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

Lying For the Lord and Obama - Where's the Lightning?

I hate when someone catches me trusting them and I share a phony post, quote, video or news item. I always go back and take it down, but I do so hate being made a tool for liars. Sadly, the person I got it from may actually have been suckered himself. You really have to check everything you post these days, even if it comes from someone you trust.

Ironically, it is trustworthy people who tend to be fooled most easily by liars because trustworthy people tend to trust others and are therefore easier to fool than untrustworthy people who don't trust anyone. So, as cautious and skeptical as you want to be, my trustworthy friends, somebody's going to lie to you largely because you do trust them.

These people have somehow come to the ludicrous conclusion that they can serve the cause of truth by making stuff up. This kind of stuff happens all the time. It is particularly noxious when someone makes up something from whole cloth about God or religion - as though God needs some good PR and the only way He can get it is if you make up nice-sounding lies about things He's done. It's not any nicer when the lie is for a political cause as I view politics as something of an extension of religion anyway. People aren't quite as stupid as you think they are and if they figure out that you've lied to them, well...............

That's when the torches and pitchforks tend to come out.

So, cut it out guys okay? You aren't helping your cause!

Retail Workers, Dishwashers and Ditch Diggers, Oh My!

I get stuff like this (right) all the time from, to borrow a phrase from Tom Paxton, the "smart alecs" out there who believe they are part of the hereditary ruling elite. As you know I blame Walt Disney for promoting the idea of hereditary nobility long after the idea wore out its usefulness. Too many impressionable kids grew up believing that they were, in fact, the long lost princess (even some of the boys). But really. That's a fairy tale (which also may further explain a few things).

Did you read what you just wrote people? You start out with the standard false assumption in order to make a point that has no real basis in logical thought. The false assumption - that retail workers, dishwashers, ditch diggers and laborers are pretty much too stupid to get training or, at least, shouldn't have to be bothered to make any effort to improve their job situation. They are saying that somehow, just because these jobs exist, we should subsidize them in order to insure they don't get all riotous and mess up the elistists' front lawns.

The assumption is that if you subsidize these positions at rates of pay considerably above what the market offers, that somehow everybody will be happy and peace and joy and choruses of Kumbayah will break out. This is based on Maslow's Heirarchy of Need and idea socialists have seized on to justify placing all governance in the hands of a few elite smart people. The theory goes that if you give people assurance of food, water, clothing, shelter, healthcare and some sort of busywork to do, they will spontaneously want to move up the heirarchy and want to be productive, creative and useful citizens to the collective that gives them the basics. The Russians discovered, for instance, that when you took the farms away from the farmers and paid them what farm hands get paid, they weren't interested in managing their farms and doing all the extra hard work that farm owners do. They wound up with everybody on the farm doing the minimum and everybody began to starve (except the farmers that were growing stuff for themselves off the books).

Unfortunately for Marxist theory, Maslow was wrong. People without adequate food, shelter, clothing and healthcare do self-actuated, highly productive and creative things all the time - whether because they just are that sort of people or because they are hoping for a reward or payoff as a result of what they are doing. The theory is balderdash. If you pay people a lot of money who have no skills, then they have no motivation to learn any new skills or even the bare bones requirements of their jobs. They just sit around drawing a paycheck and doing as little as possible.

I have been an employer. I took over one small company that was losing $5000 a quarter. The staff was demoralized. Nobody had had a raise in ages because there was no money to give them raises. I came in and worked for six weeks without pay, Found a grant to cover my paycheck and began overhauling the organization. Instead of raises being given by time served, I looked around, found a couple of people who werer still working hard and trying to do a good job and gave each a small raise (remember we were still losing money). I visited my people and asked for their input as to how we could improve things and make their lives easier on the job. I acted promptly to get them what I could and gave them timelines for when we would get the rest. I stayed there late at night painting and fixing things up working hours I was not paid for. I got us some nice carpet for the rooms they worked in. We organized their equipment and made it easier for them to get to without having to run begging to the bosses for what they needed. Even got them some equipment they needed. 

In the first quarter we broke even and had a 20% growth in customers. By the end of the year we had cleared $19,000 above operating expenses and had a cash reserve. I gave more raises and worker performance improved except in two or three cases where the employees continued to do the minimum possible and grumbled because they weren't getting raises. As they began to get the idea, they began to do extra and to put more energy into their work. As they did so, we made more money and I was able to give more raises.

Most employers do that kind of thing. If they don't, you shouldn't work for them. If people didn't tolerate bad employers, they would have to pay far more than the good employers for help. Then bad employees could take the jobs with the bad employers, make more money for putting up with lousy working conditions and everybody would be happy. Right?

No, of course, not. If people stopped working for a bad employer who didn't give them a fair wage, the employer would have to improve working conditions and give a fair wage in order to have an adequate number of employees to conduct business. Bad employees, no matter how well paid, drive away customers, so the owner, in order to make more profits would have to pay an increased market price in order to get good employees.

That's how free market capitalism works. Artificially bumping up wages of entry level workers does nothing to improve their working conditions, their performance on the job or the way they take care of a business's customers. Mostly it just gets minimum effort employees replaced by higher paid people who can do the slacker's job and their own or the operation gets roboticized.

Now stick out your tongue and say "nyuh-uh!" That always works. Maybe call me, what was it? Oh, yeah, "mean-spirited and ignorant." Well I turned a losing business into a profitable one with a healthy cash reserve, 30% customer increase, improved facilities, better program and better-paid employees in 9 months. And I raised my entire first year's salary from outside sources. Years later after we ended the project, I still have former employees on my Friends List on Facebook.

So tell me, what have you done, oh great expert on how business should run, that gives you expertise in this matter?

Sheesh!© 2015 by Tom King

Why Can't We Solve the Illegal Immigration Problem

People keep asking this question.  It's the wrong question. The question ought to be, "Why won't we solve the illegal immigration problem?"

I come from Texas and I can tell you why there has been a traditional reluctance to slow down illegal immigration. Two words:

CHEAP LABOR!
 

Even the party of "the workers", "the people" and the "ordinary guy" (Hint - the name of the party I'm talking about starts with a big D), lets slip on occasion when it's waxing rhetorical that the reason we want illegals in the country is to have someone take the jobs "Americans don't want".  Does anyone here banjos and the faint strains of "Dixie" when they say stupid things like that? I mean it sounds to me like they're advocating an off-the-books form of indentured servitude doesn't it? Please don't tell me the party of Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson aren't advocating something like that!

Since the bad old days when Democrats ruled the roost in Texas, several distinct industries have made their profits by heavily exploiting cheap undocumented workers. In East Texas the dairy, chicken raising and processing industries, the rose growing industry employee vast numbers of illegal aliens. Look on farms, construction crews, and household staffs and you'll find heavily underpaid illegals. In South Texas, the citrus industry, cattle ranching and other industries also depend heavily on low-paid illegals to pad their profits, not to mention the drug industry. Sadly, things are not much improved under Republicans, though to be fair, you don't fix more than a century-old problems in a decade.

Advocates in the illegal immigration debates often point to the existence of hundreds of border colonias - immensely poor and unclean communities packed to the walls with illegal immigrants - as evidence that we should "do something". Texas has a lot of colonias in heavily Democrat South Texas, but these kinds of places aren't limited to the border counties. East Texas, when I lived there, had a couple of dozen colonias its own self.  Now, you can't legally call them that because of a Democrat inspired law that limits the term "colonia" only to such communities that are within 150 miles of the Mexican border. 

Because you can't call them "colonias" legally, being too far from the border, they aren't eligible for grants to build water and sewer infrastructure - thank you very much.  Put simply, the Democrats in South Texas have gamed the system so that federal grant money for relief for the colonias can't be siphoned off by counties where Republicans rule the roost. 


How convenient!

However, the little collections of shacks tucked far from view, deep in the East Texas woods, are colonias in every meaningful sense of the word. They have little or no running water, sewers, roads or other infrastructure. Most are little more than a collection of cardboard and tar paper shacks. The women barter food stamps for a ride to town to get groceries. They ride, packed like sardines, in the back of a pickup truck. It costs about $100 a trip. They use powdered baby formula, bought with food stamps, for currency. The pickup truck drivers turn around and sell powdered formula to shady grocers and to drug dealers who use the fine powder cut shipments of heroin and cocaine carried across the border by drug mules who conceal themselves in groups of illegals.. The coyote drivers had to go to baby powder after Texas went to the Lone Star Card and you couldn't simply hand off your food stamp coupons anymore. These cockroaches always find a way to prey on the weak.

Let me say that there are a lot of good people out there employing illegals because there are jobs going begging and positions they can't fill. Many have tried to do things legally and found themselves buried in government red tape. Many talented immigrants have gone home and take their skills with them simply because American companies were required to meet onerous conditions in order to simply give them a job.  There's fault on both sides and this issue is not by any means black and white. The tragedy is that the immigrants and ordinary people are the victims of a lot of people playing political ring a round the rosey with human lives.

I visited one of these colonias in East Texas.  The grinding poverty these people live in is heart-breaking.  And these people are not criminals by and large. Most would love to learn English, have bank accounts and legitimate jobs. They are hard-working, deeply religious family oriented people. Those who employ them off the books take the men back and forth to the fields in trucks. Otherwise, they keep them poor, without transportation and with limited access to information lest they figure out how to escape servitude somehow.

The people who support this modern-day form of slavery do NOT want the borders closed and they are quite willing to tolerate the flood of criminals, drug mules and terrorists that mix themselves in with the refugees. Let the government worry about that. After all, they pay the government enough to deal with such peripheral issues.

I find it ironic that the party of "the people"; the party of the working man; the party of compassion is so willing to tolerate this massive abuse of people who are, in essence, refugees, poor and downtrodden workers. 

Shame on them.

It's time we go after the people who are supporting the immigration crisis for their own gains, only too many politicians won't do it. They get too much campaign cash from the slave-masters. Instead they settle for parking the detritus of this massive exploitation of human beings in ghettos and colonias surrounded by cops. Those who aren't safely in these more sophisticated versions of concentration camps are kept entertained either in prison or in transit to and from Mexico in order to give the appearance that something is being done about the "immigration problem".

I personally think the best way to get Democrat cooperation on slowing down illegal immigration is to send in teams of Republicans to convert the illegals and make conservatives out of them. The Dems would have tanks at the border tomorrow if illegals coming across were voting Republican.  Besides, we're a much better political fit for them really on issues like abortion, family values, economic opportunity, free trade and such.

It's time we stopped asking what we can do and start asking why we don't do anything effective. The answer to that question may light up some dark areas of our government and our society and would most certainly bring down some very important people - which is why it's not likely to happen given how dangerous it would be to expose such people for anyone who did so.

I'd just like to point out something, though - God is watching. It was Jesus who said, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my children, ye have done it also unto me."  I suspect he will not be pleased at those who have done this to his children. 

© 2015 by Tom King

You might be a Democrat if...

What they don't tell you is that if you tax churches,
you tax church members an extra 1 million
dollars every 7 minutes and 30 seconds beyond
the taxes they already pay. And the church member
has to pay the extra tax, just for believing in something
that progressives don't (God in case you missed that).

THE CRY HAS NOW GONE UP: CHURCHES SHOULD BE TAXED!

So, dear friends, are you saying the government should take 30 to 40% of my tithe and offerings so the government can take over the charitable things that my church does and somehow that's going to work out a lot better for us all?  Not to mention that the government will also use that tax money they take from my tithes and offerings to blow up things, to pay useless bureaucrats exhorbitant salaries to sit in cubicles generating paperwork for each other and interfering with small business, to build roads to nowhere and to imprison people in large numbers.

So you're okay with the church being able to afford 30% fewer pastors and teachers, 30% fewer missions, mission doctors and mission workers, 30% fewer schools and 30% fewer hospitals for the church? 

And that's if the tax rate stays that low. Anyone realize what the tax rate has been under previous Democrat administrations.  Would you believe 70%?  How about 90%.  The tax rate has got that high under the Dems. Is there anybody you believe should give back 90% of what he or she earns by their own efforts?  Does anyone really think that taking that much away from people who create jobs is a good idea?

If you do, you might be a Democrat.

In the interest of equal time, here's ten reason why churches should be taxed.  My favorite is this one:

To exempt churches from taxation unfairly restricts the ability of other social elements that deserve to progress, and thereby goes against what the government was built to do in the first place.

There's an argument that presumes churches don't deserve to progress. He earlier says "Churches don't exist primarily to provide for the citizen; the government does." Anybody else see where we're going. In the typical satanic (yeah I went there) propoganda ploy you lead with an assumption that is false, but which you say is true and then, hoping they'll take your word for it that the first thing is true, you go on to tell the untruth you want them to swallow. In this case, the untruth is that we should give all our money to someone who will take care of us; in fact that someone else gives us our rights and benefits, rather than that we ourselves earn those rights and benefits.  I'd maintain that government exists, not to grant us rights and benefits, but to protect citizens from eternal busybodies who want to always be telling others what to do and restricting our rights and privileges. The whole point of the revolution that created the United States was that we didn't want other people to be meddling in our business all the time.

This ain't how Robin Hood worked.
He actually took from the tax collectors
and gave the money back to the taxpayers.
Obama Hood? Not so much....

The great fallacy in the reasoning that not taxing churches is stealing from taxpayers is that there is an underlying assumption that the government owns all the money and gives it back to us in order to take care of us. It follows under this line of reasoning that, if the government can't take it from churches, then they can't give it to "taxpayers" so that's somehow cheating "taxpayers". If you missed the subtle little problem here, they are calling us tax PAYERS and yet casting the argument as though we were tax "getters". In other words they assume we all agree that government works like this. They TAKE money from you the taxpayer (since the government owned all your money anyway) and leave you a little to muddle by on. Then, the government decides what to do with the money they took from you and they may (or may not) give you some of it back if the government approves of whatever you are doing.  I wrote government grants for more than 20 years. They're very picky about who they give money back to and if they don't like what you are doing, they won't give you any.

Now under the "churches ought to be taxed" scheme, if you are a Christian, for instance, and you give 10-20% of your income to the church and the government TAKES that money through taxation, then you are being effectively charged an indirect luxury tax for the privilege of giving money to your church! You were already taxed once on all the money you kept. Then, you would be taxed on the money you give for God's work also. Now atheists or non-churchy progressives get to keep that 10-20% of their income to use to buy themselves beer and skittles. So, if we're arguing about fairness, I think it's danged unfair that Bob the Progressive gets to not only keep more of his income for his own self-gratification, but that I also have to pay a tax on whatever I do not keep for myself, but give to help my church do its charitable works, thus saving the government money that Bob thinks it needs to spend on said charitable works.

In the real world, Bob the Progressive should not get to tell me whether or not what I freely give to my church is worthwhile or not. He doesn't get to say whether or not my religion is useless and should be taxed. Bob the Progressive is proposing a sort of a luxury tax for people being religious and he's obviously doing it because he doesn't approve of religion and taxing churches he hopes will punish them and decrease their power. King George III would have like to shut up a few American pastors too as I recall.

The right to the free exercise of religion is enshrined in the Constitution. You don't get to meddle with it just so you can save on your own taxes or get yourself some more government goodies. It doesn't work that way.

Check out the 10 reasons churches should be taxed, but only if you've taken your blood pressure meds this morning. It's a rare, honest peek inside the plans of the progressive left for religion in America.  How many false assumptions can you count?

© 2015 by Tom King