Let the Dems “cave”…

For the past several days we have been hearing talk of fiscally conservative Republicans “caving” to the progressive/socialist cries to increase taxes to “avoid the fiscal cliff.”

They have been sugar-coating their “caving” by calling their proposed compromise “closing tax loopholes.”  I’ve got news.  One man’s loophole is another man’s exemption.  How would you like to see your home mortgage interest “exemption” called a “loophole” and eliminated?  How would you like to see the exemption for your children called a “loophole” and eliminated?

That is apparently what many in Congress are all about – proposing the elimination of “loopholes.”  I call it tax increases disguised through a shell game.

Oh, and the reason given for “closing the loopholes” is “tax reform.”  That is the drip drip drip water torture version of “tax reform.”  That kind of tax reform is just another excuse for raising taxes.

Not one penny of tax increase – for the middle class or for the rich - through closing “loopholes” or in the name of “tax reform” should be tolerated unless there is a comprehensive – a comprehensive -  tax reform package.  And not any increase, not even as a result of comprehensive tax reform, until the unemployment rate is below 5%.

Raising a billion here and a billion there by closing loopholes  - read “eliminating exemptions” - will cause much more harm to the producers and job creators of this country than it will benefit any budget shortfall.  That doesn’t even begin to touch the magnitude of the deficit.

Cut spending.  Cut government.  Eliminate czars.  Eliminate Departments and Bureaus.  Eliminate programs.  Eliminate funding abortions.  Eliminate funding obscene “art” and insane environmental and green energy boondoggles  and free-flowing food stamps and excessively lengthy unemployment benefits.  These all waste money and unnecessarily inhibit business, job growth and personal initiative.  

Our demand needs to be:  Cut  government, don’t tax its subjects more.  And don’t pretend that “eliminating loopholes” isn’t raising taxes. 

Reduce government.  Don’t tax more to grow more government.   Don’t encourage people to be dependent on government.  Encourage people to be independent and self-sufficient produces.  That’s how our country grew strong.  Not by its people being takers dependent on government but by its people being producers independent of government.

To mock the sickening words of our first “lady”, for the first time in my adult life I am ashamed of my country for electing leaders who insist on taking us down the path of dependency, bigger government, higher taxes, and ultimately, loss of our freedoms.

Too many Catholics poop in their own nest…

I attended a social event the other night where there happened to be eight people who claimed to be Catholic sitting at our table.

My wife mentioned how pleased she was that the Priest at our church had no problem being outspoken about abortion and moral values generally.  She rightly believed that mention of this topic would be safe among fellow “Catholics.”  She may have been right 50 years ago.

Four or five of the other alleged Catholics jumped on her opinion as if she had two heads.  One proclaimed that the Priests opinions aren’t worth diddly and basically that everyone’s situation is different and they ought to be able to do what feels right to them.  I thought to myself in that instant that this reinforces my opinion about Catholics – that of the minority of them who do attend Mass regularly, most appear to attend for the ritual and out of habit rather than out of any love of the church or sense of allowing Catholic doctrine to permeate and influence their lifestyle or morals.  The fact that 50% of Catholics voted for Obama despite his violation of Catholic religious freedoms and doctrine flashed through my mind.  This tells me how much half the Catholics care about Catholic doctrine – very little.

But it got worse.  Two or three of these “Catholic” apostates went on a rant about the past sins of priests and a number of other complaints about the Church.  This was very old news, but still stuck in their craw.   It got to the point that I mentioned to the woman next to me, “this discussion is motivating me to write a blog about how a group of Catholics can be so opposed to their own Church.” 

It is one thing to understand the moral decline of our nation by doing extensive reading about it.  It is quite another, and much more disconcerting, to experience a table full of alleged Catholic Christians poo-pooing the idea of moral absolutes right in front of my eyes.  This experience represented one microcosm of why this nation is in moral, spiritual, and economic decline.

The room we were in was noisy, and conversation was not easy without getting loud ourselves.  My wife and I had to bite our tongues  because there was a lot we would have liked to have said to these others if the environment was conducive.   So we left a bit early.  Were were getting “tired”, not sleepy tired so much as tired of the bullshit.

Not a lot of difference…

Bradley Manning, the security leaker, David Petraeus, the security liability

 

Captain Neville, the uppity bastard of Revolution.      Barack Obama, the uppity bastard of Chicago.

Weirdness and illogic of election results lead me to one overwhelming conclusion…

Nearly half the US population agrees with me that we had a choice between good and evil in this past election.

I won’t go into the candidates respective qualities – they are well known by most who care to know.  But we know what each man represented.

Dozens of different reasons and excuses are given by analysts and pundits for Romney’s loss, surprising to many, not surprising to some.  You’ve probably heard most of them.  I won’t rehash those excuses, either.

There are over a million people in the United States (maybe several times that number) who believe the United States and all other world governments generally are so corrupt and immoral that they will not participate in government at all.  They won’t run for office, they won’t vote, they won’t serve in the armed forces, they won’t salute the flag.  Most will pay taxes (some won’t) and obey all the other laws of the land out of Biblical principle to obey.  But voluntary participation will not be in their to do list.

They believe that governments are so out of touch with God’s pattern for governance that most governments have become anti-God.  Governments reflect the culture and the culture has become anti-God.  To participate or engage voluntarily with the government in any capacity is believed to be working against God.  They believe what Jesus said:

"Anyone who isn't with me opposes me, and anyone who isn't working with me is actually working against me.

New Living Translation (©2007)

And they take this command seriously.  Most denominations, mainline and otherwise, don’t go this far.  Most denominational leaders take the lead of Catholic Cardinal Dolan and schmooze with the political elite, believing that they can make a difference without corrupting themselves.   Others believe such leaders are fools and are deceived and make a mockery of their supposed ‘Godliness.’

The weirdness and illogic of this past election has reinforced my growing conviction that events in this nation are the consequence of a spiritual battle of good verses evil.  And good is losing.  Evil is prevailing so completely that the “hedge of protection” that many Christians believe in is being lifted.  We have become so enamored with ourselves and so dismissive of God that God is becoming dismissive of us.  He is saying, in essence, “if that is the direction they want to go, let them go.  If they no longer want to honor Me, I will no longer honor them.  I will call a “timeout” on my sacred covenant and let them pursue their heart’s desire.” 

The forces of evil are lovin’ it.

US Policy in the Middle East Flunks the Stink Test…

…and Patraeus was the architect and implementer

There is nothing to pity about Petraeus.   He is not the vaunted military strategist who brought us victory in Iraq or anywhere else. He is a political pawn in the pocket of Islamic sympathizers in the White House.

Does anyone think we “won” in Iraq?  What is the state of affairs there?  A brooding, simmering Muslim population on the verge of civil war.  And Iraq’s anti-US government has vowed to use Mid-East oil as a weapon against the us.

Let me think.  Isn’t Petraeus the guy who apologized for the burning of a Qur’an a year or so ago, while at the same time ordering Bibles to be burned so that Muslims won’t be offended?  Wasn’t it Petraeus who demanded rules of engagement of our troops that prohibited firing against known enemies until fired upon?  Wasn’t it Petraeus who developed the plan for our troops to buddy up with and “trust” Muslim police and troops, only to have dozens of our Muslim “allies” assassinate dozens of our troops over the course of the past year?  And yes, he was among the first to blame a US YouTube video for Muslim riots.  His counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy calls for “respect Islam over our own beliefs”, and to sacrifice our soldiers for the benefit of the Muslim population and culture.  That is utter madness!

Diana West has a lot more on the vaunted useless general HERE.

Within the next year or two, we will discover that both Iraq and Afghanistan wars were nothing but a tremendous waste of life and treasure, an Islamic “rope-a-dope” that would have made Muslim Muhammad Ali proud if he was ever a Brotherhood leader.  The “dopes” are us, led by a corrupt federal government and socialist/Muslim-pandering media.

Morality should be compromised–and pigs should fly…

The recent debacle of an election was discussed by a diverse group of conservatives the other day.  We were all involved in a “post mortem” of sorts, each giving his understanding of why Romney failed.

One reason given was particularly striking:  Those damned moral Christians are so uncompromising.  They either need to learn to compromise their social conservative position or they need to be excluded from the process.  They are dinosaurs in a changing world.  They need to get with the program.

I asked, “why should moral principles be compromised?  Why don’t those who cherish their immoral position do the compromising?”

That question was not answered, as if that option doesn’t exist.  Unfortunately, that option is not taken seriously by very many of us anymore in this debased culture.  Amorality is the poster child of the new tolerance.  Our politics and our leaders reflect the corruption of our culture.  We get what we deserve.  Compromising what good there is left is hardly the solution.

So, in short, I have this to say to those who believe that morality should be compromised for their perception of “the common good”:  How about you compromise your own values instead, if you have any left.  Yeah, yeah, I know that is impolite, and not politically correct.  And it doesn’t get the votes from the requisite number of like minded TV-numbed, culture-killing amoral ignoramuses.  So be it.

 

Ever wonder why military brass don’t know crap about Islam?

…and ever wonder why we are in protracted, no win wars?

Because more of them than we ever knew are distracted and corrupt.  The ones we placed the most trust in – Patreaus and now General John R. Allen, head of NATO forces.  And how many others?

With everything these people were into they most likely had only enough time to learn about “the enemy” from MSNBC, Al Jazeera and their Muslim buddies.  I ‘ve most likely devoted more hours to learning the truth about Islam than these fools have.  And how much of their policies have been driven by blackmail?

How far does this corruption, incompetence and crime against the United States extend? Watch for news about the FBI and CIA, not to mention what we already know about the State Department.

Am I overreacting?  Frankly, I may be UNderreacting.  You tell me.

Optimism and Realistic Optimism…

A theme of a  recent post-election church service was the need to maintain our optimism in the face of adversity.  What was the basis for that hope?  It was this:   God is in control, our nation has divine origins, devout Christians will pray our nation back to Godliness, He will bless our nation, and everything will be OK.  That is optimism.   It is also somewhat presumptuous and misleading.

Yes, God is in control, as He was in control of the fate of Israel as it was overrun by pagan nations a number of times throughout the past millennia.

Yes, our nation has divine origins, as attested by many of her earliest explorers and founders, just as many prophets and ancient historians of Israel have declared of Israel’s divine origins.  The diminishing remnant of faithful Christians in America will pray and bargain with God to save our nation, just as the faithful remnant of Sodom bargained with God not to destroy that rebellious and forsaken place. 

There were times Israel was blessed; there were times Israel was overrun.  There was a time when Sodom prospered, and a time when Sodom was destroyed.  Blessing occurred when the people and leaders of these places were faithful to God.  Defeat and destruction occurred when the people and leaders turned their back on God.

These changes did not occur overnight or even in just a few years.  Decline occurred and occurs over decades and generations.  Misery and bondage most often remains just as long.  Recovery and renewed prosperity often take additional decades if it occurs at all.

The United States has been in the grip of spiritual and moral decline for more than a half century.  Legalized abortion, removal of prayer from schools and public places, the mocking of Christians, the acceptance and glorification of homosexuality and gay marriage, rampant pornography, and the liberalization of most churches into social and entertainment centers attest to this decline.  The Word of God has lost it’s authority and respect in most denominations.  Academia is entrenched in promoting the doctrine that government is more important than God or Godliness.   These Godless centers of indoctrination are cranking out tens of thousands of like minded promoters of Godlessness every year.  Nearly a majority of our citizens now rely on government for “free stuff” to the same extent as Americans relied on God just two generations ago.  Government has replaced God.

Is God in control?  Yes He is.  But God is not mocked.  Nor is His timing our timing.  God is patient.  He has all the time in the world to allow evil and rebellion against Him to run its course.  The Godless and lukewarm will not turn around back toward Him tomorrow or next week or next year.  Things have not gotten nearly dire enough to get the attention of most people.  Our evil has not run its course.  God has a history of letting people and nations stew awhile in their own rebellious desires before He is ready to restore blessings.  Many hope for a Third Great Awakening any moment.  But we are much further gone into rebellion than we were prior to the First and Second.  Godliness has become institutionalized and ingrained into our government and culture like never before.  Hey, a majority just elected a president who prefers Islam over Christianity in a party who by voice vote voted to reject the word “God” in its platform.

On a positive note about this election:  It is a good thing that a good man was not elected president before the people of this nation are ready to turn around.  I would hate to see the momentum toward national destruction destroy the reputation and spirit of a good man.  God allows the people to be led by the leaders they deserve.  And right now, the majority deserve what they got.

We are a long way from a Third Great Awakening and God’s blessing on our nation.  Faithful Christians are now a remnant, a minority.  Hard times are coming that will test our faithfulness.  Mocking, persecution, censure, and legal actions will be brought against our attempts to influence the culture and our government.   But that is also part of God’s plan for us.  That is part of His culling process.  That has been His method in the past and there is no reason to expect that His methods have changed.

Now is NOT the time to believe we have easy solutions and a rosy path forward to reclaiming America.  To the contrary, things will get tougher.  Our faith and our actions must match the challenge.  This requires that we all seek God, ask for his mercy and protection for ourselves and other like believers.  We need to seek stronger faith and greater resolve to endure and engage in the fight before we can effectively influence others.

That, for whatever it is worth, is REALISTIC optimism.

  

The Masses vs. the Remnant…

Seeking reasons for the election results, I glanced at a few of my favorite sites around the internet.

Ann Barhardt (http://barnhardt.biz/) referred to an article the essence of which was this: 

As the word “masses” is commonly used, it suggests agglomerations of poor and underprivileged people, laboring people, proletarians, and it means nothing like that; it means simply the majority. The mass man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.

From the Ludwig von Mises Institute – full article HERE

There are media masses and media remnants; preacher masses and preacher remnants; politician masses and politician remnants; voter masses and voter remnants.  Substitute “masses” with “whore” and the picture becomes more current.  We have media whores, preacher whores, politician whores, and voter whores.  Each seeks the greatest advantage from (not “for”) the dumbed down masses or for themselves.

The remnant lost this election.  The opportunity for the real, longer lasting greater good lost out to the masses, to the whores.

I haven’t even gotten to my favorite religious sites yet.  But I will bet they suggest, speaking of whores, that this nation is absolutely screwed.  God is not happy and will not be mocked.  There are too many willfully unGodly things the masses of this nation have done and are unrepentantly continuing to do.  Mass baby killing, spending like a drunken sailor, promotion of perversion of millenia-old moral codes, encouraging  mass infiltration of foreign cultures and ideologies, degrading our national unity and military defenses.  Sites like Joseph Farah’s World Net Daily speak of the re-election of Obama being God’s judgment on America.

I do not have any answers for “what do we do now?”  But I wrote earlier on what I think will result over the next months and years HERE.

There is a new TV series on the National Geographic channel  called Doomsday Preppers.  Most scenarios they present seem extreme and off the wall.  But there is a lot of food for thought, water for sustenance, and many suggested measures for personal defense discussed.

As I have said, discovering we have little control or influence in our whoring nation is no excuse for failing to do all we can to prepare to take care of ourselves and our loved ones - both materially and spiritually.   We are the remnant.

Voting hell in Sumter County…

If I were the Supervisor of Elections in Sumter County Florida, I would have little reason to be pleased with the voting process in a number of precincts.

In fact, if the long lines and wasted time for voters and poll workers at Coconut Cove in The Villages is any example, I would go into hiding for awhile.   I expect long lines during a presidential election, but I would expect long lines to move quickly.  These lines did NOT move quickly.  There is NO good excuse for the gridlock that the logistical failures produced.

The bottleneck was this:  There was only one scanner – an inferior, balky scanner - at this particular precinct, and at most precincts, as I understand it. 

Throughout the day the line of people waiting for their ballots to be scanned after completing their ballots filled the length of the 40 foot long room – 25 to 30 people long.  Once you waited outside in line for an hour and a half, and once you completed your ballot, you had another half in another line waiting to get your ballot scanned.  Sure, there were plenty of poll workers to assure proper ID and registration and plenty of booths for voters to mark their ballots.   But just one scanner that worked very slowly and very poorly – spitting back out half of the ballots that were fed to it.  That performance of that scanner was poor enough to make any thinking person believe that some government officials somewhere made a lot of money on that scanner contract.  I am convinced that there was no award to the lowest and BEST bid on that piece of crap excuse for a ballot scanner.

In fact the scanner created such a bottleneck that there were repeated half hour periods of time throughout the day when the  5 or 6 poll workers at the ID check in tables were not allowed to process voters because they had to wait for the line waiting for the scanner to shorten – they had to sit and twiddled their thumbs while a line of 100 people or more waited outside for the scanner line to clear out.  All because of the one crappy scanner.  If they had two or three crappy scanners at each polling place, things would have run much more efficiently.  Or if they had one scanner that didn’t act like it had indigestion with its incessant belching of paper back at ya the lines would have moved much faster.

I am wondering how many hundreds of elderly potential voters in just this precinct alone decided not to vote because of the long and unacceptably slow lines caused by the ill conceived logistics.

So, my assessment of the voting operation is this:

1)  The selection of scanners was ill advised; inferior scanners were chosen for whatever reason, and

2) The planners for this election should be familiar with the capabilities of the equipment they have on hand to perform the job.  Assuming that they were, there is no excuse for having just one crappy scanner at each precinct.  It created an unacceptable and wasteful bottleneck.

Except for this screw-up, the poll workers were great and the voters remained in mostly good spirits.  But the Supervisor of Elections responsible for this wasteful fiasco imposed way too much on the patience of the voters and really ought to know how to administer an election a lot better.  I will keep this experience in mind the next time I have an opportunity to consider a new person for that position.

Below are photos of the lines outside of this precinct.  The first is at 11:00 am; the second is t 6:30 pm.  The line is not long because of the volume of voters.  It is long because of the inexcusable bottleneck created by the scanning process.

If Obama wins

                      …here is what to expect

If the unthinkable happens, we can expect some pretty depressingly dramatic and irreversible events to occur over the next several years.

Here are the most obvious…

1.  Gun and ammo sales will spike yet again.  Here is a graph of Smith and Wesson sales over the past 10 years.  Note the spikes in 2008 and 2012.  Why do you think this occurred?  There is a sign on one gun shop counter that reads “Obama has increased our sales by 50%  without a dime of taxpayer stimulus.”

2.  Why would gun and ammo sales increase under Obama?  Because as a socialist liberal, we know that given the opportunity, he will do all in his power to limit gun sales and ownership.  That is the nature of socialism. And we know a second term will give him that opportunity.   So, expect Obama to circumvent Congress and enact very creative methods to tax and regulate guns and ammo out the gazoo should he be given the flexibility of an unencumbered second term.

3. Federal government regulated and run health care, complete with boards of efficiency, aka “death panels” will become permanent and irreversible.  Choices will decline, inefficiencies and red tape will balloon, and waiting lists for procedures and treatment will increase exponentially.

4.  Many conservative political leaders will embark on attempts to form a 3rd party independent of and unfettered by what they view as an out of touch, old guard, good ol’ boy political machine in the existing Republican Party.  Most conservatives within the existing Republican Party will jump ship to this new party leaving only a RHINO shell.  But the resulted will be a fragmented conservative constituency.

5. There will be a dramatic increase of concern about financial collapse and related doomsday scenarios brought about by Obama’s unbridled tax and spend policies.  This will motivate a larger proportion of our population to adopt a “prepper” mentality.  This is also among the causes of the increase in the sale of firearms and ammo.

6.  There will be a dramatic increase in organized conservative self defense and survival skills groups.  People who never considered associating with such groups will be seeking like minded individuals to help with their preparations and form community alliances.  These groups will be demonized by the Federal government and leftists as “hate groups” and “right wing militias.”  Obama’s “class against class” ideology will promote these defensive efforts.

7.  An Obama victory will mean that the United States, for the first time in its history, has passed the tipping point where the takers exceed the producers.  In other words, the  number of voters who pay little or no tax and who depend on the government for their survival or comfort level without doing a whole lot of work have exceeded the number of voters who produce and contribute to our tax base.  This is a recipe for promoting further disincentives to work, creating debilitating inflation leading to financial collapse and civil unrest.  Check out Greece and other southern European countries.  Note this ominous quote from many decades ago…

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing.

8.  Islamic law, aka Sharia, will be given increased preference via appointment of federal and Supreme Court justices by our Islamist-favoring president.  Muslims will be appointed to governmental positions in increasing numbers.  Muslim boldness in asserting Islamic culture and privilege will significantly increase.  Expect increasing numbers of confrontations and violence against the infidel.  Muslims will be emboldened not only by Obama’s pro-Islamic policies in the Middle East, but in our own homeland as well.  HERE is Obamas record regarding Islam and other radical ideologies over the past four years.  There is no reason to expect anything different over the next four, except worse.

9.  Expect massive cuts in military spending including unilateral cuts in our missile defense and nuclear deterrent capabilities.  Obama will fulfill his unintended hot mike promise to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would have more flexibility after the November election to deal with the contentious issue of missile defense – i.e. cutting our defensive capabilities.

Sandy, helplessness, and big government…

It is informative to watch news reports of the big city folks hit by Sandy demanding that government do more for them – whining that things aren’t being done quickly enough for them.  They are so accustomed to government taking care of their every need that in times of disaster they know nothing else but to stand paralyzed in place like a spoiled whining two year old demanding that mommy change his diaper.  Transportation, healthcare, water, sewer, electricity, sanitation.  Its all government, all the time. 

My favorite distortion of the famous line from Kennedy’s speech is this:

Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for yourself.

The complainers in New York and New Jersey are an accurate reflection of the democrat, big government mindset:  The government should do more, I should do less and I don’t really need to be responsible for my own preparation and survival in a natural disaster.  Pathetic.

Big cities breed big government.  Big government creates greater dependency.  Greater dependency demands bigger government.  This creates a mushrooming of parasitic mutual dependency until both the government and individuals become inert and useless.

This “Sandy” experience in the East Coast demonstrates the difference in ideology between those promoting Obama’s bigger government and Romney’s smaller government.  Bigger government equals less personal responsibility.  Smaller government equals more personal responsibility. 

The example and the contrast could not be clearer.  Which way do you think this country should be headed?