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.

Two disparate news items this weekend got me thinking.  The main stream media is all abuzz with Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, even to the point of throwing the term royalty around.  It is estimated that the wedding will cost $3-$5 million, although Sally Quinn of the Washington post puts the bill at closer to $1 million.  The comparison was then made to the cost of Jenna Bush’s wedding, a mere $100,000.  This became fodder for The Joy Behar Show.  Comedian Judy Gold leaped at the opportunity to take a shot at Bush, “Yeah, well, if he could have found a way for us to pay for Jenna`s wedding, he would have done that, okay, he likes to spend other people`s money.”  An interesting perspective on other people’s money that I will return to later.

The other news items was an article in The New York Times, by Bob Herbert titled “A Sin and a Shame,” lamenting that corporations are hording cash and not hiring people and it is all so unfair, in fact, sinful.  This is while this government is spending huge amounts of money that someone will have to pay back, massive new programs like ObamaCare that we are still uncovering what that will cost, and enormous tax increases about to kick in on January 1 when the Bush tax cuts expire.  Perhaps they are hording cash for a reason?  Perhaps they are not hiring because they don’t know what any new employees will cost under these new programs, or for that matter what their existing employees are going to cost?  Perhaps it is because the latest economic reports show GDP shrinking and if that continues why would you start hiring if your business is going to slow down with the rest of the economy?

We have two very divergent views of the economy today.  One view is held by those who actually work in the private economy and the other view is held by those in the ivory towers of government, which brings me back to the weddings.  I really don’t care what the Clintons or the Bushes spend on their daughter’s weddings.  It’s their money.  But perhaps it is instructive to look at where that money came from.

George Herbert Walker Bush, Jenna’s grandfather, was born into a successful family.  His father was a banker and a Senator.  But after getting out of the Army after WWII he went to Yale and upon graduation, moved away from that family and settled in Texas to start an oil company.  He went into private business and put his own money at risk.  What that means, to those who never took that chance, is you may be successful and make a lot of money, you may be successful and make a little money, you may fail and lose your money.  Chances are greater that you will lose than win, but that is the American Dream.  If you lose, you have to start over by trying to earn and save up what you lost to try again, if you have the guts and drive.  Bush succeeded in forming Bush-Overby and later with Zapata Petroleum.  He became President of Zapata for ten years and then Chairman for another two, before going into politics.  By then he was a millionaire in his own right.

George Walker Bush, Jenna’s dad, attended public school in Midland, Texas, where his parents had settled.  He went to private school after the family moved to Houston.  He later attended Yale University and became the only president to get an MBA which he did, from Harvard.  Like his father, he went into the oil business starting several independent oil exploration companies.  He later bought a stake in the Texas Rangers baseball team for $800,000 and was instrumental in building the team’s attendance.  He later sold his stake for $15 million.  Then he went into politics.

The two Bushes know risk, know about taking chances and became millionaires on their own before going into politics.  They also learned lessons about spending money and doing so prudently. 

Bill Clinton went into politics almost immediately after getting his law degree.  He was Attorney General and then Governor of Arkansas.  As governor he had a governor’s mansion.  He ran for president and upon winning traded in his governor’s mansion for the Executive Mansion, aka the White House.  He had been on the government payroll and living in government provided housing almost his entire working life.  The sweat of the people in who paid their taxes paid him.  After leaving office, Mr. Clinton was able to write books about his experience and make speeches commanding six figures a pop.  His wife did pretty much the same.  They lived off the people and ended up very rich.  They didn’t create a product or service, they didn’t create jobs, and they didn’t meet a payroll. 

I can hear the screams from the left right now, “What do you mean he didn’t create a job or meet a payroll?”  Try this test.  If Bill Clinton’s opponent was elected rather than Bill Clinton, would there still be a government payroll and government jobs?  If yes, Bill Clinton didn’t create them.  If either of the Bushes didn’t create their companies would there be jobs at those companies or payrolls?  No.

What about some other famous politicians who tell us what to do?  Let’s look at Al Gore.  Here is another individual that spent the bulk of his career in government.  He was a member of Congress, a United States Senator, Vice President and presidential candidate.  Today he is very rich.  It is said he may become the first “green billionaire”.  If he went into his current endeavors before a life in government, would the story be the same?  Or is it because of his name, reputation, and connections that he made at the public trough, that he is wallowing in riches, and telling the rest of us to reduce our carbon footprint while his mansions consume ten times the energy of his neighbors?

Charlie Rangel spent most of his life in government.  He rose through the ranks and now has a waterfront condominium in the Dominican Republic, writes the tax laws but does not observe them, and is a wealthy man.  Conservatives don’t believe in rent control or rent stabilized apartments, but Charlie does.  After all, how can poor and middle income people afford to live in places like Manhattan if greedy landlords have their way.  So Charlie Rangel who makes $174,000 per year, plus his chairmanship pay, has not one, not two, not three, but four rent controlled apartments.  Is he poor or middle class?  No, he is the political class.  He took three adjoining rent controlled apartments and had them joined together, while the fourth apartment served, illegally, as his campaign headquarters.  What about the poor and blue collar workers who could live in Manhattan if three of your four rent controlled apartments weren’t being horded by you?  Let them eat cake.

John Kerry is in the news for trying to avoid $500,000 in taxes on his new yacht.  Here is another individual who spent his entire working life in government.  He can tell the rest of us to pay more taxes while he garners favors spending our money. He is the richest man in the Senate but with prenuptial agreements with his wife he only lists personal assets of between $400,000 and $1.8 million and joint assets with his wife of $300,000 – $600,000.  So how does he buy a $7 million yacht?  I am not suggesting anything nefarious, it’s obvious his wife paid for it, but do you think he is in touch with someone trying to make a payroll in the private sector?  You pay taxes; John Kerry has advisors to figure out how to avoid them.

So those evil corporations started by those evil men like George Herbert Walker Bush and George Walker Bush, know the value of a dollar.  They know we are not out of the woods yet and so to protect the jobs that their companies still have they are not hiring but are building their rainy day funds.  Perhaps Bob Herbert should ask why his employer is shedding jobs left and right.  Perhaps this is his safe way of doing so, but on the other hand the New York Times is hardly hording cash.  Its circulation is crashing because people like Bob Herbert are so out of touch with the rest of America; no one wants to read his rants any longer.

So perhaps Bill Clinton spends millions on Chelsea’s wedding because he didn’t learn the value of a dollar.  He lived of the government for many years and then just held out a basket and it was miraculously filled with more money than he can count.  George Bush spent $100,000 on a wedding because he knows how hard it is to earn a dollar.  What we need is less of the political class telling us what to do, and then handing us the bill and more entrepreneurial Americans who risk their own money, watch it like hawks, create jobs and generate wealth that they then reinvest in America.

Best wishes to Chelsea and Marc.

There was a time when people came to our shores to find a better life.  To escape persecution and poverty and to build a better life for their children was their goal.  They found Lady Liberty lifting her lamp beside the golden door.

What happened next was that people assimilated.  Their children went to school with other children and learned to read and speak English.  Their names may have sounded different but before long their voices didn’t.  Sure, New Englanders sounded different than those from Mississippi, but they sounded very much like their neighbors.  They became Americans.

I just finished reading Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen’s historical novel, To Try Men’s Souls, which is the story of the George Washington crossing the Delaware on Christmas night, 1776, and attacking Trenton.  Trenton was guarded by Hessian mercenaries, who were some of the most elite soldiers in Europe.  It was a mismatch beyond belief, but in a last ditch effort, their password that night was “Victory or Death,” and with the element of surprise, they prevailed.  In one passage it mentioned American soldiers of Dutch and German extraction shouting to the Hessians to surrender, in German.  They were probably closer to the Hessians in culture and blood than to their fellow Americans from Boston, but they considered themselves Americans and were willing to die for their country.

The Balkanization of America

Today, we are mired in multiculturalism.  I remember the story of an Hispanic man loudly protesting to his local school board regarding bilingual education to which he was opposed.  “You’re teaching my son to be a janitor!” he said, “I want him to learn in English, so that he can get a job with a future!” 

We should not lose track of our roots.  It is right to celebrate where we came from.  One of the great things about New York is the different neighborhoods and parades that teach and celebrate about where we came from, which is good.  But if carried to the point where we no longer assimilate; where we remain pockets of groups with their own identity and politics, we are in grave danger of ceasing to be America.

During World War II, what if people of German heritage refused to fight against Hitler or for that matter felt a greater allegiance to him than to America?  Some did.  They were tried for treason. What if they were protected instead?  What if their differences were looked at with admiration rather than suspicion?

Fort Hood

Commentators in the news are twisting themselves in knots trying to disassociate Major Nidal Hasan’s slaughter of 13 Americans from his jihadist proclivities, despite evidence of outright hostility toward America and contact with a radical imam.  It is politically incorrect, to speak of his religion.  The Army Chief of Staff raises concern about negatively impacting the military’s record of diversity, if we focus on anything but a lone gunman who snapped.

But what if there is a larger plot?  What if there is an effort on the behalf of some Muslims to purposely not assimilate, to infiltrate the military and become a fifth column within?  Multiculturalism makes it far easier for this to occur because if everyone looks different, no one stands out.  On the other hand, if everyone assimilates, those who speak, act, or plot against America become more obvious.  Again, imagine multiculturalism in the United States in 1943.  You might have whole communities that were German to the core, did not like non-Germans among them and quickly spread the alarm when a stranger approached.  How much easier would it have been for Hitler to build a network of saboteurs?

Kill Multiculturalism Before it Kills Us

We must reinvigorate the idea of assimilation.  Speak any language you want at home; dress any way you want; practice your faith as you please, but where government is involved, we should be treated equally. We should speak one common language for all official business.  If not, where do we draw the line?

In Minnesota in 2007 a public university coffee cart was banned from playing Christmas Carols, but public money was being used to install foot baths to accommodate Muslims before prayer.  After the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and now another terrorist attack at Fort Hood, we have to be able to tell the good Muslims from those out to kill us.  We must have true peace loving Muslims, become true Americans.  We have to engender that we are Americans first, like those early Americans of Dutch and German decent, and not have divided loyalties particularly where the “other loyalty” insists on killing us infidels.