Nobody Cares About the Stupid Dogs

Relax.  The last thing I want is for us to decide the fate of the most powerful office in the world based on two ridiculously insignificant dog stories.  These goes to both sides.

My first thought when I heard about liberals in a rage that Mitt Romney strapped a dog carrier to the top of his car was, that if this was the best dirt that they could come up with, then we're golden.  

Then Mitt Romney responds by mentioning that Obama has admitted to actually eating down.  Okay, that's both gross, and to some, morally questionable.  In one of Obama's autobiographies, he mentions that as a child in Indonesia, his father fed him dog meat.  It's gross, but it's not that big of a deal.

This mention should probably be the end of it.  We should be focusing our attention on how insignificant the dog carrier story is, not obsessing with our own insignificant dog story.

Animal rights activists are having a hay day over the dog carrier story.  Because we all know how much dogs hate the feel of wind in their faces.  Ever roll down the window for a dog?  You're biggest worry is them jumping out, not him somehow getting sick.  Like I said, ridiculously insignificant story.  It's just the mad rantings of people looking for a reason to crucify anyone opposing Obama.

But now usually level headed conservatives are obsessed with the dog meat story.  It's gross, but let's be real.  He was a child, and his dad fed it to him.  Kids will eat just about anything that you tell them to.  Is this what the side opposing the most Socialist president in the history of our country should be known for?  This is a guy who said that his home state of Hawaii was in Asia, and that the United States has 57 states, and we're talking about a questionable meal his father fed him?  He's been on more vacations and he's spent astronomically more than any president prior, and we're obsessed with this?  

If we want to dethrone Obama, we can't obsess with petty things, particularly when there are so many concrete things going on.  How about we talk about his accusations that Bush was unpatriotic for spending $4 trillion in eight years, and then he himself spent $5 trillion in three years?  That's a rate of 3.25 times the rate that was spent while fighting a war.

Can we drop this, before we lose all credibility?

Free Market Capitalism

Free Market Capitalism is the ONLY system that works for the people.  It is the one system where a people can truly be free, because it's the one system that encourages independence.

As a child, I lived with my parents.  I paid no rent, I had no bills, I was fed, and I was even provided with spending money.  But I had rules.  I had a curfew, I was only allowed to watch certain movies, and I needed permission for a great many things that would have otherwise only been my business.  The reason I had these rules was because I was living under someone else's roof, and being taken care of.  I had the burden of dependence.

When I became an adult, I moved out.  I got a job, and I started paying my own way.  I got married to the girl I wanted to marry, I chose the house I wanted to live in, when I go grocery shopping, I buy what I want.  I am permitted to do anything that isn't illegal, because I now have the freedom of independence.

In systems like Socialism or Communism, you have a life compared to the childhood I described.  The more you allow your government to take care of you, the less freedom you have.  The government is able to demand Social Security payments on the basis that it will have to take care of you if you have no retirement plan.  It makes sense.  If you are going to end up their obligation if you don't do it, then they need to limit that as much as possible.  Though the Individual Mandate in Obamacare was rightly deemed Unconstitutional, the reason was government would have their hands in insurance.  If they are going to take care of you by disallowing an insurance company's right to not cover preexisting conditions, then they need to make sure that everyone has insurance to begin with.  Otherwise, insurance companies would all tank, since nobody would bother buying health insurance until they actually get sick, meaning that the job of an insurance company would be to trade a large amount of money for a small amount of money, which isn't viable.

When you take unadulterated Free Market Capitalism, you get the opposite.  You are responsible for yourself. You're free to make the right decision to get insurance.  You're also free to get the coverage you want.  You're free to have the rights to your own money.  If your job isn't bringing in enough, you're free to cut your budget, save, and invest.  Have a modest income?  You can still do the same, and then have a generous income.  There's no reason to stop there.  But it's not just personal wealth that's affected.  If you're having a second baby, you have the right to keep it.  When you put government in charge of mandating your finances, they get to determine that the population is too high, and needs to cut it down.  You're free to live the life that you want to live, and to make your own personal decisions.

Zimmerman's Arrest and You

It's been confirmed.  George Zimmerman is in custody.  While some may cry out that justice is finally being served, I say quite the contrary.

George Zimmerman has been charged with second degree murder.  In order to qualify as murder, Zimmerman must have committed a premeditated act with intent to kill from the beginning.  That means that before he was aggressively beat down, that he had to have plans to kill him, either wise, it would be considered manslaughter, even if it weren't justified.

What evidence of murder do we have leading to his arrest?  Let's take a look at everything we know so far:

1.  Zimmerman claims that he was attacked by Martin.  His claim is that Martin broke his nose, then began       banging his head into the sidewalk.

2.  Police Reports back this claim up.  Reports say that he was badly beaten, and covered in grass stains.

3.  A witness claims that a person in a red sweater (What Zimmerman was wearing) was being beaten, and screaming for help.

4.  A security video that was once used as proof that Zimmerman was unharmed shows a large gash in the back of Zimmerman's head after being enhanced.

5.  Zimmerman was a community volunteer.  Aside from being the Neighborhood Watch Captain, he also tutored minority children for free on the weekends.

6.  Martin was at least to some degree, a juvenile delinquent.  He was currently suspended for being in possession of a baggy with the remnants of marijuana.

7.  According to the head detective, Martin's father originally said that it was not his son's voice screaming in the 911 recordings.  

8.  Zimmerman is half white, Martin is black, and virtually all of those calling for Zimmerman's arrest cried out racism without a hint of evidence that Zimmerman, guilty or not, was racially motivated, suggesting that the accusation made against him actually ARE racially motivated.

On the other side of the issue, we have:

1.  Martin's parents and friends (with a clear reason to have a bias) claim that he was a good kid.

2.  Zimmerman followed him while on the phone with 911 reporting suspicious behavior.

There is a mountain of evidence suggesting that Zimmerman had just cause, with only a negligible amount of circumstantial evidence against him.  There isn't even evidence of manslaughter, let alone murder.  But what does this mean for you?

It means that if you are attacked, and the difference between life and death is you taking their life, the act of defending yourself could land you in prison, particularly if you're white, and the aggressor is black.  What's more is that criminals will know this.  

Self defense laws are important, because criminals should live in fear.  It's really the only thing preventing crime.  If they don't live in fear, then law abiding citizens live in fear.  So even if you're the type that would die before defending your life, you're still affected by this.  You are now more likely to have the opportunity to put that to the test.  Criminals now know that as long as they are the right color, they can get away with it.  As long as their aren't cops around, they're free to act like thugs, just as long as you're the wrong color.

Ironic?

Cuts we can Afford

We hear so often that the Republicans aren't playing fair, because the Democrats have made so many cuts, that they just can't afford to make any more.  Realistically, those "cuts" haven't been cuts from what we've previously spent, but more of a small cut to the increase.  Raise taxes 10%, then cut it down to 9.5% and call it a spending cut.  But in case they're serious, I thought I'd help.

In 2011, Tom Coburn (R-OK) put together a report on Government's most wasteful spending.  If you'd like to check it out yourself, there's a link at the bottom of this blog.  It exposes millions in wasted spending, including $35.38 million spent on extravagant campaign parties, $120 million in benefits to dead federal employees, $30 million on a failed project to increase Pakistan's mango sales, and more.

But that was just 2011.  He also did a report in 2010, showing such waste as $1.5 million improving apartments that were to be torn down, $930 million in wasted on unnecessary printing costs, and $2.9 million to study the World of Warcraft.  There's even a section in there how the department of Energy wastes $2.2 million a year by leaving lights on unnecessarily. 

These ridiculous wastes could only survive in government.  In the private sector, if a company did an audit, and discovered that $930 million was being wasted on printing costs, they would immediately crack down on it.  They would install ID codes into the printers so they could track which employees were printing more than necessary, and make sure that supervisors weren't allowing this to continue.  If a particular branch couldn't cut down on unnecessary printing, that Supervisor would be fired.

If it was discovered that $120 million was being paid out to former employees that weren't even living, people would most definitely be fired.  The problem would be stopped immediately.  It doesn't get fixed in government, because nobody involved has any reason to care.  After all, it's not like it's their money.

If this were to occur in a private sector corporation, people would not only be fired, but imprisoned for misappropriation of funds.   I assume we've all seen "It's a Wonderful Life".  Why is government not held to this standard?

A couple years ago, an audit was performed in my own home state of Idaho.  The audit was given to the DMV, and one of the things discovered was over 60 managers, each managing only one employee.  Their entire job was to manage a single employee, to make sure that one single person was doing their job, and paid a management salary to do so.  And you so there is no waste to cut?

The Federal Government keeps adding more and more spending, and they want to raise taxes more and more.  It seems to me that they already have the money.  These are only a few examples.  Between these two reports, you only have the tip of iceberg.  If only I could discover this much waste in my own budget, I could fix it, and never have money problems again, and yet they have the nerve to say that we just can't handle any more cuts, while we add more than $1.5 trillion in debt every year, with the only cuts being negligible ones to the increases in spending, rather than an actual cut in spending.


Source Materials

2011 Report
http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=b69a6ebd-7ebe-41b7-bb03-c25a5e194365

2010 Report
http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=774a6cca-18fa-4619-987b-a15eb44e7f18

Abortions and a Beating Heart

I recently had an argument in the comments section of an article related to After Birth Abortion.  I responded to a person who accused every single pro-lifer on the planet of being selfish.  This was based on the likelihood that the child's life would be less than perfect.  I'd like to offer a public counter argument.

Is it okay to kill someone because we don't think their life will be good enough? If the problem is over-crowded orphanages, perhaps we should just go in and euthanize about 95% of all orphans.  Using the same tactic as abortion, we've completely solved the over-populated orphanages problem, and saved all those children by providing death rather than the possibility of a not so great life.

Who your parents are, and how you grow up dictate how your childhood is.  When you live in an orphanage, and you have no parents, it can be a depressing childhood.  But then you grow up.  And while your childhood likely affects your adulthood, it doesn't have to.  People overcome adversity every day, and to take someone's chance away to overcome that adversity because you think that they won't do it is wrong.

Say you know that the child is going to grow up a criminal.  Does this make abortion okay?  What if we had a way to determine for sure every kid that ends up a criminal?  Should we execute all these children?  If abortion is okay because these children might turn out badly, surely it should be okay if we were to know for sure.

For those that say that abortion is wrong, but that we have no right to dictate what a woman does with her body, then why stop with pregnancies?  If you know that it's wrong, then you've conceded that the fetus is a living person.  Therefore, you've conceded that an abortion is murder.  Why only legalize infanticide?  If we go that far, why not say it's okay to shoot your next door neighbor because his music is always too loud?  Or at least poison them in a humane way.

Life has consequences.  When you have sex, you get pregnant.  I know that there is a tiny percentage out there of those who have been raped, but those are really small numbers in comparison to the more likely possibility, that you chose to have sex, and now you're pregnant.  It was your choice, not the choice of the child.  When you choose abortion, you choose the child's death to avoid nine months of inconvenience.

There is too much lack of responsibility in today's society.  People want to live however they want, and they want to do it without consequences.  If they get pregnant, they want an abortion so that they don't have to deal with the baby.  If they eat McDonald's every day, they want diet pills, or a Gastric Bypass, rather than just learn to eat better.  If they spent their money junk instead of health insurance, they want government to pay for it.  Life has consequences.  You can dodge the responsibility of the situation you put yourself into with an abortion, but there are still consequences.  For you, the consequences are psychological issues, and spending the rest of your life knowing that you may have murdered a living person.  For the child, those consequences are death.

Abortion is wrong.  I've seen videos of the act.  If you haven't, and you think you have the stomach, you should.  It's not just a clump of cells, it's a baby that reacts.  Abortion is wrong, and as someone who believes that abortion is wrong, I would be a monster to not stand against it.  So I will stand against it, regardless of the cheap tactics used against me to paint me as somehow sexist because I don't condone infanticide, because the cause is greater than myself.

A Defense of Rush

The mainstream liberal media has always brutally slandered anyone who spoke out conservatively, but there's nobody that they like to slander more than Rush Limbaugh. I've heard so many terrible things that he said, just to find out that they didn't just take a quote out of context, but changed it entirely.  There's also been cases where they just made quotes up entirely.  Or at least used a false Wikipedia entry as a source.

In case you don't know, Wikipedia is never considered an acceptable source.  In college, a paper wasn't accepted if we used a Wikipedia.  You know why?  Because any jackass can edit it at any time.  Condemning someone because of a quote found on Wikipedia is like walking through the halls of a high school, and using quotes that you overheard from rumors.  Here's one of the "quotes" that Rush Limbaugh was falsely accused of.

"I mean, let's face it, we didn't have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing.  Quite  the opposite: slavery built the South.  I'm not saying we should bring it back; I'm just saying it had it's merits.  For one thing, the streets were safer after dark."

That quote is ridiculous, and never actually said by Rush Limbaugh.  Mark Steyn says that it's up to Rush Limbaugh to prove that he didn't say it, but that's impossible.  It doesn't take a journalist scouring Wikipedia to know that it's impossible to prove a negative.  If I were to claim that I can fly, you can't prove that I can't.  It's up to these journalists making these outlandish claims to prove it's true.  If he had said these things, it would be easy to prove.  After all, Rush Limbaugh supposedly says these things on the radio.  That means it's recorded.

There's another quote he never said as well, honoring the admitted assassin of Martin Luther King.

"You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor?  James Earl Ray.  We miss you.  James, Godspeed."

Never said it.  Never said anything like it.  This quote seems to have originated from a blogger that went by the name Cobra.  He claims that he got the quote out of the book "101 People Screwing up America", a book written in 2006.  Cobra first started spewing this slander in 2005.  Maybe he called the Psychic Hotline.  Who am I to question him?

There's also been numerous quotes that were altered in a way to make him look bad.  I remember everyone cheering him on to leave the country because he said that if Obamacare was passed he would leave the country. False.  He said if Obamacare is passed, that you're better off receiving healthcare in another country.  See the difference?

Rush Limbaugh has made a few missteps.  Said things quickly, without being careful about his words, as we've all done.  He's said things that his attackers were able to publish out of context, and therefore able to paint him any way they want.  What it really comes down to is this.  If the things he says are really so bad, why do they have to lie about him so much to make him look worse?  I don't have to make up fake Hitler quotes to make him look bad.  I can just tell you what he actually said.  I can even provide a link showing his entire speech so that you can make sure that it wasn't taken out of context.  This is because he actually WAS racist.

Now the liberal media is in an outrage because he called a woman who claimed she was owed $3,000 dollars in condoms a slut.  Not that I blame him, but he apologized.  Ed Schultz condemned him for this, even after he apologized.  Why is this significant?  Here is Ed Schultz calling Laura Ingraham a slut.

And that, ladies and gentleman, is what we call a source.  So, let's recap here.  Rush Limbaugh calls a woman a slut.  He apologizes.  Calls are made for him to be removed from the air.  Those making the calls say that another woman is a slut.  No calls made.  Ed apologized as well, but that apparently doesn't make them equal.  If Ed Schultz thinks that Rush should be pulled off the air, and wants to be taken seriously, then he needs to quit. None of the people calling out for Rush to be fired were upset at all about this, nor about any of the ridiculously sexist things to come out of Bill Maher's mouth. 

The Housing Bubble

We the people are in the worst economic crisis that my generation is likely to ever see.  But what caused this?  The answer you seem to hear quite frequently is "Bush", or "Banks".  Is it that simple?  Let's break it down.

The main cause of this was the crash of the housing market.  Before the recession, we had seen a serious housing bubble.  Housing prices were high, and sales were up.  This is the ideal market.  Sort of.  You see, the thing with a bubble is that it's full of air.  When it pops, things go to crap.  Hence, our current economic crisis.

Certain factors caused the aforementioned housing bubble.  Banks gave out loans, in massive numbers, to people of lower incomes, who couldn't afford them.  This is where people blame the banks.  But why would they do this?  What is there to gain?

The answer is that they never chose to do it.  It was the result of the Community Reinvestment Act.  A project intended to force banks to make a contribution to the bettering of the lives of the lower and middle class.  Originally put into effect by Jimmy Carter, this was a disaster.

What this Act does is force banks to give loans to people that can't afford them, in order to make things "fair" for the lower and middle class, and to prevent banks from discriminating. Though put into effect during Carters era, it was Janet Reno that most recently really rammed it through.

Now you have a housing bubble.  Lots of people buying homes, driving real estate prices up, making it look as though we have a booming economy, all thanks to liberal politicians.  But bubbles only last so long.

Eventually you move into the next phase of the bubble.  The popping.  People who couldn't afford their homes eventually began getting foreclosed on.  As this occurred more, real estate prices began to plummet.  Now, not only do are people being forced out of the homes they never should have owned in the first place, they realize that their homes are now worth far less than they paid for them.

Now you have a lot of people that lost everything.  This results in a whole lot of people not spending money.  Now all these businesses don't have any income.  They're forced to lay people off.  This results in more foreclosures, and even less spending.

Now there's a panic, with banks suffering.  So the feds create a plan to solve it.  Bailouts.  They not only offer bailout money, but they force them to take it, in the way that they forced them to give out bad loans.  Now they control the banks, and it's easily done, since they've pitted the American people against them.

Now we're in a downward spiral.  Taxes skyrocket to cover these bailouts, while the same feds keep adding new programs that cost exponential amounts of money, causing these taxes to skyrocket even more. Now there are greats amount of pressure on our biggest employers.  So once again, people are laid off, spending less money, getting foreclosed on, etc.

As the great Ronald Reagan said, "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to the problem.  Government is the problem."  But the feds, teamed up with a one sided media, have convinced the people that it's the greedy banks, and too little government.  That the solution is government.  So they continue to step in, spending billions and billions on bailouts, stimuli, and huge government programs.  Businesses go under, people are laid off, people are foreclosed on, people spend less money, more businesses go under, etc.  The vicious cycle continues, and like any good magician, feds having you watching the right hand, while the left hand makes the economy disappear.  

Autism Speaks (A Bit too Quickly)

Something was brought to my attention recently.  Autism Speaks, an organization dedicated to spreading awareness in regards to autism, recently reported that by definition, autism could now be considered an epidemic.  Now, far be it from me to play down autism.  I've seen it's effects.  I have no desire to go into any further details, but it's a subject that I know a little about, because I have a family member that suffers from it.  We're not that close, I honestly know most of what I do as a result of my mom, who used to study the disorder on his behalf.  It's often a debilitating disorder, but with the right management, those who suffer it can go on to do things that the average person cannot even comprehend.  But I digress.  Here is the video, originally posted by Mark Reinhardt.

The point in all this is this; Autism Speaks is doing nobody any favors.  This is the kind of thing that gets out, and then people take it less seriously.  Though they may be doing what they're doing for the right reason, it's the wrong thing.