Strength vs. Rhetoric

There are many different immpressions people got from the State of the Union address. I would say that few, especially those outside the US, got a sense of a strong union.

Let's face it, the Union is strained, stressed, and stagnate, but not strong.  We have traded opportunity for protection and liberty for fairness.  Our ideals are lofty, our policies inpractical, and leaders selfcentered and selfserving.  We have forgotten the very principles we were founded on.

The Declaration of Independence says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."  This foundational principle has been forgotten and replaced with something more like, "There is no truth or creator, the federal state is all powerful and will dictate your rights, that amoung these are Life as defined by our limited scientific understanding, Government Regulation to protect you from yourself, and the pursuit of Fairness." 

How many people dream of winning the lottery thinking, "If I had that kind of money all my problems would be solved!"?  How often have you read the statistics of how quickly the average lottery winner is back where they started?  Without the foundational principles of success, a lump sum lottery payout will quickly be wasted in the same way a weekly pay check was.  Likewise, how many stories have you heard of folks who, with very little income, have disciplined themselves and lived according to principles to end up attaining a level of success desired by many, but earned by few.

The last Presidential election liberals thought they had won the lottery.  They thought all they needed was a radical socialist that could talk smooth and the power of the White House, and all their problems would be solved!  What a shock to find out that when you win the lottery everyone and their brother wants a cut.  What a surprise that all the same old socialist ideas that have robbed other people of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, are now doing it to us.

I find no comfort in the very liberals that have backed Obama's mantra of "Hope and Change" are now starting to turn on him.  By the time liberal idiots realize that Obama and his cronies are not going to be able to give them everything they ever wanted, the damage will be done.  Obama won't care what the actual results of his administration are, he will be too busy giving speeches about how he would have been able to do all those things that he promised, but for the horrible mess Bush left him with.

Rhetoric is just talk, results tell the truth.  Obama's rhetoric is contrary to the results.  I just Hope we can undo the damage of the Change.

Voluminous and Incoherent

"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be to-morrow."

Federalist No. 62

With ObamaCare having thousands of pages is it reasonable that the average citizen could understand the bill? It is bad enough that a large majority of our representatives are lawyers, but when you have to be a lawyer to understand what proposed legislation means, is there a problem?

Ignorance is no excuse for the law, which you may have learned if you were pulled over because you didn't notice that the speed limit changed from 70 to 55 on that section of highway. Maybe you missed one of the hundreds of hoops that a new business must jump through because you didn't know you needed to, will the IRS care? We are held accountable to the law regardless of our understanding of it. The prevents continual claims of ignorance as legitimate defense to habitual crime, which makes sense.

If we are going to be held accountable to the law, shouldn't we demand laws that we have a reasonable expectation to understand? What is reasonable? Well I would think that we shouldn't have to invest more than a few evenings studying the bill to read and understand it's impact. We shouldn't have to have a law degree to understand the language of the Bill. Bills should deal with individual issues and not be "Omni" in nature (deal with multiple unrelated other legislations).

Would these requirements for reasonable expectation of understanding make it harder to write legislation? Maybe, or it might make it easier, it doesn't matter. The point is that these representatives and the legislation they produce are supposed to serve us citizens. We must be able to evaluate legislation, without specialized education or an unreasonable amount of time, in order for us to judge our representatives efforts on our behalf.

In the end we are a Democratic Republic, not a true Democracy, and so our representatives should do what they believe is best for the country as a whole, while protecting the interest of their constituency. I do not propose that all citizens should vote on all legislation directly, but we MUST have a reasonable ability to evaluate the results of our representation.

Time to set them to rights

"It is to me a new and consolatory proof that wherever the people are well-informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights."

--Thomas Jefferson

Parasites

"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."


--Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Ludlow, 1824

The System is broken, we need the federal government to step in!

Our federal government has responsibilities to the citizens of this country. The system is obviously broken and many of our family, friends and neighbors pay the price for continued inaction in the face of this crisis. The stories of those who have suffered and died because our elected officials refuse to address the problem are heart breaking. Some may want things to stay the same because they take advantage of the predicament of others to further their own personal profit or political agenda, but most of us want change. Money and power, isn't that what it always comes to?

No, I am not talking about healthcare, I am talking about securing our borders. Unlike healthcare, securing our borders is a constitutionally valid area for our federal government to be involved.

Many like to try and make this issue about workers rights, human rights, or that PC favorite called fairness. Let's take them one at a time.

Workers rights, or more accurately, illegal immigrant workers rights, make no sense since it is not legal for them to be here in the first place. The fact that they are not citizens of this country means that the right of citizens does not extend to them. Many try to claim that because they are working and we benefit from it they should be allowed to continue their illegal activities and even extended all the benefits of citizenship. Well, prostitutes work hard, so I guess it is wrong to round them up. Many drug dealers work hard to distribute their product, should we have a rally to protest how local police interfere with their efforts to support their families?

Human rights is another favorite. If you stand for deporting those who have entered the country illegally, you don't care about people. This is a ridiculous position. To claim that the many human traffickers working the borders of this country are like the underground railroad is ludicrous. The US has one of the most open immigration policies in the world, immigrants should be required to adhere to it, 100% of the time. There is no good reason, humanitarian or otherwise, why we should fail to enforce our own laws.

Fairness, whatever that means, in fact, the reason liberals love this one so much is that it means whatever they say it means. As far as I can tell it is something along the lines of, "I risked all kinds of dangers to get here, work for less doing the jobs you don't want to, all to take care of my family because I am such a good person....etc., so it is unfair to deport me." Illegal immigrants and their proponents often reject that they are illegal, claiming that because they are hard working and not pursuing other crimes, they are not illegal. Well, they may not be illegal, but their action of entering the country outside of our immigration laws is. That makes them criminals, maybe likeable, hard working criminals, but still criminals.

So why don't we fix the system and secure our borders? There are several reasons for that.

Political pressure is a big reason. You have all kinds of business owners that benefit from illegal immigrants, and they at best ignore the law, and worse encourage their representatives to make the laws less effective.

The ever increasing population of illegal immigrants, and the sympathetic legal immigrants, now work to influence immigration policy by dangling the carrot of their votes. They march in protest when communities attempt to enforce immigration law, wielding signs proclaiming "We Are Human!" (Maricopa County Arizona) or demanding workers rights.

It is an uncomfortable issue for many. The poster child for illegal immigrants is the downtrodden family trying to make a better life for themselves with hard work and sacrifice. The same thing many of us seeks for ourselves. How can we in good conscience deny them of the same thing we want for ourselves? The short answer is we aren't. Having immigration laws, and enforcing them (no matter how unpleasant) is not being mean, it is being kind. Many emotionalize the issue and demonize those who insist on a rule of law, but that doesn't help create good law.

Follow the money. The cost of enforcing immigration law is often offered as a reason why we can't do it. What a waste of money to deport people who just want to work hard doing the things most Americans don't want to do. The truth is we can't afford not to enforce them any longer.

The United Sates has always welcomed immigrants. We are characterized as the melting pot of cultures from around the world. I embrace this because I believe that all cultures have good people who can add to our great nation. We must be in control of how we accommodate those immigrants though, and if they ignore our laws in order to get here, it seems fair to assume they will ignore any other laws that may interfere with their desires.

Strike a compromise

House and Senate leaders, along with union bosses and White House officials, have been meeting all week in a hard push to strike a compromise on the health care package. The White House reached a breakthrough in talks with House Democrats and union leaders Thursday, agreeing to scale back plans for a tax on high-value insurance plans. - FoxNews.com

A few observations here:
Why are Union bosses involved in these secret talks in the White House? How is it that a public process is not allowed, but the Union special interest is invited to participate? This is change? Sounds like the same kind of partisan agenda that Obama said Bush was guilty of and his new admin. would not have. Despite claims of transparency, eliminating special interest influence, and reaching out across the aisle, Obama has shown that he is all talk (as long as the teleprompter is working).

The breakthrough on the "Cadillac" insurance plans is based on how much they cost. Obama's rationalization of taxing these plans is they do not make anyone healthier. I am wondering how they can determine the health benefit of a plan based on the price? At $24,000 per year (the point that an insurance plan looses it's benefits and becomes a luxury vehicle) that is $2000 per month. I knew of a couple 5 years ago that had to pay $3000 per month for insurance for a few years until they could qualify for Medicare. It is interesting that we had to redefine what a Cadillac is to suit the Unions, but not the rest of us.

For those who have eyes to see, this is just more of the eternal campaign mode that Obama operates in. First the push was to have healthcare reform complete in his first year. Now he is postponing his state of the union address so he can claim a victory in that. Just look at the way he ties his policy ideas to his plug for Massachusetts Democrat Martha Coakley's bid for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, "In Washington, I'm fighting to curb the abuses of a health insurance industry that routinely denies care, and it's clear now that the outcome of these and other fights will probably rest on one vote in the United State Senate." Let me translate, "The reason you should vote for her has nothing to do with her ability to represent you, it has to do with me being able to do whatever I want using the super majority."

Strike a compromise? I would say that is the last thing on Obama's mind. Rest assured that in those secret meetings with Union leaders there was the same kind of vote buying we saw with anyone else who has dared to suggest they might not back Obama's healthcare agenda....oh, unless you happen to be a Republican, they don't count.

I am for the public option

I am for a public option on the current health care bill. No, not the one where the government provides health care insurance for everyone, I am talking about the option for the public to witness the reconciliation of the House and Senate bills.

We have seen, and the Democrat Party has felt the results of the vote buying that has occurred to allow Obama to claim a health care reform victory (one of his campaign promises). Now that the reconciliation process is underway Obama is refusing to have the process be public, on CSPAN, "...so the people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents..." (another campaign promise). This gives the impression that all the bad press for not making things public is less than the bad press they would receive if we really knew what they were up to.

"I'm on record as saying that taxing Cadillac plans that don't make people healthier but just take more money out of their pockets because they're paying more for insurance than they need to, that's actually a good idea, and that helps bend the cost curve, that helps to reduce the cost of health care over the long term. I think that's a smart thing to do." - National Public Radio interview just before Christmas.

This is the usual sound bite Obama uses to distract from what he is doing, the prestige that distracts you from his sleight of hand. What he is saying is, "I am so much wiser than you that I will decide what health care insurance will make you healthier, and tax you if you disagree. Don't worry though, if you are going to be foolish and spend your money on insurance I do not approve of, you have plenty of extra money to spend helping finance somebody else's health insurance."

Obama seems to have it out for you if you want to live without health insurance, or if you want health insurance that is TOO good. What happened to a federal government that protected our liberty to choose for ourselves how to invest our money and live our lives?

My family spend a good amount of money in the effort to be healthy. We do not need a health insurance with low deductibles since we budget for medical expenses. Besides that, we participate in Medi-Share, a Christian medical expense sharing program. Will we be forced to participate in some other government approved program instead? Will we be fined or jailed if we do not want to change? How can this be fair?

Let's take the "Cadillac" mentality to the next level...where does it end? What is next, a special tax on certain types of makeup because it doesn't make women any prettier? How about a tax on certain "Cadillac schools" like Yale or Harvard because they don't really make you any smarter?

It is interesting that Cadillac is a GM product....you know, GM that is operated by the government....maybe people who actually buy those luxurious vehicles that do nothing to make anyone healthier should be taxed as well? No, wait, got that one backwards, Obama will want to tax those of us who by a Ford to subsidize those government Cadillac's he is selling...how ironic.