The he** with his minimum wage raise…we don’t have any jobs…

Here is the number one thing the party in power does not want you to know – you can negotiate with your vote and right now the party in power does not negotiate.  They take the black vote for granted.  The way to negotiate is to vote for the other party, the one out of power. Give it a try.  Then the best way to follow through is to insist that the sweetheart deals that all go to the folks who are tied into the party in power – those deals are over.  Let business build factories here.  Forget about taxes and forget about laws and bureaucrats restricting everything business wants to do.  Tell them to keep their turkeys and their minimum wage nonsense.  We want factories and businesses right here and our vote goes to the party that delivers the good jobs now.  Here, in our neighborhood.  As Bill Clinton says, "It's a no-brainer!"

I am Allawi

In his own words – Jim Webb

 

TF comment/question – This rambling speech from the former senator is heavily focused on war policy.  Webb knows that any politician seeking to build momentum for a run at the presidency in 2016 and challenge the democrat party front runner must force Hillary's hand on her war tendencies.  He also mentions the need to rationalize and “reorganize” the federal government.  Pretty obvious to all but the incumbent.  And he caters heavily to the black vote; Hillary's Achilles heel.  But, Jim, what about debt?  You never mentioned debt.  No top level politician in America ever mentions our debt!

The dream of every little boy

Sixty three years ago ----

 



 

Same team, different town, last night ----

 



Consumerism

The question on our mind is this – is consumerism fading, even a bit?  Is it possible that this weird infatuation that we Americans have with gathering gobs of useless, shiny objects with only passing faddish interest and utility beginning to wear thin?  Could it be that those who have chosen (remember in a consumer dominated society the false promise of choice will always prevail) to supplant family, God, religion, morals, discipline and selflessness with shinny objects are coming around to the thinking that they have been pursuing empty endeavors of hope and change?

As usual we don’t know but we do see the early signs of something.  Here are the early signs we see:

·         Massive visual and noisy sound based poundings of messages telling us to buy, buy, buy packaged as if the act of buying, buying, buying will somehow make us young, good looking, surrounded by gobs of similar looking young, good looking people who admire us as we admire them and we are beginning to grasp that it is all baloney, and

·         An entire generation or two of politicians and government bureaucrats who simply don’t have a clue about all that they claim to be so well informed about, and

·         Too many people pursuing too many frivolous, needless, useless activities that are just what they appear to be – time consuming wastes of time, and

·         Time is so brief for all of us that it makes no sense to waste it on shiny objects produced in foreign lands and empty activities promoted by beer companies, soda companies, fast food companies, erection enhancing pill companies and all sorts of other costly products and services that do not bring an ounce of the joy that comes from holding a baby; chatting with a granddaughter; tossing a ball back and forth with a son or a grandson or simply reading a good book!

Nah – who’s kidding whom.

We’re Americans.  We like to buy crap; use it for a day or two and then toss it in the garage or a closet until we can’t fit anything else in so we go out and rent a storage space.  When we’re not doing that we like to sit in front of the TV set, eating and drinking the crap advertised on the show we are watching even though we just watched the same thing yesterday.  We particularly like to watch commercials of young good looking people doing things even though we are too fat to do the things that they are doing.

Buy, buy, buy.  That’s what life is all about.  For a minute there we thought we saw something changing but no, we were wrong.

Rights

We, us Americans, are fascinated with this concept of rights.  Perhaps it all began when the founders submitted their draft constitution to the 13 colonial and now state legislators for ratification.  The pushback was – what about our rights?

From whence came, the “bill of rights.”  10 amendments added to the new constitution just to get the needed 2/3rds (9 states) of the legislators to ratify all the other mumbo jumbo about checks and balances, federalism and separations of power.  We, us Americans, just love our rights.

Since then, the federal government set up by the ratified constitution has done nothing but peel back the 10 amendments providing us our “rights.”  Well that’s almost true in and of itself but something else has developed more recently – in the last 50 years.  And it seems to have all begun with the civil rights movement or whatever you may call it.

In 1964 black Americans got their very own legislation to confirm their rights – actually it was just federally enforceable law to implement a variety of equitable treatments such as openness in education, public access, voting, employment and other basic elements of societal behavior.   These so-called civil rights laws had two accompanying enforcement provisions that previously did  not exist.

1.    Penalties for those who could prove violations, and

2.    Federal bureaucracies to assist, even promote, compliance

We were now on the road to a very different form of separation of powers, checks and balances and federalism.  Rights trumped those concepts.

It didn’t take long for others to see the light – the light to federally enforced rights.  And lo and behold, the gates opened up.  We chose not to document the order because now it seems to be meaningless.  Here are just a few of the rights now permanently embedded in enforceable federal law:

·         Employee rights

·         Handicapped/disability rights

·         Health care access rights

·         Animal rights

·         Patient rights

·         Unionization rights

·         Immigrant rights

·         Education rights

·         Legal defense rights

·         Crime victim rights

·         Voting rights

·         Gay and lesbian rights

·         Student rights

So the bill of rights, those 10 amendments that were designed to keep government away from the people; those 10 that were solely designed to provide comfort to those asked to approve the new constitution by assuring them that government could not and would not ever enter the everyday comings and goings of law abiding citizens have now evolved into (here we are guessing) 10,000+ pages of laws and rules and bureaucrat gobbledy gook all designed to introduce a federal government oversight into our everyday life.

It’s almost funny to realize what we have done; to ourselves.  But we notice one thing is missing in all this rush to legislate rights.  One right has been ignored.  Do you know what it is?