How Much Government is Enough?

The Republican slogan for the 2014 election should be a repeated question that Democrats can't answer: "How much government is enough?" It summarizes our position and at the same time focuses the increasing mistrust voters have for ever bigger government. It should be on bumper stickers and buttons. It should be the first thing every Republican candidate says in their stump speech. It should be our first talking point for every media appearance. It should be everywhere the Democrats and their Pravda Press friends don't want it to be. From this starting point, it is easy to say Democrats want big government so much they lied through their teeth to get control of healthcare. The Affordable Healthcare Act is not affordable and liberals don't care. All of our other issues come back to the ever increasing size and power of government. The reason our economy is a mess is that the government is borrowing, taxing and regulating too much. Let's talk about the 1%. Eleven of the 25 richest counties in the US are Washington, DC, suburbs. Further government expansion will just impoverish the rest of the country and concentrate more of the 1% around DC.

I made this comment to this article.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/373257/democrats-and-panic-button-john-fund

Another commenter made the further suggestion that we should be spray painting it on walls, just to make sure everyone got the message.

Ukraine 2014 and Sudetenland 1938

The Crimea may not be Poland, but it really looks and sounds like the Sudetenland in 1938. Putin is even talking about defending people who speak his language just like Hitler did. The Sudetenland problem was settled by a German occupation army seizing all of Czechoslovakia. While I don't think we have much of a military option, Our Smartest President ever has to do something more than suspend preparations for the G-8 summit in Sochi. The Magnitsky Act of 2012 would allow the expansion of the list of Putin backers with frozen assets and canceled visas, just for starters. We should also be actively investigating the financial dealings of Russian government officials with an eye towards revealing embarrassing details that name names. Since personally targeted sanctions would have little effect on European economies, they would be likely to cooperate as well. Talking big and carrying a twig is just going to encourage Putin and other lesser thugs to grab whatever they want. 

We HAVE to Close Ranks After the Primaries

I hope that the total lawlessness of our Dear Leader is remembered in November. The Republican establishment and tea party folks can fight all they want in the primaries. Once we have a nominee, whether we voted for the candidate or not, we HAVE to turn out and vote Republican in November. If we don't have Republican majorities in the House AND Senate, we have absolutely no chance to enact any of our agenda. Even a RINO is a sure vote against Obamacare. Any Democrat, no matter how "conservative" he tries to be during the election, is a sure vote for whatever Harry Reid and the Community Organizer in Chief cook up next. I we control both the House and Senate, we can pass a budget and appropriation bills in the normal order. The Smartest President Ever would then have to veto the bills to stop them. Again, even RINOs will vote for a much tighter budget than any Democrat, no matter what the Democrat promises to get elected, period. Conservatives sitting out the election in November because their candidate didn't get nominated are, in effect, voting for further mischief from The One We Weren't Really Waiting For.

I share the frustration that many conservatives have with GOP leadership. But during primaries is the time to have the argument. Once the candidate is nominated, I become a "Spot the Dog" Republican. I will vote for Spot the Dog if he has an R next to his name. I do this because our country's situation is becoming critical. If our Dear Leader gets away with ruling without Congress, the country becomes an elected dictatorship at best. Our Dear Leader and his friends have circumvented almost all of the checks and balances originally in the Constitution. The Pravda Press excuses this behavior with discussion about the meaning of "shall" in the Obamacare law. This has to be stopped as soon as possible, before we reach a point of no return. So even if the GOP candidate is not to my taste on a lot of issues, I vote for him because a Republican Congress is the only mechanism available to put a stop to creeping dictatorship before it's too late. We have to hang together because if we don't, we'll hang separately. 

Settled Science = Oxymoron

Progressive Liberals like to say that man made global warming is "settled science."  "Settled science" is an oxymoron. Scientific theory is always open to change due to new experimental results. Global Warming's scientific foundation is rotten to the core. The raw, unadjusted, data supporting the initial "hockey stick" graph of global temperature was "accidentally" erased. Only the "adjusted" data remains. This is the scientific equivalent of the dog ate my homework. Models predicting global warming have a uniformly dismal record in predicting future temperature averages in the real world. Global Warming is a cult, not a scientific result.

Remember that the original climate hockey stick work depended on raw data that was "accidentally" erased. To this ignorant red neck, that sounds like the scientific equivalent of the dog ate my homework. As someone with a little bit of statistics training, I have always been amazed that climate scientists are willing to use less than 150 years of rigorous temperature records and proxies for earlier observations to predict temperature patterns that unfold over thousands and tens of thousands of years. For just one example, look up the patterns of Lake Missoula glacial floods over time. During a 2000 year period between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago, ice dams would build up a huge amount of water, then burst. Geological evidence indicates that this happened at least 25 times. Missoula is a town of about 45,000 people today. There is no lake. (I used to live in Missoula.) It's clear that temperatures varied widely over the period of time before man was a factor. Anthropomorphic global warming has always struck me as extreme hubris. 

Mean Greens want to prohibit the use of petroleum products and natural gas.  However, we can't go back to whale oil lamps, as you might suggest, because we have to save the whales. Animal tallow lamps offend animal rights folks in PETA, so they are out. I think the only solution is a banner I saw on a college dorm window years ago. It said, "US OUT of North America."