Quiet Please

Would you actors and/or whatever might be celebrities, please shut-up on sharing your political values with us, and just entertain and celeb (whatever that means)! Know we appreciate your tax deductible contributions to worthy charities for the most part, but please enough of this political pontificating from your all too lofty media soap box! It offends in our knowledge of your over the top salaries, palatial estates, living large and reckless life styles; many of you taking up residence, even citizenship abroad; sheltering your American gained wealth in every nook, cranny and trust available to man-, all your prerogative I might add. But please spare us the sanctimonious dribble from your distorted perspective! I find myself making entertainment decisions based on a performer's political views! I'm to understand I've missed a lot of good movies lately! What a sorry state of affairs!

Are We Over?

We say, we are spending our way into insolvency! They  say we are not-, in fact they are saying we are not spending enough! We say our burgeoning welfare rolls and government entitlements are unsustainable! They say it is our obligation, our commitment to each other to provide such sustenance to our deserving needy!  We say our taxes are too high! They say, they are not high enough! We say there is a glaring discrepancy between those who pay taxes and those who do not! They say the "rich" are not paying their fair share! We say, and the not-so- rich are not; show us the numbers to substantiate your allegations? They remind us: What is it that we don't understand about the results of Election Day Tuesday November 6, 2012! We roll over and play dead! With his thought to be electorate mandate bit firmly in his teeth, this president of ours is off to the race for socialism in his life time, with renewed  commitment and intensity.

I grow weary in these observations, although  I am looking forward to the upcoming budget negotiations as an opportunity, hopefully to some appreciable degree, stemming this tide of fiscal irresponsibility. To give us some hope for a survival course in the foreseeable post Obama future! I must admit however, I'm not all that optimistic judging by our performance to date!

A Ryan of Hope

This young Representative from Wisconsin and our resent candidate for the vice- presidency continues to have something to say and purports himself very well in saying  it. He has a comprehensive  plan to restore our solvency and the credentials and experience to backup his fiscal conjectures and postulates, not just another law degreed Washingtonian! At a  resent meeting of conservative activists In Charlotte N.C, Paul Ryan was a standout. He and his conservative cohorts were not cowering in our recent defeat at the polls but were steadfast in promoting conservative principals, rallying our members to the cause of a smaller, less intrusive, more efficient government, more attuned to the electorate's changing demographics, hyper-sensitive to the threatening consequences of insolvency! A while back I asked where are our young lions  ready and eager to take on this formidable socialist regime lead by President Obama.  I'm now perhaps more willing to recognize that there  are  some of them out there putting up the good fight, but obscured by neglect and the din of the liberal media to convince us otherwise. Their incessant rant "the  people have spoken, long live Barack Husain Obama"  had clouded my mind! Now, let all of us pay attention to the fight at hand, these pending budget machinations. We must have  a measure to hold their feet to the fire with. They have been very successful in avoiding the drawing of a budget (unconstitutionally I might add) and blaming the failure on us! Pay attention and let your feelings be known!

Phil Mickelson's Stifled Cry in the Night

Isn't this Phil Mickelson complaining about his tax situation interesting? Too bad he  backpedaled after liberal backlash, but at least he got it out there...,although the mainstream media has not exactly given it much press. I suppose we just have to bide our time until our president faces yet another crisis he can't handle, exposing him once again for the pretender he is. You'd think sooner or later the preponderance of evidence decrying his incompetence would awaken we the people! Or of course we along with him, can continue to circle the economic drain ignoring our certain fate!

Interesting to note the  NPR did a piece on LeBron James with the amazing claim that at 17 million per year, he is underpaid based on his worth to the franchise.  By their calculations, they estimated that his actual value should place his salary at 40 million dollars per year, stating that he was getting "hosed".  They did mention league parity and competitiveness as an afterthought. An unbelievable example of liberal hypocrisy when they can tout the talents of this athlete, whose worth to society is stuffing a ball through a hoop and hawking sweatbands and sneakers as being worth $40 million and yet they continue to hammer the "rich" overpaid CEOs and hedge fund managers on Wall Street for their exorbitant salaries and simutaneously praise the wonders of Obamacare when the average pediatrician makes $115,000 per year! There is something so basically wrong with this liberal logic that defies comprehension.

A Week of OMG

Let me get this straight: President Obama , if he can just resolve those pressing issues of Gay rights, abortions, illegal immigration, gun control, global warming and a myriad of other equally pressing social issues in his second term; those other pesky little problems of our nation's pending insolvency, unemployment, a faltering economy, bloated welfare rolls well take care of themselves? And, in the knowledge Timothy Geithner is out but Jacob Lew is in as Secretary of the Treasury our fiscal fortunes will continue to be guided by a tax more/spend more philosophy while promising to stay the course of insolvency, inflation and depression? And let's not forget you, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in being resolute to never having the likes of Benghazi happen again; yet in so many words have not been able to tell us what did happen in Benghazi? And thinking forward in promoting our international prestige and reputation, we are to rest assured in the knowledge that Vice President Biden remains at his post as our expert on foreign policy (remember that's why he was on this presidential ticket in the first place). Now being joined by our sure to be newly appointed Secretary of State, the ever erudite John Kerry, our peerless international policies and relationships of the past four years will be sustained. How reassuring!

Enough!

Enough with this racial, cultural and/or color prefix or suffix identification of everyone's person, spoken word, action, or inaction! Latino, Black, Asian, or whatever! It is divisive! That's what makes Americans unique. For the most part our only common denominator is that we are Americans! True our heritages may trace back to origins other than the United States, but in our citizenship we are, or should be Americans first and foremost. We or our forefathers before us, again for the most part-, made that choice of their own free will. By all means be proud of our heritage, but don't use it as a reason to divide us in the best interests of this great country of ours! And yes, in our associations to preserve our heritage's culture, be the hyphenated Americans we chose to be, but always keeping in mind the obligations of being citizens of this representative government of the United States of America-, yet again for the most part, that has been so very good to us all!

I cringe at the tactics of those who obviously think otherwise. That angst most recently peaked in the inauguration of BHO, coinciding with the celebration of MLK Day. One the great divider, the other a great unifier; one who promotes racial and cultural differences for political gain, the other who had a dream of homogeneous racial and cultural equality for all! One who history will certainly see him for what he is, the other for what he was!

Cuomo Gun Law

Direct from Albany we have the latest winner in the category of grandstanding, self-serving politicians: the ineffectual, union pandering, rubber faced, socialist, Andrew Cuomo.  Does anyone out there with a functioning cerebral cortex think that his passage of “the toughest gun law in the country” in a closed door, middle of the night, Obama-esque end-around has anything to do with preventing gun violence?  The short answer: No.  This has everything to do with political posturing and appealing to his liberal base to set himself up for a run at the presidency in 2016.  With a swift stroke of his opportunistic pen, he has managed to stomp on the Second Amendment and turn legal, law-abiding, tax paying gun owners throughout the once great State of New York into criminals.  Bravo, I can hear Bloomberg high fiving his armed security detail.  I can also imagine the fury in Obama’s camp who was beaten to the political punch and whose thunder was stolen by a two-bit politician attempting to become the socialist heir apparent. His speech was nothing more than a stump speech, shrill and wild-eyed with all the charm of Howard Dean’s notorious war cry. He sounded more like a union thug or a mob boss than a presidential contender in a performance that will not play well with moderate republicans or independents. All in all, a pitiful display of political opportunism.

Mr. Cuomo, how exactly is it that the will of your downstate Manhattan elites should be imposed on a dairy farmer in Rome?  How is it that the highly politicized, city-warped views of a bunch of Mercedes driving, Starbucks sipping, yuppies with their Italian suits, man purses and season tickets to Broadway shows have anything to do with the daily reality of a pick-up driving, deer-hunting farmer freezing his butt off in a pair of Carharts in upstate New York whose concerns are getting in two milking cycles a day and keeping the coyote and woodchuck population in check?  New York State is a big, diverse place and this wrong-headed bill is like having someone in northern New Jersey pretending to know and influence the life of someone in rural Montana. You can’t paint all of New York with one big liberal brush and Cuomo’s comment that New York is a “progressive state” was verification that as far as New York state legislators are concerned, upstate is just an inconvenience.  New York City, Westchester County and Long Island are where the votes are and to hell with the rest of you.  Thank you governor for clarification, we suspected as much.  Rural America take note.

Tougher gun laws are not necessarily smart gun laws.  Once again, all the laws on the books are worthless if they are not enforced or if they are not adhered to by the criminal element.  It is essentially like making crime illegal.  Duh.  The insistence by the leftists on demonizing guns based on appearance is preposterous.  Cuomo’s expansion of the definition of an assault weapon to a gun with only one “military style” feature makes him look like an idiot.  Calling a semi-automatic rifle an assault weapon because it has a bayonet lug is like calling a Plymouth Neon a race car because it has a spoiler.  And the restriction of magazines to 7 rounds with the caveat that you can have a ten round magazine but are not allowed to load it with more than seven rounds is ludicrous.  Are we going to start a new division of magazine police?  And while on the subject of magazines:  this nonsense about magazine restriction to seven but you can have a ten round magazine but only load it to seven and only have two total and all magazines greater than 10 are instantly illegal and have to be disposed of within a year is like reading the NFL rules on blocking.  Only this, only there, and not always, but sometimes.  It is nothing more than a hilarious inconvenience for the law abiding and a laugh riot for the criminal element who I’m sure are just peeing themselves over the legal contortions, contortions that they have no intention of following anyway. It is an amazing embarrassment that the M-1 Garand, a seventy-year-old rifle credited by General Patton as the greatest battle implement ever designed, the rifle that won World War Two, a twelve pound, wooden stocked, tank of a firearm now has the dubious distinction of being a registered NYS assault weapon, based on a semi-automatic action and a bayonet lug.  And all this nonsense, this political grandstanding for a topic that, despite the media’s best attempts to keep it in the public eye, to report even the errant use of a slingshot in Arkansas, remains at a level of importance ranking of 4% in the public’s list of concerns.  It’s the economy, stupid.

With all these designations and definitions also comes registration, the natural precursor to confiscation.  Of course confiscation is our government’s goal.  Why else would we be spending so much time and resources on registering a group of firearms that are used in less than 1% of all crimes?  Senator Dianne Feinstein, she of the left coast, actually suggested that registration is necessary to track firearms to their owners when they are found at the scene of a crime, thus linking the gun to the criminal?  Seriously? Criminals are not so stupid as to leave valuable tools of the trade at the scene of the crime, and they are only found when the criminal is either dead or otherwise incapacitated at the scene, thereby negating the necessity of tracking the gun to the owner. Furthermore, it is more likely that the perpetrator did not conveniently choose to register his weapon, obtained it through illegal trafficking, or simply stole it to avoid those pesky background checks. Even the socialist leaning Canadians, notorious gun haters in Ms. Feinstein’s class, eliminated their long gun registry because it was found to be costly and ineffectual. Kind of like Congress.  But why would we expect Governor Cuomo to consider statistics or taxpayers in this stump stunt?  New York only recently eliminated a ballistic identification program (COBIS) that established yet another branch of the State Police to catalog and record the markings on cartridges, markings made when ejected from a semi-automatic firearm.  Never mind that the technology was unproven and found to be unreliable (markings on casings change as the extractor in the gun wears or if the parts are replaced). After seven years of operation at a cost of 4 million taxpayer dollars per year, COBIS had failed to solve a single crime.  Next up on the liberal radar is ballistic identification through microstamping, a technology that can be readily defeated with a nail file.  I wonder how much we will spend on that before it too is proven worthless. 

In a related moment of hysterical hypocrisy last week, Obama actually extended secret service protection to former presidents and first ladies for the remainder of their lives while simultaneously seeking to disarm law abiding Americans.  On this issue the NRA has it exactly right:  why is it that our politicians enjoy a life of security surrounded by armed bodyguards but treat the rest of us like serfs?  The NRA pointed to this inconsistency in a television spot where it was asked why Obama’s children have armed security at their school, yet that is not seen as a viable option for the rest of us.  The White House response was quick and predictable: how dare you use Obama’s children as an example, calling the spot “repugnant and cowardly”.  The next day, however, Obama revealed his gun control agenda surrounded by children who wrote letters to the president expressing their concerns about gun violence.  You just can’t make this stuff up.  I’m unsure which is more amusing, the glaring hypocrisy or the suggestion that Obama takes his policy cues from pre-pubescent school children.  As I opined before, why is it that we value our celebrities, our politicians, and even our money so highly that we surround them with armed guards, yet when the NRA suggests the same level of protection for our children, they are vilified in the press? From the democrat party that preaches equality, praises redistribution, and lavishes the poor with entitlements why do we see such hypocrisy in not allowing us, the people, the same level of security that they enjoy?  Fend for yourselves they seem to be saying.  Let them eat cake. They don’t even have to suffer through Obamacare.

And speaking of healthcare, how exactly are we going to monitor our mental health professionals?  Every time a bipolar patient hiccups, are they expected to make a call or file a report?  How exactly does all this meld seamlessly with a patient’s right to privacy, physician confidentiality and HIPAA?  And who exactly polices the mental health professional?  If one of their patients goes off the reservation, are they to be held responsible for not reporting a potentially unstable individual as a danger to society? And how is all this going to be enforced anyway?  Are we moving to the next level in a violation of out rights?  Are we going to conduct home inspections?  Arbitrarily conduct raids on random gun owners from the state data base?  Is it time to hack another chunk out of the Constitution, you know that inconvenient part about illegal search and seizure?  This is how freedom is lost.  With registration will come confiscation.  It is how England did it, how Australia did it and how every authoritarian regime in history has done it including Stalin’s.  So line up and register your weapons to the applause of the media and the left.  And take one step closer to servitude.  After all, when we finally rebel, the government can be assured that you will only have seven rounds in your magazine.

So in summary, I can only hope that Mr. Cuomo’s partisan stump speech will irreparably damage his presidential aspirations by failing to resonate with independents and centrist democrats, whilst completely alienating moderate republicans.  There is a fine line between a passionate speech and just being nuts.  Ten “bullets” may indeed be more ammunition than you “need to hunt deer”, it may be just about right for coyotes, crows and woodchucks, but it is most certainly less than you need when an oppressive, tyrannical government comes calling to quell a rebellion.  And that, my dear Mr. Cuomo, is the true intent of the Second Amendment.