Results tagged “Election 2012” from Bill's Words

[This is the last political entry I intend to post on this site. I don’t have a lot of readers, I don’t have a lot of time, and I don’t get paid for my effort. I’ve only ever heard from one of my recent readers—and that’s OK!—and I don’t think that my voice does much but add to the noise. Might I recommend The American Spectator for superb conservative political commentary? I’ll continue to publish computing and thought pieces, but this election cycle has made me tired of national politics. WNE]

Dear Mr. Obama,

Your victory speech was elegant as always; you have the gift of the gab, truly. You used some words that I expect you to live up to lest they fall onto the heap of broken promises of your first term. These words were, “…whether you held an Obama sign or a Romney sign, you made your voice heard…”

Though you may have heard, my question to you, Mr. Obama, is Were you listening?

If you were listening, then what you heard is your country’s saying:

Stop letting the mainstream media do your work for you. If you are a man, if you are a leader, then you should be able to convey the message you intend the country to hear without having the likes of Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews covering for you. Let them do their job. Let them be critical of you. Stop trading access for control of the narrative. Let the people hear the truth through Jefferson’s independent fourth estate. Man up.

You’ll make mistakes. Own up to them. The rest of us have to live with the consequences of your errors, so why don’t you? Stop letting the media cover for your mistakes. Man up.

Your way isn’t necessarily the best way. Your long-held socialist beliefs are not what the country wants. You, the liberal elite, Hollywood, and their ilk certainly want this nation to become a nation of redistribution. But it’s time you listen to other sides of the story. Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan do have a plan which could work, but you’ll have to listen to them, to avoid letting your own biases block the path “forward.” It takes guts to listen to, respect and incorporate the other side’s points of view. Man up.

Vilification of the rich is great for short term political gain, but divides the country. I have yet to understand why the “poor” hate the job-creating “rich” but worship the do-nothing Hollywood elite, why George Clooney is revered, but Linda McMahon is reviled. If you want the “rich” on your side—and by your own admission, you must have the rich to fund your spending machine—stop pissing them off. Stop dividing the country with artificial class warfare. Unify.

Speaking of warfare, listen to this:

Stop creating artificial wars. Your “war on women” is a prime example of rhetoric for the sake of inflaming your supporters. It does nothing but push your supporters and your detractors further apart. It does not build consensus. Build consensus.

Get to work. 10 weeks of golf. Celebrity basketball games. Bragging about your beer recipe. All of these are great past-times and would be great features on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But for a sitting President, they are inappropriate. You used your first term to prove that you’re just a regular Joe who is somehow privileged enough to hang out with stars and celebrities. Now get to work and do the job you were elected to do. Attend those briefings. Learn a work ethic befitting a president.

Strengthen this country’s defense. I do not believe it to be any coincidence that you and Bill Clinton ushered in horrific terrorist attacks. You must ensure that the world of terrorists does not see your peacemaking overtures (or whatever it is you’re doing) to the world of Arabs as indication that the US is soft on terrorism. Declaring that Al Qeada is dead does not make it so. Put ears on the ground in-country and build intel that we can use to hunt down and kill terrorists. Prevent attacks, and when warned of imminent attacks, pay attention, dammit.

Stop governing with czars and edicts. You are not a dictator, and you have no right to dictate. Only a complacent Congress has allowed this abhorrent mangling of checks and balances to continue. Do your job right.

Clean house. Your Vice-President is not a “happy warrior”—he’s the punch line to many jokes. He’s making a mockery of his office and acts the fool. Likewise, you have a staff containing tax evaders and cheats; I imagine that there are others with less-than-stellar records, too. Remove these people from office and put well-respected, well-vetted and centrist (mostly because neither the left nor the right will approve a radical of either extreme) people in front of Congress and into those jobs.

“It’s the economy, stupid.” Worry about social programs after the economy is fixed. Until we have a working economy, you can’t afford social programs. Your credit card is maxed out, and our house is so far underwater that our great-grandchildren will have no place to live in if you continue at the torrid pace you set during your first term. China is not our friend. Manufacturers must be encouraged to bring business back on shore. Likewise, stop picking winners. You clearly demonstrated that the government has no business in investing in technological fantasies, that “more money” doesn’t equate to “success.” You want to make good on that balanced budget thing? First, stop spending so you know how much you need to take in. Then tax. If you do it the other way around, you’ll never get what you need, the economy will continue to stagnate, and more generations will drown.

Innovate. If the private sector can figure out ways to manufacture items more efficiently, to break the laws of nature, to avoid paying taxes, to find new ways of doing old things better, then why can’t government? It’s because we’re asking politicians, not problem-solving experts, to fix the problems. Bring in experts from industry. Bring in the brilliant minds. Ignore their party affiliation. Leave the Hollywood elites at home. Let the brilliant people of this country solve the problems we face, because solve it they will… if you’ll let them.

Now hear this: Your victory wasn’t quite “decisive” as the mainstream media are so quick to report. No, you won through the grace of the Electoral College. The fact that you won by a thinner margin of the vote this time means that more people are listening, learning, and understanding the deficiencies of hiring a community organizer to do the job of a world leader. Unfortunately, not enough understood this problem and the net result is you get four more years to make good on the promises of your “one term proposition.”

For the rest of us who did understand, we are left praying first for our families, then for our country, and then for you and the rest of our elected leaders. Because in spite of the “us” and “them” rhetoric you bludgeon us with each day, we are all in this together.

Sincerely yours,

/Bill/

William N. Eccles

“My message to the governors as well as to the mayors is anything they need, we will be there, and we will cut through red tape,” Mr. Obama said. “We are not going to get bogged down with a lot of rules.”

We’ve had a few natural disasters during your presidency, Mr. Obama, and yet you still have not streamlined the government and eliminate the red tape you vow to “cut through.” Why not? It’s because your solution is typical of liberals: Make government bigger, trying to cure the symptom instead of solving the problem.

Obamacare is a prime example. It does not do anything to address the basic problems of health care costs, instead trying to find ways either to pay inflated costs or to force costs to be lower with magic, all the while increasing demand for health care without adequately addressing supply. Obamacare is nearly 2,000 pages of legislation which sticks a BandAid on the patient’s knee instead of trying to figure out why the patient has cancer in the first place.

If red tape can be cut through, don’t just cut through it: get rid of it.

I posted a link to an article called A Guide to the Obama Administration’s Five Major Scandals for Mainstream Media Dummies on Facebook. Yes, I know, I broke the Office Christmas Party Protocol, and I wasn’t sure exactly sure at the time why I posted it.

I finally put my finger on it: As much as I believe this article does indeed portray an unfortunate level of comfort this administration has with being a corruptocracy, I believe it’s as much—if not more so—an indictment of the media for its consistent failure to investigate with unbiased zeal the misdeeds and missteps of our political establishment. We can no longer rely on the press to investigate the very government which it is supposed to protect us from.

The media used to be equal-opportiunity haters. All politicians hated them because they were relentless in their pursuit of the deepest, darkest misdeeds of all politicians. They did this task out of a sense of journalistic responsibility, of integrity, and of a need to sell papers.

No more, however, is the free press independent, nor is the independent press free.

To the first half of the preceding statement, and by far the worst part of this problem, the media is letting their work be done by the very branches of the government from which they are supposed to be independent. When the President’s staff gets veto power over statements the press is planning on publishing, the press cannot possibly be the objective fourth estate we need.¹

And independence means not only independence from the government, but independence to have opinions and findings different from others. The mere existence of the JournoList and the collusion thereon is indicative that this level of independence is dead.² News organizations which do not toe the party line are called out as radical regardless of how much truth there may be to their stories.

I suppose that the guarantees in the Bill of Rights give the press the right to collude and write the narrative and to spin the data however they like. But the result is that Americans don’t trust the media to do their job at all, as discovered in a recent Gallup poll.³

I’m not alone in this concern. Democratic pollster Patrick Caddell said, “We designed a constitutional system with many checks and balances. The one that had no checks and balances was the press, and that was done under an implicit understanding that, somehow, the press would protect the people from the government and the power by telling—somehow allowing—people to have the truth. That is being abrogated as we speak, and has been for some time.”⁴

Quite frankly, I do not understand, given the death of the American newspaper, why journalists are so unwilling to investigate this administration. Controversy sells papers, after all. Maybe it’s cost cutting. Maybe it’s a group decision to support this president because there’s something in it for the media that I just can’t figure out—other than outright access, that is. On that subject, The Guardian says “It is pure ‘access journalism’: these reporters are given scoops in exchange for their wholly unjustified promise to allow government officials to propagandize the citizenry without accountability (that is, from behind the protective shield of anonymity). By necessity, their journalistic storytelling is shaped by the perspective of these official sources.”⁵ If people on the other side of the pond can see what’s going on so very clearly, I can’t help but wonder why we’re so blind to what’s happening within our own borders.

Finally, when the polls are intentionally skewed to reflect the beliefs and leanings of their publishers, as have past media polls⁶, I believe all the journalistic integrity which decades’ worth of reporters before them have gone to the ends of the earth to build is thoroughly and completely dead.

Given the media’s inability to provide any checks or balances on this administration, I would much rather there be a different administration in place, one in which the media are actively committed and doggedly interested in exposing the government’s misdeeds. That’s a media I could respect.

¹ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/us/politics/latest-word-on-the-campaign-trail-i-take-it-back.html?_r=0

² http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/20/documents-show-media-plotting-to-kill-stories-about-rev-jeremiah-wright/

³ http://www.gallup.com/poll/157589/distrust-media-hits-new-high.aspx

⁴ http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/09/29/mainstream-media-threatening-our-country-future/

⁵ http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/08/obama-administration-making-us-media-its-mouthpiece

⁶ http://spectator.org/archives/2012/09/25/how-carter-beat-reagan/print

Guess what? Obama preserved his voting bloc in one defense contractor’s workers.

But is it even what’s best for the workers? That depends on your point of view.

If it’s 2012 and you’re the current Obama administration, then it’s good. On January 2, if the Pentagon cancels contracts and thousands of workers are laid off, then they might say that it was to the workers’ benefits because they didn’t have to “needlessly worry” about the layoff. President Obama’s administration think’s it’s good.

But if it’s 2007 and you were then-Senator Obama who co-sponsored the Forewarn Act which upped the warning in the WARN Act to 90 days and expanded the number of companies affected by it, then it’s certainly bad. These workers could get zero notice. And that’s bad. Really bad. Then-Senator Obama thought it was bad.

And they say Mitt Romney flip-flops… Where’s Obama’s confidence in his voters in this runaway election?

(Background story here.)

Legally, no. No, this administration can’t legally influence the elections.

But that hasn’t stopped the Obama administration from trying and, apparently, succeeding. Kathleen Sebelius got away with it, so what’s stopping the whole Labor Department?

Here’s the lowdown as I understand it:

Congress raised the debt ceiling last summer, in August of 2011, and instead of giving the President carte blanche, the GOP attached a proviso that raising the debt ceiling would require a corresponding cuts in Federal spending. If cuts didn’t meet the requirement, an automatic $1.2 trillion cut called the sequester would slam into Federal spending on January 1, 2012, with an additional $1 trillion by 2021.

Needless to say, the so-called “supercomittee” in charge of finding these cuts failed miserably. As a result, on January 1, 2012, across-the-board spending cuts will take effect on every Federal program there is. Essentially, the sequester is one big frickin’ stick and was supposed to encourage Congress (under the “leadership” of the President) to pass a budget with real spending reforms in it. They failed, so both parties will continue blaming the other and life in Washington, D.C., will continue to move “forward” as it has during these last four years. Little changes.

As the phrase goes, “in other news” there are clauses written into the WARN Act (which is unrelated legislation) which say that any government contractor who will have massive layoffs has to notify the affected workers 60 days in advance of the layoff. If they don’t then there are fines and legal proceedings involved. I.e., breaking the law is bad.

Coincidentally, 60 days before sequestration layoffs is November 2, four days before election day.

You might be thinking that this is intentional timing, that whoever put two and two together might have been thinking that Congress shouldn’t be the only ones to take the blame, that the sitting President might need to share some blame, too. You’d probably be right, and the Obama administration would agree with you.

In fact, the Obama administration recognizes that blame sharing is bad, so much so that that the Obama administration is offering to cover the legal fees, court costs, and employee compensation for companies who ignore the law and do not notify affected workers.

“Go ahead! Break the law! It’s OK, we’ll cover you no matter what!”—to paraphrase loosely. “Just don’t tell those workers they might get laid off. It might be viewed as a failure on the part of the President, and we don’t want that.”

Distilled to the bare facts, the Obama administration is influencing voting with taxpayer money.

Oh, sure, they’re doing this under the guise of not scaring workers (read “potential Obama voters”), saying that there’s a chance (read “snowball’s chance in hell”) the sequester might not happen, so why bother? And unless somebody turns up E-mails to the contrary (read “unless there was an idiot who took notes”), that’s the story the mainstream media will use to sweep these misdeeds under the rug.

If you don’t believe me, simply Google “sequester layoffs” and see just how many mainstream media outlets are covering the story. I’ll save you the trouble. It’s…

zero.

And our media claim not to be biased? Yeah, right.

If this action doesn’t make you sick to your stomach, you’re not paying attention, and you’ll likely vote for the wrong person—and his administration—in November.

Nobama. Can’t say it any more succinctly than that.

Dr. Barbara Bellar, candidate for Illinois State Senate, District 18, sums up Obamacare in one (very long) sentence.

Don’t want to or can’t watch? Or you’d like to share the text on Facebook (just to really piss off your liberal Obama-worshiping friends)? Here’s what she said:

So, let me get this straight… We are going to be gifted with a health care plan we are forced to purchase and fined if we don’t, which purportedly covers at least 10 million more people without adding a single new doctor but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn’t understand it, passed by a Congress that didn’t read it but exempted themselves from it, and signed by a President who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes, for which we will be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect by a government which has already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare, all to be overseen by a Surgeon General who is obese, and financed by a country that’s broke. So what the “blank” could possibly go wrong?!

I’ll say it again: the ideas might have been good, but the implementation absolutely, without a doubt, sucks.

(via Blonde Sagacity who did 95% of the transcription)

Obama never promised us “better off”. His campaign slogan was “Hope and Change”, which he has delivered (to his constituents, anyway).

Now he’s all on about “Firewood”. I’m not exactly sure what that’s all about, but it might have something to do with energy independence—I’m not sure.

Keepin’ it classy, y’all…

These buttons are being distributed by the Illinois delegation to the Democratic convention.

Charlie Crist, apparently still off his meds:

“I applaud and share [Obama’s] vision of a future built by a strong and confident middle class in an economy that gives us the opportunity to reap prosperity through hard work and personal responsibility,” said Crist, in an op-ed published in the Tampa Bay Times.

Wait, what? Is he endorsing the same guy who said, “It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. blah blah blah …you didn’t build it. blah blah blah”? Is he endorsing the same guy who gutted the workfare requirement of welfare?

Obama doesn’t even begin to understand “personal responsibility.” In his view, if the government isn’t responsible for your prosperity, then nobody is.

via MM

Chock full of data and explanation, such as:

In 1972, when the highest tax rate on the rich was 70 percent and the top capital-gains tax rate was 35 percent, the richest 1 percent of Americans assumed 18 percent of the income-tax burden. Today, with a top income-tax rate of 35 percent and a capital-gains rate of 15 percent, their share is 39 percent, more than twice as much. This is true because, faced with high tax rates, the rich of 40 years ago put more of their income into tax shelters or foreign countries. They invested less, and they worked less. And the rest of us suffered during the years of stagflation—as we will again, if rates are raised.

Read the rest of this article by Stephen Moore, Senior Economics Writer, Wall Street Journal Editorial Board.

If you think this year’s presidential election is about anything other than the economy, you’ve been listening to the Democrats too long.

Well said, and worth the read.

And Linda McMahon gets it, too.

Folks, I don’t care what party you align with. You can’t argue with history, and history says that the path Obama is taking us on is dooming this country. Our only hope is to support the work of Ryan and McMahon and to dump the current batch of politicians who blame their predecessors and call what they’ve been doing for the past 13 years “a work in progress” (all while not showing up for work in the first place).

And history is on their side.

Vote Ryan. Vote McMahon.

Amazing.

I have never seen quite a laundry list of Obama’s failures in such a public presentation.

And it’s quite a list. Read for yourself here

The cover is worth calling out specifically.

If you want to identify who the liberal mainstream media are, just look at who’s yelling loudest about it. I’ll give you a hint: most start with “New York”.

And if you want to see who’s the conservative media, look at the ones who are laughing loudest in the wake of the “Mitt Romney: Wimp” cover. I’ll give you a hint: they’re being drowned out by the category above.

Go read the article. It’s a good read.

The right wing blogosphere has been whipped into a frenzy because Soledad O’Brien used Talking Points Memo, a far-left blog, as a source during her interview with Barbara Comstock.

O’Brien’s obvious bias has always been clear as she campaigns for President Obama, and she does a good job of pounding the Dem’s message home for them in her interview. And if there’s anybody who appears flustered, it’s Comstock. She hardly gets a complete statement in and could take a lesson from the unflappable Condoleezza Rice. O’Brien, biased or not, is actually prepared for Comstock’s response and only appears to be searching through her material to locate the exact quote she requires.

So she found the quote on TPM; it’s a non-issue. TPM actually links to a Slate article which sources the original quote to the HuffPo-where Wyden published his piece in the first place. I.e., HuffPo is the barn in which the horse (or ass?) spoke. Which liberal media outlet would you rather she quote?

Comstock would have been much better off sticking with the “Is there a question in there?” line. “I thought this was to be an interview, not a campaign stop for President Obama,” would have been a much better response.

At any rate, this kind of video is the kind that makes me sick because we conservatives look like idiots for rallying around a hollow, meaningless non-victory, instead of having real victories to promote. What we need is superior firepower (think Rice) based on sound facts, not contrived campaign rhetoric. The R&R campaign should never have attempted to make more of Wyden’s policy statement than there was to make in the first place. Yeah, they should say that the Medicare aspects of Ryan’s budget were, in fact, derived from a liberal Democrat’s policy statement. But to imply that it was co-sponsored? Sigh…

I am a staunch conservative, but this is a meaningless rallying point.

I am no tax history scholar, but I know a thing or two. But this? This shocked me.

From spectator.org comes this bit of economics history:

These tax policies enjoy a history of bipartisan success. [He] proposed legislation to reduce income tax rates across the board by 30 percent, explaining:

“It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today, and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the tax rates….[A]n economy constrained by high tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance the budget, just as it will never create enough jobs or enough profits.”

[His] proposed tax cuts were adopted… and pulled the top rate from 91 percent down to 70 percent, while reducing the lower rates. The next year, economic growth soared by 50 percent, and income tax revenues increased by 41 percent! [Two years later], unemployment had fallen to its lowest peacetime level in almost 40 years. U.S. News and World Report exclaimed: “The unusual budget spectacle of sharply rising revenues following the biggest tax cut in history is beginning to astonish even those who pushed hardest for tax cuts in the first place.” …[T]he administration’s chief economic advisor estimated that the tax cuts expanded the economy in just two years by 10 percent above where it would have been.

Wow. I never knew that Reagan Bush no… JFK understood taxes so well.

Yes, John F. Kennedy’s tax cuts were adopted in 1964, and the direct result was economic growth and significant tax revenue gains. So while you Obama worshippers think that the only way to balance the budget is to ask the rich to pay more (you say “fair share,” but that’s a load of crap and you know it) and everybody else knows that won’t even put a dent in the mess Obama has made, your own beloved JFK proved you wrong! Reagan and “W” were also students of history with identical successes to JFK’s, and also proved you wrong, too.

Well, you can ignore Reagan and “W” all you want. But JFK? You’ll ignore the success of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and listen to the lies our current president spews forth on the campaign trail, all so he can continue to buy voters and further plunge our economy into the toilet?

It’s time for you to wake up. Barack Obama doesn’t have a clue and isn’t likely to get a clue. He simply does not understand that good rhetoric is not good tax policy.

So… what to do? You hate Romney. That Ryan guy is from Wisconsin and is therefore the devil incarnate. And you’d never vote for America’s Comeback Team.

Here’s what you should do in November:

Stay home.

Don’t vote. Or vote for Ron Paul if you must participate. Just don’t vote for Obama. Because if you do and Obama wins, all you’ll get is another four years of “It’s not my fault” and clueless tax policies which will grind this nation into complete and total economic disaster, the likes of which we’ve never seen before.

(Read the rest of the source article. It’s worth your time.)

[Edited: Ooops. I had Kennedy adopting his tax cuts in 1964. He didn’t do it himself, obviously. His proposed tax cuts were adopted in 1964. Thanks, Darren, for pointing out this error.]

There are numerous “discussions” on Facebook about the Romney ads which show people who say “I built this business.” Detractors say that they really should have said, “I built this business, but I had a lot of help from the U.S. Government and the American taxpayer and couldn’t have done it without them.” Detractors also say that these people are “liars.”

What absolutely galls me about this stance—that these people are liars, a very strong choice of word—is the insistence that passive participation is somehow meritorious of credit and therefore diminishes the role of the business owners in their own successes.

I believe that this insistence is an underlying difference between conservatives and liberals and is indicative of a pattern of thinking which defies logic and the natural order of the universe. It is the same reasoning which blames the maker of the gun for a massacre. It is the same reasoning which blames the alcohol, not the alcoholic. It is the same reasoning which goes further than merely awarding trophies to the losing team “just for playing.”

This reasoning takes the trophies from the winning team and gives them to the moms who drove the kids to the games, to the road builders who made those roads, to the Chrysler employees who made the minivans, and to the taxpayers who subsidized those minivans during this administration.

Congratulations, American people! President Obama thinks you won a soccer game! Thanks for not playing!

Speaking of sports, tonight I watched three men run 10,000m in less than 28 minutes thereby placing them on the podium to receive gold, silver and bronze medals. There isn’t a person in the world who would deny that they achieved that victory, that the race was theirs to win or lose, and that they won…

…except, apparently, President Obama. By his own reasoning, he would stand at that podium and denounce their victories.

“You didn’t win that race on your own, somebody else won that race for you!”

“I’m always struck by people who think ‘well, it must be because I was just so fast.’ There are a lot of fast people out there! ‘It must be because I ran faster than everybody else.’ Let me tell you something—there are a whole bunch of fast people out there!”

President Obama would remove the medals from the necks of these athletes and place them around his own neck, all in the name of a shared victory. You know, because we earned it.

I’m sure there aren’t many business owners who wouldn’t give credit where credit is due, just like I’m sure that there isn’t an athlete who wouldn’t credit coaches and training partners with helping. But coaches coach. Training partners train. Business partners partner. Investors invest. Spouses spice or whatever it is that we do as we support our business builders in their quests.

What President Obama is missing is that all of these activities are active in their support of those who build businesses, of those who run the races, of those who clear the bar, of those who play the game. For one to claim any sort of credit for the success of another requires active participation—doing something.

Yes, the government can do something. For example, if a Small Business Administration adviser helped that business succeed, she can claim some credit because she actively participated. But just because we paid taxes to pay her salary does not mean that we built that business, not one bit. That’s called a “passive activity,” by the government’s very own definition. (See “IRS.”)

It means that I, Bill Eccles, taxpayer, had nothing to do with the success of your business. I don’t deserve the credit, nor do I want it.

The good news is that most Americans don’t want the credit which President Obama is offering them. [source] So, wise Americans: are you going to re-elect a president who is willing to blame others for his own failures, while stealing success from others, distributing it to anybody willing to accept the handout?

I didn’t think so, because you’re one of those “smart people out there.”

Vote wisely in November.