The Collapse of the Dollar...

"The dollar's fall follows a United Nations report released Monday calling for a reduced role of the dollar as the world's primary reserve currency..." Forbes Magazine

READ THE REST OF THE FORBES ARTICLE HERE...

Forrest Bird...

Received the Presidential Citizen on December 10, 2008.

If you don't know Forrest Bird's inspiring story.

This piece on 60 Minutes was beautifully done.

See it here.

Muilticulturalism.. Something to think about...

To many people, the word Multicultural and the idea of Multiculturalism are the anti-racism with the idea that all races and cultures should be appreciated the same. But, racism and multiculturalism really have nothing to do with each other.
Racism is the idea that someone has a license to hate, exclude or mistreat another human being because of their skin color or the shape of their eyes. Racism is wrong, stupid and immoral.

Culture is defined as: the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group.

Multiculturalism is the idea that all cultures are equal and of equal value in the world.

NOT SO.

About a year ago, I read the book Three Cups Of Tea about the mission of the author Greg Mortensen to build schools for girls and boys in Pakistan. While the book was fascinating and the mission of Mr. Mortensen highly laudable, there was an underlying multiculturalistic attitude in the book. What a lovely slow-paced society! These people can really enjoy the simple things in life with out being materialistic. GAG!

I became angry as I read page after page of men sitting for hours drinking cup after cup of tea while their children had no schools to attend, no hospitals to be born in, and 40 percent of them were malnourished.

"In 2000, the infant mortality rate was 83 per 1,000 live births. Major causes of infant mortality are immunizable diseases, diarrhea, malnutrition, and poor environmental sanitation."
http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/Asia-and-Oceania/Pakistan-HEALTH.html
But, hey.. don't get up.. continue with your little tea party.


Multiculturalism is a lie. There are cultures that are more valuable ... *better* than others. Those are the cultures that make their people smarter, healthier, stronger, safer, happier and wealthier. And, the culture that encourages those things not by force, but through greater liberty is superior to others.

I really enjoyed this little speech by the brilliant Canadian Mark Steyn...
Check it out HERE.

Healthcare...

Healthcare solutions...
HERE..

Stanford University's Landmark Healthcare Study..

If you haven't read anything else about the flaws in the current debate.. read this summary of Stanford University's Hoover Institute Study on Healthcare.. it's very enlightening...

1. Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers. Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.

Read More HERE...

Who really are the uninsured?

Politicians and the media often state that 47 million are uninsured, roughly 15 percent of people living in the U.S., but what are the numbers behind that statistic? Who are these people?
The Census Bureau points out that almost 10 million of those are illegal aliens. According to the same report there are 8.3 million uninsured who make between $50,000 and $75,000 per year. Many of these are the young and healthy who would rather spend $200 some odd dollars a month playing than paying for health coverage. Almost 9 million more make more than $75,000 per year.
If we count those that are transitioning between jobs, but that will have coverage in less than 4 months.. we may be able to discount a full 45 percent of the almost 20 million left.
Studies done by The Kaiser Family Foundation, a liberal non-profit founded to inform media and government on health issues... "puts the number of uninsured Americans who do not qualify for current government programs and make less than $50,000 a year between 13.9 million and 8.2 million. That is a much smaller figure than the media reports. Kaiser’s 8.2 million figure for the chronically uninsured only includes those uninsured for two years or more."8.2 million represents about 2 percent of Americans. That said, I agree with President Obama that we are our brothers keeper.
It must be understood that Health Insurance is not the same as Health Care. Even illegals in this country have access to health care. There are free clinics where the poor and illegals can receive pre-natal care and have their cuts sewn up. Their babies are delivered in hospitals.. no questions asked. No one can be turned away from an Emergency Room.. it is against the law.
Crack babies born premature and in disastrous health will have a million dollars spent on their care before they even leave the hospital. Who pays for all of this?? We do. Americans are very generous. What do you think hospital and doctor bills would be like if the hospitals didn't pass these costs on to every patient who is able to pay? Some of this type of health care is tax payer funded and much is passed along to the insured who are able to pay.. in other words us.
Much of that is OK with me because I want to be compassionate and good. But don't wreck the best, by far the best, health care system in the world over faulty statistics and political power grabs.
That said, there are many things that we could do to improve our current system. I like the ideas John Mackey wrote in a recent article for the WSJ.
Socialized medicine is a Trillion dollar gamble with poor odds since it has compromised the economies of almost every European nation and Canada. Let's take some time and think it out very carefully and then when our representatives come up with something, let's do our own thinking on it. Let's ask that actual reform not be buried in pork spending so we can barely find the bill.If Americans tune into the fall television line up and stop watching their government, they may wake up in the spring to a lesser America.. one they don't even recognize.

Read more here.

Does single payer really help the poor?

This story is anecdotal and I try to stay away from that kind of thing, but this piece points out at the core something real and true. Entitlement is an ugly word. It is beneath the dignity of liberty which requires self-discipline, hard work and integrity. When we give up our liberty for something "free" we are sold what we deserve.. something that is less.

This is a story from Canada...

"Everything I want to say about this is summed up in a story that happened to my partner Shelley. Shelley and I are partners in a restaurant, and she actually runs it. She was given an appointment at the hospital for a procedure, and she duly showed up at the appointed time. Two hours later she was still sitting there waiting to be called. Now she was only able to get a two-hour parking meter, and so she approached the desk and asked if she could go and put money in the meter. She was curtly told that she was free to go and put the money in, but that if her name were called while she was away, that her name would fall back to the bottom of the queue. So she just decided that she would take the parking ticket as part of the price of getting the medical service she needed. Another two hours passed, and still she was not called, so she again approached the counter, and very patiently and politely explained (as only Shelley can, because she is the soul of graciousness) that she actually had a small business to run; that she was there at the appointed time for her appointment; that she had waited four hours, which is far longer than she had been led to expect the whole thing would take; that she had other commitments because of the business; and could they possibly at least give her some idea of how much longer she might have to wait?
Well, the woman behind the counter got on her dignity, drew herself up to her full height, glared at Shelley and said, "You're talking as if you're some kind of customer!"
There you have it, ladies and gentlemen, the essence of the problem: When the government supplies you with "free" health care, you are not a powerful customer who must be satisfied. They are doing you a favor and you owe the state gratitude and servility in return for this awesome generosity. They can give you the worst service in the world, but because it is free, you are totally disempowered. One of the most important lessons I have learned from my contact with the Canadian Medicare system is that payment makes you powerful. And its absence makes you risible if not invisible.
Now the articulate and the middle class do not let little things like that get them down. Even though they do not pay, they still get in the faces of the people providing service and make their wishes known. But often the vulnerable, the poor, the ill-educated, and the inarticulate are the ones who suffer the most because no one's well-being within the health care system depends on patients/consumers being well looked after. And by depriving them of the power of payment within the health care system, Medicare disempowers them. And the poor see this, because while they may be poor, they are not stupid."

Read more here.

Wealth...

Our current representatives do not understand the principle of wealth, they believe it is only money, but money is easily spent and gone. The wealth of our nation is not money, or resources although this land is blessed with both. Our true wealth is in the creativity and ingenuity and especially the industry of our people.

Hi, I'm from the Government & I'm here to help...

I am sorry to admit that I was initially in favor.. strongly in favor of TARP. It seemed like a good idea to get money to the banks so that they could begin lending again, so that small businesses could make payroll and so that folks could finance homes etc... That was all when the program was about 4 pages long.
In a moment of crisis and panic, I trusted government. By the time the congress got a hold of the 4 page document, it was a mess. Henry Paulson met with Harry Reid and Harry explained to Henry the needs and expectation of his constituency... in other words.. the congress had to add thousands of pages of pork until now we are bailing out folks that made the horrid mistake of purchasing a Suburban rather than a Prius.
President Bush said that Wall Street got drunk.. maybe so.. but it is the constant and consistent bingeing of the congress (left and right) that has me worried.
And, so many Americans don't understand money. They don't get that we've spent it. It's gone. The Chinese who have been saving while we've been spending are not as comfortable with our treasury bonds as they once were. When they stop buying, we will have no choice but to print money causing inflation that is not so easy to predict or control.
So when the government now wants to be in the health care business I think of these words of President Reagan... "The ten most dangerous words in the English language are "Hi, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

The troubles of Industry...

Federal regulation chokes industry while dishonesty starves it to death.
My husband, one of the smartest men I've ever met, said that last night.. Brilliant.

An Important Issue in the Healthcare Debate...

One of the more insidious arguments from the left in favor of government involvement in health care is the infant mortality rate in the United States.
"The infant mortality rate is also called the infant death rate. It is the number of deaths that occur in the first year of life for 1000 live births." This is the definition used by the World Health Organization. However, it like so many statistics is flawed because when life begins is often fudged.

"Count again. We report mortality rates based on World Health Organization guidelines for a live birth. A baby fully separated from the mother and showing any sign of life, even a single breath, counts as a newborn, regardless of other factors. Many developed countries with better infant mortality rates don't follow that to the letter. They purposely exclude deaths according to weight, degree of prematurity, or how long the baby lives.
Be serious—if you try to save sicker babies, you will have higher mortality. Some are catching on. In a recent study, researchers found that by correcting for weight, the mortality risk was the same in the United States as in Canada—and maybe even a bit better—despite our northern neighbor's welfare entitlements and universal healthcare system."

Please read the full article in U.S. News

Other countries’ lower infant-mortality rates in the World Health Organization’s tables are often used to shame the U.S.’s health-care system. But those numbers hide the greater effort the U.S. takes to save the life of preterm babies, those born 6 to 20 weeks before they are due.

Please read the full article in WSJ
and
THIS ONE

It is a non-statistic and a non-issue. Please educate yourself on this issue. Again, please read the articles referred to.

Tax & Spend...

During the past election, I used to see tickers everywhere. They were ticking the cost of the national debt as it rose. Bloggers had tickers counting up the mounting cost of the war in Iraq.
Well, Obama won the election. No one is watching ticking tickers now because when the dems took over they spent us into oblivion. They spent in several months the cost of the war in Iraq. And, they continue to spend.
During the election Obama promised that he would not raise taxes for folks who make less than $250,000 per year. A promise that he now is not and I think never intended to keep.
Cap and Trade will tax every person in the United States who owns a light bulb, who operates a vehicle or purchases anything made or grown in the United States. By 2035 it will cost every family of 4 nearly $7,000 extra per year in today's dollars. It will ding the rich. It will kill the middle class. It will devastate the poor.
But, that's not all. Heath Savings Accounts, which I think could be the answer to rising health care costs, will be taxed to the tune of 8.2 Billion dollars. Enough to kill one of the programs that really works. I know. I have an HSA.
I am against the Democratic platform in a big way. It seems like such a nice idea to tax money away from the rich and give it to the poor. But, instead it kills the producers, the employment creators, the generous supporters of every good cause are forced to give less.
It makes the government more powerful and the people less. It puts Americans on the dole and keeps them there for generations where they live in publicly paid for squalor and remain, uneducated and unable to live with the dignity that comes from being a contributor rather than simply a consumer, from helping others rather than mooching off society.
Drive by New York City sometime. The projects go on to the skyline, a great and monstrously hideous monument to Johnson's Great Society where we would simply give the poor enough and they would soon be able to care for themselves. Instead, people who are only people have preferred the little they get on the dole to what they must have the courage and industry to reach on their own. The great grandchildren of the Great Society live in conditions that I can only shudder at.
You want to help the poor. Throw out the spenders Democrat and Republican. Throw them out. Write them letters. Call them on the phone. Get them out. Get them out of the way of American industry, innovation and compassion. Help the producers produce more. Help them in producing more. Stop spending on social programs that have proven to keep people down rather than raise them up. Understand that dignity comes from putting your own bread on the table. Make that possible for more Americans rather than less.

Cap & Trade...

Cap & Trade...

Important Articles about Climate Change...

"The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon."
Kimberley A. Strassel WSJ 6.26.2009

" it isn’t just greater wealth that leads to a better environment, but greater freedom, too.."
Bret Stephens WSJ 8.4.2009

A Brilliant Opinion Piece...

HERE...

"The reason is that too many of our intellectuals are themselves ensnared in a bad idea. That idea is multiculturalism -- the notion that no system or government is inherently better than any other, that the rules of morality are just a doctrine written by history's winners. Thus there are no enduring human truths, only "narratives" by which almost any beastliness can be explained away if committed by a people with a claim to having been victimized by a dominant culture.
This bad idea has all but silenced our nation at a moment when the world most needs our voice. Thousands of people in Iran are marching in the streets, protesting a sham election, heroically risking life and limb to try to tear some little breathing space in the smothering shroud of theocracy. Yet President Barack Obama, the leader of the most powerful free nation on earth, responds with mealy-mouthed strategic dithering. The man who in his recent speech in Cairo drew an absurd moral equivalence between Western errors and Islam's unstinting history of oppression has condemned the Iranian government's violent reaction to the demonstrations but remains canny and vague in his support of the protestors.
This is too shrewd by half. There comes a time in the affairs of men when bad ideas can be -- and therefore must be -- powerfully opposed by good ones.
Compare, if you can bear it, President Ronald Reagan's response to the 1982 crackdown on the Polish union Solidarity by the Soviet Union: "The struggle in the world today for the hearts and minds of mankind is based on one simple question: Is man born to be free, or slave? In country after country, people have long known the answer to that question. We are free by divine right." In less than a decade, in startlingly large measure because this one idea found so mighty a voice, the Soviet Union was gone."

By Andrew Klavan

Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell...

Read this book. It's very enlightening...

"Most statistics on income inequality are very misleading in yet another way. These statistics almost invariably leave out money received as transfers from the government in various programs for low-income people which provide benefits of substantial value for which the recipients pay nothing."

According to Sowell the bottom 20 percent of income recipients receive more than two thirds of their income from such transfer payments... such as subsidized housing etc..

"In 2001, for example, cash and in-kind transfers together accounted for 77.8 percent of the economic resources of people in the bottom 20 percent. In other words, the alarming statistics on their incomes so often cited in the media and by politicians count only 22 percent of the actual economic resources at their disposal."

Why does government so encourage the increase in transfer payments to the bottom 20 percent? One reason I can see is that government workers rarely create any real value in the the economy and so many are paid in a portion of these transfer payments to the poor. If there is a new government program to provide say car seats to the poor by income, there must be scads of people employed to manage this program. Incomes must be checked and car seats must be purchased and distributed.

A second reason is that more and more the electorate will vote for the person or persons who can promise the most in programs and fixes that take from the "rich" and redistribute to the "poor". This has become the easy way to power for politicians in both major parties.

Anyway, this book is very enlightening.. I hope you'll get it and read on...

Visit Thomas Sowell's site here... and you really ought to read this blurb about him here..

Management 101...

This is something my Dad wrote and sent me this morning. I thought it was funny, but then kind of too true to be really hilarious.

"Since they appear determined to dictate how all businesses should conduct themselves, and to run everything, perhaps the government should merge all mass transit systems in the country, and Amtrak, and Chrysler Corporation, into one single firm. If they did this, then the cars no one wants, the buses no one gets in, and the rails no one rides, could all be mismanaged by a bunch of megalomaniacs no one trusts."

No He Can't...

I like this article. This women can say some things that I can't. I like the line she uses here, "the politics of victimization." We can victimize ourselves and say the the government should provide this and that for us, although those of us who are young enough to remember the lines at the DMV don't really think the government is an organization that does almost anything really well and keeping it out of the business of most things is the way to preserve both liberty and efficiency. It's going to be a long 4 years I'm afraid. I hope I recognize my beloved country when it's over.

Liberty...

My brother sent me this and it was so wonderful.. I thought I would share with you...

In the critical year of 1944 a vast “I Am an American Day” ceremony was held in Central Park, New York City, on May 21. Many thousands of people were present, including a large number of new citizens. Learned Hand’s brief address was so eloquent and so moving that the text immediately became the object of wide demand. It was quickly printed and reprinted and also put into anthologies. The impact was so great that the speaker was invited to address a similar gathering the next year. (Judge Learned Hand [this was his real, albeit unfortunate, name] was a judge of the 2d Circuit Court of Appeals, and together with Judge Posner on the 7th Circuit and a few others, is among the most influential jurists in American history, despite having never served on the United States Supreme Court.)

“We have gathered here to affirm a faith, a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion. Some of us have chosen America as the land of our adoption; the rest have come from those who did the same. For this reason we have some right to consider ourselves a picked group, a group of those who had the courage to break from the past and brave the dangers and the loneliness of a strange land. What was the object that nerved us, or those who went before us, to this choice? We sought liberty; freedom from oppression, freedom from want, freedom to be ourselves. This we then sought; this we now believe . . . . What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.

“What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest. And now in that spirit, that spirit of an America which has never been, and which may never be; nay, which never will be except as the conscience and courage of Americans create it; yet in the spirit of that America which lies hidden in some form in the aspirations of us all; in the spirit of that America for which our young men are at this moment fighting and dying; in that spirit of liberty and of America I ask you to rise and with me pledge our faith in the glorious destiny of our beloved country.”

Taxing the Rich???

"The composition of the tax hikes in the 2010 budget is frighteningly similar to the Revenue Act of 1932, the much-maligned Hoover tax hikes that put the “Great” in Great Depression by putting an enormous tax burden on millions of Americans, largely through excise taxes. These taxes, raised even further by FDR, were justified by the promise that the funds would be returned in the form of relief programs, which is to say that some portion of the tax revenue, after administrative costs in Washington, would go back to the states with strings attached, often to further political rather than economic objectives."

This is happening my fair folksies.

"Despite President Obama’s promise that “If your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increase a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime,” his new budget raises 45 percent of its revenue from energy taxes that will be paid by everyone who fills a gas tank, pays an electric bill, or buys anything that was grown, shipped, or manufactured."

See the rest of the article Obama’s Scary Hoover-Style Tax Hikes
By Phil Kerpen Director of Policy, Americans for Prosperity HERE...