickled that such a bold faced lie is out there and it will affect seniors and she knows the famous line from Winston Churchill, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

The tenth rule of ethics of means and ends is that you do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral arguments.– Saul Alinksy, Rules for Radicals

So is the moral argument that someone uncovered the death panels? This is like the Democratic congressional aide that told me there is no such thing as ObamaCare, because there was no legislation that offically carried that name. The left calls it end-of-life counseling, the right calls it death panels. It’s a panel, and what typically happens at the end of one’s life? Death.

But don’t take my word for it, judge Ms. Kohn’s demeanor and truthfullness for yourself.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVAXXeBKOrA&feature=player_embedded

Ms. Kohn claimed that the real purpose of the “silly ad” was to get people talking. Okay, Ms. Kohn, then how about on your next public appearance you talk about this:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMJE9jBroUU

So, Sally Kohn, instead of making silly and stupid videos of grandma in the wheelchair, why not make an intelligent video like this one and make the case for your solution over Paul Ryan’s plan? Or don’t you have a case?

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

It wasn’t long after the Paul Ryan budget was released that the disinformation Democrats began trumpeting seniors being starved, being unable to afford health care, and the usual demogogic scare tactics. But doctors are dropping coverage, the key slices of the pie above are growing much faster than inflation, and the Democrats have no plan other than the age old cut benefits (reimburse doctors less) and increase taxes, just enough to kick the can down the road for someone else to deal with. Congressman Ryan had the guts to come up with a plan to actually fix the system by giving seniors a choice and they seem to like the idea. Why?

Obama wants to have yet another commission that will experiment with different ideas and basically control and dictate medicine from Washington. Experiment? Isn’t that the concept behind federalism? Let the fifty different states experiment with solutions that work for their population and geography. But a centralized bureaucracy? How can that experiment without wildly jumping from idea to idea and dragging all of us along with it?

Seniors know what government bureaucracy looks and feels like and they don’t want it to the power of ten. The idea that they could actually control their medical care and not run into some bureaucrat with a clipboard who says you can have this, you can’t have that.

Ryan is being honest with the American people that Medicare is heading for the rocks and a change in course is imperitive. The other point that must be emphasized before the main stream media drowns it out is that seniors, those over 55, will see no change the in status quo. What exists today will continue to exist. So don’t start pricing cat food to see how to fit it into grandma’s diet.

But what is it with this administration and the left when it comes to private enterprise. What is the love affair with the government and the antipathy toward greedy private business? If your life depended on getting a letter delivered tomorrow, who would you turn to, the post office or Federal Express? Who would you rather get a letter from Wells Fargo or the IRS? How many organizations in the book In Search of Excellence are private enterprises and how many are government agencies? We have Securities and Exchange attorneys looking at pornography on their computers all day instead of catching Bernie Madoff; we have air traffic controllers asleep on the job instead of privatizing the whole thing like Canada did. Wake up, America, and realize that life could be a lot better, and you could be a lot wealthier if we took more out of the government’s hands than making Washington bigger and more powerful.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

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.

Wisconsin is facing a budget shortfall this year of $137 million for the current fiscal year and $3.6 billion for next year. Like many states around the country, and the federal government too, there is no time for small steps. The governor wants the public sector unions to pay more for their retirement and medical care and he also wants to end collective bargaining on anything but wages, and those to be increased no more than the Consumer Price Index. In return there will be no layoffs.  The battle lines were drawn.

Let’s be Civil

After Tucson, the main stream media and Democrats were all over the airwaves admonishing us (conservatives) to be civil. My Congressman came to my daughter’s high school to give a ten minute lecture on civility and how we have to be nicer to politicians who are trying to do their job. This is the same Congressman who ran for reelection primarily by calling his opponent a liar, and running from his own record. Very civil.

There were the numerous references to Hitler (just what is it with the left’s Hitler fetish anyway?). Posters with the Hitler moustache painted on Governor Walker, a picture of the governor with crosshairs drawn over his face. So much for the outrage after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.

Fakin’ It

Many teachers called in “sick” so that they could abandon their students and classrooms to protest in Madison against the governor’s proposals. Since everyone knows that virtually all of these sudden “illnesses” are bogus, some teachers started to worry about covering their tracks. Not to worry though, doctors or doctor impersonators were on the scene to hand out fake sick notes. No mention of any illness or disease is necessary. They were handing them out like candy on Halloween.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjFbMDp5Pg8

The doctors or doctor impersonators should be tracked down and charged with fraud. If they are doctors, they should lose their license. If they are not doctors they should be charged with practicing medicine without a license.

A couple of relevant tweets illustrate the differences between the union organized protestors and the Tea Party. From a union supporter, “Tea Partiers protest on the weekends – which were won for them by unions.” The claim about weekends being won by unions is dubious, but even the union supporters acknowledge that the Tea Partiers don’t steal their pay from their employers by calling in sick, they wait until they are on their own time. I can’t say if the union supporter is mocking the Tea Partiers for being ethical or not. From a Tea Party supporter, “Gov. Walker, sorry we’re late, we work full time.”

Organizing for America

According to our federal form of government the states and the federal government are both sovereign entities, meaning one is not subordinate to the other. Instead of focusing on getting the federal budget in order, President Obama is taking time to weigh in on Wisconsin. Not only that, but there is an organization called Organizing for America that is actively involved.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkc-diFmcb8 

This political arm is encouraging teachers to violate their contract. So let’s take a step back. The unions are outraged that the governor wants to curtail their collective bargaining rights. The unions negotiate a contract with the government and then violate it with impunity when it suits their ends. The unions want to hold the state accountable but they don’t want to be accountable.

Dereliction of Duty

To help their union supporters, all of the Democrat Wisconsin State Senators fled the state to prevent their being a quorum to vote on the measure curtailing union power. These senators took an oath to do their job and they are hiding out in Illinois. The far left web site Daily Kos is actively raising money to help these senators violate their oath. This is an excerpt from an e-mail sent to their supporters: 

Even though you don’t live in Wisconsin, there’s a way you can help. The 14 Democratic state Senators who kept the fight alive are on Act Blue, and we’ve put their party committee on our Orange to Blue 2012 page.

Please, contribute $14 to the Wisconsin State Senate Democratic committee, $1 for each of the heroic Senators.

Republicans hold a 19-14 edge in the Wisconsin state Senate, but 20 Senators are needed for a quorum. So, in response to a Republican attempt to pass a bill making public sector unions virtually illegal, all 14 Democrats simply left the state. If even one of these Democrats had remained in Wisconsin, then s/he would have been rounded up by the police, forcibly brought to the state Capitol, and the bill would have passed. At great personal and electoral risk, these 14 Democrats are protecting workers’ rights and making resistance to the Tea Party the top news story in the country.

When the Democrats held the House, Senate and White House and rammed through ObamaCare despite polling showing the American people were opposed, did the Republican members of Congress flee to Canada? No. They fought at the ballot box to elect Scott Brown in Massachusetts. They fought in the Senate using Senate rules like the filibuster. They lost the battle and ObamaCare passed, but they stayed and did their duty representing their constitutents.

They fought at the ballot box again winning big in November 2010. Among those wins was both houses of the state government in Wisconsin and the governor. Now, with the tables turned, the left shows their true colors. Instead of fighting within the system, they lie, violate contracts, cheat with fraudulent sick notes, they abandon their responsibilities to hide out in another state, while still claiming to hold their office. This is the left’s vision of America, and all the while holding signs equating the legitimate government to Hitler, Mubarak, Cairo, Bahrain, etc. It pretty much speaks for itself.

If the senators do not go back to the state house to do their jobs, then the only alternative to balance the budget may be to fire about 5,000 state workers.

Public Sector Unions

The issue with public sector unions is collusion. Unions collect dues from their members. Their members, like the general public come from all parts of the political spectrum: Democrats, Republicans, Independents and even people not registered to vote or who don’t vote. Parts of those union dues are steered toward political activism which in short means electing as many Democrats as possible. The amount of money raised and spent is staggering. The Democrats that get elected are then in a position to negotiate contracts with those same unions and reward them for their support. As long as those Democrats are out of office before the bill comes due, they are happy to oblige.

What is happening in Wisconsin is ending that collusion. An alternative would be that public sector unions are not allowed to collect any dues for political purposes or participate in any political activity. In the private sector, unions don’t appoint the management that they eventually negotiate with for their contracts, why should it be different in the public sector? In the private sector if a company negotiates a lousy contract with the unions and it bankrupts them, they go out of business. In the public sector, if the government, generously helped into office by the unions, negotiates a lousy contract with the unions, the government doesn’t suffer, the taxpayers are stuck with the bill.

In Wisconsin those taxpayers said, “enough,” and turned out the Democrats and elected the Republicans to fix the problem. The Republicans are trying to do what they were elected to do.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours.  Please comment below.