Land of the Free and Home of the Brave

Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.

We Made This Mess, We Will Have to Clean It Up

We Made This Mess, We Will Have to Clean It Up.

We Made This Mess, We Will Have to Clean It Up

Well, here we are, 2014 and lets take a good hard look at where we stand.

Jobs are coming back, but not good ones or well paying jobs. Long term unemployment benefits have been cut because politicians, people we elected, decided that it encouraged people to be lazy. This coming from the least productive congress arguably ever. There is some serious laziness there. How many unemployed folks get paid days off and vacations to do nothing?

Social Security? Cut it! If you don’t have enough money because, say you lost most of your retirement in the economic crash, oh well. Politicians are guaranteed a pension for life, so it’s not like they care.

We need social reform and fiscal reform but the best approach to a problem is… an approach. I was taught that when a problem arose at a job, always have a solution to offer to the boss. May be lousy but it may be the first step to fixing the problem. Congresses answer to that is to do nothing. Well Ladies and Gentleman of Congress, we have a water main leak and if you don’t do something, main street will be an economic sinkhole.

Now,at this point I believe pointing fingers is actually pointless. There are very few congressmen and women who actually do the peoples business and think of the majority of us, the rest are in some way and clandestine form getting perks and kickbacks for votes or are doing something that normal folks would really look at and ask what is wrong with you?

It isn’t all at the federal level, we have governors and state legislatures utterly disregarding the separation of church and state by painting their bills and laws on medical determinations not in a what is fair to a woman as a human right.

Now here is the bad news….. we did it. Yep, you and I voted ( I hope you voted! If you didn’t get registered and vote in the next election). I like to think I was mislead by what my particular candidate said, but I read about the ridiculous legislation being introduced, the lack of concern for the public good and I am pretty sure we all got suckered. Well, we need to clean this mess ourselves, we voted the fools in.

What I am going to do for my part is I am abandoning a party and I will vote based on what they represent. There are good ideas on both sides and some really crappy ones. One thing I will not do again is vote for the less of two evils. If everyone voted like that there would be people who were elected by people who trusted them, I think the futures of some of our state and federal leaders would take a different turn.

We need to elect people who are both knowledgeable as well as familiar with life in the non-wealthy part of the country and remember it every time they vote or introduce legislation. But it is our job to find these people and elect them.The alternative is a mess that takes twice as long to clean up and stinks a lot worse.

Yeah, we made this mess ourselves, so in the midterm elections probably be a good idea if we brought out some brooms and dustpans and clean this mess up.

We are to Blame and We are the ones to Fix it

We are to Blame and We are the ones to Fix it.

We are to Blame and We are the ones to Fix it

 

Daily we see more frequent allegations of misdeeds by our politicians. Now, agreeably we should and do expect a higher standard of conduct than that of others but currently the news media is going to extremes to discredit or defame candidates and politicians. The lengths that news organizations will go is astounding. I read today on one reasonable respected news site that a GOP politician wrote something in 1997 that was defamatory towards women.

 

Now my point here is not to defend anyone for being disrespectful, hateful or racist, but, to make the point that the world has changed dramatically over the last 16 years. In fact it is changing dramatically almost daily and what was considered acceptable eight years ago is not any longer much, less sixteen years ago.

 

The country is in a shambles. This is something I believe we all can agree on regardless of what political view you hold and to what area you look. The question is why?

 

The typical answers point like an arrow towards Washington D.C and Congress, the President and the Supreme Court. I challenge you, the reader to look beyond that for a moment and consider this from a different view.

 

As I mentioned we see the media attacking relentlessly politicians and candidates. This is the media doing the attacking, not typical mudslinging from one politician to another, although the amount of mud slung in our nation’s capitol is epic. News organizations, the very places we rely on for accurate, unbiased information on domestic and world information are applying their own personal views into the news. This is not news, this is editorializing. In the past we knew the difference. A news anchor would state clearly he/she was speaking in an editorial fashion,but, no longer is that the practice. Now one must determine what is journalism and what is not. For many that is a task that is difficult and foreign and as such, all news and editorials are assumed to be accurate and true and unbiased.

 

As we move down the ladder as opposed to up we find that we, you and I allow this to occur. Why? Because it is what we are fed, much as children are told to eat your spinach, our major news organizations are force feeding us unhealthy amounts of garbage that are causing us to become intellectually bloated with disinformation, preventing us to think clearly and critically. Remember though, we allow and accept this.

 

So down one more step on the ladder and as we look we can now see the problem. The ladder is unstable and no one is holding the ladder. This instability and shakiness that is creating the problem further up the ladder is the most worrisome part. We are the ones who are the problem.

 

Yes, you and I,most if not all of us are the problem. You may ask how or why and the answer is simple. The issues in this country we allow. We choose to listen to all this garbage and eat it up like a five star meal. We allow a few to alter our views of events as opposed to us drawing our conclusions based on our own knowledge and beliefs. We may not, as an example, really believe on our own that President Obama is a Muslim from Kenya,but, if we listen long enough that he is, like anything else, it begins to invade or common sense structure until we do.

 

Now, the question is, how do we change this? That answer is equally as simple and can be done in an instant. Stop believing in everything you are told and hear from pundits and the press. Stop and think hard and draw your own conclusions based on what you truly in your heart believe. Think, does it really make sense that the people we elect go to Washington arrive and suddenly change their minds on important subjects or have they been paid to change their minds? Do we really believe that everyone who is on welfare or on food stamps is a lazy bum when most of us know a friend or family member who may be using the very same programs? Is your neighbor of 15 years who has worked his whole life and was the guy who helped you shovel your driveway last year now a bum because he lost his job and his family needs help?

 

You see, in the end, we still call the shots in our country. Every two years we have the ability to change things in our governments and we have the choice whether we listen to the news that is biased or not. Watching MSNBC or Fox News eliminates our need to think because they, with great gusto, will tell you in no uncertain terms how to think, who to vote for what to eat and where to buy it.

 

What we need to do as a country is to stop letting others do our thinking for us and do it ourselves. Cast off the labels conservative or liberal and instead be ourselves.

 

Finally, every time you enter a voting booth and you are alone, vote not for a political party but vote for who you think will do the best job for the country and you.

 

These are the answers to our nations ills and until we accept that we created them we will not get better. We are the doctors and the cure to our troubles and as such “Physician, heal thyself”

 

It’s More Fun to Cheat if No One Knows

Unless you have been living in a cave the last few days, you have heard the various and sundry government, law enforcement and commercial agencies have been accessing and taking our information and phone calls and either listening or storing or both and stashing them away for a rainy day.
Now first I think it should be clear. This is not really news. Most reasonably well informed people in the United States already knew it or at the very least suspected it. How anyone could not, after 9/11 and the creation of a gigantic group of war on terrorism agencies escapes me.
Please note I did not say network because that would indicate they actually all work together. Our nations internal and external secret intelligence works as well together as a dysfunctional family with substance abuse issues.
It has been reported in the past that one agency is actually spying on another agency, both thinking the other is a foreign or domestic individual that is hell bent on blowing up a vacant building, probably housing a third and yet to be named different spy agency.
Yes, it is true. In the United States it is Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy and so on. They have to spy on someone and lets face it, there is just not enough foreign terrorism for all these agencies to watch, so, like the male lion eating its young, our agencies turned their spyglasses and magic decoder rings inward. What they discovered was a smorgasbord of people to spy on to such a level that they become drunk with the information. The keys to their parents liquor cabinet had been found and the kids went wild.
Now of course in any dysfunctional family there is always the malcontent, the one who calls the police when there is an argument or someone smokes a joint behind the barn and here we find Snowden. Selling his soul for the good of us all. A modern day savior with the message the “Gods are watching” while simultaneously nailing himself to a cross while preaching the dangers of the communications networks we all use.
Is he a hero or a patriot? I personally would not go that far but he does have guts, but to what end?
The most outrageous and possibly cynical part of this whole thing is not that we are spied on or that this young man has basically destroyed his life to let us know the depth of the spying that has occurred.
What stuns this writer into a stupor similar to standing next to a flash grenade is that there are people actually surprised and amazed. We are angry and insulted and we feel violated.
We don’t feel this way for any other reason than, somewhere in the deep inner workings of our psyche, we feel a need to be angry.
We have known for years we are being watched. We have known our phone calls could be monitored and our internet was as secure as the unlocked door to a public bathroom.
Perhaps now we can just all stop looking over our shoulders now, comfortable in the knowledge that yes Virginia, there is domestic spying going on and it is us they are spying on. We can put our self-righteous cry of foul away and accept what has been going on in one form or another since 1978.
Ideally we accept this and finally admit that just like a couple that has an open marriage, we may not talk about it but we know we are cheating and so is our spouse. Maybe it is just a let down to finally know what we already knew.
In the meantime, accept that we have been, are now and will continue to be spied on and just like a Die Hard movie, regardless of how much time goes by, there will be another revelation as to what level they are watching us. Is any of this sordid spying morally or ethically right? No. Is it the way things are and the way they will continue to be? Yes
So we might as well accept it and move on because we can’t escape it any more than a fly in a spiders web, and the more we struggle, the faster the death will come.

Sandy, Oklahoma and Disaster Relief: Some Will Lose No Matter What Happens

It must be very uncomfortable in Congress right now. Imagine that just a few months ago some Representatives and Senators either voted against relief for Hurricane Sandy or insisted on offset cuts for disaster relief. Now in the wake of Oklahoma, where possibly the worst tornado ever recorded destroyed countless building,homes and lives, these same people will have to appropriate funding for Oklahoma.
Now, if they vote yes with no offsets or other attachments for Oklahoma, it will be used against them as being more partial to Oklahoma than New Jersey and New York, infuriating those two states, and rightfully so. After all, how can disaster relief be easier for one state to get than another?
On the other hand, these same members may choose to follow the same tactic and insist on disaster relief to be scaled back or tied to offsets causing needless and harmful delays in people and towns receiving the assistance they need to rebuild. This will cause incredible outrage amongst Americans.
This would be nothing new in today’s “no budge” political climate except for one thing that I am sure has these congressmen and women squirming in their seats a little bit. Midterms.
Next year many of these members and many other seats will come up for re-election and the members of Congress that chose to hinder disaster relief for Sandy victims are in an unenviable position. They are literally damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Natural disasters have a horrible way of coming at bad times, and no worse time than now because these elected officials have to answer for whatever they choose. They will either deny or attempt to deny disaster aid or they won’t. Regardless they will anger and alienate either one large group or another.
This is not something that will fade from peoples minds when the midterm elections arrive, in fact, it will be close to that time that the disaster aid should be starting to flow. If the money is delayed, anger and frustration will be rampant but unlike New Jersey and New York, Oklahoma is a Republican state and many members that made disaster relief difficult for Sandy were Republicans.
For those members right now it will be interesting to see if they are willing to play politics a second time with disaster aid.
Whether they do or not, fiscally conservative Karma has come back and there will be some back sides that get bit.

Dick Cheney and Me

In the past week Dick Cheney said that the tragedy in Benghazi is one of the worst incidents he has seen.

Well Dick, apparently you forgot that on September ,11, 2001 four planes were hijacked in the United States, two hit the World Trade Centers and one was crashed to the ground by the passengers in Pennsylvania and one flew into the Pentagon. Well over 3000 people died that day and the president was forced to stay in the air for most of that day for his safety.

That seems like a pretty bad incident to me that really beats Benghazi. The trouble with his statement isn’t that he is wrong,but, what is worse is he has such a distaste for our president he would say something so utterly foolish.

Politics is killing our nation and Dick Cheney just proved it. He did not make that statement from a point of fact. He was Vice President on September 11 so he is one who should have no issue knowing how serious an incident is. No he said that because he is a Republican who dislikes our president.

Yes there, was some outrage over the statement, but not enough. A former Vice president compared an embassy attack to September 11th. The outrage every American should have expressed should have shaken the planet, but, it did not. We just shrugged it off.

We do that a lot now a days….. shrug things off. Voting rights obstacles, war on the poor, wars on terror, drugs, Iraq, Afghanistan. We just let it go because we feel powerless to stop it, The politicians don’t listen or care, and if that is how you feel, you are right.

When background checks were proposed, an estimated 90% of us thought ” Hey that is a good idea!” Well so did congress until it came time to vote and then they didn’t like it anymore.

We have people who lost their homes by illegal bank practices, large sections of the country still damaged from hurricanes from almost 8 years ago still not repaired. We have veterans who fought for our country sleeping in the streets and Benghazi is the worst incident Cheney can recall?

Why do we put up with this foolishness? Is it because we are numb to our politicians present and former saying whatever they feel with no notice?

I don’t think that is it. I think we have become so beaten down and been lied too so often by so many  that we elect people the way we go  to the grocery stores and randomly buy milk. No real thought, just grab the jug and put it in the cart. That is he same level of interest we have in our government and former politicians’.

We will wake up one of these days and realize that it is the big things that do count, not the petty ones like who holds an umbrella over the Presidents head in the rain.

And when we awake from this slumber, or more like a coma really, we will rub our eyes and look around and say “What the hell happened?” and the answers will be in the books.

The citizens gave up and took a nap and the politicians took the reins and as we speak are driving the stagecoach right over a cliff and if we don’t pull back the reins. over the cliff we go.

The worst incident Cheney can remember? I guess I can add amnesia to his other health issues.

Thirty Seven

 

Today the U.S. House of Representatives voted for the 37^th time to repeal “Obamacare”. 37 times in 39 months.

This time it was so 70 new representatives would have the chance to show their constituents that they were against it.

So I did a little math for fun. We pay our members of the house $174,000 dollars a year. If you break that down to 40 weeks at 40 hours per week we pay them around $109 dollars an hour. This vote took at least an hour and 424 members voted. That cost you and I $46,216 dollars in our tax dollars to pass a vote that even the House Speaker John Boehner admits won’t pass the Senate.

Thirty seven times at $46,216.00 equals basically $1,710,000.00 dollars. Money that could have been spent on paying down the deficit or even introducing useful legislation to help create jobs.

It was also discovered today that documents regarding the Benghazi Embassy incident were changed after they were given to Republican committee members. Changed in a way to make them appear that the administration had lied to the people.

These two things came from the same party that has openly pronounced it would not work with the president on any bi-partisan issues. In effect they have said “ Play by my rules or I am going home and taking my ball with me”.

  This writers political views are irrelevant to what I have just written, and for one reason. Our elected Representatives are there to do our business, not theirs. I do not vote for people who don’t represent my views. If they are elected I expect all members of Congress, Representatives and Senators to represent all constituents and follow the lead of the nation. Not the other way around.

So here we are, with a congress that will fight anything the President recommends, will vote over and over again with full knowledge it will not pass and refuses to listen to constituents.

Are there members of congress  who stick to their principals and oath and do the peoples business? Yes there are,but, as long as they are outnumbered no meaningful progress will be made.

Why has this happened? Because we are poor parents and we have let the children of Congress become spoiled rotten like teens will do.

We have opportunities to change this. We have elections next year and two years after that and it is up to us to vote the members who ignored us out, and, bring new members in. We hire these people with our votes.

  Congress is dysfunctional and a useless body spending our money in a cavalier way that one would expect a delinquent teen would spend money.

It is up to us to write them and call them and let them know we as a nation just woke up and we are not happy with what they are doing or not doing.

Otherwise we will see no progress, no meaningful and useful legislation and no relief in sight.

We allowed them to do this 37 times.

Time is up and it is job review time. My opinion is that most of our elected officials have failed in their jobs. In our world we would be fired. In their world it needs to be the same.

The Shift Away from Our Rights

A month ago we saw a situation play out in Boston that ended in Watertown Mass with the successful apprehension of one of the bombers. All in all a good day for the citizens of the City of Boston and the US.
Living near Boston, I was relieved when he was captured and so were many of my friends.
Now that time has passed I have considered something that is troubling and it is not related solely to Boston, but to us nationally.
Many times we see civil rights broken on a case by case basis, but, in the recent months we have seen four of our civil liberties squashed under the guise of safety or attempted to be legislated for our safety.
In Boston, or more specifically Watertown, on the Friday the bomber was apprehended, every police agency available went door to door and searched all households in that area. These were not warranted searches nor were they the knock on the door they had been widely reported. Some were kick the door in searches and again, all warrantless. That is a breach of our 4th amendment right to illegal search and seizure. Was it required? I think it was, regardless of the fact he was not found in a house. But it as an example of how our civil liberties are being scaled back one by one.
On the similar subject the surviving bomber was interrogated with out his Miranda rights. He is a citizen of the United States and charged with a crime, but ,denied his right to the 5th amendment preventing the authorities to use his statements without being informed of his right to a lawyer.
Now you might be thinking “Who cares, look what he did? He doesn’t deserve them”. I admit, I am likely to agree with that sentiment, but, sentiment and rule of law are not the same and the rule of law is how we govern our country and keep law and order as well as protect our way of life.
This takes us to the horrors of Newtown Connecticut. There is talk of banning types of guns and gun clips and background checks. These are not being legislated yet because our leaders are afraid of the gun lobby. My opinion of whether we should ban or regulate the weapons is moot for this writing.
What is important is that the second amendment has been spotlighted and is trying to be altered for the safety of the public. Is it a good idea? Yes, but it is a fundamental civil right and as such requires more thought than I presently see from our legislators. Frankly I am suspect to any legislation that is passed right now as it seems to only help a few and hurt many, but I digress.
Our right to freely assemble and redress our grievances with our government have been denied as well as special attention to payed to tax exempt organizations. I admit I find humorous some of the groups looked at by the IRS claiming tax exemptions are the same groups whom complain about tax loopholes and people not paying their taxes, but again I digress.
Presently I have listed abuses to four of our civil rights as Americans. This should raise concerns among all parties and political ideologies. We have these rights and although it has been assumed that we have them, little by little, reasons come up to ignore them for the public good.
When is it not good to look out for the public good? When that good takes away more than the good it will create.
My opinions on whether those rights and laws need to be adjusted is not relevant here. What is relevant is that, unless we are cautious, the reasons to choose to ignore our civil rights will become more frequent and feeble, but we will be led to believe they are necessary.
This is a thought we must all be cognizant of, lest we lose our rights under the guise  “It is for our safety”