If you follow politics at all, a phenomenon takes place on a regular basis in Washington D.C. It’s the Friday afternoon dump. When politicians have bad news to report, they break the story on Friday afternoon when everyone is heading out for the weekend. It's kind of like dropping off your report card on the kitchen table as you head out to stay at your friend's house for the night.
President Obama just dropped off his spending report card as he left for vacation. How were his grades?
"Needs improvement" does not seem to be strong enough.
"The Obama administration will raise its 10-year budget deficit projection to approximately $9 Trillion from $7.108 Trillion in a report next week, a senior administration official told Reuters on Friday."
This is future debt, not the $7.4 Trillion national debt we already owe. That is a total of $16.4 Trillion in ten years. It makes you yearn for the good old days, when deficits were measured in billions.
A great analysis from columnist to the world, Mark Steyn:
"Meanwhile, in Brazil, India, China, Japan and much of Continental Europe the recession has ended. In the second quarter this year, both the French and German economies grew by 0.3 percent, while the U.S. economy shrank by 1 percent. How can that be? Unlike America, France and Germany had no government stimulus worth speaking of, the Germans declining to go the Obama route on the quaint grounds that they couldn't afford it. They did not invest in the critical signage-in-front-of-holes-in-the-road sector. And yet their recession has gone away. Of the world's biggest economies, only the U.S., Britain and Italy are still contracting. All three are big stimulators, though Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi can't compete with Obama's $800 billion porkapalooza. The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet."
Now there is a call by US commanders for more troops to immediately be sent to Afghanistan. Isn't it strange that the anti-war crowd is so silent today? Last month in Afghanistan, the US lost forty soldiers. Forty brave, young Americans and their sacrifices hardly get any coverage in the mainstream media. Remember when the MSM were showing every smoldering bombing site in Iraq? Remember them giving a nightly update of every soldier killed? That was a different President and a different war. To Quote Cindy Sheehan, "The 'anti-war' 'left' was used by the Democratic Party. I like to call it the 'anti-Republican War' movement." Stop the presses, I actually agree with Cindy Sheehan on something.
For those who sent care packages and wrote letters to the troops before, it's time to double down. They need to know we support them and we stand behind them. Republican, Democrat, Independent, Peace and Freedom, or Decline to state, these men and women are our brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, neighbors and friends. There are many groups out there; Soldiers Angels.org, USO.org, or Anysoldier.com. Get in touch with these groups and make a difference.
When the President and Congress come back from their recess, there will be many things left on the Democrat's legislative agenda. They will try to force some form of health care reform bill through the Senate and onto the President's desk. They need a victory on this one, even a tiny victory. However, the road does not look any smother for Democrats even if they do get a watered down bill passed. They will then take up even more unpopular legislation. The massive energy tax, better known as Cap and Trade, will again swamp the D.C. switchboards with angry constituents, and if that were not enough, the President wants to take on comprehensive immigration reform.
Stay tuned folks; this is going to get messy.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Take your daughter to work day.....
Makes me think of Matt Rexroad taking Abbie to a Board of Supervisor's meeting......But who would play Darth Vader?
Monday, August 17, 2009
Lines in time
We live each day in adrift in a sea of time. The hours, minutes and seconds pile up until they reach a full day. The days pass by to make up our work week, then our weekend and so on. Time is, by its very nature, linear. A point in time once past cannot be turned backwards or repeated. As humans, and certainly as Americans, we draw lines through time as we try to make the most of this precious commodity.
There is an entire industry devoted to "Time Management." We all have a calendar on our refrigerator or some other conspicuous place to mark down vacations, birthday parties, anniversaries, doctor's appointments and all the rest. However, calendars are for mere amateurs, to really carve up time you need a day planner or an application for your iPhone that electronically tracks every minute of your time and devotes it to some purpose.
This thing called time will run our lives if we let it. We can only try to divide it up and draw lines through it so we can know what happened, what is happening and what will be happening. Divide and conquer, so the theory goes.
No matter how full our kitchen calendar is, no matter how many important dates are written in the small squares, there are other lines in time that do not show up, but are more important to us. They are lines in time that changed everything.
While I actually do remember our wedding anniversary, and our children would never dream of letting us forget their birthdays, May 17 is not marked on my calendar, but it is a day that changed my life forever. I can divide my life at that point in time. Everything before that was before, and everything after that day was after. It was the day my father died. Along with meeting my wife and the birth of our children, I can't think of another event that fundamentally changed my world as much as that day. The hard part for me was, I never saw it coming.
Two days before my father was fine, two days later I was sitting in a car driving back home over the Yolo causeway trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do now. I had been working for my father since I was old enough to ride a horse. As I said, that day changed my life and while it was painful at the time, it made me who I am today, for better or worse.
Here is the catch; I have another unseen line in time coming, and so do you. A line in time that will again divide my life into what happened before and what happened after. A telephone call from the doctor telling me I have cancer or someone I love has some dreaded disease. A call from the CHP telling me a loved-one has been in accident, or someone calling my wife telling her I was hit by a casino bus. It could be a million things. Whatever happens, I will lean on my faith, my family and my friends. I just want to make sure I let everyone know exactly what they mean to me while I can.
I would give anything to have ten minutes with my father that week before he died. I would tell him how much I love him, and even give him a piece of my mind about some of his many faults. As much as I want to, I cannot. However, there is one thing I can do, talk to the people who are still in my life. I love my wife and my kids and I tell them that I love them all the time, but I don't recall the last time I grabbed them, held them tight, and told them how much they mean to me.
This has been a rough couple of months for some of my friends. One death, one deer versus Harley accident and a friend is fighting for his life right now with a failed heart. In a close community, we are all trying to reach out, as best we can, to make these difficult situations a little easier for our friends. We all have our busy lives and the pressures that come with it, and we can escape from these hard times into our daily routine. For those living through these challenging times, what has happened to their loved one is front and center every waking moment. All we can do is try to be there for them. I remember my tough times, and the people who reached out to me, it made a difference.
I guess my point is none of us is guaranteed tomorrow. Do not let another day pass before telling those around you how much they mean to you. Call your family, if you have something to forgive or something to be forgiven of, now is the time. An old friend who was a big part of your life, call them. Go hug your kids and tell them how much you love them. Right now, not tomorrow, not this weekend, now. There is nothing more expensive than regret.
There is an entire industry devoted to "Time Management." We all have a calendar on our refrigerator or some other conspicuous place to mark down vacations, birthday parties, anniversaries, doctor's appointments and all the rest. However, calendars are for mere amateurs, to really carve up time you need a day planner or an application for your iPhone that electronically tracks every minute of your time and devotes it to some purpose.
This thing called time will run our lives if we let it. We can only try to divide it up and draw lines through it so we can know what happened, what is happening and what will be happening. Divide and conquer, so the theory goes.
No matter how full our kitchen calendar is, no matter how many important dates are written in the small squares, there are other lines in time that do not show up, but are more important to us. They are lines in time that changed everything.
While I actually do remember our wedding anniversary, and our children would never dream of letting us forget their birthdays, May 17 is not marked on my calendar, but it is a day that changed my life forever. I can divide my life at that point in time. Everything before that was before, and everything after that day was after. It was the day my father died. Along with meeting my wife and the birth of our children, I can't think of another event that fundamentally changed my world as much as that day. The hard part for me was, I never saw it coming.
Two days before my father was fine, two days later I was sitting in a car driving back home over the Yolo causeway trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do now. I had been working for my father since I was old enough to ride a horse. As I said, that day changed my life and while it was painful at the time, it made me who I am today, for better or worse.
Here is the catch; I have another unseen line in time coming, and so do you. A line in time that will again divide my life into what happened before and what happened after. A telephone call from the doctor telling me I have cancer or someone I love has some dreaded disease. A call from the CHP telling me a loved-one has been in accident, or someone calling my wife telling her I was hit by a casino bus. It could be a million things. Whatever happens, I will lean on my faith, my family and my friends. I just want to make sure I let everyone know exactly what they mean to me while I can.
I would give anything to have ten minutes with my father that week before he died. I would tell him how much I love him, and even give him a piece of my mind about some of his many faults. As much as I want to, I cannot. However, there is one thing I can do, talk to the people who are still in my life. I love my wife and my kids and I tell them that I love them all the time, but I don't recall the last time I grabbed them, held them tight, and told them how much they mean to me.
This has been a rough couple of months for some of my friends. One death, one deer versus Harley accident and a friend is fighting for his life right now with a failed heart. In a close community, we are all trying to reach out, as best we can, to make these difficult situations a little easier for our friends. We all have our busy lives and the pressures that come with it, and we can escape from these hard times into our daily routine. For those living through these challenging times, what has happened to their loved one is front and center every waking moment. All we can do is try to be there for them. I remember my tough times, and the people who reached out to me, it made a difference.
I guess my point is none of us is guaranteed tomorrow. Do not let another day pass before telling those around you how much they mean to you. Call your family, if you have something to forgive or something to be forgiven of, now is the time. An old friend who was a big part of your life, call them. Go hug your kids and tell them how much you love them. Right now, not tomorrow, not this weekend, now. There is nothing more expensive than regret.
Sunday, August 09, 2009
Democrats go home to explain the government takeover of the health care system
Nancy, Did you see Rush Limbaugh out there?
Limbaugh? No.
Good, for a minute there I thought we were in trouble....... let's go
Saturday, August 08, 2009
So populism and community organizing are bad when they're against your programs?
You have to love the left. Really, you do. They are so much fun to watch when they are in charge. When liberals or 'progressives' were out of power, they organized union labor activists, environmental activists, pro-abortion, gay rights, and whatever 'cause of the day' forces they could muster to march, protest, write letters, and interrupt public meetings. It was just fine when liberals organized and protested. Protest is the highest form of patriotism! It's the power of the people! It's the will of the nation! It's a grassroots movement!
How the language changes when circumstances are reversed. Today, when regular citizens show up in huge numbers to oppose fundamental and ruinous changes to the medical care Americans receive, the progressives label it 'Astro-turf.' I mean, who could oppose such an effective, efficient, and fiscally responsible entity like the federal government running our medical system?
So why are Americans so upset with Obama-care? Bait and switch.
Sure, it's easy to tell everyone I am going to make sure the 40 million people who don't have health insurance receive coverage. Everyone says, yea, do something about those people. However, if you were listening closely to what candidate Obama was saying, and were not sucked into the hopey-changey rhetoric, you would have known this was coming.
Americans wanted health insurance coverage for folks who do not have it. Take care of them, but do not change my health care. I like my doctor, and my small co-pays, and my prescription drug coverage. Don't change my health care; just do something for those other people. That is what America thought when they elected President Obama, change the bad, keep the good.
The President, ladies and gentlemen, does not want to fix American health care, he wants fundamentally change how we receive health care. He and the liberal/progressive elements in Congress want to eliminate private health care insurance and ultimately replace it with a single-payer, government run health care system. No amount of elegant, legal, and technical talking points about "keeping what you have" can stand up to the what is written in black and white in the two House bills being debated right now.
When the president says you can keep you private insurance, you can keep your doctor; he is parsing his words so very carefully. If you have private insurance coverage through your employer, and you lose your job, presto, you are now permanently in the "qualified plan" or public option system of limited care. If your employer looks at the $1,000 per family he is paying for your private insurance, and the subsidized cost of the 'public option' is $500 per family, you going to get the limited care public option whether you want it or not. If your private insurance makes any changes to your policy, co-pays or deductibles, you will have to move into a qualified plan. So I guess if you never change jobs, never change coverage, never change doctors, never change providers, you can keep your private insurance. Good luck with that.
The public option of government run health care will not be anything close to what we have now. Please spare me the "we pay more for health care and our system is 37th in the world" speech. Why is it billionaires and regular folks from all over the world come to America for our 37th best health care? We pay more, because we earn more, and we also get more. You can make statistics say what ever you want, but when it comes to life-saving medicine, people leave their socialized-medical utopias to come to America.
Every government run health care system has to keep costs down by rationing health care. It's just a fact. If you are seventy one years old and need a hip replacement, sorry, you're not contributing to the system, so you get pain medication and mandatory end-of-life counseling. Long waits, for less care, fewer doctors and fewer choices isn't something Nancy Pelosi and President want you to know about. And we haven't even mentioned the trillions of dollars this will cost, or the 500 billion in cuts to the Medicare system.
Therefore, when congressional Democrats come home to angry constituents, it's not astro-turf, it is as real as it gets. The government screwed up the housing market by requiring lenders to give mortgages to folks who had no business owning homes, subsequently, our home prices plummeted, our home equity disappeared or we lost our homes to foreclosure. We are still reeling from that government induced calamity. If the government screws up our health care, I don't even want to think of the consequences.
How the language changes when circumstances are reversed. Today, when regular citizens show up in huge numbers to oppose fundamental and ruinous changes to the medical care Americans receive, the progressives label it 'Astro-turf.' I mean, who could oppose such an effective, efficient, and fiscally responsible entity like the federal government running our medical system?
So why are Americans so upset with Obama-care? Bait and switch.
Sure, it's easy to tell everyone I am going to make sure the 40 million people who don't have health insurance receive coverage. Everyone says, yea, do something about those people. However, if you were listening closely to what candidate Obama was saying, and were not sucked into the hopey-changey rhetoric, you would have known this was coming.
Americans wanted health insurance coverage for folks who do not have it. Take care of them, but do not change my health care. I like my doctor, and my small co-pays, and my prescription drug coverage. Don't change my health care; just do something for those other people. That is what America thought when they elected President Obama, change the bad, keep the good.
The President, ladies and gentlemen, does not want to fix American health care, he wants fundamentally change how we receive health care. He and the liberal/progressive elements in Congress want to eliminate private health care insurance and ultimately replace it with a single-payer, government run health care system. No amount of elegant, legal, and technical talking points about "keeping what you have" can stand up to the what is written in black and white in the two House bills being debated right now.
When the president says you can keep you private insurance, you can keep your doctor; he is parsing his words so very carefully. If you have private insurance coverage through your employer, and you lose your job, presto, you are now permanently in the "qualified plan" or public option system of limited care. If your employer looks at the $1,000 per family he is paying for your private insurance, and the subsidized cost of the 'public option' is $500 per family, you going to get the limited care public option whether you want it or not. If your private insurance makes any changes to your policy, co-pays or deductibles, you will have to move into a qualified plan. So I guess if you never change jobs, never change coverage, never change doctors, never change providers, you can keep your private insurance. Good luck with that.
The public option of government run health care will not be anything close to what we have now. Please spare me the "we pay more for health care and our system is 37th in the world" speech. Why is it billionaires and regular folks from all over the world come to America for our 37th best health care? We pay more, because we earn more, and we also get more. You can make statistics say what ever you want, but when it comes to life-saving medicine, people leave their socialized-medical utopias to come to America.
Every government run health care system has to keep costs down by rationing health care. It's just a fact. If you are seventy one years old and need a hip replacement, sorry, you're not contributing to the system, so you get pain medication and mandatory end-of-life counseling. Long waits, for less care, fewer doctors and fewer choices isn't something Nancy Pelosi and President want you to know about. And we haven't even mentioned the trillions of dollars this will cost, or the 500 billion in cuts to the Medicare system.
Therefore, when congressional Democrats come home to angry constituents, it's not astro-turf, it is as real as it gets. The government screwed up the housing market by requiring lenders to give mortgages to folks who had no business owning homes, subsequently, our home prices plummeted, our home equity disappeared or we lost our homes to foreclosure. We are still reeling from that government induced calamity. If the government screws up our health care, I don't even want to think of the consequences.
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
What Obama and the media want you to believe.
Hello?
Hi, is this Walt Lucas?Yes it is, who is calling?This is Jay Gellert, I'm the CEO of Heathnet, your insurance provider.Um, yea, um, what can I do for you today Mr. Gellert?Mr. Lucas, I am calling everyone of our 6.7 million members to see if you would be willing to find out where your local member of Congress will be having town hall meeting in your area and to shop up and protest.You are calling 6.7 million people?Well, I have half the list, Rush Limbaugh has the other half.So what exactly do you want me to protest?The President's health care plan, do you need any posters or a bull horn? We found a great deal on Amazon for bullhorns, I ordered two truckloads.No,,,,,thanks for the offer, I am already opposed to to any plan that will limit private heath care coverage and force people onto a government program, but I'm probably not going to protest.Are you sure Mr. Lucas?Well, I would have gone to talk to Congressman Mike Thomson in Woodland today if I would have found out about it sooner. They ran an article in the paper yesterday saying the meeting was going to be this morning, but I had to work. I guess Mr. Thompson doesn't want to announce his public meetings in advance so he won't have to deal with his constituents.How did you find out about the heath care bill without a call from an insurance provider? Did one of the pharmaceutical companies call you, we are supposed to be working off different lists.Well, I just follow the news I guess. I mean, its not hard to find out what is inside the competing versions of the health care bill, you just have to do a little research.By yourself? Are you sure one of the talk-radio guys didn't call you first?No sir, I just figured that health care is about one seventh of our economy and I thought I better figure out what the Democrats really want to do before it's too late. If the government is in charge of health care it will have all the efficiency of the DMV combined with the compassion of the IRS.Well said, well said. Are you are sure don't want a bullhorn?No thanks, good luck with your protest promotion.
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