Post Scripts

by Jack Lee

Got any resolutions you care to share with us? Mine is real simple, yet real hard to do – lose weight. I want to drop 40 pounds of big, flabby, gut fat… and I want to do it by changing my diet and increasing my exercise. Oh, yeah I have no doubts that this one is going to be tough, really tough – but really worth it.

If you share a similar goal, maybe we can help each other? I really intend to keep my resolution and to that end Im going to be doing a chronology of my fat loss program with you. I will be posting the best diet tips I can find and I’ll be happy to put your story/tips up here too, if you care too share?

Posted by Tina

In the comments section recently we have touched upon the concept of freedom in America when discussing government policy and the differences in ideology within the two major political parties. Today I experienced one of those holy #%*# moments as I read Bob Barr’s article, “Bill of Rights a forgotten document”.

I thought I’d pass it along to you to see if it rings any warning bells. Here’s the section that grabbed me:

According to a survey conducted earlier this month for the Bill of Rights Institute by Harris Interactive, for example, nearly half of the American people – some 42 percent — believe that the communist phrase “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is part of one of the more important documents in American history. Through ignorance and forgotten history, Karl Marx has morphed into James Madison in the mind of the American people. (emphasis mine)

That is incredible! It reflects an extreme failure of parents, our schools, and government to adequately teach the American principles and ideals of her founding documents.

Other results from the survey are equally disturbing:

55% percent do not realize that education is not a First Amendment right

Only 20% know that all powers not expressly authorized in the Constitution for the federal government are reserved for the states or the people. (Tenth Amendment)

60 percent did not realize that the concept of government powers deriving from the consent of the governed was uniquely American

If we do not pass along the unique tenets of our American Heritage to future generations we won’t have a prayer of preserving the individual freedoms our founding documents were meant to preserve. The alternative is some form of tyranny or statism.

One question that begs an answer…is this dumbing down of the American citizenry a deliberately contrived outcome?

I don’t normally drink but I was so happy to see 2011 go I thought I would have a couple of belts of whiskey. I just kept them coming, one after another. By 2 a.m. I realized I was much, much too drunk to drive my own car home, so I thought, “Hey what the heck, I’ll take a bus”. I had trouble just getting inside, I stumbled getting up the steps, I was that drunk. How I made it home I’ll never know. . . . .I’ve never driven a bus before.

Does anyone know how to get this thing in reverse? I think it’s parked on my morning paper.

We made it!!! One more year gone bye-bye and good riddence! We’re emerging from the worst recession in our lives. So, I’m hoping we can all start off 2011 with positive thoughts and expect better things to come our way, knowing what hasn’t killed us has made us stronger.

Happy New Year…everyone!

Posted by Tina

Jack I hope you, and of course our readers, will slog through the article, “Goldman Sachs Prospers at Tax Payer’s Expense,” by Fred N. Sauer in The American Thinker. You would probably understand the nuts and bolts of the article better than I but even with my limited knowledge I was able to understand the gist of it. The bottom line isn’t exactly new, althought the particulars are to me. It’s disturbing to say the least:

The real crime of the matter is revealed by our discovery of exactly the nature of Goldman Sachs Mysterious Business. Quite simply, the Mysterious Business is the largest highly leveraged hedge fund in the world that is run exclusively for the benefit of the employees of Goldman Sachs. All risks are absorbed by the Federal Reserve System with the U.S. taxpayers standing by at all times as ultimate guarantors.

Except for this alliance, Goldman Sachs would have disappeared under the waves of the financial crisis whose destructive excesses could no longer be prevented by the Glass-Steagall Act. The process by which this happened is a disgrace at best.

Robert Rubin left the top of his career at Goldman Sachs in 1995 to become Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration. He quickly, and controversially, disbursed $20 billion to support the bailout of Mexico’s government bond market in which Goldman Sachs had extreme, if not life threatening, risk. He then became the architect and engineer of the removal of the Glass-Steagall Act whose principal immediate beneficiary would be Sandy Weill, who would make billions by merging his Travelers Group into Citicorp. Not surprisingly, Robert Rubin would go to work almost immediately for Sandy Weill as a top executive for Citicorp.

When the dust finally cleared, it became obvious that the demise of Glass-Steagall allowed the risk-taking traders at Citicorp to jeopardize nearly $1 trillion worth of customer deposits, which is the main reason the feds had to spend so much bailing it out. With that, Bob Rubin’s Wall Street career was over. He was forced to resign from the Citi board and the firm itself with his reputation in tatters, but not without earning more than $100 million. (emphasis mine)

DemocRAT lending regulation written under Clinton and Carter, DemocRAT executives at Fannie Mae, and DemocRAT executives at Goldman Sachs and Citicorp managed to orchestrate some very heavy duty destruction on the American people while positioning themselves to make a lot of money. The rats in the system need to be stopped. One way to begin would be to rid ourselves of these corrupt players when we discover their corrupt ways. Unfortunately those that are elected have supporters that are both dumb and loyal…and so they just keep rewarding them. Others are protected by the very legislation that made it possible for them to set up the scams in the first place. They were in business to help themselves to as much cash as they could.

This is not an example of greedy corporate America or greedy Wall Street. It is an example of using the political system to manipulate business operations and practices for personal gain. It is corruption at the highest levels. Interesting that many of those who benefited from these schemes also are the ones likely to point fingers at corporate America and Wall Street as the greedy bad guys. They do it under cover of being the ones who care most about people, ie, loans for people who can’t afford them.
They do it to provide a target for all of the anger the public rightly feels.

The word that best fits these jerks is decivious. They are people who are both deceptive and devious, working within our political/economic system for their own personal benefit and gain.

Hey, if Sarah Palin can create a new word, refudiate, why not I?

By Steve Thompson, Chairman of the Butte County Republican Party

Hello Everyone, hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and that you’ll enjoy your New Year celebrations.
I’ve been away for a while now, both away and very busy the past month, but then, who isn’t busy in December? Most of us are running ourselves ragged putting up decorations, baking, and shopping for the perfect gifts. It seems crazy but it’s all for a good cause and there’s nothing that quite compares to Christmas with your family. Heck, even atheists get in on the fun running around looking for things to hate and people to sue this time of year!
For me there was a bit of travel this December as well. I spent the first week of the month away on military training in Louisiana of all places. I won’t bore you with the training, but if this were a food column I could probably write a full blog on my experiences there and recipes containing a lot of good spice. Anyone here like gumbo?
No sooner did I return when I packed my bags for an elk hunting trip in Nevada with my father. I had requested some vacation time before I knew about the army trip, and fortunately I have an employer who is extremely supportive of my military duties, so it didn’t become a problem. I went from Louisiana temperatures in the 50’s to upstate Nevada temps down in the teens. But we had a successful hunt and the Thompson freezer will have meat this year.

Continue reading “Republican Corner: New Year Observations” »

Census Bureau director Robert Groves announced last week the first results of the 2010 census and the reapportionment of House seats (and therefore electoral votes) among the states, reports Michael Barone, a resident fellow with the American Enterprise Institute.

It’s hard to get a grasp the numbers, but Barone shares a few observations on what they mean.

First, the great engine of growth in America is not the Northeast Megalopolis, which was growing faster than average in the mid-20th century, or California, which grew lustily in the succeeding half-century — it is low-tax, business-friendly Texas.

As a result, the 2010 reapportionment gives Texas four additional House seats.

In contrast, California gets no new House seats, for the first time since it was admitted to the Union in 1850.

This leads to a second point, which is that growth tends to be stronger where taxes are lower.

Seven of the nine states that do not levy an income tax grew faster than the national average.

The other two, South Dakota and New Hampshire, had the fastest growth in their regions, the Midwest and New England.

Altogether, 35 percent of the nation’s total population growth occurred in these nine nontaxing states, which accounted for just 19 percent of total population at the beginning of the decade.

The net effect of the reapportionment was to add six House seats and electoral votes to the states John McCain carried in 2008 and to subtract six House seats and electoral votes from the states Barack Obama carried that year. Similarly, the states carried by George W. Bush in 2004 gained six seats and the states carried by John Kerry lost six.
That’s not an enormous change. But it’s part of a long-term trend that has reshaped the nation’s politics. The bottom line: You need a lot more than the Northeast and the industrial Midwest to get elected president these days, says Barone.