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I love America. That is why I fight for her

I don’t doubt that the people on the left “love” America.

What I also know is true is that their definition of “love” of America is 100% the opposite of mine.

My love of country is frequently called “jingoistic” in online debates, a term once used by America’s arch-foe, the Soviet Union, and their treasonous allies planted on American soil.

The left’s “love” for America is for its rich opportunity to be turned into a fantasy utopia, the likes of which Marxists have been pursuing one way or another for over 100 years.

Leftists would take all of our material success until now, and convert it into state-controlled property, to be doled out sparingly to everyone equally.  That policy failed awfully in the Soviet Union, but as someone once close to me used to say, “Communism failed only because the Soviets did not implement it correctly.  It is otherwise a great thing and still ought to be pursued.”

The Soviets failed, and the Berlin Wall fell (25 years ago), because a tidal wave of individual hope for freedom and liberty continually corroded state power; eventually, the system just leaked throughout its faulty pipes.

The left would ignore all that and return us to those dark days.  Oh sure, they don’t say the days will be dark.  Neither did the Soviets, and neither do the Chinese or the North Koreans – they all say things are just rosy.

I love the America that was founded in 1776 and 1787 and 1794 and 1812 and 1867 and 1922 and 1948 and 1954 and 1964 and…….Yes, America as it was founded had the tools built into it to overcome the many challenges the young nation inherited (slavery and abolition) and later worked through (women’s suffrage, Negro voting rights, etc.).

America is not perfect – what nation is? – but America is perfectly designed and built to successfully process all challenges.

The challenge we face now is the same we faced when the Soviets had their agents working to damage us on the home front.  We face domestic political opponents who really do not believe in the America as it was founded.  They do not really love America, as it was created.  They are like little Benedict Arnolds, riding through the countryside at night, doing their utmost to un-do all the goodness.

I and tens of millions like me, however, we do love America as it was founded and as it has progressed since its founding.  And we will not sit idly by as our great nation is “transformed” into something unrecognizable.  Our fight is as much with liberals in the Democratic Party as it is with liberals in the Republican Party, and there are plenty there, too.

Speaking of the traitor Benedict Arnold, he was caught by two ragamuffin Patriot soldiers, more militiamen than regulars, and he offered them huge sums of money if they would but let him go to his British handlers waiting for him not far away.  Our two boys were destitute of money, but not of spirit, and in their ragged clothing they held him at the end of their loaded barrels and marched him back to patriot lines.

Today, people like me, no matter how much money is thrown at us, for or against us in supportive politics or opposition politics, we are going to keep on fighting to bring back the America we once knew – The America that offers full and equal prosperity to all who are willing to work hard and contribute to a society bound by Constitutional obligations and opportunities, and nothing more, or less.

Out of all proportion

If there is one core element to the “new thinking” taking America down, it is victimology.

You know, the idea that everyone is a victim, and some people are special victims and some are especially victimized.

For someone to be a victim, there must be a perpetrator, and political correctness has created all sorts of creative solutions to real and perceived wounds which perpetrators can, or must!, endlessly do to atone.  America has been afflicted with this, to the absurd point where illegal aliens crossing our borders in search of better work are “victims” and deserve our taxpayer money and the right to vote themselves a lot more of it.

It is a fair idea that people should be treated fairly.  No arguing with that.  But what happens when whatever apology, compensation, or other action worth remedying the problem has been completed, and the victim identity remains?  This phenomenon is nowhere more clearly evident than in the Middle East, or technically the Near East, where “Palestinian” Arabs have wallowed in artificial and purposefully perpetuated victim status for five decades.

Even their refugee status is inherited, contrary to every other refugee situation around the world.  The UN helps maintain this arrangement.

Although there were nearly twice as many refugee Jews ejected from Arab and Muslim nations at the same time, no one talks about them.  Islamic imperialism and Arab colonialism are responsible for one of the largest and longest-standing occupations ever on planet Earth, where the farms, homes, and businesses that once belonged to Jews are now the property of supposedly well-intentioned Muslim Arabs.  Billions of dollars worth of property and banks were stolen overnight, from one group of people and given to another group that had no claim on it other than they held the knife and gun, and the victim did not.

If someone were looking for victims to feel bad for, the Jews have had that victim experience in spades, not to mention the Armenians (Christians who suffered a none-too-gentle genocide and land-theft at the hands of the Muslim Turks from 1910-1915), Kurds, Tibetans, and, well, never mind that the iconic and fiercely warlike Oglala Sioux ejected the Mandan, Cheyenne, and Pawnee from millions of acres of their historic Happy Hunting Grounds and militarily occupied them for hundreds of years…after all, the American Indians who massacred, tortured, and occupied one another are considered to have engaged in acceptable behavior.  Anyhow, I digress…..

The Jews now find themselves fighting for their lives with their backs to the wall, yet once again against Islamic supremacists, Islamic imperialists, and Arab colonists; and those same Jews are now presented with yet another double-standard: Proportionality.

This is the idea that, if someone hits you in the face with the intention of killing you, but fails to do so that first time and is winding up to hit you again and harder this next time, why, you are only supposed to hit them back once and only just as hard as you were first hit.  You are not allowed to land a knockout punch, despite having survived an attempted knockout punch.

The EU demands that endless Arab rockets from Gaza onto indigenous Jews, living an unbroken 3,000-year presence in their homeland, be met with…thousands of random rockets from Israel?  My God no! Unacceptable!

Obviously, the idea of proportionality is alien to every people that has fought a war, especially a defensive war.  War is fought to be won, and dumbing-down and reducing the effectiveness of your response is a foolish and possibly suicidal thing to do.

But Europe and America cater first and foremost to artificial victims, and no matter what, those victims are due every gift, every extra opportunity, every kind gesture in the face of bloody hands, truckloads of taxpayer money despite tremendous waste by the recipients, and so on and so forth.  Although this behavior seems suicidal, suicide seems to be the new definition of democracy, in the interest of appeasing the ‘victims’ among us, out of all proportion to whatever happened in the first place.

But to give the supposed victims their due, proportionality must be maintained, and in the Middle East today, Western civilization is expected to fight Islamic aggression, theft, murder, and occupation with both hands tied behind its back.  It is apparently the new thing to do.

Good move by Gov. Corbett

If I hear one more false accusation that Tom Corbett is short changing government schools, I am gonna buttonhole that next person who says it.  It is not true that government school funding was or has been cut by the Corbett administration.  Like so many things that former governor Ed Rendell had done, those previous annual education budgets were temporarily bolstered by one-time FEDERAL money.  That funding was never intended to be continuous, and if it is not continuous, then it is in Barack Obama’s hands, not some governor who has zero control over federal spending.

Whatever your beef with Tom Corbett may be, and Lord knows, people have legitimate beefs with him, he is not responsible for “cutting education funding.” That is a lie.

Today, Corbett did the right thing by signing the legislature’s proposed budget, but using his line-item veto power to exclude the state legislature’s hoggish claim to some $72 million taxpayer dollars.  I have seen the state legislature hog over $100 million, and even higher, for their pet projects that the careerist leaders and their “pets” use to spend on projects to buy votes and get re-elected.

Corbett is angling for the legislature to return and fix the state pension crisis.

Good move, Tom Corbett.

No “severance tax,” unless

A “severance tax” on deep shale gas would be on top of, in addition to, the Capital Stock and Franchise Tax, an astronomical Corporate Net Income Tax, and the Act 13 Impact Fee that is collected from wells and distributed to hosting counties.

Adding an additional tax, no matter what you call it, is stupid. It’s bad public policy, it’s bad government. Tax-and-spend officials always like spending other people’s money. That’s the worst sort of government.

A severance tax could make sense if one or all of the other taxes and fees were eliminated. Then there’d be balance. That’s good public policy, good government.

If you want higher prices in your own house for many food items, grill gas, heating gas, etc. and you want to open up your own wallet, take out more money than you need to pay, and just donate it, OK. But don’t demand that everyone else also dig deeper into their wallets for their money to cover your bad ideas. The severance tax will be passed on to the public with higher costs for lots of things.

Just leave it alone.

 

How ObamaCare is directly funding the Democratic Party. Good Government? Fair?

‘Healthy’ Democrats

By BETSY McCAUGHEY
New York Post
Posted: 10:36 PM, June 25, 2013

If you have to keep it a secret, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.

California is trying to keep secret how it spends $910 million in federal taxpayer money granted by the Obama administration to set up its health-insurance exchange, Covered California.What we’ve learned so far about the misuse of that money should raise red flags in all states setting up exchanges — including New York.

In California,some of the $910 million is going for rich compensation packages for exchange employees ($360,000 a year for the executive director). More than half the funds are being handed out in contracts to third parties, and the lion’s share of those contracts are for what the exchange terms “outreach.” In truth, the money is going to build Democratic Party enrollment.

Amazingly, the California state legislature passed a law that allowed the exchange to keep secret for a year who received the contracts and indefinitely how much they were paid. This month Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.) and four other senators called for an investigation of California’s concealing information on contracts awarded using federal taxpayer money.

What is known so far suggests that California politicians are exploiting health reform to enroll millions of the uninsured in the Democratic Party and fill the coffers of left-wing interest groups with taxpayer money. Here are the facts:

California lawmakers passed a law requiring that voter registration be part of the health-insurance exchange. Last month, Covered California announced $37 million in grants to 48 organizations to build public awareness about the opening of the health exchange. Of the 48 groups that got grants, only a handful are health-care-related.

The California NAACP got $600,000 to do door-to-door canvassing and presentations at community organizations. Service Employees International Union, which says its mission is “economic justice,”received two grants totaling $2 million to make phone calls, robo-calls and go door-to-door.

The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor AFL-CIO got $1 million for door-to-door, one-on-one education and social networking. It describes its role as “engaging in both organizing and political campaigns, electing pro-union and pro-worker candidates.”

Community Health Councils, a California organization with a long history of political activism against fracking, for-profit hospitals, state budget cuts and oil exploration, got $1 million to conduct presentations at community and neighborhood meetings and one-to-one sessions.

These groups, closely allied with Democrats, are being funded by your tax dollars to conduct “outreach” — the kind of phone-banking and door-to-door canvassing that activists do to turn out the vote. They will turn out the uninsured to enroll in the exchanges and in the Democratic Party.

California’s actual enrollment process is also outsourced to community groups, unions and health clinics. An additional $49 million is budgeted to pay them the first year, but in future years, these assisters will be paid out of the premiums collected by the exchange. The template is repeated in every state. ObamaCare creates a permanent, nationwide stream of funding for unions and community activists.

Assisters will also guide the uninsured to sign up for whatever non-health social services they may be eligible for — including welfare, food stamps and housing assistance, according to the manual prepared for California’s implementation.

Anyone who remembers the days of James Curley, Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall should get the picture. If you were poor or a newcomer, you went to the local ward boss and got whatever you needed, in exchange for your vote. The difference is that back then, politics was local. Now the Obama health law is institutionalizing this corrupt style of politics across the country to create a permanent, Democratic voting majority.

Rule 15 Fight at Convention

Three Romney mailers arrived over past two months, asking me for money.
Sure, I said.
Then came the Rule 15 fight at the convention. Establishment wants us hard working conservatives to move the party ball forward, but then they strip away our influence.
Good luck, guys!