I...am a geek. In the classic sense of the word though. Growing up, I loved sci-fi... I played Dungeons & Dragons the old fashioned way....by using my imagination. I actually wore a pocket protector for a short period of time. I finally stopped when I could no longer take the beatings I got routinely after school. I used to be the really annoying smart kid who never seemed to need to study to make good grades. Some of my classmates and teachers alike, viewed me with equal disdain. I stress the phrase "used to be". Girls and music brought that to a screeching halt however, much to my mother's dismay.
The geek in me has been reliving the glory days by watching old Star Trek shows again. I have several seasons of the original and TNG on DVD. I have mentioned that I'm a geek right? I digress...
I've begun to notice a very odd thing however by watching those shows again. I have a fairly explosive theory to posit. Well, explosive to other geeks like me. It is my hypothesis that the ship and crew from the original series are much tougher and more "sea-worthy" than the ship and crew of Next Generation. Beyond the obvious styles of Captaincy of Kirk and Picard, the ship from TNG is really a piece of junk. The crew comes off every now and then as latte' sipping yuppies trying desperately to keep their flying tub aloft.
I know how that would ripple through the geek universe if it were widely known. I can faintly hear the snapping of pencils and the whir of computers sparking to life. Chaos would reign supreme if that little theory made it to wider view. It would be anarchy I tell you.
Let me state part of my case and let the reader decide.
New ship: Every time they got near an asteroid field, the sensors stopped working. Who made the damn sensors? Nextel?
Old Ship: Scotty could make that thing go to warp just by tapping on a display panel. "Just jiggle the handle Captain."
New ship: Every time they went near anything with the word "anomaly" in the name, the engines would crap out. Poor Geordi got worked to death.
Old ship: Kirk once did a "fly-by" with the ship, bringing it into Earth's atmosphere. Like it was a Camaro on hot blacktop.
New ship: Data, an android who wants to experience emotion. What's next...skin creme and a manicure?
Old ship: Mr. Spock, half-human, half-Vulcan who wants to be devoid of emotion. Easier to blast the bad guy that way.
New ship: Picard was an experienced, effective diplomat. He could talk his way through any door.
Old ship: Kirk knew where the photon torpedo button was and used it often. He never even noticed the door.
New ship: Picard has destroyed three different ships thus far. I have to question the wisdom of Starfleet that they would continue to let this man fly the "flagship" of the Federation. He treated the Enterprise like a drunken teenager treats his dad's BMW.
Old ship: That ship flew until it was invaded by Klingons. Kirk even stole the ship once to go pick Spock up for an interstellar kegger. Gutsy move dude!
New ship: One female member of the crew regularly showed cleavage ...Counsellor Troi. The ship was always blowing a phase inducer or some such critical component.
Old ship: EVERY female member of the crew showed cleavage. The fact that the old ship performed as well as she did with all that eye-candy around, is a testament to how sturdy she was.
New ship: Typical dialog..."We need to realign the coil emissions to match the new frequency of the rammistat core Captain, or we're all going to die." What the hell does that even MEAN?
Old ship: Typical dialog..."He's dead, Jim" I know EXACTLY what that means.
New ship: Picard was once captured by the Cardassians and tortured mercilessly while suspended from some terrible device. Oh, he was naked too. He also got "violated" by the Borg and assimilated.
Old ship: Kirk got stuck inside a planet and still managed to find his way out. He didn't take crap from anybody. He was once forced to make out with Uhura. Terrible punishment that must have been. Where do you sign up for torture like that?
Of course...these opinions are my own. I love both shows but I seem to have finally found my preference. I may start in on watching all the movies in order as well. Just to complete my little journey of self-discovery. I have them all by the way...I seem to recall mentioning that I am a .....geek.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Scapegoat
We’ve all heard it said before at one time or another, “this or that is the new something”. Like, “Pink is the new black” or “60 is the new 40”. You know what I’m saying. Heck, you’ve probably even said it yourself. It’s a simple way of transposing one idea or standard with another to create a new one with a slight twist. I’m going to create one now to suit my own personal style. “47 is the new 18”. I figure this should absolve me of acting like a grownup too often while leaving me free to listen to Lynard Skynard at ear splitting volumes whilst I drive around town.
It’s been said countless times and sometimes the comparisons are agreeable but too often, they just seem silly. Pink is not the new black no matter how you look at it. Would men react so positively to a “little pink dress”? Probably not. Can you imagine police cars being called “pink and whites”? I certainly can’t and it’s ridiculous to think anyone else would find it reasonable. Although I suspect it would probably go over quite well somewhere in California.
As a way to provide perspective to this piece let me state clearly that I watch, read and listen to a lot of news. I gobble up as much as I can partly to be well informed and partly due to my fascination with all things “homo sapiens“. People are the most interesting yet puzzling creatures on the planet and I never tire of learning about them. The world truly is a wondrous place because humans are in it. They never cease to amaze me for their great leaps of intelligence, their unyielding commitment to each other and sadly, the depravity they are able to sink to. That depravity is what grounds me and reminds me all too often that we are, after all, just another species of animal. Capable of choosing our own path, in most cases, and also capable of such destructive evil on both a personal and a global level.
The old maxim used to be “Sex sells.” but over the years it seems that it’s been changed to “Death sells.” The one defining characteristic of being human seems to be our never ending ability to visit horror on our fellow humans. Great leaders throughout history have risen to power riding a tide of human suffering and bathed in blood. Ghengis Khan, Torquemada, Mao, Guevara, Stalin and of course, everyone’s favorite demon in human form - Adolph Hitler.
I hold Hitler to be far worse than almost any other purveyor of human suffering in that he convinced his fellow countrymen, or at least most of them, that an entire religion was the single source for all his country’s, and the world’s, ills. The startling reality was that he did this in modern times when news outlets and cameras were readily available to document his atrocities. The mere word “jewish” became synonymous with suffering even to a people who had known thousands of years of it. Even in recent times, Jews are mocked openly, denigrated by millions of people across the globe and treated as less than human by the vast majority of Muslims. Once again, they are held up as everything that is wrong with the world today.
It’s at this point you’re probably wondering why I broke into a lesson on history that you already knew. I’m going to draw a comparison that some of you might cringe at and still others will decry as paranoia and utter stupidity but I’m going to make it anyway.
“Conservative is the new Jewish.”
There. Let that sink in for a moment. Do you feel that vein in your temple beginning to throb? I’ll bet you’re already thinking of the counter argument but let me state categorically that I in no way intend to downplay the suffering or the brutality visited upon the Jewish people nor do I seek to infer that being conservative means they round you up and send you to the gas chamber. Not yet anyway.
I suppose I could say just as easily;
“Conservative is the new AIDS” or
“Conservative is the new ‘negro’”
“Conservative is the new whatever we don’t like and want to get rid of these days.”
It’s dirty word these days no matter how you say it. Not to those practitioners of conservatism like myself but to practically all the media and the rest of the country we are held up as all that is wrong with the modern life. Our individuals and groups are thought of as stupid, dangerous and less than human. We are openly mocked night after night on radio, TV and movies. Our male leaders are called stupid and our female leaders are held up as objects to be sexually denigrated by respectable journalists, celebrities and leaders in government.
“If we could only shut them up, we’d all be better off.”
Or as Dan Savage, liberal radio host and outspoken gay activist said recently, “I wish they were all f*cking dead.” He also said on Bill Maher’s HBO show, Real Time, that he wanted to have violent “hate sex” with Conservative presidential hopeful, Rick Santorum. And not a single peep from the arbiters of tolerance on the left.
We are cast as a plague on humanity. Not only is it perfectly acceptable to say horrible things about us, it is encouraged by no less than the President Of The United States. According to him, we are “bitterly clinging to our guns and religion” and we are cast as “the enemy” to be punished. He openly mocks and seeks to isolate the only news network where conservatives can go to hear their viewpoints expressed as something other than fantasy and hysteria.
It’s trendy and chic to hate conservatives in the swankier restaurants in New York City. It’s a sign of higher intelligence to think we are just a bunch of gun-toting crazies who want to kill everyone who doesn’t look like us. It’s true enlightenment to be tolerant of every kind of societal depravity known to man but not to conservative opinion. Tolerance these days has come to mean being tolerant to those who hate conservatives.
Imagine for a moment that Rush Limbaugh had wished every Liberal dead. Or that he fantasized about violent hate sex with Nancy Pelosi, scary as that might sound. Rush takes enormous heat by saying things that are one-one thousandth as harsh and Dan Savage gets a free pass because he said it about a conservative. That’s ok. Bill Maher can call Sarah Palin and Michele Bachman “milfs” because he said it about conservatives so it’s ok. Olbermann, Schultz and Matthews can call us “tea baggers” as frequently as possible because it’s only being said about conservatives. It’s ok. Obama can call us “the enemy” and get away with it because he’s talking about conservatives. It’s ok.
At what point does shutting us up become ok? When does it become ok to shut down our media sources and deny us free speech? Are we almost to the point when it’s ok to make us wear something that identifies us as conservative? Like a big red “C” sewn into our clothing maybe?
Atrocity starts with a whisper but always ends with a scream. It starts with one group finally deciding they’ve had enough of some other group. It starts with something simple that’s done for the good of a nation but ends with people being rounded up.
Go now and read some of Goebel’s or Gehring’s speeches and substitute the word “jewish” with the word “conservative” and tell me how you feel afterwards.
It’s been said countless times and sometimes the comparisons are agreeable but too often, they just seem silly. Pink is not the new black no matter how you look at it. Would men react so positively to a “little pink dress”? Probably not. Can you imagine police cars being called “pink and whites”? I certainly can’t and it’s ridiculous to think anyone else would find it reasonable. Although I suspect it would probably go over quite well somewhere in California.
As a way to provide perspective to this piece let me state clearly that I watch, read and listen to a lot of news. I gobble up as much as I can partly to be well informed and partly due to my fascination with all things “homo sapiens“. People are the most interesting yet puzzling creatures on the planet and I never tire of learning about them. The world truly is a wondrous place because humans are in it. They never cease to amaze me for their great leaps of intelligence, their unyielding commitment to each other and sadly, the depravity they are able to sink to. That depravity is what grounds me and reminds me all too often that we are, after all, just another species of animal. Capable of choosing our own path, in most cases, and also capable of such destructive evil on both a personal and a global level.
The old maxim used to be “Sex sells.” but over the years it seems that it’s been changed to “Death sells.” The one defining characteristic of being human seems to be our never ending ability to visit horror on our fellow humans. Great leaders throughout history have risen to power riding a tide of human suffering and bathed in blood. Ghengis Khan, Torquemada, Mao, Guevara, Stalin and of course, everyone’s favorite demon in human form - Adolph Hitler.
I hold Hitler to be far worse than almost any other purveyor of human suffering in that he convinced his fellow countrymen, or at least most of them, that an entire religion was the single source for all his country’s, and the world’s, ills. The startling reality was that he did this in modern times when news outlets and cameras were readily available to document his atrocities. The mere word “jewish” became synonymous with suffering even to a people who had known thousands of years of it. Even in recent times, Jews are mocked openly, denigrated by millions of people across the globe and treated as less than human by the vast majority of Muslims. Once again, they are held up as everything that is wrong with the world today.
It’s at this point you’re probably wondering why I broke into a lesson on history that you already knew. I’m going to draw a comparison that some of you might cringe at and still others will decry as paranoia and utter stupidity but I’m going to make it anyway.
“Conservative is the new Jewish.”
There. Let that sink in for a moment. Do you feel that vein in your temple beginning to throb? I’ll bet you’re already thinking of the counter argument but let me state categorically that I in no way intend to downplay the suffering or the brutality visited upon the Jewish people nor do I seek to infer that being conservative means they round you up and send you to the gas chamber. Not yet anyway.
I suppose I could say just as easily;
“Conservative is the new AIDS” or
“Conservative is the new ‘negro’”
“Conservative is the new whatever we don’t like and want to get rid of these days.”
It’s dirty word these days no matter how you say it. Not to those practitioners of conservatism like myself but to practically all the media and the rest of the country we are held up as all that is wrong with the modern life. Our individuals and groups are thought of as stupid, dangerous and less than human. We are openly mocked night after night on radio, TV and movies. Our male leaders are called stupid and our female leaders are held up as objects to be sexually denigrated by respectable journalists, celebrities and leaders in government.
“If we could only shut them up, we’d all be better off.”
Or as Dan Savage, liberal radio host and outspoken gay activist said recently, “I wish they were all f*cking dead.” He also said on Bill Maher’s HBO show, Real Time, that he wanted to have violent “hate sex” with Conservative presidential hopeful, Rick Santorum. And not a single peep from the arbiters of tolerance on the left.
We are cast as a plague on humanity. Not only is it perfectly acceptable to say horrible things about us, it is encouraged by no less than the President Of The United States. According to him, we are “bitterly clinging to our guns and religion” and we are cast as “the enemy” to be punished. He openly mocks and seeks to isolate the only news network where conservatives can go to hear their viewpoints expressed as something other than fantasy and hysteria.
It’s trendy and chic to hate conservatives in the swankier restaurants in New York City. It’s a sign of higher intelligence to think we are just a bunch of gun-toting crazies who want to kill everyone who doesn’t look like us. It’s true enlightenment to be tolerant of every kind of societal depravity known to man but not to conservative opinion. Tolerance these days has come to mean being tolerant to those who hate conservatives.
Imagine for a moment that Rush Limbaugh had wished every Liberal dead. Or that he fantasized about violent hate sex with Nancy Pelosi, scary as that might sound. Rush takes enormous heat by saying things that are one-one thousandth as harsh and Dan Savage gets a free pass because he said it about a conservative. That’s ok. Bill Maher can call Sarah Palin and Michele Bachman “milfs” because he said it about conservatives so it’s ok. Olbermann, Schultz and Matthews can call us “tea baggers” as frequently as possible because it’s only being said about conservatives. It’s ok. Obama can call us “the enemy” and get away with it because he’s talking about conservatives. It’s ok.
At what point does shutting us up become ok? When does it become ok to shut down our media sources and deny us free speech? Are we almost to the point when it’s ok to make us wear something that identifies us as conservative? Like a big red “C” sewn into our clothing maybe?
Atrocity starts with a whisper but always ends with a scream. It starts with one group finally deciding they’ve had enough of some other group. It starts with something simple that’s done for the good of a nation but ends with people being rounded up.
Go now and read some of Goebel’s or Gehring’s speeches and substitute the word “jewish” with the word “conservative” and tell me how you feel afterwards.
The Politics Of Fear
“I cannot guarantee that those checks go out…if we haven’t resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be money in the coffers to do it.”
President Obama in an interview with CBS News’ Scott Pelley
Politicians lie. We all know it. Congressmen, Senators, Cabinet Members even Presidents lie. The truth is that prevarication knows no party lines. It’s not more prevalent on one side or another nor does it only happen once in awhile, it happens constantly. They lie about things great and small, important and inconsequential. They’ll even lie about the color of the sky if it becomes politically expedient to do so. They lie about each other, they lie about their records in the public and private sector and they lie about caring what you and I think, hope for and feel.
We’ve come to accept this sad truth as a nation and even begun to categorize lying for them. We’ve decided to arbitrarily call some lies worse than others so we can better accept the fact that we never know when they’re telling the truth. Thanks to Bill Clinton, we now have a new category of lies. Lies about your private life are suddenly out of bounds and cannot be held up as evidence of poor character or a possible fault in leadership. Lying in your private life no longer matters when put into the context of your job performance. That’s fine if you live in a vacuum.
The media is complicit in helping us categorize lies told by politicians. In fact, they’ve led the charge in defining what constitutes a big lie and what constitutes a lie that doesn’t really matter. Republicans tell big lies, Democrats lie about things that don’t matter for the most part. Case in point: Anthony Weiner. The mainstream media by and large saw no problem that Weiner lied about the scandal that eventually forced him from office. Conversely, the lies told by Mark Foley were egregious and unforgivable according to Newsweek. Foley faced an unrelenting media barrage that sought to expose him for the creep he truly was yet did everything they could to minimalize the exposure of what a creep Anthony Weiner was. When hiding the truth was eventually unattainable, they changed their tactic to downplaying the severity of the scandal saying instead that it was his personal life and we had no right to stick our noses in it. It became a lie that didn’t really matter.
I started this piece with a quote from the President as a way to highlight the kind of lies that I’m talking about. The everyday, garden variety lies that politicians spew with amazing frequency. We have all become so jaded by the lies they tell that we hardly raise our eyebrows when a true whopper comes along. That quote is not just a lie. It’s a true whopper. More than being a lie, it’s a threat and that ventures into a whole new category of lying done by politicians. This particular lie though is of the variety that most often comes from the left. More often than not it comes from desperate Democrats trying hard to scare the right people into believing them. President Obama leveled the “lie laser” at seniors, the disabled and veterans and pulled the trigger hoping to singe as many people as possible.
It is, quite honestly, the most despicable lie that I have heard uttered by a politician in a very long time. Two that spring to mind are;
“I am not a crook.” Richard M. Nixon
“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” Bill Clinton
Not since Alexander Hamilton call John Adams a hermaphrodite has the political lie been so egregious, so obviously false and so easily refuted. Before I go into too much detail about the lies told by this man let me share some facts with you first.
During the period of May 12 - June 7, 2011, the federal government took in 296 billion dollars. That’s less than a month when you look at it. Interest payments on our debt totaled 14 billion dollars during the same period. Basic math tells me that there’s about 282 billion dollars left over for all federal spending during that period. Despite what the President may say, there is more than enough money to cover both the debt and the day to day operational costs of the federal government. The government takes in more than 2 trillion dollars in revenue annually even with the “low” tax rates that we currently enjoy. Sorry Mr. President, but math can be a bitch sometimes. Now, I’m not a degreed economist but I can add and subtract like the wind.
What the President is doing can only be termed economic terrorism. The truly disgusting part is that he’s doing it to senior citizens. He’s lying to the least among us as a means to an end. The end is tax increases on anyone making more than $250,000 a year and he’s willing to look your grandmother in the eye and tell her that her monthly check is in doubt to get what he wants. He’s more like a petulant child being told no so he’s going to hold his breath until he gets his way. The trouble is, too many people would believe him because most of them don’t think anyone would tell a lie that big and expect us to believe it. Still others would believe because they have no understanding of how money works in the federal government.
Let me ask another pertinent question. If Obama couldn’t get a tax hike done during the 2 years he controlled the White House and the Congress, why does he now expect Republicans to hand him their certain doom and his imminent reelection now? If raising taxes back in December of last year was so potentially injurious to the economy as to be out of the question, why would he think it’s a good idea now? Is the economy any better? Are the unemployment numbers any lower now as opposed to then. Not really. He’s insisting on tax hikes now only as a way to shatter the confidence that the republican base has in it’s new members in the House and Senate which he knows will ultimately hand him a victory in 2012. Not only his but a victory in the House as well. If Boehner or McConnell cave on the issue of tax increases they can kiss any hope for a majority in either house goodbye for at least 4 more years. Let’s read that quote one more time:
“I cannot guarantee that those checks go out…if we haven’t resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be money in the coffers to do it.”
Are we really supposed to believe that he would allow senior’s checks to stop before he’d consider shutting something nonessential off first? He does, after all, have the power to designate what gets paid and what doesn’t in the event the debt ceiling isn’t raised. The country would still be able to pay it’s bills for quite a few months before the effects of our current spending and taxation levels made it impossible to stay above water. I ran into a similar problem with my own personal “economy” recently due to increased healthcare costs and rising food and fuel prices. I’ll set the scenario and then let you judge who is the better economist, Obama or me.
Within the last few months, my hours at work had been reduced slightly due to what we call the “seasonal slowdown” It happens every year but with the economy the way it is, I found myself spending more on things like healthcare and food. Part of my own personal economy was unemployed so revenues had taken a dip accordingly. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? I sat down with my Treasury Secretary, my wife, and asked for ways to boost revenues or reduce spending. She came up with several very good ideas and we set about implementing them to prevent reaching our own “debt ceiling” and seeing our economy collapse. We looked at discretionary items that we could cut back on until the revenue crisis passed and came to the conclusion that there were several things that we spent too much money on and could ill afford to continue like…our addiction to cable TV and our DVR. We restructured our healthcare plan to reflect our actual needs and decided to forego the fancy cell phones and home phone plan we had always had. We got a Magic Jack as a gift and our cost for home phone dropped from $40 per month to $2 per month. A few minor cuts later and after looking at the balance sheet, our current revenue far exceeded our monthly demands. As I said, I’m not a degreed economic professional but even I know when I can and can’t raise revenue(taxes) and when and where I can cut out the pork spending to achieve the same net effect. By cutting the fat from my budget, I have effectively increased my revenue stream.
Is the President not smart enough to see this? Or is he just so inured with the idea of taxing the evil rich that he simply will not see how easy it is to trim the fat? The Federal Government spends more than $300,000 every year to study the effects of marijuana on monkeys during their menstrual cycles. Is that more important than paying social security benefits? We annually spend more than 1 million dollars to study the effects of mercury on fish and this is somehow more important than sending checks out to our disabled veterans?
That’s why I find his lie about checks not going out to be so offensive. First and foremost he’s using the politics of fear in such a way as to needlessly frighten millions upon millions of senior citizens, like my mother. Secondly, he’s insulting the intelligence of those of us who can actually add and subtract.
I am smarter than the President. I am also smarter than everyone at MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times and NPR. I am in fact, smarter than Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist and I have just proven it. Well, I’m either smarter than all those vaunted denizens of the media…or I am simply telling the truth where they are not.
You be the judge.
President Obama in an interview with CBS News’ Scott Pelley
Politicians lie. We all know it. Congressmen, Senators, Cabinet Members even Presidents lie. The truth is that prevarication knows no party lines. It’s not more prevalent on one side or another nor does it only happen once in awhile, it happens constantly. They lie about things great and small, important and inconsequential. They’ll even lie about the color of the sky if it becomes politically expedient to do so. They lie about each other, they lie about their records in the public and private sector and they lie about caring what you and I think, hope for and feel.
We’ve come to accept this sad truth as a nation and even begun to categorize lying for them. We’ve decided to arbitrarily call some lies worse than others so we can better accept the fact that we never know when they’re telling the truth. Thanks to Bill Clinton, we now have a new category of lies. Lies about your private life are suddenly out of bounds and cannot be held up as evidence of poor character or a possible fault in leadership. Lying in your private life no longer matters when put into the context of your job performance. That’s fine if you live in a vacuum.
The media is complicit in helping us categorize lies told by politicians. In fact, they’ve led the charge in defining what constitutes a big lie and what constitutes a lie that doesn’t really matter. Republicans tell big lies, Democrats lie about things that don’t matter for the most part. Case in point: Anthony Weiner. The mainstream media by and large saw no problem that Weiner lied about the scandal that eventually forced him from office. Conversely, the lies told by Mark Foley were egregious and unforgivable according to Newsweek. Foley faced an unrelenting media barrage that sought to expose him for the creep he truly was yet did everything they could to minimalize the exposure of what a creep Anthony Weiner was. When hiding the truth was eventually unattainable, they changed their tactic to downplaying the severity of the scandal saying instead that it was his personal life and we had no right to stick our noses in it. It became a lie that didn’t really matter.
I started this piece with a quote from the President as a way to highlight the kind of lies that I’m talking about. The everyday, garden variety lies that politicians spew with amazing frequency. We have all become so jaded by the lies they tell that we hardly raise our eyebrows when a true whopper comes along. That quote is not just a lie. It’s a true whopper. More than being a lie, it’s a threat and that ventures into a whole new category of lying done by politicians. This particular lie though is of the variety that most often comes from the left. More often than not it comes from desperate Democrats trying hard to scare the right people into believing them. President Obama leveled the “lie laser” at seniors, the disabled and veterans and pulled the trigger hoping to singe as many people as possible.
It is, quite honestly, the most despicable lie that I have heard uttered by a politician in a very long time. Two that spring to mind are;
“I am not a crook.” Richard M. Nixon
“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” Bill Clinton
Not since Alexander Hamilton call John Adams a hermaphrodite has the political lie been so egregious, so obviously false and so easily refuted. Before I go into too much detail about the lies told by this man let me share some facts with you first.
During the period of May 12 - June 7, 2011, the federal government took in 296 billion dollars. That’s less than a month when you look at it. Interest payments on our debt totaled 14 billion dollars during the same period. Basic math tells me that there’s about 282 billion dollars left over for all federal spending during that period. Despite what the President may say, there is more than enough money to cover both the debt and the day to day operational costs of the federal government. The government takes in more than 2 trillion dollars in revenue annually even with the “low” tax rates that we currently enjoy. Sorry Mr. President, but math can be a bitch sometimes. Now, I’m not a degreed economist but I can add and subtract like the wind.
What the President is doing can only be termed economic terrorism. The truly disgusting part is that he’s doing it to senior citizens. He’s lying to the least among us as a means to an end. The end is tax increases on anyone making more than $250,000 a year and he’s willing to look your grandmother in the eye and tell her that her monthly check is in doubt to get what he wants. He’s more like a petulant child being told no so he’s going to hold his breath until he gets his way. The trouble is, too many people would believe him because most of them don’t think anyone would tell a lie that big and expect us to believe it. Still others would believe because they have no understanding of how money works in the federal government.
Let me ask another pertinent question. If Obama couldn’t get a tax hike done during the 2 years he controlled the White House and the Congress, why does he now expect Republicans to hand him their certain doom and his imminent reelection now? If raising taxes back in December of last year was so potentially injurious to the economy as to be out of the question, why would he think it’s a good idea now? Is the economy any better? Are the unemployment numbers any lower now as opposed to then. Not really. He’s insisting on tax hikes now only as a way to shatter the confidence that the republican base has in it’s new members in the House and Senate which he knows will ultimately hand him a victory in 2012. Not only his but a victory in the House as well. If Boehner or McConnell cave on the issue of tax increases they can kiss any hope for a majority in either house goodbye for at least 4 more years. Let’s read that quote one more time:
“I cannot guarantee that those checks go out…if we haven’t resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be money in the coffers to do it.”
Are we really supposed to believe that he would allow senior’s checks to stop before he’d consider shutting something nonessential off first? He does, after all, have the power to designate what gets paid and what doesn’t in the event the debt ceiling isn’t raised. The country would still be able to pay it’s bills for quite a few months before the effects of our current spending and taxation levels made it impossible to stay above water. I ran into a similar problem with my own personal “economy” recently due to increased healthcare costs and rising food and fuel prices. I’ll set the scenario and then let you judge who is the better economist, Obama or me.
Within the last few months, my hours at work had been reduced slightly due to what we call the “seasonal slowdown” It happens every year but with the economy the way it is, I found myself spending more on things like healthcare and food. Part of my own personal economy was unemployed so revenues had taken a dip accordingly. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? I sat down with my Treasury Secretary, my wife, and asked for ways to boost revenues or reduce spending. She came up with several very good ideas and we set about implementing them to prevent reaching our own “debt ceiling” and seeing our economy collapse. We looked at discretionary items that we could cut back on until the revenue crisis passed and came to the conclusion that there were several things that we spent too much money on and could ill afford to continue like…our addiction to cable TV and our DVR. We restructured our healthcare plan to reflect our actual needs and decided to forego the fancy cell phones and home phone plan we had always had. We got a Magic Jack as a gift and our cost for home phone dropped from $40 per month to $2 per month. A few minor cuts later and after looking at the balance sheet, our current revenue far exceeded our monthly demands. As I said, I’m not a degreed economic professional but even I know when I can and can’t raise revenue(taxes) and when and where I can cut out the pork spending to achieve the same net effect. By cutting the fat from my budget, I have effectively increased my revenue stream.
Is the President not smart enough to see this? Or is he just so inured with the idea of taxing the evil rich that he simply will not see how easy it is to trim the fat? The Federal Government spends more than $300,000 every year to study the effects of marijuana on monkeys during their menstrual cycles. Is that more important than paying social security benefits? We annually spend more than 1 million dollars to study the effects of mercury on fish and this is somehow more important than sending checks out to our disabled veterans?
That’s why I find his lie about checks not going out to be so offensive. First and foremost he’s using the politics of fear in such a way as to needlessly frighten millions upon millions of senior citizens, like my mother. Secondly, he’s insulting the intelligence of those of us who can actually add and subtract.
I am smarter than the President. I am also smarter than everyone at MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times and NPR. I am in fact, smarter than Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist and I have just proven it. Well, I’m either smarter than all those vaunted denizens of the media…or I am simply telling the truth where they are not.
You be the judge.
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