Government Needs an Occasional Vacation

Every time a Ted Cruz, Mike Lee or Michelle Bachman, Louis Gohmert or Marsha Blackburn dig their heels in on a point of principle (always over budget over-spending) and threaten to shut down the government, the media reacts like Chicken Little, running around proclaiming the imminent falling of the skies. But is the sky about to collapse on us if the government is forced to take a little vay-cay? How much does it hurt us if government takes a little break. It's not like they couldn't send out some social security checks during the interim. They have plenty of our money sitting in the bank with which to do that and computers to release the cash. So what's the big deal if we take a holiday from spending like drunken sailors?

Actually I should apologize to drunken sailors for that one. The government spends at a rate that would make a drunken sailor verklempt. 

I've read the reports in the New York Times and the Huffing and Puffington Post castigating Republicans for the damage their brinksmanship has done to the economy. They cite a minuscule, six-tenths of a percentage drop in the Federal Reserves anticipated "growth" rate for the economy. Remember, the president can cause that big a drop just by making another one of his speeches and mentioning the word "collective" a couple of times. That economic impact of .6% doesn't mean much more than that a few nervous stock speculators saw their stock prices drop a little because other nervous stock speculators decided they didn't want to pay that much for those over-priced stocks. Some of these financial gamblers lost a little perceived value for their stocks, but if they played it smart and hung on to their stocks, most of these stock prices came back up after a while (see headline below). Standard and Poor meanwhile, worried that the shutdown of 2013 might "weigh on consumer confidence, especially among government workers that were furloughed.”

So, let me get this straight, the government shutdown worried mostly government workers? Standard and Poor tries to bring the rest of us in on it, again weighing in with a moan that, “If people (i.e. government workers) are afraid that the government policy brinkmanship will resurface again, and with it the risk of another shutdown or worse, they’ll remain afraid to open up their checkbooks.”

So, just perhaps, a shutdown might cause people to actually save some of their money instead of spending it, if only for a while. If you are one of those poor simple people who think that everybody being a little frugal and putting some money back for a rainy day is a good thing, you will find that the liberal media finds your attitude unprogressive in the worst way. People sitting on their money is something  the imminent liberal economist, John Maynard Keynes, was always terrified of, as are his progressive acolytes almost a century later. The reason Keynesians like Democrats and even, sad to say, like some Republicans fear a reduction in spending is that Keynesian economic model depends on people spending steadily and paying lots of taxes, so that governments can afford to meddle in the economy, ostensibly to keep the economy stable. If people are left to their own economic devices, Keynes posits that things will be "very bad". Theoretically, a government shutdown should do serious damage to the economy if you buy into Keynesian economics.

Turns out, though, that when the talking heads and government agencies tot up the "damage" caused by the sixteen day 2013 shutdown, they figure it cost the economy around $21 billion. Sounds terrible right?  In describing the impact, however, they mention casually (hoping you don't notice) that during the shutdown, the government didn't spend 10 billion dollars a week. Let's see. Let me add that up in my head. That works out to a little over 1.42 billion per day. Multiply by 16 days and you get around 22.8 billion dollars the government didn't spend. That's a bit more than 21 billion in taxpayer dollars that the government was unable to spend during the shutdown (you can't keep them from spending altogether so they did manage to apparently spend at least 1.8 billion dollars somehow.

And when it was all said and done,  in 2013, right after the terrible 16 day government shutdown in October, the world went on spending and doing business quite well on its own. Some might argue that the economy bounced back nicely, perhaps with even more vigor from having had the government monkey off their back for 16 days.The CNBC (decidedly not a conservative media outlet) led it's 2013  annual year-end report with this headline:

Wall Street closes 2013 at records;
Best year in 16 for Standard and Poor, 18 for Dow

 I think someone on Wall Street should have sent thank you cards to Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Michelle Bachman, Louis Gohmert, Marsha Blackburn and the rest of those terrible Tea Party people.  What do you want to bet that they didn't? So Ronald Reagan seems to have been correct when he told Johnny Carson we could send the government away for 3 weeks and not notice. Of course you don't shut down the essential stuff like the military and the air traffic controllers and such. You only send off the "nonessential" personnel.

Listen to that again. You only send off the "nonessential" personnel and shut down nonessential services during a government shutdown. Apparently those "nonessential" personnel are costing you and me 10 billion dollars a week. Does it occur to anyone else that we might could find a few things to trim from our budget since they are already neatly categorized into the "nonessential" category.

I'm living on a fixed budget, with bad knees and a disabled family member to care for. My personal budget is pretty much limited to essentials these days. I understand about making do without some nonessentials and getting creative with my spending. Shouldn't our government be at least a little more careful about nonessential spending? Doing so doesn't seem to harm our robust, still semi-free market economy. I think we might be able to adapt to a little frugality. We could start by putting the savings back into social security from which the Congress has been stealing for years.

This election cycle we have two candidates for "Dear Leader" lined up, both of whom are very fond of spending ?other people's money" - Clinton the taxpayer's money and Trump* his suckers, uh, investors money.  Hopefully people will at least vote for down ballot conservatives like the Cruz and the rest that I mentioned above. A solid conservative block in Congress would at least have the power to shut the government down, if only for two or three weeks.

I'm with Reagan. Let's send the government on a mandatory three week vacation once in a while, if only to remind some of them that they are, after all, nonessential!

Just sayin'

© 2016 by Tom King

* And before you Trumpians jump on me, you should read Trump's books - especially the part about using other people's money. Trump dearly loves making other people pay for his projects. He used 160 million dollars of George Soros' money to build Trump Towers in Chicago when he ran out of other other people's money.

The Louisiana Theater Shooter is NOT a Tea Partier

Oh, the gun control folk are wetting their pants! Finally, a Tea Partier has murdered some people and therefore since one out of the last 20 or 30 serial shooters was a "Tea Partier", that proves we need gun control to stop them. And they sing it in solidarity like a Hitler Youth chorus line!

Well, they're wrong. The Louisiana theater shooter was NOT a "tea partier". First off nobody parties over tea. It's a "party" in the political sense of that word and the informal sense for that matter since the Tea Party has only a loose organizational structure at best and exists in total disorganization at worst with any nut job, who wants to join, able to claim membership.  To be fair, there is a language barrier at play here. When Democrats use the word "party" they use it (incorrectly) as a verb, i.e. to engage in sex, drugs and rock n' roll in a group setting. Tea Party members don't "party" in that sense. We may host a "party" to talk bad about Democrats, but we don't party in the same sense that liberals do.

The man in question (and I will not use his name for reasons I've explained elsewhere) had once signed up for an online Tea Party website account.  He never used it. An article in RawStory says he hated Obama, but then quotes him as saying he supported Obama's re-election (check this article link to verify).

The man was bipolar (manic-depressive) and obviously mentally ill. Local talk radio hosts, in fact, used to bring him on opposite Democrats because he said such outlandish things that it made the phones light up. In other words these people brought in a mentally ill person and put him on the air lined him up opposite to a Democrat, knowing full well the Democrat would torment him and make him babble incoherently on television and radio and look foolish. They admitted that they did this in order to boost their ratings.

He could hardly be called a Tea Party member (we don't call ourselves Tea Partiers - like I said, that's the Democrat meaning of "party", We don't party. Party is a noun in my part of the country, something you host, not something you do.

Sounds to me like the man was a clinically deranged person that leftists were allowed to torment till he cracked. These people should be ashamed of themselves and recognize that someone should have got this guy into treatment instead of using him to boost ratings for their shows. Shame on them all. Perhaps they will learn not to torment mentally ill people. They are all to blame for his crack up and for the deaths that resulted.

The RawStory article also claimed the guy "loved" Hitler, then I'd say that made him a socialist - Hitler was, after all a socialist and not a Republican. That makes him sound like some variety of lib (Libertarian or Liberal - there's not that much difference between 'em). And, as it turned out, his family had him committed in 2008, but it's very hard to hold a mental patient against his will anymore thanks to a set of laws that Democrats passed back during the Carter administration to "protect" people in mental institutions. The new law was a scattergun attemp to correct abuses brought on by sweetheart deals between government and mental institutions under previous largely Democrat administrations that virtually imprisoned mental patients with no way to get out.  The law was inspired by a Mickey Rooney movie. The resultant government "solution" to the problem simply turned loose hundreds of thousands of severely disturbed individuals onto the streets. Homelessness shot through the roof and the new law made it danged near impossible to commit anyone into care against their will until they had actually shot, stabbed or beaten someone. So despite efforts by his family to intervene, our shooter was able to sign himself out of treatment, after which his mental illness ramped on up to his final act of violence.

Great system you came up with there, guys!  I'm being sarcastic for those of you in San Francisco who missed that.  I know the folk in Lafayette, Louisiana certainly "got" it.


Just sayin'

Tom King © 2015

Everybody's After the Tea Party

What started out as an American tax revolt by conservatives has, through the good graces of the mainstream media, Democrat, Republican, far right and far left propagandists, become the whipping boy of every political power and would-be power out there. As a self-identified member of the Tea Party, I feel rather like the folk at the Alamo - surrounded and outnumbered.

• On the one hand the Democrats and the loony left-wing piled on with a boost wherever possible from their allies in the mainstream media calling us right-wing kooks.

• Next came the radical, Ron Paul right complete with conspiracy theories and a holier-than-thou attitude to complain we weren't real conservatives and make us look like right-wing kooks.

• Then came the Republican establishment who were terrified that a resurgence of conservatism might endanger their long and largely unsuccessful attempt to win elections and accumulate power by staking out the middle.

I've always like the avuncular, country sort of folk who showed up for Tea Party rallies. They don't mind pushing back when outsiders try to co-opt what has proven to be the most resilient grassroots movement in recent political history.

The Tea Party gets accused of being beholden to some mythical corporate fat cats who are duping us all into supporting crony capitalism. Meanwhile the corporate fat cats are disturbed because they don't seem to be able to find a way to co-opt the Tea Party for their own purposes. With a movement like the Tea Party which has a few self-proclaimed organizations, no political structure to speak of, you can hardly blame either fat-cat corporations or fat-cat political organizations for being frustrated. Unlike most political machines, one has a great deal of difficulty finding out where to insert the money with this bunch.

I've been accused of being in the pay of some guys called the Koch brothers because I belong to the Tea Party. I don't know the Koch brothers and if I'm getting paid to write conservative weblogs for them, I need to figure out where to go to pick up my check.

Now if I wanted to work for the hard left, I could go to Craigslist or a couple of nonprofit jobs sites I know and there are hundreds of paid "grassroots" organizing jobs I could get working for the left. If I didn't mind living in a ratty, commune somewhere I could work for the scary libertarian or scary liberal faction and get some of my bills paid. But so far, I've never been paid for going to any rallies, writing blogs or passing out handbills in support of Tea Party events or activities.

It's that quality of being unorganized, self-identified and not-beholden-to-anyone-with-money quality that troubles the powers-that-wannabe. They don't like loose cannons like the Tea Party.

I love being a loose cannon. In the days of fighting sailing ships, if you were a loose cannon, people on board the ship had to pay attention to you, lest you crash through the deck and knock a whole in the bottom of the boat or roll over someone important in the crew.

Personally, I think the Tea Party is doing a valuable service to the political process, rolling around all out of control, if only to rattle the folk who are sailing this ship of ours off into the rather nasty-looking storm over there on the horizon.

Just sayin'

© 2014 by Tom King

ABC's Rick Klein Gives "Helpful" Advice to Republicans

Rick Klein - Boy King of all things
Political at ABC News

Ditch the Tea Party Candidates

Yahoo News' gleeful analysis of two East Coast state governor's races draws the conclusion that Republicans ought to reject the Tea Party conservative wing for candidates that are just slightly right of center - a formula for disaster virtually everywhere else in the country except the East Coast. Author Rick Klein cites Chris Christie's success in New Jersey and Tea Party supported conservative Ken Cuccinelli apparently losing campaign in Virginia as THE examples of what's wrong with the Republican Party.

Before the GOP starts taking advice from Klein, the brother of openly leftist Huffpo columnist Ezra Klein and would-be guru of all things political, as the new political director at ABC, they might want to consider the source of all this helpful advice and the premise behind it.

New Jersey as Klein's article points out is "Deep Blue" and Virginia, while ostensibly a Southern State, is virtually a parish of Washington DC so far as the number of Northern Virginians working in the capital goes. So many DC workers depend on Democrats for their continued and growing employment opportunities these days that the modern Army of Northern Virginia while still distinctly pro-Democrat, supports a very different party from the one that poor white Southerners fought for in the name of "States Rights". The Democrat party's pro-union and anti-states rights policies are the polar opposite of what Bobby Lee's descendents once claimed to have fought for, although very much pro-rich plantation owner if you judge by the number's of so-called 1 percenters that contribute heavily to Democrats.

Rick Klein's "strategy" to help the Republicans win elections might work in a heavily Yankee state like Jersey or the new Virginia, though I suspect that what the Yankees like most about Christie is his saucy, kick-ass rhetoric rather than his Republican-ness.  However, Klein's advice to kick the Tea Party conservatives to the curb would pretty much finish dividing the party and secure a Democrat majority ad nauseum anywhere west of the Alleghenies or East of the Sierras - which is likely just what Mr. Klein hopes for.

Klein, trained in the best leftist journalism schools, buys the mistaken premise that one captures the moderate "swing vote" best by running a moderate candidate, despite the fact that the moderate lost to the leftist in both of the last two elections. The only big wins for Republicans in the past 40 years have been when they've run a hard nosed conservative for president and similarly conservative candidates in most of the heartland.

What Klein neglects to mention in his "advice" is, that if the Republicans run a bunch of Chris Christies next go round, the Tea party will exit stage right and take their votes with them to a third party, or worse, to nowhere at all. Given the leftist tone over at the Libertarian Party, it's not likely they'll go there, so a fourth party (if you count the Libertarians as a party) becomes an even more likely possibility, leaving the plurality of votes solidly in the hands of the Democrats and likely to remain there.


How much more entertaining would it be for an ABC political director to have three or four political parties upon which to opine?


© 2013 by Tom King

Time to Change Tactics and Go Guerrilla

New look for conservatives.

I'm a big military history buff and when I think about conflict, even conflict of a philosophical nature, I tend to think in military terminology about a response to something I think is just plain wrong. Ellen White's landmark 1888 book, The Great Controversy, lays out the spiritual history of the world in terms of a momentous conflict between good and evil and it is hard this day and age not to see the great political world conflicts as a similar confrontation between good and evil.

In the past three decades, the political division in the United States of America between liberals and conservatives have become become more pronounced to the point that we haven't seen this level of political nastiness since 1859, right before the Civil War broke out.

Politically, conservatism is losing the battle for the hearts and minds of America in favor of a centrist, socialist bread and circuses dispensing entrenched left-wing government bureaucracy and its allies in the Democrat party. There's a reason we're losing the battle.

Bill Whittle pointed out in this week's Klavan and Whittle members-only episode on PJTV that when you look at the situation from a military standpoint, it's easy to see why we're losing.  The left has air-superiority. Over the past century, the conservatives in America have gradually allowed themselves to lose the battle for the airwaves. The left infiltrated journalism schools, bought up media outlets, TV, radio and newspaper outlets and learned from the communist party how to infiltrate and use music, films and other entertainment resources to sell their message. Conservatives allowed liberals to steal a march on us that wound up with an almost entirely leftist mainstream media by the end of the 1970s.

On the media front, there has been an insurgency led by guys like Rush Limbaugh who took a medium searching for a product and gave it one.  AM radio was dying in the 80s because FM stations did a better job of broadcasting music - less static and interference. Limbaugh proved that people would put up with a little static to hear conservative political talk while driving to and from work or taking a lunch break. Limbaugh tried a brief foray into television, but TV was too entrenched and he shut it down, sticking with what worked. Because of his success, other conservative talk shows took off and soon there were radio stations that were all talk. Then Fox News sprang up on the new cable TV alternative to over-the-air network programming and proved that conservatives preferred a more balanced news source by a rather wide margin.

Next the Internet offered independent, unsponsored writers an outlet in the form of weblogs and the new blogosphere suddenly began pouring forth information that had not been sanitized and politicized by the mainstream media. The contrast between information in the blogosphere and in the traditional news was startling. If we are to keep the conservative viewpoint any kind of force at all, we have to get that message out there in any form we can, using any media available. 

Bill Whittle's assertation that we've lost air superiority is true, but we have actually been fighting back nontraditional resources like the Internet. The blogger groups grew up and established a legitimate place for themselves in news media.  Conservative Internet-based media like PJTV, Breitbart and the Drudge Report have outstripped similar liberal net-based efforts, but the mainstream media still seems to have the power to shout down conservative opinion, at least with what Rush Limbaugh has dubbed "the low-information voter".

It's time we start thinking of the battle for the American soul as if it were a war. It is one.  So, what do you do when your enemy has air superiority?

You don't give them a target to shoot at. You have to feel bad about the public blitzkriegs people like Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz, Herman Cain and Michelle Bachmann have had to endure.  Every time a conservative moves to the leadership, the liberals call in air strikes.  And air strikes they are, because every time a conservative leader rears his or her head, liberal thought police like Media Matters assault the news media with talking points and they all dutifully repeat those talking points over and over and over until the American public is forced to look up from the latest episode of Jersey Shores or Dancing with the Stars and notice that the media is saying that Sarah Palin is stupid.

We are entering a phase in this conflict where a guerrilla war is what we're fighting - at least until (and if) we can take back the big guns. In reality, whether we admit it or not, it's been a guerrilla war for some time.  So how do you fight a guerrilla war.

The first thing we do is take off the brightly colored uniforms. We have to stop labeling ourselves as Tea Party or Conservative or Libertarian. We just have to lead with the awkward questions and avoid labeling the questions as "conservative".  Instead of addressing stupidity about global warming by wailing about how stupid liberals are, which identifies you immediately as one of those evil conservatives Diane Sawyer warned you about, know enough about the issue to ask questions like this one from Bill Whittle, "Oh, and which 'climate' are we protecting from change?"  The Earth has had climates that have ranged from so hot the Earth was covered with jungle to so cold the Earth was covered in ice.  Are we talking about the climate of 2013 or 1944 or 1912 or 1492 or 550 AD or even 1000 BC? Climates change. Who are we to decide which one is best.

George Carlin pointed out in one of his more spectacular rants that we can't save the planet and that it's impossibly arrogant to think we can. If mother nature doesn't like us, she'll just swat us like bugs and move on down the road. Send your friend who is concerned about global climate change, the youtube clip of that little speech of Carlin's without comment. They just love Carlin.

Whatever issue it is, the debt, the budget, entitlements or foreign policy, just stop waving the conservative, tea party or Republican flag. It only calls down the drones upon your head. Instead, use the stealth approach.  Simply make the logical argument or ask one of those questions that's hard for them to answer.  If we ask the unanswerable questions and let the public figure it out for themselves, we are harder to discredit.  The liberals are already trying to do that by posing as conservatives and trying to ask those killer questions that prove the left is right. Unfortunately, for them, what seems obvious from the perspective of their laptops perched on one of those little round tables at the university Starbuck's is not so obvious when you look at it from out in the real world. Logic, it turns out, is the conservative's friend.

Like a SEAL team working "in-country", we have to hold back on the machine gun fire and take the time to win the hearts and minds of the real people if we ever hope to at least come out ahead in all this. To do so, we may have to forgo the flags for a bit. We need to stop leading with labels and lead with logic. We have to approach with kindness and simple questions, not hostility. We have to treat those who do not understand what is going on as if they were our neighbors and share information with them in a neighborly fashion.  

It will likely come as a surprise, for some of our conservative, tea party, patriot, Republican, Libertarian compatriots that the folk we need to be reaching actually are our neighbors and that we need to treat them as we would have them treat us - with respect.
© 2013 by Tom King

One More Time: The Koch Brothers Aren't Paying Off Tea Party People.

"Dangerous" Tea Partiers - tough looking group, huh?

I'm sick to death of progressive socialists and liberals claiming the Tea Party is being run by the Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch.  That's the stupidest thing I ever heard. Maybe they support some conservative think tanks, some TV programs or whatever, but front line Tea Party people aren't getting a dime to support conservative cause.  We truly believe this stuff.  That completely befuddles liberals.

Liberals really do think we're all being paid off by evil corporations.  So where do I go to get my check? I don't know one single person who's ever been paid by a corporation to support the Tea Party.  

First of all there is no organized "Party". We're a loosely disorganized gang of cranky old conservatives who have a few get togethers once in a while to gripe about the liberal agenda. We all drive ourselves to those meetings on our own dime. We don't get bussed to Washington by anybody, much less the evil Koch brothers. It's such an unbelievable load of BS. 

The last time I was in Washington, however, I witnessed about 5000 people marching on the capitol with nice printed signs and everything. They were served meals by union sponsors. They rode free buses into Washington for the Rally. I went back later that day and the National Mall was a mess where they'd been.  Want to guess where their funding came from?

I also saw a "Tea Party" rally in Austin. Everyone car-pooled or drove themselves. We brought our own lunch, made our own signs and I sure as hell never saw anybody issuing paychecks to any of us. and we cleaned up after ourselves.  The Union guys left the place a wreck after the Washington rally.  The bankrollers of the event paid to have it cleaned up.

But that's how progressives do it, so they assume, since they're being bankrolled by billionaires, we conservatives all must be too. I could care less what the Koch brothers do. You can check my weblog. I've been howling about this stuff for years. I have hundreds of blog posts supporting conservative causes. Nobody EVER paid me to write them. People read my stuff because they are interested in the subject matter. I make a few bucks on Google advertising, but writing this stuff is nowhere near worth the time and effort I put into it. That's what liberals don't get about the Tea Party. We're not shills from some corporate hedge fund crook who broke the Bank of England and bankrupted small Eastern European countries after a career in WWII of collaborating with the Nazis. We're just regularly raggedy people who want to be left alone to do our business and take care of our families without interference from the government.

This Koch brothers nonsense is nothing but a smoke screeen to cover how deeply beholden the leftist organizations in this country are to funding from the likes of George Soros and his ilk. The corporate cronies of the president get all kinds of favors from him, from massive government loans to bailouts to businesses that claim to be too big to fail.  Those evil corporations pull his strings far more thoroughly than any right wing "agitator" does with conservatives.  Some of the worst of them sit on his cabinet or act as his "advisors". 

Conservatives are not, as a rule, very obedient people. Not good citizen candidates for the socialist utopia the progressives are planning.  We've been pitching the damned tea in the bay for more than 200 years now -- whenever the government gets too big for its britches. And we will not go quietly into any socialist utopia you care to design. We've seen the gulags and the gas ovens at the end of that road thank you very much.

© 2013 by Tom King

I've decided to stop humoring the lunatic fringe - both the liberal ones and the conservative ones.  They're two peas of a pod.  I am deeply conservative in my politics, but not that deep.  I'm not liberal phobic either.   Some of my best friends are liberals (in the classical sense). Actually the term "liberal" used to mean one who believed in the equality of all men and that human beings had inalienable rights like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That is very different from the "progressive" socialist or the manic facist right-winger who believe there are special people endowed by their genes with special privileges, among which are the right to tell everyone else what to do, the right to being richer than the rest of us and the right to take for themselves anything they think they need to in order to manage the rest of us. I even leave that stuff up if they want a nice clean debate. I'm talking about the slavering paranoid racist supremists that try to sell themselves off as "real" liberals or conservatives and only make us people with sense look like idiots.

What I find particularly distasteful is the rise of the new antisemitism, particularly when it comes from Europeans who ought to know better.  I've seen a spate of attacks recently on Jews that trouble me. They are disturbingly familiar in theme, dwelling on Jewish conspiracies, Jewish bankers and alleged stealth-Jews in positions of power.  These new attacks claim the poor innocent Muslims are victims in all the recent unrest and not in any way the cause of it, despite the overwhelming amount of in-your-face evidence to the contrary.

The only Muslims I see as being victims in Europe or anywhere else are those who actually do seek peace and freedom (and there are plenty). Unfortunately, jihad is built into traditional Islam and it is VERY dangerous for any right-thinking Muslim to speak out against them. If you are a "good Muslim" you're a dead Muslim in many Islamist dominated countries. 

The Jihadis I have no sympathy for. The guys like the one in London that took off the head of a British soldier and then rambled on about on camera telling us how the guy deserved it and threatening to bring this down on the rest of us if we didn't submit to Islam was evil. And that seems to me to be the real threat. 

I believe there's a shell game going on here that relies on moral cowardice to be successful. It's easy to accuse the Jews of all sorts of evil. I've not seen crowds of Jews drag someone out of their car and behead them in front of their family because the weren't Jews. It's easy to blame it on Tea Party members. Have you seen the old geezers who show up for those.  They even stick around to pick up their trash afterward. These are not people to fear, unless you're afraid they might not watch your TV channel or they might vote you out of office.  I've not seen Jews OR Tea Party folk attack or kill people because of their race, religion or political opinion.

I have seen Muslims do just that and do it with malice aforethought. It's little wonder people are afraid to say anything negative about them. Poor old Salman Rushdie has had to spend the rest of his life in hiding because he wrote something  Islamic sensibilities because an Iranian mullah put out a Fatwah (death order) on him. It troubles me that any religion would even have a special word for "death order).

Muslim rebels in Syria have exterminated whole villages of Christians just in the past few months and we remain silent about it. We don't even talk about it on the mainstream news channels. Muslim Brotherhood supported groups have attacked and murdered Coptic Christians in Egypt. We are silent. We even had Muslims kill a couple of Coptic Christians here in the US and chopped them up in parts. Not a word on the ten o'clock news. The Boston Marathon bombing was the work of Muslim terrorists. They killed a nine year-old kid. Jews didn't do that. But the news and the president tried to blame it on Tea-partiers, mysterious homegrown terror groups and George Bush until it became obvious it was an Islamic terrorist act. Then they went silent.

It's as if we hope that if we don't criticize Islamic terrorist outrages or if we blame all the trouble on someone else and we show the Muslim fanatics that we also hate Jews (and, by the way, all the conservatives who criticize Islamists), then we think that somehow, maybe they won't hurt us. The Jews are under attack by people who want them dead and gone and the sooner the better. The Jewish people have decided not to go quietly. I applaud that, even when they get a little testy with me. You can hardly blame them for seeing a growing threat to them in this increasingly antisemitic world.

If we don't wake up to the fact that Islam has declared war on the rest of us, we're going to wind up precisely where we were in the Autumn of 1939. The Poles of all people should remember how that went and who their friends were and yet there are increasing rumblings against Jews even in the land that saw the horror that was Auschwitz built on their own soil by the Nazis.

13 year old girl, gang-raped by Muslim males,
is stoned for "fornication"

The guys I've started boycotting are the folk are largely those whose constant, unremitting claim is that the Jews are to blame for how people treat them. It's like saying to a woman, if you were raped, it must have been your fault. And that IS is common practice in Muslim countries. A woman who is raped and complains about it can wind up stoned to death. I've seen the video. What I want to know is where in the world is the moral outrage about that????

If a conservative had denied the same woman the right to an abortion, you could have heard the howls of outrage across the planet. It would have been the subject of special news reports on the network channels and a flurry of new laws designed to put an end to the Tea Party menace. This solves two problems for our cowardly ruling class.  It allows you to attack people who are not likely to strike back by blowing you up or kidnapping and beheading you and at the same time appeases people who WILL blow you up or kidnap and behead you.

If a redneck Tea Party Patriot had showed up at Fort Hood and shouted "Praise Jesus" and started shooting people, the government would have had 500 conservatives arrested by sundown and we'd still be seeing Michael Moore documentary retrospectives on how terrible the Tea Party is to this day. Instead, the Fort Hood shooter, a Muslim psychiatrist who went into an area crowded with soldiers, shouted "Allahu Akbar" and gunned down 35 people, was arrested and to this day sits in jail, still drawing his full military pay ($275,000 to date).  He isn't even scheduled for trial.  And his crime has been reclassified as "workplace violence" to boot.

Now that gets my attention. 

The fact that there are some bankers out there who are Jewish bothers me not at all.

Tom King
(c) 2013

The Insane March on Washington (With Loaded Guns)

Veterans for Ron Paul Activist Leads Suicidal False Flag March on Washington

Tea Party my foot..... This man's a troll
squatting under the bridge squeezing
tolls out of others using fear tactics

You may have heard about a protest scheduled for July 4 in which thousands of armed Americans plan to march across the Memorial Bridge into Washington.  The idea is to carry loaded weapons into downtown Washington, march around the Capitol, the White House and a bunch of other government buildings and then supposedly march back out the way they came.  Of course, this won't happen the way it's planned.  Of course there will be a huge military and police presence and of course there will be lots of arrests.  The prison terms could be extensive and the fines could destroy anyone arrested. If they are not careful, some fok could be shot and even killed.  Not only that, but the man leading the march is a fake with a long history as a liberal Marxist radical working with liberal Marxist groups.  He's even asked President Obama to support the march. Talk about a false flag operation, this one is the mother of all false flag ops.

Michelle Malkin published a piece on Adam Kokesh the self-proclaimed "libertarian anarchist" who is organizing the march.  Even his Wikipedia entry gives you some insight into his activities with Marxist groups and the Wikipedia entry has been white-washed as much as Adam and his supporters could manage. The Washington Post says Code Pink will be at the bridge to offer "hugs" to protestors o "counter the pro-gun message of the marchers. Interesting action by Code Pink since they have a history of working with Adam Kokesh in the past.   Kokesh also helped organize the radical Iraq Veterans Against the War group and (insert Claud Rains quote here - "I'm shocked, shocked!") he helped organize "Veterans for Ron Paul".  That poor man never had a chance at the presidency.  He attracts lunatics like a magnet attracts iron filings.

This "March" is nothing more than an attempt to discredit pro-second amendment Americans. The man's a troll on steroids. Marching on Washington with loaded guns is an incredibly bad idea. If you really WANT a gun ban, the thing you do is you show up at the Capitol where the lawmakers sit with several thousand lunatics with loaded guns.  Want to really protest.  Show up on the far side of the bridge with signs that say - "We are the Tea Party - You don't represent us".

Personally I support a gun ban in Washington, DC. The city has the highest concentration of Democrats of anywhere in the country. I maintain that, with all those liberals packed together in one place, they should not be allowed to carry or even possess firearms. 

They'll shoot their eyes out!

Tom King (c) 2013

Open Letter to a Liberal Snob

Response to a Salon.com post on how pointless Sarah Palin is.

"The peasants are revolting!"

I love it when you libs spend all that energy explaining how some conservative or other is pointless. If Sarah Palin is so pointless, why are you guys so perturbed about her? If she's like all the other people over the years that liberal pundits have proclaimed either stupid, trivial or, now, "pointless", you may be in trouble. I read in the Times and New Yorker recently how Glenn Beck is an idiot and stupid and far beneath notice of the author of the piece - though he did manage to notice him enough to write an article about how stupid he is. Next thing I know, the same guys are whimpering because the New York Times bestseller list is dominated by books Glenn Beck has recommended, pushing off all the glib liberal pundits that used to live there in cool intellectual security.

Hey, Glenn has people reading again. He’s not just selling his books; he’s selling millions of books for obscure professors and academics, newspaper columnists and freelance writers. Where's the kudos to him for that! The publishing industry must be loving the sales numbers. They're probably scrambling right now looking for the next conservative blockbuster they can get him to recommend. All the while, you can bet their staff holds its collective pseudo-intellectual nose (not forgetting to endorse those paychecks when they deposit them, though).

From articles like this and others in the liberal blogosphere, it's obvious that you guys really do think regular folks like me are complete idiots that never check out anything but simply stumble around blindly doing as we're told.

Well you're wrong. What scares the willy out of the progressive left right now is that the conservative tea party movement doesn't seem to be collapsing. The mythical payoffs from big insurance were supposed to run out and all those grandmas and grandpas and guys in overalls and feed store caps were supposed to stop coming to rallies once they weren't being paid anymore
What happened? Why are the rallies growing ever larger? Why are we dominating the bestseller lists? Why are news media that offer a conservative viewpoint burying the mainstream media that sits solidly on the left? Why are the incumbents in both parties that got our country into this mess in the first place dropping like flies in the primaries (or bailing out while they can still collect their pensions)?

You may not like us, Bub, but we're real and we will not go quietly into that good night as we were expected to (and yes, we do read poetry). You may think we are just a collection of the most stupid people in the country and that we are being herded sheep-like by golden-tongued radio personalities.

Keep thinking that and you really will continue to be utterly surprised as we stand up en masse to oppose the blind rush to socialism that the left has been engineering for so long.

Once, the lower 50% of the IQ range in this country belonged to the Democrat party and voted blindly because they were told (more like chanted at really) that Republicans were rich exploiters and besides FDR saved us from the depression. Unfortunately for Dems, the conservatives are beginning to dip down into the loyal Democrats for new converts. Simple folks are beginning to hear a coherent message from conservatives like Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity and others that makes sense to them. The Democrats are doing stuff that makes them so mad, they’ve forgotten FDR and the propaganda about how evil Rush Limbaugh is supposed to be. They’re having a little listen and discovering that the evil conservatives are a lot more like them than are the spokeswomen for the “People’s Party”.

You're losing them and you haven’t a prayer of gaining any traction with the diverse and often very bright set of folks that have taken up the tea party banner. As people grow more angry with what the federal government is up to, you’ll see more folks lose their fear of being seen publicly to align themselves with the tea party. The crowds will continue to swell and the ratings will continue to rise.

You libs remind me of the fat burghers in Europe who lived constantly in dread that the peasants would figure out what was going on and rise up and murder them in their beds. Of course, they were also constantly trying to figure out how to keep the peasants fed (but not too well fed), how to keep them quiet, but busy on the farms and how to work them to a stupor so they wouldn’t have time or energy to figure out how scared the barons and earls really were of them.

It won't happen like that here. America’s peasant class is well fed (by its own efforts), but not so quiet. America’s one of the few countries in the world where obesity is a problem among our poor. It’s kind of odd really.

It is nice that you fear that we’ll murder you all in your beds. It makes for some really entertaining media. We enjoy watching jumpy liberals look for boogers at every tea party rally. Some of you guys have even resorted to manufacturing boogers and taking them to tea parties – I suppose to relieve your anxiety. By the way, you need to work on being a little more subtle when you misspell words on signs. The gun-toting Nazis in the group can pick you out like an orange pig in yellow grass.

I mean after all the tea party people are supposed to be gun-toting Nazis aren’t they? The progressive ideology says so. If the tea party folk aren’t gun-toting Nazis, what else could be wrong with progressive ideology? And that thought is apparently unthinkable to the progressive mind. We see that in socialist countries where the news reports vary widely from actual conditions on the ground in those countries. The elitist socialist will not tolerate variance from his ideology, even in the face of reality. Better to manufacture evidence than admit the ideology is flawed.

People tend to see the world through their own prejudices, beliefs and attitudes. Thieves see everyone as a potential thief. People who love power think everyone around them wants to take their power from them. After all, it’s what they’d do if the tables were turned. People, who think they are smarter than everyone else, tend to view others not in their “class” as stupid. They delude themselves into believing that most everyone except for themselves and their circle is stupid and that they should, somehow, be smart enough to figure out how to make all those stupid people do what they want them to do. They are, after all, stupid and incapable of governing themselves. The ideology says so.

What you've done, though, is finally get the attention of all those folks you thought were so stupid. You see, all those wonderfully diverse and intelligent folks out there who were content to let you guys play power games for all these years, so long as you left them alone to do their business and live their lives, have suddenly realized that you guys are really starting to mess things up. When you start diddling with people’s paychecks, you get their attention. You're taking their money for things they don't want to buy. You're mortgaging their children's futures

And, yes, Virginia, conservatives have learned, to your horror, how to use slogans effectively - a propaganda technique you always hoped we were too stupid to figure out. People with no interest in technology or the Internet have picked up this useful tool and the propaganda techniques to go with it in response to the threat they see from progressive socialism. And they are using it to devastating effect. Grandmas and grandpas are networking and organizing in a way that would give Saul Alinsky an orgasm if we all were progressive socialists.

Ah, but there's the rub. Once again, an enemy of America has misunderstood the character of the nation and badly misjudged. The Japanese did it back in the 30’s. They thought our preoccupation with business and digging ourselves out of a depression and our love for peace and our tiny military, meant we would fold easily once confronted with the might of the Japanese Empire. After all, Americans are far from warlike was the thinking. The resulting war, which had been going quite well for the Japanese up until they won that great "victory" at Pearl Harbor, turned out rather badly for them once Americans got into it..

The progressive movement thinks that free market capitalism is an "antique" notion and that folks will gladly give up capitalism and a few of our freedoms and privileges as Americans - at least a few at a time - in exchange for small payoffs like healthcare. They think, despite evidence to the contrary, that the time is ripe for the really smart people to finally fix things. They see themselves creating a world without hunger, ill health, homelessness or joblessness. What could be better than that? Oh, and the fat burghers who help create this new worker’s paradise will get to keep their treasure and prestige while the proletariat and working middle class and working wealthy will level out into a nice dreary gray sameness under the benign control of the new government. And the so-called classless society the progressives fantasize about will pretty much ossify the classes into just two - the elite leaders and the proletariat.

Imagine the shock when they begin to reach for our liberties and get their fingers bit off.

It'll be quite a shock to the ideology that believes the ignorant masses will go quietly into that dreary dusk of a once-thriving civilization. But, the left isn’t there yet. They’re still true believers like the arrogant Japanese military leaders in the heady days after Pearl Harbor. They didn’t yet realize they were doomed.

You see, we have help coming soon, from a quarter that no amount of central planning can prepare for. Whatever gains the progressives think they are making, whatever powerful coalitions they think they are creating, they are simply binding themselves into bundles - just like the ones I put out by the curb on Tuesday and Friday.

The brilliant Japanese admiral, Yamamoto, said it best when he lamented after Pearl Harbor that he feared that all they had done was “…waken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

Tea anyone?

Just one man’s opinion….

Tom King
(c) 2010 originally printed in "Uncle Tom's Traveling Salvation Show" - Open Salon, May 5, 2010

The IRS Thinks Something's Sinister at the Tea Party?

Media pundits, political operatives and the Obama Adminstration keep trying to "discover" something sinister going on with the Tea Party. Now the Nonprofit Quarterly's Rick Cohen gets into the act, reporting gleefully that the IRS is going after the Tea Party.

First, there is not a "Tea Party" so far as a national organizations goes. The Tea Party is a loose collection of individuals who share a desire for smaller, less intrusive government (not nonexistent government as Mr. Cohen snarkily suggests). Many Tea Parties are only organized in the sense that some guy made T-shirts and we all bought them with our own money and showed up at a park to rally for a specific candidate. We communicate by bulletin boards and websites that some of us donate money to in order to pay for the hosting charges.

NPQ's Cohen is rather tickled that the IRS is going after the Tea Party.  The IRS is going to be monumentally disappointed after it spends all that money trying to find out where the Tea Party is making money off the Koch brothers or whatever conservative bugbear they and the left believes is funding the whole thing. The administration and its allies on the left can't seem to imagine that regular raggedy people like me would care about politics without being paid to.

I spent 30 years in the nonprofit industry helping raise millions of dolllars for small nonprofits that couldn't afford to pay me to do it. I was always the development director AND something else that took up most of my time. And there's a reason they called those agencies "nonprofit". I'm 57 and have no retirement, no savings, no home and no health insurance. If I get sick I either pay for it or die and that's okay by me because I chose to do what I did. I worked with seriously troubled kids, many with disabilities on top of abuse and mental illness, adults with physical, mental and developmental disabilities, seniors with age-related disabilities, preschoolers with learning disabilities and the 1 in 5 citizens in East Texas who cannot drive due to age or disability. I started an independent living center for people with disabilities. I worked for six months to write the grant, organize the board, raised nearly 2 million dollars and then gave the organization over to people with disabilities to run and walked away to work on transportation issues. I worked side by side with conservatives and liberals to create fair funding for transit across my state, testified before the state legislature and was warned to check under my car before starting it because I was messing with somebody's "deal".

And, largely because of what I saw in government and quasi-government agencies, I am a Tea Party Activist. I've never received a cent to show up at a rally nor has anyone I know of. We all pay our own way, make or buy our own signs and T-Shirts, volunteer to organize and bring food to rallies. How the hell is the IRS going to tax that. The Tea Party where I'm from only exists when a bunch of us come together to howl. The only real way you can tell what we think is to ask us and pollsters do.

We've learned a bit about community organizing from the left. We kept some parts and pitched the other, less savory bits. NGOs and government officials kept asking me what I was trying to get out of the transportation advocacy I was doing. I told them nothing, but they didn't believe me. They kept telling me I couldn't get any grant money. I kept telling them I didn't want any. I wanted fair funding for East Texas rural transit - two very political Democrat leaning district were taking 60-75% of all the rural transit dollars. My group took them on head-on. I was attacked verbally, reviled and appointed to the Public Transportation Advisory Committee for my state by the governor. We got the job done, but it was because we all worked together to do it - progressives and conservatives. We just had to figure out that we wanted the same things, only disagreed on how to do it. Once we figured out what we all wanted, it was easier to figure out how to get it.

When we were done, we didn't organize a nonprofit to do something we no longer needed done. We just let our legislature know we'd be back if they messed with East Texas again. It was my introduction to the kind of real community organizing that led to a Tea Party organizing in my neck of the woods.

My tea party associates help fund charitable organizations all over the region. They are neighbors, friends and decent people. I really resent the implication that there is something sinister going on with the Tea Party. I know well what they charge for helping the nonprofits I've worked with - $0. So, I do get a bit impatient with folk who complain because some mega-corporation's CEO gets a bonus that's bigger than their salary when they've chosen, of their own free will, to work for a nonprofit organization, knowing full well that it's a "nonprofit". I agree that the laborer deserves his hire, but to complain that they are not making what someone who has dedicated his life to making money is rather disingenuous.

The angst among left leaning politicians and career nonprofit managers over taxing the Tea Party reminds me of my Uncle Bob, who once borrowed his son's electric car. He called home from the gas station frustrated. "I've circled this thing have a dozen times and can't figure out where to stick the gas nozzle in."

The IRS is going to have the same devil of a time figuring out how to tax Tea Parties as the British did trying to find the "Indians" who threw all that tea into the bay.

(c) 2012 by Tom King

Tea Party: The Reports of Our Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated.

by Tom King (c) 2011

"It's time to take it back - it's time for it to be our way." - Julie Driscoll, Chicago Liberal Examiner

And there you have it in a nutshell. Unless you agree with liberals and let them have it all their way, they will not ever be satisfied. Through this ideological paradigm, Ms Driscoll has captured a distorted view of the Tea Party. She gloats that the tea party is becoming irrelevant and chortles that , "It's about time!" Ms. Driscoll, like most liberal/progressive/socialists, gets it wrong.

The Tea Party movement is not like Students for Democratic Society or one of those other lib organizations. It's a strictly grass roots movement in every sense of the word. There are no memberships. There are no "official" membership roles. I consider myself a member and have never paid any dues to the nonexistent official organization. We don't pledge oaths to the party. We don't get regular checks from the Koch brothers, no matter what Keith Olbermann says. Hell, when we go to a rally, no one even sends a "free" bus to give us a ride. We have to buy our own gas. When we went to Washington, we paid our way. That's why so many Tea Party rallies tend to be small neighborhood get-togethers, more so than staged big-city marches and stuff like that. Shoot, my knees wouldn't hold up to a "march" if we held one. Give me something with folding chairs, fans and plenty of iced tea.

Liberals don't understand that because progressive socialism calls for high levels of organization, heavy investment in a shared ideology and hired gun community organizing. Next to the liberal wing of the Democrat party, the Tea Party is hopelessly inept at organizing and influencing policy. We are real working stiffs that just got fed up with the way things are going. We get mad, go somewhere and yell about how mad we are, then we go home and mow the grass, because it keeps growing no matter what they do in Washington.

You guys keep gloating over how poorly organized we are. What you don't seem to get is, that's the whole point. We're busy working, caring for our families, living our lives. We didn't come to this because we love politics. Most of us find politics repugnant. We cherish our way of life is all and just want the government to get out of our business.

Libs like Ms Driscoll, on the other hand, want the government to get more and more into their business (and into ours too). The political parasites that find government a useful tool for gaining wealth and power spend fortunes supporting political movements that promise to hand them ever more power (and wealth).  It's just a good investment for them. They'd donate to the devil if they could make money on the deal.

Shoot, if you go with the Tea Party, those evil corporations you liberal guys hate so much, would have the devil's own time trying to get the government to protect their profits, their markets and their fortunes at taxpayer expense. Look at the great bailouts of 2009. How may corporate fortunes were saved by the American taxpayer thanks to the good old government? Pundits like Ms. Driscoll are gloating about the very Tea Party weaknesses that I think are strengths.

So go ahead and dismiss the Tea Party movement. PLeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease! Rig the polls. Make sure the Chicago graveyards still have full voting rights. Congratulate yourselves on having whipped those stupid Tea Party rubes. If you win, it doesn't make you right and you will receive exactly what you deserve when the jackboots are marching in the street.

Enjoy the apocalypse. You're helping to make it.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King

Why Did He Wait to Release the Birth Certificate?

The president has finally released his long form birth certificate.

Told ya' so!

I predicted this would happen back when all the birther controversy started. Obama's people realized they had a priceless opportunity to help him overcome problem before the next election.  And all they had to do was sit back and let the controversy get built up.

Look, these guys know that lots of people wildly dislike Obama's policies and desperately want him out of there right now.  Of course they would want to believe they could get rid of him with the birth certificate issue. So, having the birth certificate, like good little politicians, they passed out the rope and gave us time to get the knots thoroughly tied.

It's a handy smoke screen people - always has been. They got the idea from way their own people went after John McCain with foam on their lips over his alleged birth certificate problems. McCain, being an honest (if often mistaken) man, did the right and proper thing and released his birth records. When the same crisis visited the Obama campaign, however, in the spirit of never wasting a good crisis, they used this one.

All they had to do was hold on to it till it was no longer useful for distracting people or till some front running Republican opened his mouth in support of the issue.  Is it a coincidence that Glenn Beck had a rant just yesterday, practically screaming that the birth certificate was a distraction and that people were focusing all this energy on a phoney issue. Is it an accident that Donald Trump spoke openly about it and has been asking a lot of other awkward questions lately.

Time to fire the birth certificate gun to greatest effect.  Look what they get for it. 

1. They can use it to try and make Trump look foolish, which would be hard to do with that hair of his.
2. It revives the issue at a time when Republican and Tea Party leaders are pleading for their people to let it go. 
3. It makes the birthers look paranoid and foolish - at least that's how it will be portrayed in the media.

This administration IS busily undermining our way of life. They want to create a magical socialist utopia, but in order to do so, they need us to look elsewhere. They need us to be focused on something trivial while they do what they need to do.

We could have seen it coming. How stupid would it have been for the Soros coalition to have selected a candidate with such a damning flaw as having not been born in this country.

The best thing in the world they could do for themselves, right now, since the leaders of the tea party conservatives are telling their people to lay off the birth certificate is to fire up the whole thing all over again by releasing the birth certificate. They figure they can make the whole birther conspiracy crowd look like stupid conspiracy theorists.

And the media will love it.  They've probably had to get mops out over at MNBC to handle all the salivation going on over at MSNBC.  The leftist media WILL use this as an excuse to marginalize tea party conservatives.

The tea party has been shackled with the birther controversy as an issue almost since its inception. Whether we wanted to carry water for the birther conspiracy or not, both the largely libertarian birthers and the leftist liberals.  I think of them collectively as libs as they both are turning out to be harmful to the country.  Glenn Beck has been the only libertarian leaning commentator I know that hasn't been sucked into the birther mess.

Unfortunately, because of this artificial association between the tea party and the 9/12 movement. We' are going to be painted with the same brush. Oh, the birth certificate thing was a plot all right. It was a plot to use the hatred of conservatives for this president against us and to marginalize our influence in the upcoming election.

And boy, oh, boy, surprise, surprise!  Just in time for the next presidential campaign! Good work people and congratulations to all those who will never, ever believe he has a real Hawaiian birth certificate anyway. While you turn your microscopes on the document and discussing ad nauseum how this one's a phoney, these guys are going to be winning another term for this nightmare of a president.

It's going to be the mantra of the media that conservatives just "hate Obama because he's black." Sadly, there are too many birthers that actually do hate him for being black and it's too easy for the media to find them and get them to talk on camera. They are so going to stick this issue to the tea party and the 912 project like Louisiana gumbo mud to a waffle boot.

I wish we all could have dropped this years ago, but instead, we honed a fine bludgeon for the left to use against us and now we've successfully placed it in their waiting hands. Hope you're wearing a hard hat because this is going to hurt.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King

The Hormones of Revolution

Why it's always 20-somethings that want to run the revolution.

I heard a young man on the radio today opining to an unsympathetic Sean Hannity about how it was "always" the young people that made a revolution happen.  He seemed to be making the case that conservatives couldn't have a revolution because they weren't young people.  This guy actually said, "Nobody wants to hear what some wrinkled up old 65 year old has to say!"

Say what?

I would just love to see this arrogant little twit try to defend that attitude. This kid is a victim of his own hormones which are busily deluding him into believing he is smarter than Mom and Dad and ought to be out on his own so he can be free!  This is nature's way of tricking kids into leaving home.  It's a good thing, but too often kids misinterpret temporary insanity for some great burst of enlightenment.  All it really is, is a burst of hormones designed by nature to draw all the intelligence out of their wee brains and fool them into believing the fount of all knowledge is located somewhere in their pants.

I say we put this little brainiac on television and let him repeat that statement out in the open where he can be seen. These kids really have no idea how many baby boomers there are out there and how badly we outnumber them.  They don't really understand that my generation and my parents generation control something like 85% of all the money in the country. And we grew up iin the 50's and 60's.  You want a revolution, buddy, you've come to the right place.  You think we were spoiled brats then, go ahead and try to tell us we're irrelevant now.  We'll show you a temper tantrum. 

Try and explain to us how the handful of you young folk are going to stand up against the generations that whipped the Germans, Japanese, Italians, North Koreans, Chinese, Libyans, Panamanians, Russians, Iraqis (twice) and scared the bejeebers out of anybody else we really wanted to frighten. We didn't really lose to the North Vietnamese. We just threw a twenty-something hormonal tantrum and made our parents stop fighting. We've since realized we were being manipulated by communists and socialist infiltrators.

I, for one, am still pretty hacked off about that.

Make fun of the Tea Parties all you want, but we are just warming up, kid.  There ain't nothing as determined as some hacked off grandma that thinks you're doing harm to her grandbabies.  Her entire reason for existence from that point on is to tell grandpa where he should place the next shot!

You want to take us on little boy?

To quote a wrinkled up old man I know, "Go ahead. Make my day!"

Tom King, Flint, TX
(c) 2010 - Some rights reserved. Permission to use this is granted provided you include this notice and the piece is used without change. http://apocalypseobserved.blogspot.com/

Debra Medina Takes a Swan Dive on Glenn Beck

Splaaaaaaaaaat!

That was the sound of Texas gubernatorial candidate, Debra Medina's landing after she took a swan dive off the high platform that is the Glenn Beck show this morning.

I very much respect Glenn Beck. He and his team do very thorough research and analysis. Glenn doesn't adopt the latest theories willy nilly and he gives even his opponents a pretty fair shake. He gave the White House a hot-line to come on his show and debunk anything he was saying; a hotline, I might add, that they have yet to have the courage to use.

So, I really looked forward to this morning's interview with Debra Medina.  I figured that if she had any chance at all, the Beck interview would be the springboard to victory. 

Imagine my disappoint when Ms. Medina landed in the kiddy pool.

Beck asked her about rumors that she was a 9/11 truther.  The answer should have been, "Absolutely not."  That would have been that except for a few ruffled Ron Paul acolytes. 

Instead, she looked back over her shoulder at all the kook fringe supporters that had brought her this far and she caved.

I don't think all the evidence is in to state unequivocally......

She waffled badly, not wanting to offend her "Truther" base.  She lost my vote in that 10 seconds. I don't imagine I am alone.  I'm sick about it because I really wanted a conservative in the governor's mansion this time.  I see now that with Medina, we'd have the same problem that we have with Obama.  We'd have a leader who is beholden to the lunatic fringe of his or her base.  I don't think she could issue a retraction fast enough to avoid the kind of damage she did to herself this morning. Her answer to Glenn revealed one of three things about Medina:  (1) A lack of courage to disagree with her own supporters, (2) A lack of preparedness for the big stage (she had to know Glenn would go there and she should have been ready to answer the question directly) and (3) A serious gullibility factor if she really is a "Truther".

You needn't send me hate mail, it will have no effect.  George Bush did NOT allow the destruction of the World Trade Center in order to have an excuse to invade Iraq and erase his father's humiliation or for whatever B spy movie plot line you care to pitch. 

There are bad people in this world who want to run things their way and they hate us because we are so hard to manipulate - or at least were. They are evil and manipulative and want us dead or under the thumb of their religion. They wanted to hit symbolic targets.  They tried to hit the WTC during the Clinton Adminstration.  GWB was back in Texas then, unless he was funneling evil oil profits to the blind sheik so they could do a test attack in preparation for the big one when the Illuminati got him elected president.

Give it a rest, okay?

The struggle here is simple.  We want four basic things:

(1) Lower taxes
(2) Smaller government
(3) Less spending
(4) Strong defense

The kook fringes on both sides are a distraction to that agenda. They lead us to overcompensate by electing overly cautious men and women who are so afraid of doing or saying anything spectacular that they wind up going along and doing nothing.  The kook fringe hurts us, no matter which side the fringe dangles from.

Dear God (and I'm praying here), please give us men and women of true courage and conviction, who say what is true and damn the consequences.  Remember Ronald Reagan.  They said, "Don't walk away from the arms talks in Reykjavik - it's political suicide."  The Russians counted on that, but they reckoned without the intestinal fortitude of America's Cowboy in Chief.  He walked away.  In a year they were begging him to come back on his own terms.

All of Reagan's advisers told him not to challenge the Soviets at the Berlin Wall. They wanted the "tear down this wall" line removed from his speech.  When his speech writer asked if he should take out the line, Reagan told him, better leave it in. "It's the right thing to do!"  He was right!

Where can we find such men and women?  Certainly not in mainstream politics..

I'm going to write in a candidate for governor in the primaries.  He doesn't want to run for governor, which recommends him all the more for the job to my way of thinking.  My own state senator, Robert Nichols is just the man I'd like to see run for governor and because he is, it's highly unlikely that he will. Check his record. The man is a savvy, get things done legislator who came late to politics after a successful career in business.  If the Tea Party were to throw its support behind someone like him, I think we'd bust this election wide open.  It's probably too late, but I'd love to see us elect, not only a conservative, but a guy with courage who isn't beholden to anyone.

Once again, I'm throwing my vote away in a futile gesture. I'll probably vote for whoever the Republican is next time. I'm mean who needs one of the dingbats the Dems will throw up.  At least let us resolve to set fire to the feet of whatever Republican is elected if they go stray!



Just one man's opinion....

Tom King