Is there too much government in your life?
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Can we just cut to the chase? We have this convoluted political debate going on and friends we are just missing the big issue. It isn’t immigration, taxation, spending, foreign relations, unions, cap and trade, the gulf oil spill, any of that. Yes, these are issues, critical issues, but there is a bigger issue; principles.
We, the ones that are right, call them conservatives, call them libertarians, maybe in some cases even call them Republicans, need to focus on the principles. Principles anyone? The things that define us, mold us, rule us? Come on! Principles don’t waiver. They are not circumstantial, they are fundamentally solid. They are the basis that we built this nation upon and the very same thing that is the only hope of restoring this nation to its greatness. Principles. We’ve lost them, they no longer are important in our political dialogue. If we don’t re-recognize them, we will be lost. If we don’t’ re-recognize them, we will lose our nation. America and what it stands for will be history, literally.
So here’s the principles we need to focus on and analyze and solve every problem which faces us. If we default to political rhetoric, we will lose. Our children will lose, and I don’t know about you, but you hurt my kids, those are fighting words. Thus, here they are:
1. SPEND WITHIN YOU MEANS! Period. Under any other circumstance other than government, folks live by this principle and if they don’t they go bankrupt. Again, period. But our government doesn’t’ do this. On a principled level, what is our government doing? Here’s what. It is spoiling one child, unions, government, the politically correct industry, at the expense of others. It is violating the principle. Imagine you have three kids, two are o.k. and one is a recalcitrant. Are you going to penalize the good kids for the enabling of the bad kid? Probably not, but that’s what our government is doing. They did it with Wall Street, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Auto Industry, the “New” Black Panthers. Our government is borrowing from foreigners to effectuate their violation of this principle.
2. CARE ABOUT OTHERS, BUT RECOGNIZE THEIR DUTY TO TAKE CARE OF THEMSELVES. We are currently building two nations, IRAC and Afghanistan. IRAC has hope, they are Persians, they are western. But Afghanistan is a bunch of goat herding heroin dealers. We ain’t going to fix them. They don’t want to be fixed. IRAC, we’ve done enough, it should be put in their hands now. If they don’t learn, then we should hit them with cruise missiles rather than spend trillions of dollars trying to make them more like us.
On another slant, care about those who truly need, not just because somebody lost their job, but the truly needy, the truly handicapped. Stop enabling sloth. Create an incentive based upon need for those who are not handicapped to take responsibility for themselves.
3. PROTECT THE HOMELAND. Pretty basic, you lock your doors, (I don’t), have a right, in most states, to shoot an invader, you don’t serve up a meal to a stranger at your dinner table, and yet our nation opens it’s borders, welcomes illegals, unwanted guests at the dinner table. This is a no-brainer for the common folk, just close the borders. How does one argue against this principle? They can’t unless they don’t believe in national sovereignty.
4. BELIEVE IN FREEDOM! Isn’t the ultimate freedom to have control of both your work and the fruits of your labor, isn’t this the biggest inspiration? Yes, of course it is. But if you’re paying fifty percent of the fruits of you labor to government for them to redistribute to someone else, isn’t that the biggest wet blanket on productivity? Of course it is. The concept of freedom is the ultimate Viagra for ingenuity, production and enterprise. Yet, our government discounts freedom and throws the ultimate shroud of diminution upon our heartfelt desire to be creative, to produce, to actualize.
If our government was simply run on these three principles we would live in a better place, a better world, and it would be a better world. If we lived on these four principles we would prosper and the rest of the world would question, they would buy in. Until we do so, until we change our current trend and go back to these principles, we are headed for disaster, we are headed for a “What America Used To Be” existence.
That’s my Reetzality for the day.
Thanks for the read.
Brett Reetz
ELENA KAGAN. Here’s my quick take on Elena Kagan. I hope you agree with me on this.
Reetzality.
The bureaucratic delay of the A-Whale skimmer is just another example of government incompetence, the rule rather than the exception. The A-Whale, a three and a half football field long vessel was converted from a tanker to a skimmer after the gulf oil spill. It can skim as much oil from the gulf as has been so far skimmed. Put another way, private enterpise will accomplish in one day what government took seventy days to accomplish. And for at least a day, the Coast Guard and the EPA held the ship in port to inspect it before allowing it to go to work. Why didn’t President Obama order up a helicopter to transport the coast guard and EPA inspectors to the ship while it was in transit so it could start working on arrival? Here’s why. Incompetence. Here’s another reason. Our President lied when he said he was ontop of the gulf oil spill. He’s not on top of it. This fact is in our face day after day.
I’m attempting video uploads for my Reetzality with brief commentaries such as the one above. I hope my readers, now listeners, enjoy.
Thanks for the read, listen and view.
Reetzality!
Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, said Moscow was bidding to help lead efforts to build a new world economic order after the old system collapsed in the global financial crisis. Mr Medvedev said the renewed interest in Russia this year was a sign of a changing world in which the institutions of the western-dominated world order had had their day amid thousands of corporate defaults and the threat of sovereign defaults. Medvedev said, “What had seemed untouchable has collapsed. The bubbles that created the illusion of flourishing economies have burst. And we should use it to build a modern, flourishing and strong Russia … which will be a co-founder of the new world economic order and a full participant in the collective political leadership of the post-crisis world.” That’s just great. Russia is now vying to lead the world economy. Now, I’m not faulting Dmitry. I don’t fault ambition, ever. But I am going to do some “faulting” here. Here’s what I’m going to fault. Western Government, that’s what.
Two points to consider Dmitry. One, the free market didn’t fail. Two, Western Government failed. Yes, we are in a global recession. Yes, times have been tough.
But mind you Dmitry, the vast, vast, vast majority of failures have been directly tied to government. Let’s check it out. AIG? Credit default swaps unregulated by government, thank you Lindsey Grahm and President Clinton. Financial Crisis on Wall Street? Community Redevelopment Act, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, are the root causes. The auto industry? Government imposed café standards and unions. Steel Industry? Unions and regulation caused its demise. Real estate market crash? Again, Community Redevelopment Act, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Outlandish corporate risks gone bad? Enabled by government bail outs.
But the biggest failure? Government? Which one? Pick. U.S., Greece, Spain, Portugal, U.K., Ireland, Japan. Every one of them simply spent more than they took in and bankrupted themselves, except they don’t have to go bankrupt, they can tax. The problem is that when they tax they kill the host that their parasitic nature depends on. They kill the private sector which when you look at the portion of the private sector that is not tethered, buoyed or inflated by government, that portion is doing all right, even in these disastrous times. But even the portion of the private sector that isn’t attached to the wet teet of government will be crushed if government takes much more of the productivity.
And that’s the plan, to take more, to redistribute more, to further slash liberty to the bare. Every nation, every leader needs a kick in the head. They need to be forced to objectively review history and admit that they are wrong in their pursuits. They need to accept the fact that government, more often than not, is not the solution, it’s the problem. Government is unaccountable and suffers little consequence, thus they routinely fail as they are now. This isn’t new. This is the same old story.
Come on readers. How’s our government doing on the Gulf Oil Spill? How is our government doing on the illegal alien problem? Our government couldn’t even run Arlington National Cemetery correctly. If you didn’t see the news today, they found a pile of head stones in a creek bed and were recently found to be burying veterans on top of other veterans. It is rather ironic that our government can’t even manage to run a burial appropriately while at the same time, pushing us in a direction where it’s going to need it’s own burial. There’s more. Social Security? Bankrupt. Medicare? Bankrupt. Medicaid? Bankrupt. Our future, bankrupt. (If we don’t act fast). We have 113 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities crashing down on us. If we don’t change, we are dooming ourselves and our children and our children’s children. Shame on us.
Yet, I’ll give Dmitry this: He’s on the right track. He said this too: “Russia needs a real investment boom”, in order to achieve its modernization goals, he said. To stimulate that, Mr Medvedev announced Moscow would introduce zero taxation on capital gains for companies working on long-term investments starting from January next year and said Russia was improving the legal system to provide better protection for businesses against the long arm of bureaucracy.
Wow, we won the cold war only to be out libertied by the Ruskies! Now that’s down right embarrassing.
Wake up folks. Government is the problem. It’s a cancer, and it’s killing us. We need to get it under control. We need to shrink the tumor or learn to speak Russian or maybe Chinese.
Hey Mr. President, maybe you should spend some time on the internet. I used Google to identify the following submersibles. It appears that Alvin, which as you will read, retrieved a hydrogen bomb. Alvin can go 14,763 feet deep which is more than two miles. The current gulf oil crisis is occurring a mile beneath the surface, well within the range of Alvin. It would seem, given that we’ve put a man (men) on the moon, that we could utilize these deep sea submarines to deliver a fix to the rupture in the gulf. I’m no engineer, but certainly given NASA, and other federal agencies, a team could be put together to utilize existing technology, merge it into a solution and solve the problem. Wasn’t your campaign theme “Yes We Can!” It was, but more and more it is apparent that “No You Can’t.” And forming a commission isn’t going to, in your reported words, “plug the damn hole!” Anyway, these are my thoughts. Solve the problem. I know, I know, never waste a good crisis. But in this case Mr. President, your political future which is of little import compared to the environmental damage reigning in the Gulf, cannot be salvaged by new regulations, finger pointing, blaming Bush, raising taxes and certainly not by going to a barbecue in Chicago over the Memorial Day weekend. I’m pretty sure honoring Paul McCartney next week won’t fix the leak either. Here’s some further news Mr. President. The Gulf Oil Crisis will, for the first time, introduce you to a concept we in the private sector metaphorically live and die by, the bottom line. (No pun intended) This Crisis has all the signs of being your bottom line and so far Mr. President, you aren’t cutting it.
Get to work Mr. President. Read on.
ALVIN The Alvin submersible is operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Considered the world’s most productive submersible, it routinely makes more than 150 dives a year. It has been re-built numerous times since it was first designed in 1964. The original aluminum frame has been replaced by titanium, and the depth range has been increased from 13,124 feet to 14,764 feet. In 1966, Alvin, together with a Navy robot, retrieved a hydrogen bomb lost in the Mediterranean after the collision of an American B-52 and a refueling tanker. During preparations for a dive off Cape Cod in 1968, the steel cables used to raise and lower Alvin into the water snapped, sending it 5,065 feet to the seafloor (fortunately with no one on board). When it was retrieved 11 months later, scientists were stunned to find that the bologna sandwich contained in a plastic box in the sunken submersible was still edible.
NAUTILE Nautile is a French submersible operated by the French Institute of Research and Exploitation of the Sea (known by the acronym IFREMER). Holding a crew of three, it is highly maneuverable and includes a small, telecontrolled robot called Robin that can inspect and image areas inaccessible to the submersible itself. Data and imagery from the deep may be sent to the surface via an acoustic transmission unit. In 1987,
MIR-1 and MIR-2 The submersibles MIR-1 and MIR-2 were built in 1987 and are operated by the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology in Russia. Each vehicle has an iron-nickel battery with a capacity of 100 kilowatts, which is twice as much as is available for other submersibles in the same dive range (to 19,800 feet). The Mirs’ high power capacity allows them to undertake underwater work schedules of 17 to 20 hours. Both submersibles carry up to eight 1,200-watt halogen-mercury-iodine lights, which helped them film scenes of the Titanic for the blockbuster Hollywood movie. The Mirs have also been used to explore hydrothermal vents and observe the wreck of the Russian nuclear submarine Komsomolets.
Back to Reetzality. Just a thought Mr. President. Now run with it.
Losers!
Natural-Born Losers by Ann Coulter 10/14/2009
The question of whether President Obama should send more troops to Afghanistan misses the point. What Obama really needs to do is: Invent a time machine, go back to the 2008 presidential campaign and not say, over and over and over again, that Afghanistan was a “war of necessity” while the war in Iraq was a “war of choice.” (Oh, and as long as you’re back there, ditch Van Jones, Valerie Jarrett and that gay “school safety” czar.) The most important part of warfare is picking your battlefield, and President Bush picked Iraq for a reason. Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan attacked us on 9/11 — or the dozen other times American embassies, barracks and buildings came under jihadist onslaught since Jimmy Carter presided over “regime change” in Iran in 1979. Both countries — and others — gave succor to terrorists who had attacked the U.S. repeatedly, and would do so again. As liberals endlessly reminded us during the three weeks of war in Afghanistan before the U.S. military swept into Kabul, Afghanistan has all the makings of a military disaster. It is mountainous, cave-pocked, tribal, has no resources worth fighting for and a populace that makes Khalid Sheikh Mohammed look like Alistair Cooke. By contrast, Iraq had a relatively educated, pro-Western populace, but was ruled by a brutal third-world despot. It’s always something with the Muslims. You either have mostly sane people governed by a crazy dictator — Iraq, Iran and Syria (also California and Michigan) — or a crazy people governed by relatively sane leaders — Pakistan and Afghanistan, post-U.S. invasion (also Vermont and Minnesota). There are also insane people ruled by insane leaders (but enough about the House Democratic Caucus). Sane people with sane rulers has not been fully tried yet. Not only could regime change in Iraq work, but Iraq’s countryside was susceptible to America’s overwhelming air power. Also, Iraq has fabulous natural resources. Once the U.S. got control of Iraq’s oil fields, the Shia, Sunni and Kurds could decide to either prosper together or starve together. (And it’s not just oil: They’re basically sitting on top of most of the world’s proven reserves of cab drivers.) By contrast, there aren’t a lot of sticks that can be used in a wasteland like Afghanistan, where the people live in caves and scratch out a living in the dirt. The only “carrot” we might be able to offer them would be actual carrots. But Democrats couldn’t care less about military strategy — at least any “strategy” that doesn’t involve allowing soldiers to date one another. To the extent you can get liberals to focus on national security at all, you will find they are rooting against their own country. Liberals sneered at Bush’s description of Iraq as the “central front of the war on terror” and a step toward the “democratization of the Middle East” — as Mark Danner did in the Sept. 11, 2005, New York Times — because sneering was all they could do. By design, Iraq was the central front in the war on terrorism. Any fanatic who hated the Great Satan, owned an overnight bag and was not already working for The New York Times was lured across the border into Iraq … to be met by the awesome force of the U.S. military. Bush chose the battlefield that made the best flytrap for Islamic crazies and also that was most amenable to regime change. Now nearly all denizens of the Middle East want the U.S. to invade them, so they can live in democracy, too. As Thomas Friedman inadvertently admitted, Lebanese voters credit their recent free election, in which the voters threw out Hezbollah, to President Bush. (American liberals, naturally, gave the credit to Obama, who they also believe is responsible for the sun rising every morning.) Brave Iranian students who protested the tyrant Ahmadinejad did so because of Iraq — and then they stopped because of Obama’s indifference. Sadly for them, America’s foreign policy will now be based on a calculus of political correctness, not national security. During the campaign, Obama prattled on about Iraq being a “war of choice” and Afghanistan a “war of necessity” for no more thoughtful reason than a desire to win standing ovations from treasonous liberals. But lo and behold, those very liberals who were champing at the bit to fight in Afghanistan are suddenly full of objections to the war there, too. As Frank Rich points out: “Afghanistan is not Iraq. It is poorer, even larger and more populous, more fragmented and less historically susceptible to foreign intervention.” Now they notice. Afghanistan is a brutal battlefield, largely invulnerable to modern warfare — something the British and Russians learned. But as our military under Bush showed the world in 21 days, scimitar-wielding savages are no match for the voluntary civilian troops of a free people. Bush removed the Taliban from power, captured or killed the lunatics and, for the next seven years, about the only news we heard out of Afghanistan were occasional announcements of parliamentary elections, new schools, water and electricity plants. The difficult choice Obama faces in Afghanistan is entirely of his own making, not his generals’ and certainly not Bush’s. It was Obama’s meaningless blather about Afghanistan being a “war of necessity” during the campaign that has moved the central front in the war on terrorism from Iraq — a good battleground for the U.S. — to Afghanistan — a lousy battlefront for the U.S. And it was Obama’s idea to treat war as if it’s an ordinary drug bust, reading suspects their Miranda rights and taking care not to put civilians in harm’s way. A Democrat is president and, once again, America finds itself in an “unwinnable war.” I know Democrats will never learn, but I wish the voters would.
That’s my Reetzality for the Day.
