Our Sergeant Schultz President

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Sometimes I'm Embarrassed Being From the South

Good Reads

National Journal (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A few good articles to enjoy at your leisure.

ObamaCare Schaden-Fraud

In his weekly radio address, President Obama preposterously pouted that "it's well past the time for folks to stop rooting for [ObamaCare's] failure," with the obvious implication that conservative Republicans are in fact cheering for the pain of the un-insured.

No, Mr. President, we are not.  We are, however, having a delicious moment of schaden-fraud.  This is the magnificent validation we are experiencing as all elected Democrats and members of the Jurassic media are fast discovering that the man and the plan they have so arrogantly shoved down our throats - and so naively placed their hopes in -- are simultaneously being exposed as shams.

Dem Consultant: Dem Party is F***d

  

National Journal's Editorial Director and former AP Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier is well respected in liberal circles, and he starts his Monday blog post with a startling pronouncement: "Dem Party is F****d." According to Fournier, that was the subject line of an email sent to him Sunday by someone he described as "a senior Democratic consultant with strong ties to the White House and Capitol Hill."

Obama's Clueless Shtick Wearing Thin

White House officials are insisting that the president didn't know that his National Security Agency was bugging German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone.  However, according to a report in German-language newspaper Bild am Sonntag, President Obama "personally authorized the monitoring of Angela Merkel's phone three years ago." 

So here we go again.  What did Obama know, and when did he know it?  The Merkel-Obama scandal is now supplanting the ObamaCare IT fiasco.  Before the health care website flop, there were Benghazi, Syria, and Fast and Furious.  What about the IRS targeting conservative groups and the Tea Party?  No one bothered to tell Obama about that little powder keg, either.  "I can assure you that I certainly did not know anything about the [inspector general's] report beforehand," said Obama

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Train Wreck

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Disaster,” “embarrassment,” “humiliating” and “train wreck” are just a few of the colorful terms being used to describe it. The Obama administration’s incompetent half-billion-dollar rollout of its incompetent multi-trillion-dollar signature achievement is but a tragic metaphor for this man’s entire presidency. (It’s not hyperbole when it’s true.)

Nearly three weeks in and the utopian promise of “affordable care” for all has yielded but a handful of folks who’ve even been able to sign up for this clinic in socialism.

That Obamacare – something billed as a health-care panacea for the collective – is something that the collective neither asked for, nor wanted, is now the back story. That it has failed so fantastically in every respect, has taken center stage.

Reuters reports: “In its third week of operations, the [Obamacare] website continues to experience problems, which government officials say they are working day and night to repair. Even allies of the Obama administration have been highly critical, with former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs calling it ‘excruciatingly embarrassing’ and calling for ‘some people’ to be fired.”

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., was both a sponsor of – and cheerleader for – Obamacare. He saw this coming. Once he read this 2,400-page regulatory monstrosity, he came to the same conclusion as did anyone else with two synapses to rub together. He called the implementation of Obamacare “a huge train wreck” and announced that, rather than resulting in his re-election, Obama’s pet government health-care albatross would sink him into retirement.

Still, the few who have somehow managed to enroll in Obamacare are discovering, to their dismay, what many of us have warned all along: There is nothing “affordable” about the paradoxically named “Affordable Care Act.” Though government geeks may be “working day and night” to fix the website, no amount of work will fix Obamacare itself. It’s unfixable. The only solution is to total-out this jalopy

Read the rest of this story.

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What U.S. Citizenship Means to Me

This is from Sean Linnane. Sean is the pseudonym of a retired Special Forces career NCO (1st SFG, 3d SFG, 10th SFG). He served with honor on five continents; He continues to serve in other capacities. You can check out his site here.


I love Old Glory, the Flag of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

I am an immigrant. I came to this country in 1981 with a suitcase in my hand, and I earned my citizenship the old-fashioned way: military service. Just like the days of the old Roman Empire.

I love this country. There is almost unlimited opportunity here. All you need is an idea and be willing to work real hard and you can be a millionaire. As I write I sit in my favorite room of my house - the Jungle Room - surrounded by the souvenirs and momentos of soldiering on five continents. I have seen people in places where no matter how hard they tried, no matter how hard they worked, they would never lift themselves from poverty and misery. The opportunities simply do not exist over there that we take for granted here in America.

The Jungle Room

I do alright for a retired NCO, we live pretty well and I'm not finished yet. I pointed out to my daughter that everything she sees in this place is because of the opportunities available in America, opportunities that simply do not exist in other countries. I love this country.

Not many people immigrate to the United States from Australia - the two countries are very similar and life there is good like it is here, but it is not the same. I believe a person should love their country, but this is not to be confused with the government running that country. I love Australia, but I saw a few things over there that didn't sit right with me.

In Australia I saw a man - a university professor - sentenced to three days in prison for the crime of refusing to vote. To me, this is a violation of freedom of speech. Pentridge Prison was one of the most notorious prisons in Australia - since closed - three days in that place was no joke.

I saw a man have his passport pulled and not be allowed to travel outside of Australia, because he was the leader of the Hare Krishnas. He wanted to travel to India to visit the Ashram. The authorities justification for restricting this man's movements was that they believed the Hare Krishna movement w as a threat to Australian society. So much for freedom of religion.

In 1997, the Australian government implemented draconian anti-gun laws. They rounded up millions of rifles, pistols and shotguns, cut them all in half and burned them. Overnight the Australian government disarmed their law-abiding citizenry; nowadays only criminals can possess firearms in Australia. Australians are forbidden the basic human right of arming themselves in self-defense.

In America we have a contract with the government - the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights lists what citizens can do - our freedoms - and what the government cannot do to us. No other country has this. In every other country in the world, the government tells the people what they can and cannot do. We are the exception to this rule; this is what makes us exceptional. This is American Exceptionalism.

The Bill of Rights has ten amendments; the most important is the 2d Amendment, because it guarantees the other nine. Other than Israel, we are the only remaining country of all the developed, industrialized countries in the world where citizens are allowed to possess and carry weapons for self-defense, a basic human right.

What are my hopes for the next generation? I hope that they have a better life than I have had, and I've had it pretty good. I remind my kids of what the great President Reagan said, that freedom must be fought for and defended by every generation. I hope that the freedoms I have enjoyed and fought to defend are there for them. It seems we are losing freedom every day, inch by inch by an ever encroaching Federal government.

Do I feel that I am viewed as a stereotype? Yes, most certainly. We Green Berets joke about it amongst ourselves - they call us Snake Eaters and we embrace this because we do in fact eat snakes. We call ourselves knuckledragging Neanderthals because that is how we feel people perceive us; unsophisticated, brutish.

People see the Gadsden rattlesnake flag on the back of my car and they think I'm a racist political extremist of the TEA Party. This amuses me because I am in a bi-racial marriage, and how can I be an extremist when over 65% of the United States polls for TEA Party policies and sentiments? People would be surprised to know that most Green Berets are bilingual (I speak four languages), that we are of above average intelligence, with unique skills and extraordinary credentials.

Last weekend I went to Washington DC to participate in the Million Vet March on the Monuments. I went in uniform - multi-cam trousers, desert boots, an MIA/POW t-shirt and a Special Forces baseball cap - I couldn't find my beret. One of the cool things about being retired is you get to design your own uniform. I retired from the US Army five years ago and have never participated in any veteran activity before.

I am not a hero, but I served in the company of heroes.

It was an honor to serve in the greatest Army ever to march across a battlefield. I went down to the monuments to honor and respect the real heroes, the ones who didn't make it back.

This is my way of saying thank you to America.

Why We're Doomed

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From the Grouchy Old Cripple

October 15, 2013

 

The welfare state is unsustainable because of welfare brood mares like this parasite. Link from Willie in the comments on another post.

If you want a perfect snapshot of the dysfunction that is poverty in America, you won’t see a more perfect one than in the above video. (video at linked site) Angel Adams of Tampa, Florida, has fifteen children by three different fathers.

15 children by three different fathers! Holy crap! And not a single one is still with her.

When her “fiancé,” who had already fathered ten of those children got sent to jail, she says things began to fall apart. She and twelve of her children are now living in a single hotel room, without shoes, without food, and without clean clothes.

Boo freaking hoo! And, of course, she doesn’t have a job. All she knows is getting preggers and expecting other people to pay for her irresponsibility in having 15 children that she cannot afford to raise.

Adams blames social services for failing to help her. Social service agencies, however, claim that they were trying to help, and paid for rent, utilities, and even furniture. In addition, Adams admits, community members have been helping with food.

What about the other fathers? Shouldn’t they help this baby momma?

“Somebody,” Adams says, “needs to pay for all my children . . . somebody needs to be held accountable, and they need to pay.” And there’s your underclass snapshot: It’s somebody else’s problem.

Exactly! I’ve said this many times. I could end a large majority of poverty in this country in two generations. How? Simple. When a woman applies for welfare, she gets sterilized. No ifs, ands, or buts. If she wants me to take responsibility, I will. I’m taking responsibility. I’m shutting down the baby factory.

So women ask me, “What about the father?” Same thing. A sperm donor who refuses to support the babies he’s fathered with his baby mommas gets a vasectomy. Can you imagine how much money we could save on welfare, food stamps, and Section 8 housing if we did this one simple thing? Then we would not have these welfare brood mares bitching about having someone else take responsibility for their irresponsible behavior. Along with their first welfare check would come an appointment to have a tubal ligation. No show for the surgery? No welfare check. No EBT. No Section 8 housing.

Problem solved. Then maybe welfare would be what LBJ promised: “A hand up not a handout.” We certainly wouldn’t have a parasite with 15 children demanding that we pay for them. I wonder how many more children this welfare brood mare will have before menopause?

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United States of Entitlement

The Coming Collapse

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Food Stamp Riot at Wal-Mart
by John Hayward at Human Events

Think of this as a little sneak preview of what awaits us when mandatory spending gobbles up the entire federal budget – a day most readers of this post will live to see – and Food Stamp Nation gets switched off like a light bulb.  A computer glitch said to have cropped up during routine system maintenance caused EBT cards to stop working temporarily in several regions of the country.  Chaos promptly ensued, as reported by the Clarion-Ledger in Mississippi:

Customers staged a disturbance, took unpaid for groceries and walked out of a Mississippi Walmart after they were unable to use their food stamp cards on Saturday.
People in 17 states found themselves unable to buy groceries with their food stamp debit-style cards Saturday after a routine check by vendor Xerox Corp. resulted in a system failure.

The mini riot happened at the Walmart in Philadelphia, Miss. Shortly thereafter, managers decided to temporarily close the store.

“For the safety of our customers we did make a management decision to close the store.  We’re looking into everything; looking at surveillance video and working with the local police,” said Kayla Whaling, a spokesperson for Walmart.

Whaling said the disturbance happened around 10:00 p.m. and the store reopened around 11:30 p.m. She also said she was not aware of any injuries.

In Louisiana, the EBT glitch temporarily removed the spending limits on food-stamp cards, triggering what CBS News euphemistically describes as a “shopping spree”:

Walmart workers phoned their corporate headquarters to ask how they should handle all the shoppers with unlimited, government-funded spending limits, and were told to keep the registers ringing.

“We did make the decision to continue to accept EBT cards during the outage so that they could get food for their families,” Walmart representative Kayla Whaling told KSLA. She added that Walmart was, “fully engaged and monitoring the situation and transactions during the outage.”

Amateur video taken on shoppers’ cell phones shows dozens of shopping carts, piled high with merchandise, abandoned in the aisles of one Walmart after the announcement was made that EBT cards were once again showing accurate spending limits.

Police spokesmen in both locations told KSLA that no arrests were made during the spending sprees.

Shoppers gave mixed reactions to the incident, with one man in the Springhill store told KSLA it was simply “human reaction” to stock-up when given the opportunity. Shopper Stan Garcia was more critical of the unscrupulous shoppers, however, saying that taking advantage of the brief glitch in the benefits system amounted to “plain theft. That’s stealing, that’s all I got to say about it.”

Come, come, Mr. Garcia, don’t be so old-fashioned!  Haven’t you learned that it’s not “stealing” when the government is involved?

Angry social media postings predicted, and in some cases called for, violent riots.  Keep in mind this whole situation was resolved in a matter of hours.  It doesn’t take long for civic order to break down in a dependent population, does it?  Evidently many people in the affected areas concluded the EBT system failure was a deliberate aspect of the government shutdown.  As if Barack Obama would ever treat these folks the way he treats war veterans!

This is doubtless one of those stories we’re not supposed to notice or comment upon, because it’s cruel, mean, and probably racist to pay attention to the objective reality of what Food Stamp Nation does to its clients.  There are people who genuinely require food assistance, but they’re lumped in with an enormous and growing population that really doesn’t, conflating necessary welfare and charity with unnecessary and poisonous dependency.  We’re supposed to think only of impoverished mothers with starving children, not spoiled adult children who can’t handle a brief disruption in their support system.  It was inconvenient and annoying, but “annoyance” doesn’t seem like the right word to describe some of the reactions.

Frustrated users of the utterly failed ObamaCare online system have been told to send in dead-tree paperwork via snail mail.  Since the EBT system is not used for most of the data-harvesting operations it’s theoretically capable of – mustn’t let the taxpayers have a clear look at what those cards are being used to purchase! –  maybe it would be best to turn food stamps back into stamps, just to be on the safe side, until our titanic mega-government figures out how to run a website.

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Explaining the Debt Limit

Good Reads

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Click on the links to read the full stories.

The taxpayers, seem to have forked up more than $634 million of the federal purse to build the digital equivalent of a rock.

The health program the President is imposing on us isnot the Affordable Care Act. The president has dismembered andmangled it. Gone is the employer mandate, the cap on out of pocketexpenses, income verification and over half the deadlines specifiedin the law. The President delayed or did away with these features,without asking Congress. Illegally. Then he added 1,472 waivers andconnived a subsidy for members of Congress that no one else inAmerican earning $174,000 a year could get. The Supreme Court hasruled twice that presidents cannot delay, amend, and repeal partsof laws.

 

Contrary to Obama’s promises, it turns out: You can’t keep your doctor, you can’t keep your insurance — you can’t even keep your job. In other words, it’s a typical government program, but this one wrecks your health care.

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Democratic Voters Confused

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Back in 2008, when then-candidate Obama promised Joe the Plumber and the rest of America that he intended to spread the wealth around, most democrat and liberal voters embraced the notion of wealth redistribution under the guise of equality. A universal health care plan, that would be free for all Americans, was the promise from the candidate of hope and change.


Tens of millions of Americans jumped on the bandwagon waving their flags, fainting at his appearances, and fawning over his every word.

None ever thought about where the money would come from for all this new found wealth he promised to bestow upon them.

But those who understand that socialism, communism and governance by the collective are failed experiments, warned where that money would come from. It would be taken by force from the toils of the middle class, and it’d impoverish them in the process.

Now the myrmidons who once vehemently supported the policies of President Barack Obama without question are coming to the realization that when Obama spoke about spreading the wealth he actually meant their wealth too!

Cindy Vinson is one such supporter. This month, like many Americans who have health insurance through their employer or private insurers, Vinson got an unwanted awakening to the reality of government sponsored wealth confiscation and redistribution:

Cindy Vinson and Tom Waschura are big believers in the Affordable Care Act. They vote independent and are proud to say they helped elect and re-elect President Barack Obama.

Yet, like many other Bay Area residents who pay for their own medical insurance, they were floored last week when they opened their bills: Their policies were being replaced with pricier plans that conform to all the requirements of the new health care law.

Vinson, of San Jose, will pay $1,800 more a year for an individual policy, while Waschura, of Portola Valley, will cough up almost $10,000 more for insurance for his family of four.

…

“I was laughing at Boehner — until the mail came today,” Waschura said, referring to House Speaker John Boehner, who is leading the Republican charge to defund Obamacare.

“I really don’t like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this. When you take $10,000 out of my family’s pocket each year, that’s otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy.”

Both Vinson and Waschura have adjusted gross incomes greater than four times the federal poverty level — the cutoff for a tax credit. And while both said they anticipated their rates would go up, they didn’t realize they would rise so much.

“Of course, I want people to have health care,” Vinson said. “I just didn’t realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally.”

Prior the passage of Obamacare Congressional switchboards lit up with 99 out of 100 Americans urging their representatives to throw the legislation out.

They didn’t listen. They passed the bill without even reading it. In fact, they didn’t even make it public until a few hours before the vote and by then it was too late.

Read the rest here.

Who Shut Down the Government?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From the incomparable Thomas Sowell:

Even when it comes to something as basic, and apparently as simple and straightforward, as the question of who shut down the federal government, there are diametrically opposite answers, depending on whether you talk to Democrats or to Republicans. 

There is really nothing complicated about the facts. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted all the money required to keep all government activities going -- except for ObamaCare. 

This is not a matter of opinion. You can check the Congressional Record. 

As for the House of Representatives' right to grant or withhold money, that is not a matter of opinion either. You can check the Constitution of the United States. All spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives, which means that Congressmen there have a right to decide whether or not they want to spend money on a particular government activity. 

Whether ObamaCare is good, bad or indifferent is a matter of opinion. But it is a matter of fact that members of the House of Representatives have a right to make spending decisions based on their opinion. 

ObamaCare is indeed "the law of the land," as its supporters keep saying, and the Supreme Court has upheld its Constitutionality. 

But the whole point of having a division of powers within the federal government is that each branch can decide independently what it wants to do or not do, regardless of what the other branches do, when exercising the powers specifically granted to that branch by the Constitution. 

The hundreds of thousands of government workers who have been laid off are not idle because the House of Representatives did not vote enough money to pay their salaries or the other expenses of their agencies -- unless they are in an agency that would administer ObamaCare. 

Since we cannot read minds, we cannot say who -- if anybody -- "wants to shut down the government." But we do know who had the option to keep the government running and chose not to. The money voted by the House of Representatives covered everything that the government does, except for ObamaCare. 

The Senate chose not to vote to authorize that money to be spent, because it did not include money for ObamaCare. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says that he wants a "clean" bill from the House of Representatives, and some in the media keep repeating the word "clean" like a mantra. But what is unclean about not giving Harry Reid everything he wants? 

If Senator Reid and President Obama refuse to accept the money required to run the government, because it leaves out the money they want to run ObamaCare, that is their right. But that is also their responsibility. 

Read the rest.

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Serving Our Government Masters

TIME TO PULL THE PLUG ON KING OBAMA (Photo credit: SS&SS)

There was a time when even the highest government officials lived simpler lives.

President George Washington made do with Tobias Lear, who not only served as his secretary, but also doubled as a diplomat and even measured his body for burial. President Thomas Jefferson made do with Meriwether Lewis as his personal secretary and Lewis also doubled as Jefferson’s explorer in the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Washington worked on an expense account instead of a salary. He began his presidency working out of a rented three story house that was later demolished as a slum clearance project to make way for the Brooklyn Bridge on a spot only a few minutes away from what is now Ground Zero.

Washington once said that government is “a troublesome servant and a fearful master.” Government has long ceased being a troublesome servant and has become our fearful master. Today the servants of the people have more servants of their own than many kings and queens.

The government shutdown has forced Obama to make do with only a quarter of his 1,701 person staff. That would leave 436 “vital” employees. The 90 people who look after his living quarters would be slashed to 15 to “provide minimum maintenance and support”.

Buckingham Palace, which is twelve times the size of the White House and has its own clockmaker, only has an 800 person staff.  King Harald V of Norway and his court make do with 152 staffers. King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden gets by with 203.

On Twitter, Michelle Obama announced that she is unable to Tweet on her own without the aid of all of her sixteen assistants; many of whom take home six figure salaries. There are more directors, associate directors and deputy associate directors on Michelle Obama’s staff than there were in George Washington’s entire administration.

Presidents have fought wars and made peace, explored and annexed vast territories and built a nation out of a handful of colonies with fewer senior staffers than are needed to handle Michelle Obama’s Twitter account.

In 2009, Oprah’s Harpo Productions released a video of celebrities pledging “to be a servant to our president.” The idea that presidents were to be the servants of the people rather than their masters had become outmoded.

There is a word for men who surround themselves with czars, who expand their staffs, who fly their dogs out on separate planes, who amuse themselves at the expense of the people at lavish parties, concerts and vacations.

And it isn’t public servant.

Read more.

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You Can't Make This Stuff Up.

English: Aerial view of the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At the World War II Memorial on The Mall in Washington, where veterans have been staging protests to keep it open, Washington Examiner's Charlie Spiering reports that at least seven officials were dispatched Wednesday morning to set up a ring of barricades to block tourists from the memorial. That is two more security officials than the State Department had in Benghazi a year ago on the night of the terrorist attack that killed four, including the U.S. ambassador.

National Park Officials closed down the educational Claude Moore Colonial Farm near the CIA in McLean, Va., even though the federal government doesn't fund or staff the park popular with children and schools. Just because the privately-operated park is on Park Service land, making the federal government simply its landlord, the agency decided to close it.

Read more.