Feed the Birds

Posted on 03/12/2024 by Grumpa Joe

It might be my imagination that thousands of birds are seeking food at feeders this fall. Flocks of hundreds swarm through the skies in swooping aerial gymnastics and land near a feeding place. I poured a pound of sunflower seed into the backyard feeder this morning. As I write this, flying critters like English Sparrows, Chickadees, House Wrens, Gold Finches, and some that I don’t recognize are staging themselves in the adjacent juniper shrub, waiting for an opportunity to fly in and join the party. I read somewhere that when birds feed like crazy it is because a storm is coming and they are stocking up to survive the atrocious weather; it is called a “feeding frenzy.” I enjoy feeding them and recognize that with the nasty twenty degree(F) weather we are experiencing they need all the help I can give them. Like all things the cost of seed has skyrocketed and my pockets are not as deep as they were a year ago.

Numerous birds feed from the feeder
Three squirrels feed off the ground below the bird feeder

This experience with the birds is not unlike the swarms of immigrants crossing our borders to escape unhealthy conditions in their home countries. Like the birds, we feed and house them, and unless they can find work and earn a living, we must continue doing so. We can’t just put them in a motel for a week and feed them once, hoping the problem disappears. They are hungry every day. The problem, as I see it, is that these immigrants will cost me a lot more than a fifty-pound bag of sunflower seeds every two or three weeks. Feeding a few birds and or immigrants is not the same as feeding swarms of them. How do we deal with the problem?

One answer is to send them back home, but they left home because they were unhappy. We should not be concerned about their level of happiness as long as they are not starving and have shelter. Our so-called broken immigration system was carefully drafted to give the country time to assimilate new people into our culture. What is broken is the law. It is being broken daily by those who supposedly should be enforcing it.

I agree that the world has a shrinking population problem, but I also remember that not long ago people were going crazy about overpopulation. The cry was for abortion, birth control, and various schemes dedicated to keeping the planet from being ruined by too many people. Hell, China went so far as to adopt a one-child law, and they vigorously enforced it. If a Chinese couple wanted a second baby and defied the rule, they might suddenly learn that they no longer had a job or an apartment. The law worked so well that the government soon learned that there would not be enough people to care for the elderly. Now, China is panicking and encouraging more babies to be born. Except, the young people who are in the child bearing years have learned that having babies is expensive and also hard work. Without saying it, they are sending a message to the CCP to go pound sand. It is their problem, they created it, and it is theirs to deal with.

The shrinking population has also affected the USA. Like the CCP, our ruling leaders have decided to solve the problem by importing new people from countries where young people still like to have babies. Instead of doing this correctly by changing the laws to increase our population through immigration, they decided to open the borders and let the world in. I believe that the entire world population would immigrate to the USA if we were dumb enough to allow it.

Recently, I sponsored an immigrant to come to the USA. Except they were already here. It so happened that they came no matter what or how. I hired an attorney to help me make things legal. The process took three and a half years, about ten thousand dollars, and the immigration department required untold numbers of forms to be completed (I-130, I-131, I-485, I-601, I-765, G-28, I might be wrong, but I assume there are continuous form numbers to fill in all the gaps in between those I used. That would imply that there are well over a thousand forms in the immigration system all dealing with very specific cases.) . The forms are all in English but unintelligible because they are in the language of Immigration Services, and only those people trained in that system understand them. We also had three face-to-face interviews during which the immigrant was interrogated relentlessly. Thankfully, we hired an language interpreter to work with us so the questions could be answered lawfully. Many of the questions they asked were already answered in writing as they were directly from the forms submitted. It was obvious to me that they were trying to trip up the immigrant with answers different from those on the form.

Yes, the system is very hard to deal with, but our lawmakers made it that way. Any time a new case arrived that the standard forms couldn’t address, they revised the form to accept the case or invented a new form. Each form has a number. In our case the form numbers ranged from one hundred and thirty to seven hundred and sixty-five. Immigration officers must use the forms exactly as written. They must assure that the immigrant has answered the question validly, if not, the application is denied. .

This process was very much different than the one that was in place when my parents arrived on Ellis Island in the nineteen twenties. I must give our country credit for allowing over 1.4 million immigrants into the country lawfully every year. There is not another country in the world that is as generous with its immigration quotas. It is just in the last few decades that we have lost it and have decided to break our own rules. The existing system is generous to a fault. It is designed to let good healthy people in, and to give the country time to allow the newcomers to culturally assimilate, learn the language, find jobs, and housing. What we did over the last four years was to allow as many people into the country to make a new city the size of New York literally, over night.

Finally, I recommend that if you have kids, grandkids, nephews, nieces, advise them to become lawyers specializing in immigration law. They will have lifetime employment. Secondly, I urge you to feed the birds.

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Divided We Fall

Posted on 07/04/2024 by Grumpa Joe

This is one of those days when I don’t have anything to write about. So, I’ll resort to beginning with words that might not make sense at the start but may mean something by the time I finish. When I experienced my greatest readership a few years ago, I was writing opinion pieces about Obama. At the time, I thought he was a born-in-Africa communist dressed in Brooks Brothers suits and pretending to love this country. Today, I am quite certain that he is a communist born in Kenya. He was hell bent on implementing his communist father’s proposal to redistribute the wealth of America, and dividing the country into hate groups. The President of Kenya hired him, and promptly fired him when Daddy Obama began to propose his plan to take from the rich to feed the poor.

The hate groups BO tickled into functioning were not just black vs white, they were Muslims against Christians, queers against straight, Europe against Russia, the world against China, etc. the list is endless. There is more division in America today than there has ever been among peoples of the world since the beginning of time. He couldn’t accomplish the deed while in office illegally, so helped steal the last election from Trump, his greatest enemy, for a candidate that he himself believes to be a dimwit. He knew he could control the dimwit from within the depths of the Deep State bureaucracy.

During his presidency, Obama was afraid he might be exposed as a charlatan if he pushed the radical left too hard to bankrupt America. In walks the dimwit, who immediately erased every positive move Trump made while in office, he ignored all existing laws, and proceeded to open the border to allow millions of unvetted immigrants to cross. The dimwit then bussed, flew, and transported them to unidentified cities across the country and assured them that America would care for them with free stuff. At the same time, dimwit began a deep-state war against Trump to ensure that his innovative ideas to save the country will never happen. In effect, Obama granted himself a third term as president.

We all know that Obama was elected under the guise of affirmative action. We needed a black president to cool the 20 percent of the population that feels they need a savior to lead them to the promised land. The promised land where they can live happily ever after, stealing people’s stuff and shooting each other at will. I feel sorry for the blacks who live righteous lives, and I despise the blacks who are spoiling life for their brothers and sisters. Obama and dimwit will label me a racist for saying that.

We are a nation with our heads in the sand regarding placing blame where it belongs. The powers that be ignore that the lousy education system is the result of teacher unions that are more interested in making a fortune for doing nothing than in taking responsibility for poor educational outcomes. The Congress is responsible for drafting and passing stupid laws creating a culture of black families without fathers. Congress is responsible for never repealing stupid laws only making them more stupid by amending them with more complicated twists, turns, and loop holes. Congress is also responsible for abdicating to the lobby industry all responsibility to write laws. Congress, then fills the lobby written laws with pages full of porky earmarks that help them get re-elected. When will the common man be allowed to lobby a congressman to write laws that make sense and might even work? The DOJ must be renamed to the Department of Injustice for dividing law against order.

Our government does not work the way the Founding Fathers envisioned it. For one thing, I’m positive that George Washington and his cabinet did not envision the mess we have brought upon ourselves. The first immigration law was passed in 1892 and has been enhanced, improved, and complicated at least ten more times since its inception. The number of people working for all the immigration services has changed from 180 in 1891 to about 320,000 in 2024. Politicians love to blame every problem at the border on our “broken” immigration system. The problem as I see it is that they have so much help and so many conflicting policies that they are tripping over themselves trying to get the job done.

My personal experience with immigration came when I offered to help an immigrant who has lived in America for over twenty years but is not considered ‘legal’. I couldn’t live with that, so I made it my responsibility to get the immigrant processed as quickly as possible. To date, it has cost nearly ten thousand dollars, and it has been three years in the making, but still no Green Card. There is no estimate for how long the process will take. Most of the cost is for processing fees. The excuse I get is that the Law makes the immigrant responsible for the cost of his becoming ‘legal’. I see a future in this racket for immigration attorneys who specialize in understanding the laws and its loopholes. And there are loopholes a many. In trying to understand how complicated the system is I have visited the USCIS website many times and have learned that there are over 500 different forms that pertain to the laws with provisions for loop holes in each. Depending on an immigrant’s specific situation decides which form is used to use. After examining several of them I learned that the government is paranoid about anyone telling a lie on a form. Each form has a half page codicil of fine print explaining the penalty for lying on an application. Most penalties are jail, deportation, and/or fines.

My question is this: how many years will it take to:

1.) Find ten million people who have entered the country in the past three years without the necessary paperwork?

2.) How long will it be before these people achieve legal status?

While we await the answer to those questions Congress, no doubt, will spend its time drafting new revisions and laws to make the processing more complicated. They will then spend endless hours on TV news programs explaining how these new laws make us more secure than the previous law did.

Hopefully, I fulfilled my promise at the beginning by delivering final words that make sense.

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A Blatant Disregard for the Law

Posted on 28/01/2014 by Grumpa Joe

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Senator Ted Cruz from Texas wrote an insightful article for the Wall Street Journal where he exposes President Obama’s reckless disregard for the law. It is my opinion that the President should face Impeachment for his offenses to disregard his oath of office to uphold the law of the land and to protect the Constitution.

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Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the president’s persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat. On Monday, Mr. Obama acted unilaterally to raise the minimum wage paid by federal contracts, the first of many executive actions the White House promised would be a theme of his State of the Union address Tuesday night.

The president’s taste for unilateral action to circumvent Congress should concern every citizen, regardless of party or ideology. The great 18th-century political philosopher Montesquieu observed: “There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates.” America’s Founding Fathers took this warning to heart, and we should too.

Rule of law doesn’t simply mean that society has laws; dictatorships are often characterized by an abundance of laws. Rather, rule of law means that we are a nation ruled by laws, not men. That no one—and especially not the president—is above the law. For that reason, the U.S. Constitution imposes on every president the express duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

Yet rather than honor this duty, President Obama has openly defied it by repeatedly suspending, delaying and waiving portions of the laws he is charged to enforce. When Mr. Obama disagreed with federal immigration laws, he instructed the Justice Department to cease enforcing the laws. He did the same thing with federal welfare law, drug laws and the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

On many of those policy issues, reasonable minds can disagree. Mr. Obama may be right that some of those laws should be changed. But the typical way to voice that policy disagreement, for the preceding 43 presidents, has been to work with Congress to change the law. If the president cannot persuade Congress, then the next step is to take the case to the American people. As President Reagan put it: “If you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat” of electoral accountability.

President Obama has a different approach. As he said recently, describing his executive powers: “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone.” Under the Constitution, that is not the way federal law is supposed to work.

The Obama administration has been so brazen in its attempts to expand federal power that the Supreme Court has unanimously rejected the Justice Department’s efforts to expand federal power nine times since January 2012.

There is no example of lawlessness more egregious than the enforcement—or nonenforcement—of the president’s signature policy, the Affordable Care Act. Mr. Obama has repeatedly declared that “it’s the law of the land.” Yet he has repeatedly violated ObamaCare’s statutory text.

The law says that businesses with 50 or more full-time employees will face the employer mandate on Jan. 1, 2014. President Obama changed that, granting a one-year waiver to employers. How did he do so? Not by going to Congress to change the text of the law, but through a blog post by an assistant secretary at Treasury announcing the change.

The law says that only Americans who have access to state-run exchanges will be subject to employer penalties and may obtain ObamaCare premium subsidies. This was done to entice the states to create exchanges. But, when 34 states decided not to establish state-run exchanges, the Obama administration announced that the statutory words “established by State” would also mean “established by the federal government.”

The law says that members of Congress and their staffs’ health coverage must be an ObamaCare exchange plan, which would prevent them from receiving their current federal-employee health subsidies, just like millions of Americans who can’t receive such benefits. At the behest of Senate Democrats, the Obama administration instead granted a special exemption (deeming “individual” plans to be “group” plans) to members of Congress and their staffs so they could keep their pre-existing health subsidies.

Most strikingly, when over five million Americans found their health insurance plans canceled because ObamaCare made their plans illegal—despite the president’s promise “if you like your plan, you can keep it”—President Obama simply held a news conference where he told private insurance companies to disobey the law and issue plans that ObamaCare regulated out of existence.

In other words, rather than go to Congress and try to provide relief to the millions who are hurting because of the “train wreck” of ObamaCare (as one Senate Democrat put it), the president instructed private companies to violate the law and said he would in effect give them a get-out-of-jail-free card—for one year, and one year only. Moreover, in a move reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s looking-glass world, President Obama simultaneously issued a veto threat if Congress passed legislation doing what he was then ordering.

In the more than two centuries of our nation’s history, there is simply no precedent for the White House wantonly ignoring federal law and asking private companies to do the same. As my colleague Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa asked, “This was the law. How can they change the law?”

Similarly, 11 state attorneys general recently wrote a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius saying that the continuing changes to ObamaCare are “flatly illegal under federal constitutional and statutory law.” The attorneys general correctly observed that “the only way to fix this problem-ridden law is to enact changes lawfully: through Congressional action.”

In the past, when Republican presidents abused their power, many Republicans—and the press—rightly called them to account. Today many in Congress—and the press—have chosen to give President Obama a pass on his pattern of lawlessness, perhaps letting partisan loyalty to the man supersede their fidelity to the law.

But this should not be a partisan issue. In time, the country will have another president from another party. For all those who are silent now: What would they think of a Republican president who announced that he was going to ignore the law, or unilaterally change the law? Imagine a future president setting aside environmental laws, or tax laws, or labor laws, or tort laws with which he or she disagreed.

That would be wrong—and it is the Obama precedent that is opening the door for future lawlessness. As Montesquieu knew, an imperial presidency threatens the liberty of every citizen. Because when a president can pick and choose which laws to follow and which to ignore, he is no longer a president.

 

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Too Far To Turn Back? My Ass

Posted on 26/10/2012 by Grumpa Joe

Small Navy, Weak Commander

The campaign rhetoric is really desperate. Obama wants four more years to completely destroy America. Even if we change course into a more positive direction it will take us a hundred years to undo all the damage he has done. Just taking care of the division between blacks and whites will take that long. There is no doubt in my mind that any gains the blacks have made to gain equality has been undone by Obama’s class warfare. The war on the rich by demonizing them has not been so prevalent since Louis XV in France. We all know how that turned out.

Another hole we must dig out of is the blatant disregard for the laws. In a nation guided by the rule of law, our president has refused and in many cases told his Attorney General to ignore them. Take for instance the law on protecting the borders. He has literally opened the southern border and attacked Arizona with law suits to block any attempt to keep their citizens safe. Arizona asked for federal help to deal with border protection. He sent a small cadre of border patrol agents to protect a five hundred mile long space. How about ignoring New Black Panthers from intimidating polling places? What about gun running to drug cartels in the hopes to make a case against our second amendment rights. What about his latest error in failing to protect US citizens serving the country in embassies?

The real question is what more can he do in four more years? Well, for starters there is Cap and Trade another tax designed to bankrupt companies. There is immigration reform which will officially overload the welfare system. There is abdication of our gun rights to the United Nations by treaty. There is the Islamization of America by requiring schools to teach Islam. His Justice Department Judges attempt to make Sharia law in direct contradiction to the Constitution under separation of church from state. On the flip side of Sharia is the attack on religious freedom of Christians. One of my favorites is his disregard for seniors. He has deliberately raped the Medicare trust fund to fuel his Obama Care. I see this as a Human Rights violation and as discrimination against senior citizens. Don’t we have a right to the health care mandated by Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society?

I see his disregard for working with a lawful budget a disgrace. He argues that he has presented a budget, but Congress overwhelmingly rejected it. Did he re-present an acceptable budget? No.

What I see  happening is that if we give President Obama another four years it will be to put him through the stress of IMPEACHMENT.

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Law Breaker in Chief

Posted on 26/06/2012 by Grumpa Joe

Obama makes another Alinsky move and breaks another law. Section. 3. of Article II of the United States Constitution states the President’s responsibilities

“. . . he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, . . .”

What can I say? Obama is taking Care not to execute Immigration Laws and  is violating his Constitutional responsibilities. He is clearly The Law Breaker in Chief, and Congress must impeach him for this deliberate dereliction. We continue to hear “we are a Nation of Laws”, but then we fail to enforce them i.e. unless it is not politically correct to do so.

One of my current interests is in Immigration reform. My parents were immigrants who came to America by boat to Ellis Island. Most of my friends proudly claim the same heritage, they are sons and daughters of immigrants, LEGAL IMMIGRANTS. The US has a long history of laws beginning in 1875 when the Supreme Court declared that regulation of US immigration is the responsibility of the Federal Government.

1903: This Act restated the 1891 provisions concerning land borders and called for rules covering entry as well as inspection of aliens crossing the Mexican border.

The complete history is available at Rapid Immigration.com

What is grossly hypocritical is that the US government has several immigration policies. One uses the current law, and makes aliens apply through US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The process takes years and money. The second allows aliens to walk across the border. Another scheme is to  over stay a legally acquired Visa. Who decides which immigrant is to stay? Let’s go back in time and settle on one uniform process.

Roughly one million people enter the USA legally every year, millions more walk over the line and set up camp in our cities.

Law Breaker in Chief

Lincoln freed the slaves and saved the Union. Obama makes us slaves and destroys the Union.

The President’s latest assault on Arizona basically cuts the State from the Union. He has succeeded in becoming the opposite of President Lincoln who freed the slaves, and saved the Union. President Obama is severing a State from the Union, and turning private sector workers into twenty-first century tax-slaves. Essentially, the border between Mexico and Arizona ceased to exist with Obama’s order to not enforce immigration law. It is my opinion that he is making good on a campaign promise to Leftist George Soros to open the border to gain Soros’ monetary support. Somehow, I don’t think we should allow George Soros to pull Obama’s strings.

If we are truly a Nation of Laws, then let us enforce them. If we think a Law is wrong, or out of date, let us repeal it . America is a big country with a huge heart. We are capable of assimilating many Peoples into our land. We are dependent on immigration to keep our country alive and vibrant. Let us face it, many people today begin families later in life, and thus they limit how many offspring they can have. Our current birth rate will not sustain us as a people. We need immigrants to keep our exceptional culture alive.

Here is my take on Immigration Reform:

1. Secure the borders. Don’t let anyone in without proper, lawfully obtained documentation. Open borders will only cause more migration of Peoples and cultures that will destroy the concept of America as a country. Open borders will move North American civilization backwards toward a more Neanderthal time.

2. Create a pathway for those illegals already in the country to become legal citizens. Although Amnesty is an easy out, it does not solve the problem. It didn’t in the past and it won’t now or in the future.

3. Repeal current laws completely and revise immigration quotas based on labor needs, desirability (law breakers, those with communicable diseases excluded, etc.)

4. Enact laws to allow people work permits, for instance, Singapore has a law that permits foreign labor to come to the country using contracts. When a worker completes his contract he must return home. Singapore regulates how many times a worker can come back.

5. All immigrants seeking permanent residency must sign an oath of allegiance to America, and to denounce Sharia law. An immigrant may follow religious laws within his heart, but the must pledge to follow Constitutional Law to live in the country.

6. Immigrants who wish to apply for citizenship must prove they know how to read, write, and speak English.

7. Only citizens may get government benefits.

8. Working citizens and aliens must pay income taxes.

9. Renounce multiculturalism, and embrace American Exceptionalism. Political correctness and multiculturalism is on the brink of destroying Europe. France and Spain are just a few years away from losing their own unique Ethnic cultures to Islamism. Mid Eastern Civilization is conquering Europe without firing a shot by populating the countries, using the countries  own laws and social programs to excess while insisting their culture be honored over that of the host nation. Confused Europeans have allowed their demands only to see their own cultures evaporate.

10. Reject One World Order as a political system until all countries in the world can meet economic and political stability. Example: the European Union is about to fall apart because the many countries do not agree on how to control government expenditures and their economies.

Can I have an Amen?

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