It's A Mess

I fall in with the 357,000 not insured in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts because as a small business person the Commonwealth Connector uses the gross income figure on your Schedule C, Profit or Loss From Business form not the 1040 Income amount. When you have a business, the business has expenses which comes off the top of that gross income figure. No matter what your business expenses are, you will never qualify for the reduced premium program. Yet if you can't afford $1,000 a month health insurance premiums, well you're stuck and you will btw be paying a $912 penalty for not abiding by the law. You cannot get blood from a rock.

This whole mandated health insurance program is a farce and will eventually bankrupt this state but wait, there is an answer to this financial crises, Gov. Deval Patrick, rescind the law! But then we don't use Common Sense in the Commonwealth!

Kennedy Returns to the Cape

The Kennedy 50' sloop, Mya in the waters off Hyannis Port


A poignant personal moment . . .

Teddy Kennedy - God Bless

Politics aside, as a life long resident of Massachusetts (Cape Cod) I have been [through osmosis] steeped in the Kennedy family mystique; the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Rose Kennedy, JFK and Camelot, Jackie, Caroline, and John-John, the assassinations of JFK and his brother Bobby, the untimely death of John-John and the search for his plane off the Vineyard, Caroline's wedding at St. Francis Xavier in Hyannis, the beautiful sloop Mya and the Figawi, and so many more life's tragedies and celebrations too numerous to mention. Through it all, Ted Kennedy has been the strength and guiding light of the Kennedy family.

I am deeply saddened at this the most recent Kennedy tragedy, this fearful diagnosis. My heart goes out to him, his children, his wife, and the rest of the Kennedy family.

The man has witnessed much suffering. Perhaps now we can forgive and forget the mistakes of his past. God bless.

Obama's Brand of Diplomacy

Rove @ WSJ.com expresses some of the very same concerns I have with Obama, which we all should have, and provides the facts behind years of secret diplomacy with China, North Korea et al which Obama was either truly unaware of (yikes) or even more disturbing to me is the thought that he's merely posturing with the equally uninformed American electorate as this nation's savior.

Seems we've been talking with our enemies through diplomatic channels forever Mr. Obama, yet here you come riding on your white horse telling us you would for the first time sit down and talk with our nation's enemies (without preconditions btw) like it's never been done before!

And this man wants to be this nation's next president?? Hell, give me Hillary over this guy.

Obama's Flawed Grasp of History

Hugh Hewitt @ Townhall.com conducts a compelling in-depth interview with former UN Ambassador, John Bolton discussing, among other things, Obama's dangerously flawed grasp of history and it's potential for disastrous results if he should become this nation's president.

Obama, having been educated in the most elite learning institutions (not to mention his indoctrination in Black Theology), has been duped by his educators/professors into believing the revisionist history of the United States they taught (again I say as promulgated by the so-called intelligentsia like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky) as an evil warmonger nation with imperialist designs on the world. The real history of our country is being thrown down the proverbial Orwellian memory hole then rewritten to suit the purposes of the socialist/Marxists/progressives academia and their institutions of "higher learning."

Learn we must but we must learn the truth, not the lie or we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

At First Light

Oil analyst says expect gas prices of $12 - $15 a gallon within a year or two

Oil executives place the blame for the current oil crises right where it belongs--on Congress. Meanwhile, the MSM has colluded with Congress to blame big oil.

The other crucial factor in the price of oil -- the fall of the dollar:

"Many investors believe the dollar’s protracted decline over the past year has been the most significant factor behind oil’s rise from about $66 a barrel a year ago to today’s highs."

Congress' answer to the oil crises? -- sue OPEC That'll scare em, and we mean business!!

Transformational Belief

OneCosmos gives insight into the power of a belief no matter it's rationale to transform the believer:

" . . . the jihadi doesn't become a jihadi because there is any realistic hope of creating a unified Islamic caliphate worse than death on earth. Rather, the reason he becomes a jihadi is to share in this intoxicating fantasy. To believe it is to be transformed by it, so the real motivation is strictly personal, just projected onto the world-historical stage.

In so many ways, leftism shares this same dynamic, in that it always promises things that by definition it can never deliver. We know this ahead of time. But that's not the point. The point is to believe and to be transformed by the belief. This is why the left is such an odd grab-bag of losers, perverts, crackpots, ideologues, dimwits, and evil geniuses."

Kudos Hillary

Hillary has turned out to be a strong, hang-tough kind of gal throughout this interminable Democrat primary process. You go girl.

I never thought I would ever feel sorry for her but even the feminists, her own party, and the media have thrown her over for the new kid on the block. Yet she has far more Senate experience, she offers a more sane foreign policy than the dangerously naive Obama, and she has championed the concerns of the working middle class Americans (aka the bitter ones) yet it wasn't enough. If she could have just been a little less shrill and a little more personable things would be different now as the clock runs out.

How shallow though are the liberal/progressives/environmentalists/anti-war Democrats to swoon at the feet of this virtually unknown, inexperienced, arrogant, elitist lawyer/politician. What are they thinking?

Gone Over To The Dark Side

Whenever I see or hear a liberal politician spouting lies or trashing the right on the news I find myself quickly reaching for the TV remote. I cannot believe for the life of me why it is that Democrat politicians have all gone over to the Dark Side (with perhaps the exception of Joe Lieberman) since the time of their last great, genuine hope, John F. Kennedy.






Speaking of the Dark Side, while watching Star War reruns on TV the other night I finally saw the episode that explained Darth Vader's capitulation to the Dark Side. At least he had a noble reason to abandon the Force (made a bargain to save his wife's life in case you too didn't know). But then as always happens when you make a pact with the devil, there is a price to pay.



Speaking of the devil, if you haven't seen Al Pacino in Devil's Advocate I highly recommend it. Al Pacino is another one of my all time favorite actors.

First Things

Ted Kennedy has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. This doesn't sound very good. I wish him well and will pray for him, his wife and children.

Don't Ask

Here's a list of things one may not dare question aloud about the presumptive democrat presidential candidate (aka Obama) . . .

(h/t Vanderleun)

Liberals Are Cooler

I can see how if I were a "young" person today having been brought up by socially liberal parents, having gone to government schools where I was taught revisionist anti-American history a la Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, told to embrace multiculturalism, Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and provided with condoms and birth control pills in the in-school health clinic, I would look at conservatives and Conservatism as a bunch of judgmental, stodgy, out-of-touch yahoos.

Liberalism by far is more youth oriented than is Conservatism. What Conservatism needs is a charismatic, youthful spokesperson on the national level to even begin to compete with the likes of an Obama.

This is why Obama has the hold he has over the Democrat electorate and the media -- it's not his ideology, intellect, or his gravitas (remember that word?) -- it's his hipness, his cool, his demeanor, his charm, his self assured manner, his youthful good looks.

That's powerful stuff. Hillary, poor dear, only wishes she could compete on that level, but alas her youth has come and gone. It just doesn't seem fair.

Flag Pin and Principles

I thought Mr. Obama had taken a principled stand that he would never wear a flag pin on his lapel, yet when doing so would help him politically, well so much for ones' principles.

Here he is accepting the long awaited endorsement from John Edwards. Both dutifully wearing their flag pins. I guess it is expedient only when you're trying to grasp for the white vote.

At First Light

WorldNetDaily has some pics of Obama on the cover of Rev. Wright's Trumpet magazine

He apologizes but still doesn't answer her question

Okay Sean, say what? ”I hope that he will understand, if he is the nominee, the degree of disillusionment that will happen if he doesn't become a greater man than he will ever be. . .”

Maybe, just maybe Republicans will wake up

Boston Herald apologizes for falsely accusing NE Patriots

Rove explains why the GOP is imploding

He Doesn't Care

Here's what it is about Obama that turns me off above and beyond all the rhetoric, the race baiting, his associations with Wright, Ayers, Rezko, et al -- he doesn't give a damn about me. He thinks of me as just another "typical white person."

We really have nothing in common -- I'm a patriot, he hates America; I'm "middle class", he's a rich elitist; I'm a realist, he tries to sell us on hope and change; I believe in a loving God, he believes in a God that punishes whites; he doesn't care about my high taxes, he wants to tax me more; he doesn't care about how difficult it is for me to make ends meet every month what with the rising cost of fuel, food, goods, services, and state and municipal taxes, and mandated health insurance coverage in my state of Massachusetts, money is not an object for him; he's an arrogant snob, I'm a likeable hard working, grateful for all that I have and all that I am little ol' me.

If he should become president, well God help us middle class and rich white and black folk because it will be retribution time especially if Michelle has anything to say about it and then this country will really have gone to hell in a hand basket.

Values Politics

This presidential election will be decided on the basis of one and only one criteria in the end: the American electorate will vote for the candidate who best represents their personal values aka identity politics.

That person will for liberal blacks and white liberal elitists, be Obama. For white and black conservatives, libertarians, or "moderates" it will be McCain. It is all about identity politics in the end. Who is most like me. Who has the same world view. Who offers the best solutions to my problems -- skyrocketing health care and energy costs, job security, the threat posed by the Islamofacists, taxes, securing Social Security, gun rights, abortion rights, gay rights, illegal immigrant rights, -- whatever they may be.

Bill and Hillary Clinton once were the darlings of the media. But they say it's Obama's turn now. But why isn't it Hillary's turn? Is it racism? Is it sexism? Could it be identity politics? Aagh!!

"A Few Good Men" Revisited

Thanks Mike @ ColdFury for reminding me of this truly great movie moment provided by one of my all time favorite actors, Jack Nicholson, in A Few Good Men:

"Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You curse the marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. My existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall – you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide,and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you are entitled to."

Democrat's Energy Plan

We now have the long awaited and much vaunted Democrat Energy Plan and as expected there is no new substantial plan to produce additional energy either through oil or nuclear or any other currently viable energy alternatives. There is a plan, however, to tax the "windfall" profits of the oil companies as if that idea, which has been tried before, ever produced a single barrel of crude but only served to increase the cost to the consumer of a gallon of gasoline, they continue to disallow for drilling for domestic oil, instead those wily Dems will get tough with OPEC.

How does this in any way solve our country's growing energy needs, short term or long? It doesn't. They know that but then the Plan isn't meant to. It is a political ploy to convince the American people in a presidential election year that only the Democrats can solve this nation's pressing problems. And knowing the American left electorate as they do, they are assured that they will never be held to account for what they haven't done but will be championed instead for playing tough and placing the blame for all our nations ills on the party of the opposition.

Research in the private sector to find a viable energy alternative proceeds at a feverish pace. It is only a matter of time before there is a cost effective energy alternative brought to market. We don't need the federal government involved because as we all know that means we the taxpayer will be ponying up even more tax dollars which will serve to fuel the government bureaucracy but not our gas tanks.

Leaving The Cultural Left

Maggie's Farm reminds us today about this:

"I grew up in a northwest Ohio town where conservative was a polite term for reactionary. When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of Mississippi "sweltering in the heat of oppression," he could have been describing my community, where blacks knew to keep their heads down, and animosity toward Catholics and Jews was unapologetic. Liberal and conservative, like left and right, wouldn't be part of my lexicon for a while, but when King proclaimed, "I have a dream," I instinctively cast my lot with those I later found out were liberals (then synonymous with "the left" and "progressive thought"). The people on the other side were dedicated to preserving my hometown's backward-looking status quo. This was all that my 10-year-old psyche needed to
know. The knowledge carried me for a long time. Mythologies are helpful that way.

I began my activist career championing the 1968 presidential candidacies of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, because both promised to end America's misadventure in Vietnam. I marched for peace and farm worker justice, lobbied for women's right to choose and environmental protections, signed up with George McGovern in 1972 and got elected as the youngest delegate ever to a Democratic convention. Eventually I joined the staff of U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio. In short, I became a card-carrying liberal, although I never actually got a card. (Bookkeeping has never been the left's strong suit.) All my commitments centered on belief in equal opportunity, due process, respect for the dignity of the individual and solidarity with people in trouble. To my mind, Americans who had joined the resistance to Franco's fascist dystopia captured the progressive spirit at its finest.

A turning point came at a dinner party on the day Ronald Reagan famously described the Soviet Union as the pre-eminent source of evil in the modern world. The general tenor of the evening was that Reagan's use of the word "evil" had moved the world closer to annihilation. There was a palpable sense that we might not make it to dessert. When I casually offered that the surviving relatives of the more than 20 million people murdered on orders of Joseph Stalin might not find "evil'" too strong a word, the room took on a collective bemused smile of the sort you might expect if someone had casually mentioned taking up child molestation for sport. My progressive companions had a point. It was rude to bring a word like "gulag" to the dinner table.

I look back on that experience as the beginning of my departure from a left already well on its way to losing its bearings. Two decades later, I watched with astonishment as leading left intellectuals launched a telethon- like body count of civilian deaths caused by American soldiers in Afghanistan. Their premise was straightforward, almost giddily so: When the number of civilian Afghani deaths surpassed the carnage of Sept. 11, the war would be unjust, irrespective of other considerations. Stated simply: The force wielded by democracies in self-defense was declared morally equivalent to the nihilistic aggression perpetuated by Muslim fanatics. Susan Sontag cleared her throat for the "courage" of the al Qaeda pilots. Norman Mailer pronounced the dead of Sept. 11 comparable to "automobile statistics." The events of that day were likely premeditated by the White House, Gore Vidal insinuated. Noam Chomsky insisted that al Qaeda at its most atrocious generated no terror greater than American foreign policy on a mediocre day.

All of this came back to me as I watched the left's anemic, smirking response to Iraq's election in January. Didn't many of these same people stand up in the sixties for self-rule for oppressed people and against fascism in any guise? Yes, and to their lasting credit. But many had since made clear that they had also changed their minds about the virtues of King's call for equal of opportunity.

These days the postmodern left demands that government and private institutions guarantee equality of outcomes. Any racial or gender "disparities" are to be considered evidence of culpable bias, regardless of factors such as personal motivation, training, and skill. This goal is neither liberal nor progressive; but it is what the left has chosen. In a very real sense it may be the last card held by a movement increasingly ensnared in resentful questing for group-specific rights and the subordination of citizenship to group identity. There's a word for this: pathetic.

I smile when friends tell me I've "moved right." I laugh out loud at what now passes for progressive on the main lines of the cultural left. In the name of "diversity," the University of Arizona has forbidden discrimination based on "individual style." The University of Connecticut has banned "inappropriately directed laughter." Brown University, sensing unacceptable gray areas, warns that harassment "may be intentional or unintentional and still constitute
harassment." (Yes, we're talking "subconscious harassment" here. We're watching your thoughts ...).

Wait, it gets better. When actor Bill Cosby called on black parents to explain to their kids why they are not likely to get into medical school speaking English like "Why you ain't" and "Where you is," Jesse Jackson countered that the time was not yet right to "level the playing field." Why not? Because "drunk people can't do that ... illiterate people can't do that." When self-styled pragmatic feminist Camille Paglia mocked young coeds who believe "I should be able to get drunk at a fraternity party and go upstairs to a guy's room without anything happening," Susan Estrich spoke up for gender-focused feminists who "would argue that so long as women are powerless relative to men, viewing 'yes' as a sign of true consent is misguided."

I'll admit my politics have shifted in recent years, as have America's political landscape and cultural horizon. Who would have guessed that the U.S. senator with today's best voting record on human rights would be not Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas Republican Sam Brownback? He is also by most measures one of the most conservative senators. Brownback speaks openly about how his horror at the genocide in the Sudan is shaped by his Christian faith, as King did when he insisted on justice for "all of God's children."

My larger point is rather simple. Just as a body needs different medicines at different times for different reasons, this also holds for the body politic.

In the sixties, America correctly focused on bringing down walls that prevented equal access and due process. It was time to walk the Founders' talk -- and we did. With barriers to opportunity no longer written into law, today the body politic is crying for different remedies.

America must now focus on creating healthy, self-actualizing individuals committed to taking responsibility for their lives, developing their talents, honing their skills and intellects, fostering emotional and moral intelligence, all in all contributing to the advancement of the human condition.

At the heart of authentic liberalism lies the recognition, in the words of John Gardner, "that the ever renewing society will be a free society (whose] capacity for renewal depends on the individuals who make it up." A continuously renewing society, Gardner believed, is one that seeks to "foster innovative, versatile, and self-renewing men and women and give them room to breathe."

One aspect of my politics hasn't changed a bit. I became a liberal in the first place to break from the repressive group orthodoxies of my reactionary hometown. This past January, my liberalism was in full throttle when I bid the cultural left goodbye to escape a new version of that oppressiveness. I departed with new clarity about the brilliance of liberal democracy and the value system it entails; the quest for freedom as an intrinsically human affair; and the dangers of demands for conformity and adherence to any point of view through silence, fear, or coercion. "