Friday, October 31, 2008

A plea to two friends

Before I start my plea to my friends, I have to point out the new additions to my blog. In the left column, you'll notice two counters the first is the countdown to the mid-term elections. I'm putting this up in a moment of weakness and doubt as to whether McCain can pull this election off. The second is the national debt counter. I have a feeling if this election goes badly for us conservatives, we're going to see that one pick up speed. Now on to the plea...

So, here is my plea to my friends...

My first friend has told me that she is probably going to vote for Obama, but she isn't sure. She has some doubt and says she may make a last minute decision to go a different way. She says her primary problem is Palin. She feels that Palin isn't ready to be President and if my friend votes for McCain, Palin will be a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.

You are right. If you vote for McCain, Sarah Palin will be a heartbeat from the Presidency. I know you have some misgivings about her and I can understand that. I don't have those problems. Quite simply, in my opinion, a couple of bad interviews early in your time on the national stage do not an incompetent person make.

However, while she will be next in line to be President, I can't guarantee that she won't become President, nor can I guarantee that she will. What I can guarantee is that if Obama is elected, he will be the President, and that idea scares me beyond belief.

I told my wife something today that I never thought I would ever, ever say. I wish Hillary had won the Democratic nomination. During the primaries, I rooted for Obama to win the nomination because I dislike Hillary on the same level that most avid Democrats dislike Bush. However, if McCain can't win, I would so much prefer that Hillary be President over Obama, because he scares me that much.

As I listen to more and more that comes out about Barack Obama, I realize how dangerous he is for this country. The redistribution of income that he wants to do, the statements that indicate he thinks the Constitution was wrong.

I've heard him say that he doesn't think we should be sending billions of dollars to countries that don't like us very much, yet, based on things he's said and the associations he's had, he and his friends don't like this country very much.

I look into what Obama says and I see so much of the Constitution that hangs by a thread. What of the right to free speech and freedom of the press. I look at his performance and I see so much of these freedoms being suspended in the name of "fairness." Just this week he kicked the Dallas Morning News, New York Post, and Washington Times off his campaign plane because they endorsed McCain. I believe this is a precursor to what we will see with him in the White House. Those media outlets critical of what he does will simply be frozen out. The media are supposed to be the watchdog of the government, yet I believe that the First Ammendment is in danger should Mr. Obama occupy the White House.

Recently I've been reading about Fascism and the rise of the Nazi party in Germany prior to WWII. The parallels to what you see in Obama's performance are disconcerting to say the least and terrifying to say the most.

This has moved beyond Democrat and Republican for me. Mostly because I don't think that down deep, if we could know him that way, Mr. Obama is a Democrat. Down deep, I believe he is somewhere between a Marxist and a Fascist and he will do so much damage to this country and what has made it great.

So please, move beyond your worry and make sure that we don't have this man dismantling our great nation.

My second friend is planning to vote third party and my plea to him is simple...

I think you're right, a third party would help this country greatly, but this is not the time to take that stand. I've outlined only a few of my fears about Mr. Obama here, and looking at the polls, I believe that, at this point, a vote for anyone but McCain is essentially a vote for Obama. There will be a time to stand for a third party, but this is a time to stand for our country and make sure that a man who thinks our founding fathers were wrong and wants to dismantle our founding documents does not occupy the White House.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

10 reasons to vote GOP

I'm doing my own version of Letterman's Top Ten list. These are my top ten reasons not to vote Democratic....







These are the ten cities in the United States with the highest poverty rates. Note the amount of time that they've had Republican leadership.

I live in Toledo and the city is a mess. We've got some good points (the zoo, the art museum, the parks), but my basic analysis of it is that the schools are on academic watch, most of the roads drive like bombed out airstrips,the police usually have a 1 to 3 day response time to anything that doesn't involve gunfire at the moment of the call, jobs are fleeing this city and the administration is running around planting flowers, putting up lights downtown and trying to convert a warehouse into a concert hall. Talk about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Know what we have in common with the ten cities on that list? Democratic rule. Toledo is such a Democratic stronghold that we actually have two Democratic parties. You read that right, TWO DEMOCRATIC PARTIES, the A-Team and the B-Team. Sure, there's a Republican party here, but the fact is that the unions (I'll be beating my head against this wall in a later blog entry) have such a stranglehold on this city that if you ran Jesus himself on the Republican ticket, you couldn't get him elected.

Now, I ask you, why on earth would you want to put the same sort of people who ran these cities into the ground in charge of the entire United States? Having said that, I have to say that on the whole, I think we could be better off with some of those guys (including Kwami Kilpatrick) in charge before the current Democratic ticket. Why? Because while I believe that while most of those guys couldn't economically develop a lemonade stand, much less a city, I don't think that they'll take us down the road to Hell as fast as Obama, Biden, Clinton, Pelosi, Dodd, Frank and the others.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

A tarnished glimmer of hope

I caught this interview with Charles Barkley. It gives me a glimmer of hope, but a tarnished one in that he seems to think that racism is the only reason that people wouldn't vote for Obama. While I'm sure that is a reason for some, I take offense at being painted with that brush.



I find it interesting that despite the claims that the Republicans are running on race, the Democrats are the only ones who you hear talking about race. It's interesting that they constantly claim that the Republicans are running on race, but since you can't find anyone in the Republican party saying that people shouldn't vote for a black man the Democrats have to claim it's done by codewords.

I could go on all day about that as well as some things in that interview that made me want to stand up and cheer Mr. Barkley. I'll write about those in later blogs but today I want to talk about my glimmer of hope.

My glimmer of hope is in what he said about the polls. I disagree with the motivation, but I truly agree with Mr. Barkley that the polls are completely useless and that this election will be neck and neck down to the wire.

I agree that there are probably a lot of people who will tell pollsters that they would vote for a black man and then actually vote for someone else, but I think that in most cases it's not racism but political correctness that motivate that. I know a couple of people who are very racist, and they will admit to anyone who will listen that they would never vote for a black man. However, others that I know (including myself) wouldn't vote for Obama, not because of the color of his skin, but because we believe that he and his Socialist policies will take the country down a road of destruction. I believe that some of these people (myself not included) would tell a pollster that they would vote for Obama because they don't want to be seen as a racist.

As of today, the polls show that Obama's lead had dwindled to within the margin of error in most cases, and if we look back at a sampling of the 2004 election, on the left is what the polls predicted, on the right was the actual election result...


Iowa
Kerry by 1%.......................................Bush by 0.1%
Nevada
Kerry by 1.4%...................................Bush by 2.6%
New Mexico
Kerry by 4.2%...................................Bush by 0.8%
Ohio
Kerry by 6.5%...................................Bush by 2.1%
Minnesota
Kerry by 14.3%.................................Kerry by 3.5%
New Hampshire
Kerry by 15%.....................................Kerry by 1.4%
North Carolina
Bush by 3.6%.....................................Bush by 12.4%
Pennsylvania
Kerry by 13.8%.................................Kerry by 2.3%
Wisconsin
Kerry by 5.7%...................................Kerry by 0.4%

As I said, I'm with Charles here. The polls are totally meaningless, this will be neck and neck down to the wire, maybe, just maybe, it wasn't too late and the people have seen what a frightening spectre that a Socialist candidate who thinks that the Constitution was wrong.

Voters I understand and voters I don't

I got this audio in an email from a friend yesterday. It's a bit that Howard Stern did where he sent one of his people into Harlem to talk to Obama supporters. I think it says something about where at least some of Obama's supporters are coming from. If it weren't so frightening, it would be funny...



After hearing this audio this morning, I can fully understand why it is that some people will vote for the man. It truly is out of a lack of information. They're angry, they know that the Republicans have the Presidency, and therefore, the problems must be the Republicans' fault. Therefore, they're going to vote for Obama, and anything that is attributed to him must be right. Never mind if it's actually what he believes or not, never mind if it's actually what they believe or not.

I have a couple of coworkers who fall in this category, one of whom told me that Clinton was a great President. When I asked him what Clinton did to make him great, he said, "You didn't get poorer during his administration." I pointed out that for me that has been true of every President since Carter and asked him what Clinton did during his administration to facilitate my not getting poorer. He said that he couldn't tell me because he's never done any research into what Clinton did or didn't do during his Presidency. So, much like the people in the above audio, he had no information to support the view he had.

The second coworker just recently told me that this will be the first time he's going to vote, but he's going to do it because he feels so strongly about this election. Good for him, except he also falls into that uninformed voter category. He spent the next few minutes explaining to me that the reason we need Obama's change is because the economy crashed because Bush spent all of the banks' money on the war.

These people I understand. They are so woefully uninformed that they can't understand what taxes, redistribution of wealth and so forth will mean to them.

The Obama-supporting coworker I can't understand is a trust fund kid. Everyone knows that she comes from a family with money. We all know the lifestyle she lives. We all know that the best salary in her job description at our shop won't pay for one aspect of the life that she lives, much less all of her lifestyle. Yet, she's a very avid liberal and Obama supporter. Do she and people like her not realize that when Obama, Biden, Pelosi, etc. talk about taxing the crap out of the wealthiest of Americans, she is who they are talking about? She has to. This is not an uneducated, uninformed woman. She's got a lot on the ball.

I have a theory on why she thinks this way. She's what I call an old-money liberal. She was born into this money. She's never had to work for it. She's always been entitled to it and thinks that everyone should be entitled like she is. The thing that she doesn't appreciate is that someone at some time in her family put in a lot of hard work to achieve the family fortune that she and her siblings now enjoy.

I've been working hard at building a little remodeling business on my days off. I've put in a lot of hard work, a lot of 12 and 14 hour days where I work at remodeling before I go into my regular job. I'm starting to do better and I'm looking at the possibility of hiring a part-time helper next year. Should I be able to continue building this business and want to pass it down to my kid or sell it off and pass the proceeds down to my kid, who are Obama and his ilk to tell me that I and my kid have too much and that they need to confiscate a bunch of it so they can "spread the wealth?"

Where is my incentive to build my little business into anything that could give other people jobs if the SuperLiberals are just going to come, take most of it away and give it to other people? Instead, maybe I should just sit back and wait for them to take someone else's fortune and redistribute it to me.

The problem with Socialism is that as soon as the people figure out that they don't have to do anything to have things handed to them, productivity stops. You may remember a little experiment with that called the USSR. It didn't work out too well.

Going back to yesterday's blog about people who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it, did you know that the original settlers here tried a socialist setup They originally set up their colony that everyone put in everything they produced into one group and then everyone took what they needed out of that. It failed miserably. Once they let people keep the benefits of their hard work and made it so that the harder they worked, the better off they were, they succeeded.

That's what this country has been about since the start. Do we have problems? Sure. Are there areas where we could do better? Certainly, but dismantling the entire system and replacing it with Marxism, which has to date been nothing but a failure, is pure insanity. To quote my best friend (who incendentally is quite liberal), "We have a horrible system of government here. It's slow, it's unfair, and a constant problem. It's the worst system of government on earth except for all the others."

Monday, October 27, 2008

Quotes

I've spent the last few days with some quotes out of history running through my head...



1) "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." -- Karl Marx



2) "Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it." -- George Santayana



3) "Be afraid when you are approached by someone who says, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help." --Ronald Reagan



These three quotes just keep going through my head as I watch my country go down what I believe to be a very dangerous road. The dangerous road I see is the road toward socialism. Yes, I believe that Barack Obama is a full-on socialist at the core of his being. That normally wouldn't frighten me, but when you combine it with the fact that the exceptionally liberal members of congress could have a bulletproof majority, it just completely scares me.

First, lets begin with Mr. Obama. We've all heard the "Joe the Plumber" statements where he says he wants to spread the wealth around, but what is being largely ignored is the 2001 radio interview below where he actually says that in the civil rights movement, the court didn't go far enough to address the redistribution of wealth. Yes, he said redistribution of wealth as in the core belief of Mr. Marx listed above. He also lamented the fact that the court didn't break free from the limitations set by the founding fathers in the constitution. Give it a listen and see for yourself.



But you combine that with the libs having the potential of a bulletproof majority in both houses and you get the potential of people like John Kerry being able to push through the new "New Deal" that he says we need. You can read about it in a Boston Herald article. The problem with this as a theory is that if you read up on your history, you would see that the New Deal extended, not ended, the Great Depression. What ended the Great Depression was not the New Deal; it was WWII. Also, for those of you who don't know your history, there are several programs created by the New Deal that are still around today. The three biggest are: Social Security, The Securities and Exchange commission (SEC) and Fannie Mae. That's right, Fannie Mae, one of the biggest causes of the wreckage that is currently our economy was created by the New Deal, which people like John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton want to take us back to. Yes, as Mr. Santayana said, "Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it."

Personally, I wouldn't be so worried about Obama being President if it weren't for the fact that it appears that the people who want bigger and bigger government are going to have a bulletproof majority in both houses of Congress. I also wouldn't be afraid if the liberal folks were to hold a majority in Congress if we had a non-socialist President. Unfortunately if this election goes through as the polls indicate, I see a future of bigger and bigger and bigger government which will be trying to help and as Mr. Reagan said, "Be afraid when you are approached by someone who says, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help."