YCMTSU – Open Thread Version

I think it’s time that we just lay out on the table all of the garbage this administration has brought upon this country. The soiled debris of progressivism is getting knee deep, the stench is over whelming, and it’s time for us to itemize the unimaginable incompetence in a way that we can keep an inventory on what is currently rotting, so that we can properly process the new sewage that is surely headed our way over last two and half years.  I will start with:

1. The CFPB – the progressive instituted, feel good, Dudley Do Right government bureaucracy that is now embroiled in typical progressive incompetence and over spending. Reminiscent of the GSA excess’s – remember that? Good thing this administration learned their lesson there.

2. Obamacare – I know it’s kind of hard to keep up on all the refuse that is rotting all over this country, but Obamacare is one big pile of rubbish that continues to infect many peoples lives. Thankfully, a federal judge in Colorado has applied some common American sense and stopped  the Progressive Intolerant Fascist Machine from mandating the availability of abortifacients.

3. Washington Redskins – Evidently there is nothing of real importance facing this country which has allowed Harry Reid to stop all other matters in the Senate, and focus solely on the manufactured issue of a corporations name and his fascist desire to ruin it. Because of this, I will be purchasing a couple of Washington Redskin T Shirts, will wear them regularly, and encourage all of you to do the same. Honestly, I seriously think Harry Reid has lost his mind, but with a progressive, it’s really hard to determine how much brain he started with in the first place.

I encourage all of you to contribute to this list, so as we go in to the 2014 and 2016 elections, we will be sure to have a long detailed list of progressive failures, lies, and corruption which we can use as a club to repeatedly beat them over the head with – preferably until they bleed.

How Much Stupid is There?

Well, let’s wander ’round the ‘net and see:

The mayor of Houston – a bit of a commie island in a sea of pure Texas, as it were – rammed through an ordinance essentially making Houston restrooms non-gender.  Anyone can wander into whatever room depending, I guess, on how they feel about their gender at any given time.  Everyone who thinks – which means ever non-liberal out there – knows what will happen: guys who want to ogle women while they are in the rest room will claim they “felt” rather female that day…and the result will be civil lawsuits by the ogled women.  Its just a monumental bit of liberal stupidity, and its now the law in Houston.

UPDATE: A bit more from Texas:

“I’m at the breaking point,” said Gretchin Gardner, an Austin artist who bought a 1930s bungalow in the Bouldin neighborhood just south of downtown in 1991 and has watched her property tax bill soar to $8500 this year.

“It’s not because I don’t like paying taxes,” said Gardner, who attended both meetings [of “irate homeowners”]. “I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can’t afford to live here anymore.”

And she can’t put two and two together, it would seem…

Coal-fired power plants came to the rescue of freezing Americans this past winter.  Naturally, Obama’s response to this is to cook up more EPA regulations which will close coal-fired power plants. Enjoy your igloo, fellow Americans in the north.  And please note that red-State Democrats pretty much have White House blessing to run against the President’s new rules.

Of late our liberals are fretful that a bit of ice appearing to melt in Antarctica will cause sea levels to rise by 3 feet by 2100.  Trouble is, none of them appear to have checked the math.  Someone did and found for this to happen, ice-melt would have to be nearly 7 times as rapid as the warmists claim.

Obama apparently thought that the most credible person he could put out there on the Sunday talk shows to explain the Bergdahl prisoner-swap was Susan Rice.  Well, nothing like a new foreign policy issue and possible Obama illegality to at least get the VA scandal off the front pages.

Pinkos in Seattle vote to jack up the minimum wage to $15 an hour.  Businesses start to close or seek means of using fewer employees.  Pinkos are stunned – they really couldn’t see this coming.  After all, every liberal economist they can find tells them that raising the minimum wage increases employment.

The UK will start counting the illegal drug trade and prostitution in its GDP numbers. You know, I’ve always thought that all GDP numbers are BS, anyways – so, adding ladies of the evening and your local crack dealer to the mix is really no more than doubling down on stupid. I don’t want to know a bunch of quack economic numbers – I want to know real things: how much steel did we produce?  How many transport-truck miles were driven? How many loaves of bread were sold?  You tell me that and if I can compare it to past activity, I’ll really know if the economy is up or down.

Democrats promise they’ll have to really good slogans for the 2014 election any day now.

Someone has noticed that all the health food trends have one thing in common – they are usually found to be wrong over time.

 

The Joys Of Obamacare

I just received the fabulous news that my premium has gone up another 31% on top of the 22% increase last year. When I called my provider, to inquire about the increase, I was told that due to mandates of the ACA this increase was necessary, and that I may actually lose my plan at the end of this year because my plan is not 100% ACA compliant. That is of course provided the President doesn’t change his mind again and make more unilateral changes as he is known to do.

Many of you may remember our President’s 2008 campaign promise:

“I will sign a universal health care bill into law by the end of my first term as president that will cover every American and cut the cost of a typical family’s premium by up to $2,500 a year.”

Well I can tell you from a personal experience, I am paying now more than $3,000 per year for my healthcare insurance. Not surprising, a recent poll indicated that:

Almost 9 in 10 respondents said Obamacare would be “important” in determining their vote, and 60 percent said debate on the health care law should not be over.

We need to get rid of this law, we need to get rid of this President, we need to electorally wipe out progressives, and we need bring back that “shining city on the hill”! So I don’t know, or care who the GOP candidate is in your district – vote for him or her, because any Democrat in any district in any state, only becomes a tool for the progressive agenda. It’s that simple.

I will also make one more obvious observation – the VA IS single payer Government Healthcare, so the problems we are seeing with that, is what we all have in store if we don’t shed ourselves of this cancer. No pun intended – well ok pun intended.

 

Creating More Conservatives

John Hawkins over at Townhall wrote an excellent piece here about conservative outreach and how badly the GOP has been at it over the last decade or so. I completely agree with his game plan which includes, but are not limited to:

1) We’re not reaching out to people who disagree with us

2) We’ve gotten lazy about making people’s lives better

3) We need to focus more on entertaining than informing

4) We get too impressed by the “more conservative than you” game

5) We refuse to challenge liberal control of cultural institutions

This dove tails nicely with my opinion I expressed the other day of “dumbing down” our message and going into precincts we usually avoid. It also speaks to the strategy of incrementalism which we need to employ, and employ now. Considering the utter economic and social disaster that progressive policies have brought about, winning the short term by taking the Senate this fall should be a no brainer, but winning the long term will require a more methodical strategy, and I think Hawkins has identified 5 good starting points. I am curious as to what other conservative have to say on this, so have at it.

 

Conflict of Vision – Part Deaux

Retired Spook wrote an excellent article about a week ago laying out the differences between the left and right in terms of the polarizing vision each side has for our country and while I agree with that premise completely as it relates to the elite of the left, I think our differences with the masses of current leftist voters is simply a conflict of intelligence. I honestly don’t think that the masses of LIV’s really understand what they are voting for, and have been propagandized to the point of being so misinformed that laying out the conservative position and actually having it penetrate their skulls will be a tall task, but an important one. The Democrats have been extremely effective in dumbing down their messaging and reaching the LIV in easy to understand albeit completely inane sound bite policies, ie; “the war on women”, “tax breaks for the rich”, “equality”, etc., etc.. It will be important for conservatives, and for this country, that we reach these LIV’s with a message that will resonate and I believe that will require not only going into precincts conservatives would usually stay away from, but also speaking in terms the LIV can understand.

How about pointing out the 50% unemployment rate amongst black males 18-25 years old and calling it the “war on Black Employment”? How about pointing out the $500 billion cut in Medicare to fund the ACA and calling it “the war on Seniors”? Or how about pointing out the low labor participation rate and the drop in average income and calling it “the war on prosperity”?

We have to reach the LIV’s in 2016, and we have to hold progressives accountable for screwing up this country. All ideas should be seriously considered, no stone should be left unturned, and the gloves need to come off. The future of our country depends on it.

The Conservative Media Complex

You will be wanting to sit down for this one, lest you sprain an ankle falling over laughing. In the CNN opinion page today, Julian Zelizer outlines why Obama just can’t seem to catch a break, and reason #3 is …… wait for it ……. the conservative media complex:

3. The conservative media complex: Conservatives have been enormously successful in building a sophisticated network of media institutions since the 1970s. During the time of the conservative revolution in American politics, the right paid close attention to building an infrastructure on radio, television and the Internet through which to promote their ideas and counteract, what they saw, as a liberal bias in the mainstream media.

The result has been that even though Obama retained control of the White House, conservatives have their own bully pulpit through which to communicate their opposition and analyze news in a way that is unfavorable to Democrats. The President confronts a constant barrage of unfavorable news, literally, regardless of what he does or does not do.

Don’t you love that last line? “The President confronts a constant barrage of unfavorable news”. Un fricking believable. I am amazed that they let this go to print, but they definitely do cater to their own echo chamber, don’t they? What’s really amazing is that NBC, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, CNN, the LAT, the NYT, Newsweek, HuffPo, etc, have been unable to combat this “constant barrage of unfavorable news” coming from the conservative media complex. How incompetent does that make them?

Condi Rice for President

While it’s still pretty early in the game and a lot will unfold between now and November 2016, I can’t help but think that Condi Rice would make an outstanding candidate, and quite possibly an excellent President. She has terrific experience – Secretary of State 2005-2009; National Security Advisor 2001-2005; Provost of Stanford University 1993-1999; current Faculty Member in the School of Business at Stanford; and huge NFL fan (that last one is my favorite). She comes from humble beginnings, grew up in the segregated South, and in my opinion is a sensible, self aware, pragmatic conservative and from everything I have heard and read from Condi, she articulates the conservative message quite well. So not only is she a viable conservative candidate, she can completely disarm the Democrats emotional issues of gender, race and class.

Ted Kennedy once said, “a fight not joined, is a fight not enjoyed”, and I would love to join the fight and fight fire with fire this time around with the Progressives. Let the progressive try and play the “war on women” card against her, or the race card, and let her respond in a way that only she can, and as she did in her 2012 speech to the Republican National Convention:

“And on a personal note– a little girl grows up in Jim Crow Birmingham – the most segregated big city in America – her parents can’t take her to a movie theater or a restaurant – but they make her believe that even though she can’t have a hamburger at the Woolworth’s lunch counter – she can be President of the United States and she becomes the Secretary of State. Yes, America has a way of making the impossible seem inevitable in retrospect.  But of course it has never been inevitable – it has taken leadership, courage and an unwavering faith in our values.”

I am hoping that a ground swell of support will encourage Condi to enter the race, and small signs of that are there as she begins to attend fund raisers and give speeches to appreciative audiences. And since I am in pure speculation mode here, let me throw this name out as her VP candidate. Blue State Governor Scott Walker.

Monday Open Thread

Today is the 69th anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Bulge.  Hitler’s last – and monumentally stupid – last gamble for victory in the Second World War…but showing that even an idiot, cornered, can still cause grief.  We lost 19,500 dead in five weeks of battle.  We lost 4,486 over the 9 years of the Iraq campaign.  Some times, it does seem like we’re living in a different country.  That we simply don’t have the courage and the leadership we once had.  Its not that anyone is stupider – or more or less likely to make mistakes (the Battle of the Bulge was so costly mostly because of American mistakes, after all) – but that we don’t have the grit and determination to carry a thing to a conclusion.  I wonder, given our current leadership (and this is not a slam at Obama, per se; he’ll be gone in the by and by – this is a concern about the whole lot of them, military and civilian from top to bottom) if we ever can or will fight a battle to a finish?

Looks like we might be partnering up with al-Qaeda in Syria.  More of that “smart diplomacy”.

Spanish government, faced with protests, proposes anti-protest law.  That will work well.

A judge has ruled that NSA spying violates the 4th Amendment.  Obama, if he were reached for comment, would say, “who cares?”.  Its not like he’s obeying any of those tiresome, old amendments anyways.

Slow-witted, hack Democrat woman Senator endorses equally slow-witted, hack Democrat woman for President.

The President still hasn’t signed up for ObamaCare.

Hope you are all having an excellent Holiday season – as for me, I’m enjoying Christmas time.

Random Ramblings Open Thread

There is nothing Obama has said about ObamaCare which is either relevant or true.  He was lying about it when he campaigned in 2008; lied about it to get it passed in 2010; lied about it, again, when he campaigned in 2012.  He’s lying about it today.  From all appearances, he’ll never stop lying about it.  This is rather astounding – he could still get 90% of what he wants if he’ll just allow some of the worst aspects of it to be lopped off and/or reformed.  But he won’t allow that – his rhetoric that he’s willing to accept suggestions from the opposition is just more lies.  Anyone with even a bit of political skill and sense could salvage ObamaCare and them move on.  More and more, I’m just convinced that Obama is stupid.

Some people are getting a bit worried about the number of senior officers in the armed forces that Obama has forced out.  Dark visions of oppression are starting to sprout.  I wouldn’t go that way, if I were you:  Obama just wants generals and admirals who will obey his liberal stupidity…some generals and admirals were unwilling, and so they got the boot.  The main thing to remember about this is that our senior military ranks are ever more populated with officers who will agree to any stupid, old thing in order to get another star on their shoulder.  Should we win in 2017, we’ll have to ensure that the new President clears out this careerist deadwood which is taking over the military.

And, yes, Obama’s military bureaucrats are harassing Christians in the military – but this is really no different than what Obama’s IRS did.  Its not part of a grand conspiracy – its just liberals being their little, fascist selves…with the added “benefit” that in the military, the troops gotta obey.  Makes it easier for asinine things to get done faster.

I’ve been having an argument with some fellow conservatives over at a different message board and I’m a bit perplexed – am I really the only conservative out there who realizes that as long as we’re tagged with defending the rich, we’re never going to win sufficient power to change things?  Remember, liberals have got us in the minds of low info voters as being the people who defend the likes of George Soros, even though Soros is a money-bags for the left.  We have to break away from that – and we can only do it in the minds of low info voters by attacking some of the rich: that species of rich (like Soros) who don’t make money by producing worthwhile goods and services, but by manipulating our corrupt, controlled financial markets.  Arguing for tax cuts and cuts in government is all well and good – but it won’t get us much support in a nation where less than half pays income taxes and more than half gets some sort of government benefit…we’ve got to show the people that a corrupt alliance of Big Government and Big Corporation is robbing us blind for the benefit of the liberal governing class and liberal financial sharks like Soros.

Anyone argue with a liberal lately?  I got in to a Twitter argument and it came out that the liberal really, honestly felt he was helping the poor by paying his taxes.  This came out when I made the Tweet:  “want to help the poor? Ok, there’s a Catholic Charities near  you”, and then provided a link for Catholic Charities USA.  The guy got a bit miffed with me – he pays his taxes and that helps the poor plenty so he doesn’t have to go and help the poor.  It is a very weird mindset – but it does explain a lot. All you have to do is pay your taxes and you’ve discharged your duty to your brothers and sisters…

Discuss whatever you wish!

Sunday Open Thread

Just some politically conservative observations from a right wing extremist for us to discuss this weekend:

– I think Friday’s IRS revelations could potentially be very harmful to the White House. When this story broke, the administration was hoping to convince people that it was the result of just a couple of rogue agents in the Cincinnati office. Friday, it was revealed that this story now goes all the way to William Wilkins desk – an Obama political appointee and only one of two appointees in the IRS.

– I think the bankruptcy filing by Detroit should be a wake up call for all Americans regardless of your political stripe. Just 50 years ago, Detroit had the highest per capita income, the strongest manufacturing base and was arguably the model city for America, but now it is bankrupt and it is not the only municipality to file for bankruptcy, it just happens to be the largest so far. Detroit has over $18 billion in liabilities and when they began to lose some of their economic base, the model became unsustainable. Period. Now while the powers to be argue over the legality of the filing, the fact remains that Detroit is broke, aided by over promising, over spending, mismanagement and corruption all by the elected officials, and that is a sober fact that all citizens should be outraged over.

– I think the George Zimmerman case has exposed a very distasteful element in our culture and our media, and one that needs to be resolved if we are ever to “progress” as a society. I am not discounting the fact there are still some remnants of racism, but let’s not forget that those remnants are found on both sides of the political aisle, and both sides of the racial aisle. Interestingly enough, I think Booker T. Washington gave us all food for thought over 100 years ago when he said:

“There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well.”

I think that “class of people” can also include many white people, who are forever trying to show their compassion by over looking so many “real” issues that plague the black community; namely out of wedlock births and the perpetual mindset of victimhood, of which Larry Elder had the courage to confront.

As a society, we have to confront some real hard truths if we are to move this nation forward in a positive direction and that will require all of us growing a thicker skin. We have to call out corrupt and incompetent politicians, we have to quit thinking in terms of who did what, and who said what, and start thinking in terms of identifying the problem and finding solutions, and when things aren’t going well, we have to lay down our political and economical biases, and  think of a new direction which is grounded in the Constitution. Unless and until we can stop the over emotional reaction to every thing that happens, and begin to approach the nations issues with clear eyes, we are destroying this great country that was given to us.

On a final note, while I didn’t care for her reporting or her politics, RIP Helen Thomas.