Political Football

Another painting by one of our best resident artists in Southeast Iowa, T. Watson Bogaard

This is Twyla’s 2nd painting to be auctioned in support of the Wilton Community Center/Library Building Fund.

The 2009 Library Auction is Saturday, June 6.

The Building Fund Committee organizes a terrific “all you can eat” dessert spread for the evening; elegant and delicious! A ticket entitles you to go to the auction, have some dessert, and bid on silent auction items as well as a live auction.

The gallery that represents Twyla is www.thegalleriesdowntown.com.

Please continue to support the final segments of the Wilton Library building fund raising efforts.

more later on time and place…

this wasn’t the change I was hopin’ for.

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Some of Gitmo’s residents could be released in the US

ACORN helping with the census? oh, but not to worry. now that Gregg (R) turn down the commerce job, the new guy (D) says the census will move back from the WH to Commerce. Whew! I feel better now!

The President tried to whack the Insurance industry by having them pay for soldier’s injuries. wow.

and THIS is just plain creepy – dig the logo…  major creepy.

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how about you?

March 20 update – Powerlineblog wrote a great defense of the bonuses.  No one will hear the logic when all the rhetoric is so loud.

AIG, like GM, should have been allowed to go into bankruptcy. In bankruptcy, it could have wound down its financial products division just as it is doing now. Bankruptcy would not have affected the company’s international insurance businesses, distinct corporate entities which are both solvent and profitable. Those businesses could have been sold, which is what AIG now plans to do.

This is truly government gone mad. When are people going to see the GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM!

This is all about the AIG craziness. Recoup the bonuses. Write special legislation to tax them 100% retroactively. RETROACTIVE LEGISLATION. Think about that. Are they Crazy?

People’s anger should have been stronger a long time ago. It’s not a problem unless it affects you. That’s not the way we were supposed to manage our lives in this republic, this is not the government we were supposed to have but this has become the government we deserve.

This is serious. We threw together a huge entitlement plan with the bail-outs, passed it out of fear and now we reap the results. AIG is not the villain. We should not have bailed them out. We had options. The bail-out should have not been passed or certainly passed so quickly.

All politicians are doing are fomenting anger across the country against a few businessmen that were doing what the law allowed. THEY DID NOTHING ILLEGAL, IF THEY HAVE – ARREST THEM.

When politicians are saying in committee hearings that the names of those with bonuses won’t be released if they give back all the money… They should be arrested on the spot for extortion. and all Obama is going to do on the Leno show is continue to build the anger and attempt to build his power base because of the outrage. Are we ready for mob rule?

There is real anger in this country today, but it’s taking us in the wrong direction. The bailout was wrong for a reason. In our legal system a company, any company, should NOT be too large to fail. But a contract is also a contract. If these people were due a bonus, they deserve it and deserve not to be bullied into giving it back.

On the other hand, this failed business should not have been propped up.

Will the President discuss the situation in the US today in those terms in the first late night comedy show ever guested by a sitting President? I bet not; he will tell everyone this is all Bush’s fault and how we need to borrow from our grandchildren’s future because we can’t trust businesses to do the right thing, we can only trust government. yikes!

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them. Ronald Reagan

I have added a new category called “gardening” to this blog.

Many if not most of us have thought of ways to become less dependent on outside resources in the last year or two. I do not remember doing any gardening beyond weeding my mother’s garden one summer for a girl scout badge or cutting corn off the cob to freeze – again under Mom’s supervision.

Oh and in the last few years, I have started a few pots of chives or basil but they never flourished under my guidance; living in a condo has its restrictions on experimentation.

This could be my contribution to gardening this year…
http://topsyturvys.com/

In my political conversations around the district, I’ve found a gent that has expressed a willingness to post a bit about his garden.  He’s not a farmer by trade, but I am interested in learning and asking a few questions here and there through this blog.  He won’t be posting immediately, as he’s busy organizing for the garden, and I need to get him set up on this site.

When he shows up, please welcome our newest Administrator of this blog -Millennial Gardener, or MG for short.

Here is a good (low resolution but still a big file) that compare’s W’s visit with a military base and “Barry” (President Obama’s) recent visit to a military base.

bush-barry-low-res

If you have trouble playing .mp4 files download this plug in LINK

more good videos here.

Yesterday, Pam Ramer visited the Muscatine County Republican Women to talk about the Honor Tours for WWII Veterans, raising money to send local WWII Veterans to see the WWII Memorial in Washington D. C.

This group should not be confused with the Honor Flight program that operates around the US.  The Honor Tours were developed and sponsored financially at at local level but will take as many VETS of WWII as possible or as many as they can afford to take.  WWII Vets are dying at a rate of  more than 1,000 a day.

The next Honor tour starts May 13 at 8:30am.  There is a ceremony at the American Legion, where the bus starts.  The trip to the airport starts up Houser to Mulberry, then winds west again to through downtown, up East Fifth Street to Park Avenue and out HWY 61 to the Moline Airport.  Please consider taking some time off to salute these Veterans on their way to D. C.

Tom Browkaw labeled this group “the Greatest Generation” and because of their sacrifice, and the perils of those times – it would be hard not to agree with that assesment.  During WWII there was a huge effort enlisting 16 million men and women who served in the military, and almost 1/2 million died defending freedom around the world.  We have an amazing volunteer military today with 2.4 million combined regular and national guard.  One can’t help but wonder how the media would have protrayed events during WWII if media had the same access and sensibilities (or lack thereof).  I suppose there was no such thing friendly fire…

http://www.ww2honortour.com/contactus.html

Pam told stories about how AirTran, Wendy’s and Marriot have been helpful keeping costs down to $1,000 per vet, and how the 4 day tour is unique from other tours.

Almost everyone has a WWII Vet story, mine is here.

Again, don’t confuse solicitation for funds from the 1,2 day “Honor Flights” versus the 4 day “Honor Tour” sponsored specifically for Muscatine WWII Vets.

They are trying to raise funds to a third group this fall.  Please watch for their fundraisers and Mark May 13th on your calendar to watch them start their special journey.

To great guffaws, Abe told the gang:
“So, I says to Barack, I says, I knew me an Abe Lincoln once,
… and you ain’t him.”

Andy Thomas is the artist of this great piece titled Grand Old Gang.
His site can be found at: www.presidentart.com

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and click on the poster (below) to visit one of my favorite new blogs

Last week the President gave a DVD movie set to his first foreign visitor. Sounds pretty odd and not very Presidential. If the set was one that could not run on European equipment – I know they are different – that would be embarrassing. The “excuse” given for that and various other issues is that the new President is overwhelmed. But apparently not overwhelmed enough to have parties at the WH on Wednesdays.

I got my taxes done this AM and asked my CPA to reconstruct them if Iowa lost the federal deductability on State tax reporting that currently exists.

I owed $90 more in state tax than I had paid in 2008. Under the proposed system I would owe over $800 more than I had paid in 2008. Wow. That’s more than a chunk of change – something I need to budget to pay. My sense is that bill will not pass, hopefully it won’t get through funnel week.

One of my favorite reads in the AM is Powerline Blog and this AM they were talking about the political games the Democrats were playing posting Rush Limbaugh as the “titular head” of the Republican party – knowing he was not well liked outside of conservative circles. The basic tennant was that Rush wants this President to fail, and how unAmerican that is. But… they also said:

Rush wants Obama to fail to socialize the economy and run up trillions of dollars in debt. Democrats in 2006–surely a plurality, if not a majority–wanted the United States to fail in a war in which our armed forces were then engaged. Yet, through the eight years of the Bush administration, neither the President nor his spokesmen ever accused these Democrats of being unpatriotic. I hope that someday their restraint will be appreciated.

So Rush supports America but not the President. How different is that from Liberals saying they support the troops but not the mission? which is worse? Rush want’s this President’s policies to fail. So do I; I hope voters WAKE UP SOON!!!

Then they talked about Charles Freeman who has been nominated by the President to head the National Intelligence Council when it’s obvious he has a bias against Israel. Can’t say I’m shocked.   [update 5pm today - Charles Freeman is another Obama candidate casualty.  He just asked to have his name removed from consideration.  It appears not only does he sit on a Chinese Company Board but he also has taken considerable coin from the Saudis.  Don't they vet these guys at all?  At lease we can assume he's paid his taxes.  -pf]

On a brighter note – there is more public dialog on the idiocy of Algore’s Global Warming mantra. This will be one of the worst scams of all time – costing trillions of dollars but more important, more than a decade of lost time. Where would we be if we were able to rationally discuss climate change and how to prepare for it? Climate Change will happen – Algore’s hyperbole is harmful and has spawned an industry that has not solved the problem.

Read an article written on a liberal blog HERE refuting Algore’s part in the Global Warming movement.

Maybe there is hope.

When Barack Obama and Gordon Brown see ‘opportunity’, we really do have a crisis

The Left is threatening our freedom by using the downturn to bolster the power of the state, says Janet Daley.

Link

The story so far: some capitalists behaved very badly. While this was going on, the socialists didn’t ask questions because they were too busy spending the receipts that flowed from that behaviour. Now, the socialists – who were happy to look the other way during the good times or even to delude themselves into thinking that they were responsible for them – want to use the ignominy of the capitalists to seize the kind of power they thought they had lost forever.

You may quibble at my use of the word “socialist” to describe people who generally present themselves as friends of the free market, and who have repudiated full-scale nationalisation (even of the banks at a moment when that option might have appeared irresistible). So, as someone who spent her formative years on the Left, let me make clear that I am using the word to designate those who accept the primary tenet of Marxist ideology: that the economy can and should be controlled by the state.

In the hard version of this creed, it is acceptable for government to become totalitarian in order to accomplish such control. The softer version – which prevailed in much of Western Europe and Britain – was committed to achieving this through democratic means. By the end of the 1980s, the hard version had collapsed and the soft version was discredited.

Then, suddenly – a miracle! Free-market economics, which seemed to have won the historical argument hands down, is imploding. Now the very people who had embraced it as, at the very least, a milch cow for public-spending adventurism, can see an “opportunity”. Yes, that is the word that both Gordon Brown and Barack Obama have taken to using to describe the current economic apocalypse.

In Gordon Brown’s fantasy, this is an “opportunity” to exercise control over the whole world. Not just stricter regulation by national governments of their own economic institutions, but a wondrous new level of international regulation by supranational functionaries – to be appointed by whom? A World Government agency accountable to no electorate and with no democratic mandate from the populations over whom it will wield such power? Trotskyists used to say that Stalinist Russia had failed to achieve Utopia because it had embraced “socialism in one country” rather than going for “world revolution”. Now, we are being told that Labour’s market-led social justice programme failed because it opted for “regulation in one country” instead of understanding the need for “world regulation”.

Maybe being an ex-Marxist is a bit like being a lapsed Catholic: you never quite get rid of the old thought patterns.

In the more overheated renditions of the Brown theme, there is talk of a “global vision for fairness”, in which the very poverty that is being visited upon all the developed economies will somehow make it possible to redistribute wealth to the developing world.

Is he quite mad? Does he actually believe that the economic failure of rich countries will do anything but impoverish poor countries even further? Or that the moral righteousness of the intention to cure world poverty will, in itself, constitute some kind of cure for the banking collapse?

Meanwhile, Mr Obama – who gives the impression of being considerably out of his depth in the economic maelstrom – talks of an “opportunity” to “reorganise our priorities”. He gave a major speech last week in which he actually seemed to suggest that the present crisis had been caused by America’s failure to develop a universal health care system and to attend to the impending environmental disaster of global warming (”we made the wrong choices”), and that by focusing on these matters a way can be found out of the country’s economic problems.

Is he quite mad? Does he really believe that the banking crisis and the recession were some kind of divine retribution for the absence of universal health care, and excessive carbon emissions? Or is he suggesting that a practical solution lies in spending money on health care and the development of alternative energy sources?

If it is the latter, then he is making a pitch for old-fashioned Roosevelt-style government-expenditure programmes which take money out of the productive part of the economy and bring state intervention into play in new dimensions of national life. It did not work for Roosevelt and it will not work now.

But maybe sentimental mythology matters more than historical reality: what Obama and Brown are both trying to do is to put themselves on the benevolent, morally attractive side of the argument by saying: we – your government – will act, intervene, take positive steps to help you. We will not stand by and let the hurricane winds of the economy blow you down. (Mr Brown has actually used the word “hurricane” to describe the crisis, as if it were a natural disaster which no one could have prevented.)

What neither the Prime Minister nor the President can admit is what is becoming more obvious every day (and which has been admitted by the Prime Minister of New Zealand, John Key): there is precious little that any politician can do to resolve the present economic problems. The values of assets and property are simply going to have to fall from the grossly inflated points they reached under the debt bubble to what are generally accepted to be realistic levels. Then people will start to do business again – as eventually they must – and confidence will gradually return.

So are these politicians pretending that they have answers out of wilful deceit – out of the need to keep playing the game for partisan advantage? Or are they simply attempting to maintain some degree of public optimism about the future? (After all, an “opportunity” sounds better than a “debacle”.)

Well, I grew up with the Left and what this looks like to me is a power grab: a seizing of the moment by the forces which always believed in state domination. The Left sees an opening here, first for telling a critical lie about the historical origins of this crisis, which was propelled as much by the Left-liberal determination to spread prosperity through easy credit to the poor, as by the greed of bankers. And then, out of the wreckage, to restructure the economy along the lines that it always wanted, complete with central controls over the pay levels in private financial institutions.

We are being led to believe that public debate should be all about economic mechanics when it should really be about political principle: just how many freedoms do we want to lose while governments pretend that they are the solution?