An Answer to an Answer

Posted on 10/07/2014 by Grumpa Joe

Time to REboot2

The situation in America has me losing sleep. The only recourse I have to the situation is to write letters to my Senators and Congressman. Last month I wrote to them to stop the madness of allowing all these kids swarming into the country over the nonexistent border between the USA and Mexico. If there is no border where does one start and the other end? An insecure border is an abdication of our sovereignty. We might as well annex Mexico or Mexico should annex the USA. Without borders why do we need a Federal Government? Why are they necessary? Oh, I remember we still need someone to oversee the real government consisting of the EPA, IRS, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Education, etc. all of which are useless money squandering entities. Forget the office of the President his only job is to protect us by enforcing laws but he has abdicated that responsibility along with every other supposed responsibilities he has. The same goes for Congress. They respond only to big money groups like LaRaza, and CAIR. Even the Supreme Court has degenerated into a political arm of the Progressive, Socialist, Communist party of the United States. Their responsibility is to decide if the laws passed by Congress are true to the Constitution, but they chose to re-write the Obama Care law to make it work for them. They should have bounced it to Mars and told Congress to fix it. Using the same example, laws requiring expenditures are written by the House of Representatives. The Senate penned Obama-Care.

Under the Constitution, each of the three branches of government are equal but separate. Currently we see a huge imbalance between the power of the President and the Congress. Congress is taking it in the shorts. Congress should do everything in its power to curb the Presidential power plays of using Executive Orders to write laws, or the Bureaus like the EPA to write regulations that are worse than laws. If you break a law they arrest you and you get a chance with a trial. If you break an EPA regulation the EPA fines you and takes away your paycheck via garnishment and they don’t have to go to court to seek it either.

Anyway, Here is a copy of the response I received this week from Senator Dicky Durbin followed by my rebuttal.

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140710-P2-DurbinIMGFinally, here is the letter I posted today. A copy of the letter Durbin is responding to is here. Well, it the same letter only to my Congressman.:

Senator Richard J. Durban

711 Hart Senate Building Washington,

DC 20510-1304

Dear Senator Durbin:

Thank you for responding to my letter of 10 June 2014 regarding the swarm of children flooding into the country without Visa’s. I appreciate the insightful response and gained some valuable information about our system. What I didn’t get is an answer to why we allow these kids to cross the border in the first place. Where is our secure border? Why is it not secure? Why are these kids not being sent back to their home country immediately? We spend money to bus them, and fly them from one US City to another but not to their homes? What could be more humanitarian than to return a child to his parents?

As my Senator, I expect you to be urging, counseling, and even scolding the President to show example to the world by enforcing the laws we have about the rules for coming to the USA. President Obama has recklessly abandoned and choses to disregard the laws for sending VISA-less immigrants back. Yet he sends millions of dollars through HLS to Central American countries to advertise them not to come because of the terrible penalty they will meet. What penalty? How bad is it to be given a court date two years out to state your case, and then be allowed to assimilate into the population living off the system with their incredibly resourceful ability to find Social Security Cards and shirttail relatives?

Since I have not read any news about you communicating strong messages to the President to enforce our laws, I can only assume it is because you agree with the President’s policies making you just as guilty of lawlessness.

In your letter you stated how none of these VISA-less kids is to receive benefits under the laws you cited., but the President is appealing to Congress to approve his request for 3.7 billion dollars for humanitarian aid to these kids. Please clear something up for me. Congress approved a trillion-dollar bailout of the banks to save the country from destruction. Yet, I hear that the banks have paid back the money with interest. Just where is that trillion dollars now? It seems to me that there is a trillion-dollar slush fund hidden somewhere within the buildings surrounding the Washington Mall. My suggestion to you, and the President, is to find this money and use some of it for humanitarian needs within the country.

Also in your letter you very sympathetically state that “Many of these children are escaping their home countries because of the increasing threat of gangs and violence, family abuse, exploitation, and lack of education and economic opportunity “. . . I also suggest you pay attention to the situation in your home state specifically Chicago, where your exact words apply. Where will we send the Chicago kids? To which country will we send our local kids to find a better situation?

Senator Durbin, it is time for you to retire and give the position to someone who will have new enthusiasm for solving problems with ideas that work.

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You Vill Pay Up and Love It

Posted on 02/06/2014 by Grumpa Joe

harbin_china

Imagine a terrible stink in your house. What would you do to get rid of it? If it were my house I would open the windows and turn on a fan to move the stinky air out. When I get into my car, which has sat in the hot sun, I always open the windows and the sun roof to get the hot air out. What do you do when there is pollution in the atmosphere of your town? You pray for a rain storm or a strong wind to blow the pollution away. What do you do if you are asthmatic? If you own your own home and have the money, you install a filter to clean the air in the house. What happens if you are asthmatic, have a very good air-filter and leave the windows open? You suffer because there is no filter available that will clean the air coming into your house fast enough to keep it pure.
Our president drinks the cool-aid provided him by the EPA and his Liberal clean air gurus that the way to clear the air in America is to eliminate coal-burning power plants by taxing them out of business. There is one huge fault in their logic: America is not a closed system like a house. Our boundaries do not keep people from crossing into our country nor do they keep dirty air from entering. There is no bubble surrounding America to keep our pure air contained.
North America is just a tiny fraction of the surface area of Planet Earth. The layer of air between Earth and the stratosphere moves constantly within the country, and the jet stream moves it out.
The brainless scientists who promote the carbon tax scheme to clean the air of America and the world are nothing more than charlatans who are anxious to reach into our pockets to steal money. Even if we eliminate coal-burning power plants over-night and convert our transportation to solar-powered cars, trucks, buses, trains, boats, and airplanes, our air will never be very pure. Why? Because the jet stream will move our pure air to another continent and dirty air from China or India will move in. We will be taxing our power plants unfairly to clear the air of the entire planet. In the mean time, countries like China and India, who are more worried about feeding billions of people, will continue to use dirty coal, and any other form of cheap energy to run their factories. Those factories will pollute the air (as we see in photos of China where people wear face masks to avoid breathing the foul air) while the jet stream moves their crappy air over the Pacific to North America. Our EPA will measure the dirty air and continue to blame it on our power plants and cars.
There is no EPA in China to regulate the socialist government into bankruptcy like we have in America. The citizens of China have no voice in the way things run, the government tells them how to run their lives. At this point, the people in China are happy to eat and improve their condition with food, electronics and cars, and are not concerned by the purity of their air. The government is more concerned with providing jobs to the hundreds of thousands of people coming to town for work than they are about regulating their industry. It will be decades before these undeveloped countries are ready for pure air, but our EPA will continue to harass us to get cleaner to compensate.
Be happy Liberals and cough up the money for all that clean energy you will buy to power your phones, cars, and air-conditioners.

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Fire Them All

Posted on 25/11/2013 by Grumpa Joe
The administrative regions of the United State...

The administrative regions of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Environmental Protection Agency is one of my least favorite bureaucracies. It has outlived its usefulness to we the people. It is now serves the political agenda of a leftist president. Last week, a friend gave me a news clip published in the Wall Street Journal Nov. 21, 2013  titled “The Spy Who Fooled the EPA.” The story is a sick tale about an EPA employee who fooled his bosses into thinking he really did work for them.

All I know is that someone who tricks his superiors into believing he is worth being paid by not doing anything is one shrewd cookie. What makes me furious is that the EPA  did nothing to reprimand him or his superiors for this conduct. Read the article below and tell me what you would have done about this guy if he was your employee.

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The Environmental Protection Agency wants to be the nation’s super-regulator, though it might first try to regulate its own employees. At least the ones pretending to be James Bond.

The Department of Justice in late September announced a plea agreement with John C. Beale , until recently a senior career employee at EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. Beale, 64, has admitted to devoting most of his 23-year career to bilking taxpayers of some $900,000 in pay and expenses. “Saturday Night Live” couldn’t come up with this story.

Information released by law enforcement, and details from an investigation by Louisiana Senator David Vitter, show that the fraud began when Beale stated in his 1989 EPA job application that he’d worked for the U.S. Senate, though there is no record of such employment. By 1994 Beale was claiming he was a CIA operative to justify prolonged absences. Apparently this raised no eyebrows at EPA.

Prosecutors estimate that from 2000 to 2013 Beale was absent from his EPA duties for a total of 2.5 years, claiming to be working for “Langley” or on a special EPA “research project.” In 2008 he was gone for six months but never submitted a leave request. Around May 2011, Beale claimed to be retiring and celebrated with colleagues on a dinner cruise. An EPA manager admitted to not seeing Beale at the office after that, though not noticing until November 2012 that Beale was still on the payroll.

Beale used his “research” excuse to have taxpayers fund at least five trips to Los Angeles—worth $57,000 in travel expenses—to visit relatives and stay at nice hotels. Beale also claimed that he’d contracted malaria while serving in Vietnam, requiring taxpayers to cough up $18,000 for a handicapped parking spot in downtown Washington, D.C. He didn’t serve in Vietnam and he didn’t have malaria.

Beale was paid despite his absences and he received retention incentive bonuses that for a time made him among the highest paid employees at EPA. Mr. Vitter’s office has noted that Beale was only approved to receive these bonuses for six years, yet EPA somehow handed them out for 23. Spooks the world over are jealous.

To recap: The same agency that wants to regulate the nation’s carbon economy failed to vet a new hire, swallowed his spy stories, and paid a salary and bonuses to an employee who didn’t come to work and whom it didn’t notice was missing. EPA Inspector General Arthur Elkins, who is investigating the agency’s employment and supervisory practices, says this fraud was the result of “an absence of even basic internal controls at the EPA.”

Mr. Vitter is pushing for a Senate hearing into EPA mismanagement, but Environment and Public Works Chairman Barbara Boxer is resisting. Amid all of the other current demonstrations of government incompetence, perhaps she figures this is simply too embarrassing.

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Isn’t that a hoot? Imagine if you found a job at a private sector company and after working there for a few years you go absent for a month or two. You come back and your boss asks you where you were and you tell him you were working for someone else. First of all, I don’t know a single supervisor who would not fire someone who went missing for a month. Second, if he still worked for the company when he came back, he wouldn’t last a minute, especially if he told them he went to work for someone else.

It is my lame opinion after serving as a manager for over thirty years that I would not only fire the perpetrator, but I would fire his direct supervisor for not knowing what the hell was going on. Lastly, I would get fired for not knowing what was going on in my area of responsibility.

When you work for the Federal government things are different.  Who cares what is going on? It’s only taxpayer money they waste so why not milk the system for everything it is worth?

The entire  EPA must be scrapped and a law passed to crucify anyone who comes up with another agency that has the same objectives as the EPA.

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Opening Day At the 2013 Monet Vision

Posted on 15/05/2013 by Grumpa Joe

Ugh! Opening day in the garden is always a drag, and procrastination delayed my arrival. I love blogging and sat down this morning and even early this afternoon to write, but it didn’t happen. The temperature settled at 85 degrees and the little man inside my head kept urging me to go outside to enjoy the day. “Okay,” I told him, “quit nagging me.” I decided to take a baby step and to spend one hour outside. I even had a plan, i.e. start cleaning the bed behind the kitchen window. That will only take an hour. Three and a half hours later, I dragged my weary body in and collapsed, but at least I took a step.

2013-Monet Vision, Main Bed

2013-Monet Vision, Main Bed

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Cirsium Arvense, Thistle

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Grape Hyacinth

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Dandelion Puff Balls

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White Iris

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Lilly of the Valley beginning to bloom

My mind reeled with visions of work. Move the mums, split the wild geraniums, move the native hibiscus, trim the shrubs, dig out the five foot tall volunteer bush at the bird tower, move the day lilies into the sun, trim the shag bark birch, spray the dandelions, clean the leaves from the east side of the house, trim the Fallopia Japonica, cut back the shrubs along the east border, pull the weeds from the vegetable bed, and I haven’t even thought about buying any flowers yet. Oh my, what am I going to do? Take it one baby step at a time, that is what!

The first priority is to clean all maximum impact areas. What is a maximum impact area? Any flower bed that I can see from my chair at the kitchen table is a maximum impact area. There is an order of priority commencing from the chair, and progressing to the view standing at the kitchen window, to looking out the sunroom windows, to the bedroom windows, and finally, my neighbor’s view from his patio to the the far reaches of the yard.

Garden waste is always a problem for me. The village provides a pickup service, but I have to place the waste curbside in officially approved and tagged brown paper bags. That does not appeal to me at all. I prefer dumping garden waste into a pile beyond the lot line in the swamp. The EPA designation for swamp these days is “wetland.” Last year, the Wetlands Officer gave me a ticket for dumping evil grass clippings and dead dandelions on officially designated wetland property. The list of damage I subjected upon to the environment seemed endless. Further infractions of tossing horticultural matter into the swamp is punishable, and objectionable to the natural critters who consider the swamp their home.

When I finally came in, I went to my computer and googled NuWay Waste Disposal. That is the company that trucks our garbage and recyclables away. Eureka, they offer a yard waste disposal bin for a seasonal fee. The choice is to pay for the official brown bags, or for a handy waste container that gets picked up weekly. The Monet Vision produces a few square yards of horticultural matter every year, and the bin is a much more practical way to dispose of the waste. At least it is for me.

When the Frankfort Environmental Officer arrives to inspect my piece of the swamp, I will proudly point at my new garden waste bin and thumb my nose at him. Then, I will politely ask him what he will do to eradicate all the non-native thistle and doc migrating from his swamp into my horticultural masterpiece.

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Too Bloomin’ Funny

Posted on 10/01/2013 by Grumpa Joe

I don’t know why I have such a mean streak, but I do. It seems that when I find something that makes a liberal look like a dumb-ass I fall in love with it. The following news article is one of them.

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